Trees, Dogs, Books, Musings

Are the trees really taller above the Mackinac Bridge?

Once more, the North beckoned!

We went up over the Bridge again, Tree Guy and I and Naughty Barker. This time we left on Sunday and stayed until Wednesday, our mission to spend time with TG’s kids and grandkids. It went great! Thanks for asking. 

Notably, Naughty Barker dove right in with Good Dog Behavior! She recognized the place, jumped out of the car without barking, and immediately began racing happily around the yard with her new best friend! If I were able to load a video, you would see what I mean, but here are the two of them, relaxing together between romps.

Sunny and her new best friend, William

I did a lot of relaxing myself. Other than pancakes on Tuesday morning, I didn’t cook at all, and while the young people got canoes in the water, took saunas, played ping-pong and cards, I basically read my books, took long walks, and threw tennis balls for the dogs. Oh, and here and there a nap. Truly, it felt like vacation—and there will be a few similar days in the weeks ahead, because, as we all know, the North never ceases to beckon.

The river never pauses....

Books that kept me awake --

When not napping or exploring or entertaining canines, and other than time spent around the table eating and socializing (socializing even after the eating had ceased, not shunning society!), I finished a couple books brought from home. One was a little Robert Louis Stevenson volume that Tree Guy couldn’t wait to get his hands on (pictured above), and the other that John M. Barry book I’ve been reading off and on for such a long time, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty. 

Reading books on the Civil War and what led up to it, as well as what followed it—all led me, over time, to conclude that our nation was born divided, and now, having read a single, very detailed book on the history of New England, I am strengthened in that opinion, even as New England complicates the picture, showing me that divisions in American society have never been as simple as North vs. South or Europeans vs. Native Americans. In New England, it was also English vs. Native Americans, Puritans vs. Quakers, freethinkers vs. Quakers, Rhode Island vs. Massachusetts, Plymouth vs. Providence, and on and on and on. There were massacres over control and ownership of land, and there was torture and cruel, disfiguring punishment (ears cut off, holes bored in tongues, etc.), as well as excommunication and banishment, over matters of religion—which makes it sound as if religion and land ownership were separate issues, whereas actually they were hopelessly entangled.

Some 17th-century disagreements seem today nothing short of absurd, e.g., should grace be said before or following a meal? (Thanks is thanks, isn't it?) Others went to the heart of the body politic, with loyalty oaths demanded and then accepted or refused, but the deepest, and one that continues to divide Americans to this day, was over the relation of the church and the government, or religion and the state. 

State religion or a wall of separation? Which was it to be? Which is it to be?

Those who wanted 17th-century government to champion one particular religious view—not only to protect that religion but also, in doing so, to sanctify government—cited a passage in the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 49, verse 23, saying “that the state must be 'nursing father and mother' to the church” in order to

…protect and preserve not only the church but to create a moral society. From this … it also followed inevitably that church and state were inextricably linked.

Roger Williams and others disagreed. Williams thought the danger of intermingling church and state was to the church, as it was bound to be corrupted by politics. He took his stand for freedom of conscience, implying freedom of religion, and Rhode Island was founded on the principle of a “wall of separation” between religion and government.

Besides large disagreements of principle, Barry exposes other divisions nascent in the American colonies. The English of the 17th century, he notes, “had relatively little outright racial prejudice against Indians,” acknowledging that they themselves had recently been “‘savage and uncivill and worshipped the divell,’” but when one Englishman went on to compare Native Americans to the Irish, Barry reminds us how the English slaughtered the Irish—men, women, and children—on more than one occasion. English “war” on the Irish was a prequel to American “war” on North American indigenous populations.

All these disagreements, all these divisions! What has held our country together for 250 years? Nothing, I would say, but our love for the land and respect for law. So now, when we see due process and habeas corpus brushed aside by our federal government, I ask, what will hold us together? If not law, what can unify such fractious multitudes?

Solid ground! We need the law as our solid ground!

After Roger Williams, my brain needed a vacation, and I picked up an old Agatha Christie paperback, but it belonged to the cabin and did not come home with me, so I’m now reading a Studs Terkel-like book of oral histories called Chinese Lives. Priced (used) at only $6.50, it sat long on the shelf in my shop, unchosen and passed over, and only now do I realize what a gem my customers have missed! It will return to the shelf in time, giving customers another chance, but only after I have finished it myself. The lives are out-of-date, of course, the book published in 1985, with a preface by Studs Terkel himself, but history, always pregnant with what was to come, makes fascinating reading.

What condition is our condition in?

I don’t know what to say about the state of the union, because if we have ever been a union, we are certainly not one now. Daily episodes of insanity mix with daily episodes of cruelty and are stirred together daily with corruption, grift, and complete disregard for the history and ideals of our nation, as well as contempt for the law under which we all should be living. Destruction of habitat and of national monuments, absurd and childish attempts to rename geography—all demolish not only our physical country and its history but tarnish our world reputation in ways that will be difficult if not impossible to overcome in the future. The present nightmare will not go on forever, but its end is no guarantee of the restoration of the United States of America, a country that was never perfect but a country that aspired to continual improvement. Now? 

…Roger Williams, this devout Puritan, this man of faith who loved God, was willing to risk more than his life [for freedom]. For of all the remarkable things he said, the most remarkable was this: “Having bought Truth deare, we must not sell it cheape, nor the least graine of it for the whole World, so not for the saving of Soules, though our own most precious.” 

How indeed could one save one’s own soul by selling truth? 

For he knew that to believe in freedom and liberty required faith in the freedom of thought, of conscience. And that was soul liberty.

Quoted material above comes from John M. Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (NY: Viking, 2012), a book your Northport bookseller strongly recommends, either for solitary self-enrichment or lively book club discussion.

Anyway, in case you wondered, we in Northport are very patriotic. We love our country! And our post office!

4th of July photograph on post office counter

Coming soon to your bookstore in Northport!

A new book co-created by someone with a well-known family name will soon be at Dog Ears Books. Next week, I hope. For now, that’s all I’m going to say, except that if you have any kind of travel itch, you’ll want to take a look at it and get some brand-new ideas, so watch this site!

❓❓❓❓❓

Another feather in the dog’s cap

Not only more sociable than ever before, she was a really good dog in the car, too! Best ever! Little girl is growing up at last.

Lengthy postscript 8/29/26:

Michigan author Robert Traver (his pen name), otherwise known as lawyer and flyfisherman John D. Voelker (his legal name) served on the Michigan Supreme Court until the success of his novel, ANATOMY OF A MURDER, allowed him to retire from the law and devote himself to fishing and writing. Born in Ishpeming, son of an Ishpeming saloonkeeper, Voelker practiced law first in Chicago, then at home in Ishpeming, before winning his campaign to be the Prosecutor of Marquette County. It was Governor G. Mennen Williams who appointed Voelker to the Supreme Court, but Voelker tried the case on which his novel was based before he served on the court. As Robert Traver, he wrote both novels and books on fishing that continue to be popular today, and the John D. Voelker Foundation continues to do good work in his name.

I was passing a few quiet moments between customers today (Saturday, 8/29/26) when I came across this passage in ANATOMY, lawyer Paul Biegler chiding his client, Lieutenant Manion, for making disparaging remarks about the law:

‘…[F]or all its lurching and shambling imbecilities, the law—and only the law—is what keeps our society from bursting apart at the seams, from becoming a snarling jungle. While the law is not perfect, God knows, no other system has yet been found for governing men except violence. The law is society’s safety valve, its most painless way to achieve social catharsis; any other way lies anarchy.’

Biegler pauses and then goes on:

‘The law is the busy fireman that puts out society’s brush fires; that gives people a nonphysical method to discharge hostile feelings and settle violent differences, that substitutes orderly ritual for the rule of tooth and claw. The very slowness of the law, its massive impersonality, its insistence upon proceeding according to settled and ancient rules—all this tends to cool and bank the fires of passion and violence and replace them with order and reason. That is a tremendous does accomplishment in itself, however a particular case may turn out.’

The lawyer character’s speech soars as he argues with his client that 

‘...all our fine Magna Cartas and constitutions and bills of right and all the rest would be nothing but a lot of archaic and high-flown rhetoric if we could not and did not at all times have the law to buttress them, to interpret them, to breathe meaning and force and life into them. Lofty abstractions about individual liberty and justice do not enforce themselves. These things are reforged by the law, for every jury trial in the land is a small daily miracle of democracy in action.’

- Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1958)

What good does it do to “speak out”?

I’ll cut right to the chase today and save the meandering for another day. On this cold Monday morning I typed “stand with Minnesota” into my Internet search bar and found a site with exactly that name, so here it is. Within the site you will find various other links, so do a little exploring and see where you want to put your two cents—or more, I hope.

 

I STAND WITH 

MINNESOTA.

 

I STAND FOR 

THE U.S. CONSTITUTION.

 

 

A group of stalwart Northporters gathers on the sidewalk every Thursday morning, and on Monday morning, casting about with that agonizing question, “What can I do?” I thought, I can do that. 

 

Former presidents Obama and Clinton have spoken out. (I’m still waiting to hear from President Bush.) They, of course, are famous people, former presidents, historic personages. What possible difference can it possibly make for one “tiny bookseller” (as I was once called) in a tiny Up North village to hold a sign and add her aged voice to the resistance? I was told by one political opponent that my “rants” don’t do any good and was asked how I can possibly expect anything I write or say to change the course of history.

 

Let me turn that question around: How do you expect to turn our national tragedy around by remaining silent? I shouldn’t say “you” there but “anyone.” How does anyone hope to do good by crossing to the other side of the street and looking away? “How many times can a man turn his head/and pretend that he just doesn’t see?”

Protests in the Sixties (1960s, that is) were not always peaceful, and they were not always effective, and there are plenty of Sixties sayings that aren’t worth printing on a t-shirt, but one I stand by today: 

IF YOU’RE NOT PART OF THE SOLUTION, YOU’RE PART OF THE PROBLEM. One voice is not one alone when voices join together in a chorus.

 

Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse murdered—shot in the back—by federal agents in Minneapolis on Saturday (they “scattered” after firing their guns), was the classic good Samaritan. On Nicollet Avenue to observe ICE and film activities to protect his community, he stopped to help a woman pushed to the ground by federal—I want to call them “storm troopers,” but let’s use the more neutral term—“agents.” He wanted to make sure she was all right. Because of that, after his legally permitted firearm was taken from him (he did not have it in his hand), and while he was lying on the ground (already “subdued” by multiple agents), he was executed in cold blood.

 

With whom do you stand? For what do you stand? If not now, when?

Postscript: I strongly recommend this video statement by Adam Kinzinger. Watch and listen to the end. Good arguments, strong background. 

Closeup, Farther Away, Back Home Again

“You left the dog out!” 

 

No, I did not forget about Sunny Juliet, and she certainly did not spend the night outdoors! When Sunny is outside, I am outside with her, and when I am indoors, my little companion is with me there, too. But it’s true that there was not a single image of her in my last blog post, so mea culpa! Although Sunny is not a bookstore dog (Naughty Barker that she is), she is very much the dog of my heart and life and blog. So here is my dog girl, back again by popular request.

 

More around the home place

 

‘Tis the season of golden yellow, everywhere I look – forsythia, daffodils, and now—at last—the first dandelions! 

Buds are appearing on trees and shrubs, and all three of my peonies have emerged from their winter sleep. I saw my first blooming Dutchman’s breeches of the season on Saturday morning and cowslips, a.k.a., marsh marigolds, on Sunday afternoon.  

When the weather warms up (again: it had warmed once or twice but cooled down again almost immediately) and stays that way, at last, I’ll get busy cleaning my front porch. The Artist and I always lived on that porch from late spring to early fall. Though it isn’t the same without him, I’m still glad to have it, and Sunny likes it, too. But this weekend there was a different agenda in effect at my place: A neighbor teen came to help me fill an industrial-sized dumpster with trash to be hauled away. “Big job,” I texted a friend, and she texted back, “Not big—huge!” She was right. One of the dangers of rural acreage is the accumulation of stuff no longer useful, but I can now report significant progress on the cleanup, thanks to my helper’s young muscles and ability to heave heavy items over the dumpster wall.

After all that work, I tried to take a nap in the afternoon, but Sunny had other ideas, so we went for a little ride up to Northport by way of the back roads, which is where I saw the marsh marigolds—and thank you, Sunny Juliet, for not letting me sleep the day away!

 

 

Reading at home

 

I finished James A. Stimson’s historical novel, King Noanett, set in colonial America during the time of the English Civil War. The story was a blend, I would say, of adventure, history, and melodrama. The ending was particularly melodramatic, but I’m not going to give it away.

 

Friday night I began reading a novel by a Northport friend, Karen Mulvahill’s The Lost Woman, and came to the last page of that book early Sunday evening. One of the novel’s characters, Nicole, “lost herself” due to a series of difficult life events that took place during the World War II Occupation of Paris, and now, as an older woman, she has persuaded an art historian to help her recover paintings stolen from her parents’ gallery by the Nazis. Robert, the art historian, has his own issues—whether his secret dabbling has any artistic merit at all, as well as how he feels about clients who regard art as a financial investment—and he also has difficulties with relationships. As Nicole and Robert’s lives intersect, secrets involving other people come to light, helping both Nicole and Robert resolve feelings they have carried as burdens for years.

 

Mulvahill’s research is solid and also, I’m happy to say, woven seamlessly into her story. We don’t know at first how all the characters are connected to each other, but the author has her narrative threads well in hand and brings them together in a satisfying finish. 

 

Karen and I are having a little bit of trouble trying to figure out how I can acquire copies of her book at wholesale price to offer in my shop, the complication being that her publisher is in England, and the books printed and distributed, at present, only through the online behemoth. But don’t ask about it! When we find a solution, I will let you know!

 

 

Waking in the middle of the night

 

Waking not from but to a nightmare. 

 

    Try to imagine…

 

If Jimmy Carter had roared like a maniac dictator and danced around a lectern during a rally; 

 

If Bill Clinton had invited Bill Gates to head a newly created government department and fire as many career workers as possible in the fields of education, health, science, etc.;

 

If Barack Obama had taken the oath of office without placing his hand on the Bible;

 

If Joe Biden had planned a military parade costing tens of millions of dollars for his own birthday celebration, while looking to cut services to citizens and cut taxes for billionaires;

 

If any Democratic president had ever had people abducted off the streets or out of their homes and transported to a foreign gulag without benefit of due process!

 

The latest, most pitiful thing I have seen was the current president of the United States, asked by an interviewer if he is obligated to follow the rulings of the Supreme Court and to obey the Constitution, responding, “I don’t know.” –What was that oath of office again?

 

Well, he still has his supporters (where do they get their news?), but he has royally ticked off Catholics around the world for posting an AI image of himself as pope, and Lutheran bishops in this country have come together with an official statement calling him a ”danger” to religion in America. Sadly, he is not the only danger to our country, since almost the entire Republican Party has been body-snatched by the Project 2025 crowd….

A couple of facts:

Less than 1% of the U.S. population identifies as trans. Nonbinary is a real thing, though not the statistical norm. Information is readily available for those not afraid to educate themselves. You might begin here. 

As for crimes, the Biden Administration never had an “open border,” and as for fentynal coming into the country at our southern border, 80% of people arrested with the illegal drug are American citizens. Immigration is not a primary factor in illegal drugs entering the country, says the Cato Institute. See more information here. 

Issues of gender and immigration, however, are guaranteed to stir fear and are intentionally used by the Republican Party to activate their base. (Immigrants have been a convenient political diversion and punching bag for as long as our country has been in existence.) Meanwhile, far-reaching dangers are pushed to the margins by sensationalism: 

Married women who have changed their names, although citizens all their lives, will have a much harder time voting; cuts are being made daily to government programs that benefit and protect veterans, children, and elderly Americans; the American military is being turned into an offensive force, rather than simply defending our country; the richest men in the world will, if they get their way—and under the current administration, who can doubt they will get their way?—benefit from mammoth tax cuts, burdens of those cuts falling on the majority of non-wealthy Americans; the president is planning a parade on his birthday that will cost tens of millions of dollars, at the same time that he posts an AI-generated image of himself on social media as POPE; and our poor, politically battered though materially wealthy country, once a beacon of liberty around the world, has become a pariah state. THESE ARE REAL AND PRESENT DANGERS!

So by all means, MAGA folks, focus your attention on foreign drug dealers and trans Americans, and let the autocrats steal our freedom and destroy the common good while you're looking the other way, if that’s what you want. I only ask you to please open your eyes and see clearly just what you are doing! 

 

 

At the same time—

 

Take a deep breath! Ordinary life in the hinterlands goes on. New books appear, old ones bob to the surface, spring wildflowers appear, work demands attention at home and in Northport, and the days grow longer and lighter and, although erratically, gradually warmer. Today is Monday, and I planted radish and chard seeds, while blissfully innocent (ignorant?) dog girls and boys continue to have fun. Bless their hearts!!!

Spring is here, and if you're reading this, you're alive! So happy cinco de mayo, friends!

In Need of Loving Care!

 

Eat a good breakfast!

Are you taking care of yourself? You need to. It’s been a rough week, and the road ahead doesn’t look any smoother. 

Dinner, too. Keep up your strength. (See that spinach?)

Now here, not that anyone asked, is my take on what’s going in in Washington: 

 

There is waste in every organization, and the federal government is many, many organizations, so of course there is waste. Serious, close, careful review of government programs with an eye to trimming budgets and reducing and eliminating waste would be make perfect sense, but that’s not what we’re seeing. 

Shutting down programs overnight is nothing but wanton, wholesale destruction. It’s as if you decided that an apartment building was inefficiently heated, so you immediately razed it to the ground and left its residents homeless. Shutting down foreign aid and medical research is a twin disaster-in-the-making, inviting world pandemics the like of which we have never seen before.

 

And to think that all this destruction is not being carried by responsible elected officials or vetted appointees but----! Well, if someone had written our current America as a novel even as recently as ten years ago, it would have been considered too wildly unrealistic for belief. 

 

***

 

But let’s shove that mess off the table and look for a minute at the soothing world of books. At least, I want to start with books, but it won’t take long for me to work in a metaphor and get beyond bookshops and libraries.

 

Books have always been threatened….

 

As time has gone by, threats to the survival of books have become more and more serious. The materials that make up books almost from the beginning and especially since the invention of printing have gotten progressively worse. Rag paper replaced vellum, paper made from shorter fibers replaced rag paper. Alum sizing of paper—a process which allows the paper to be printed on—replaced gelatin sizing and, in the process, made the paper highly acidic. Pasted-on endbands replaced sewn-on endbands. Binder’s board (a specialized cardboard) replaced wood for covers.

 

Accompanying the decline in materials was a similar decline in structure. Now the most common binding is the ironically named “perfect” binding. [The irony is unintentional. As a conservator, the writer sees irony in a term where others well might not.] It is an economical method of binding that unfortunately does not stand up to heavy use or allow for repeated rebinding. Modern hardback books are seldom satisfactorily rounded and backed and consequently their text blocks pull away from the spine even as they stand on the shelf. 

 

-      Saving Our Books and Words exhibit label, quoted in A Degree of Mastery: A Journey Through Books Arts Apprenticeship, by Annie Tremmel Wilcox

 

A beautiful story --

The quoted passage above calls up a series of thoughts for me. 

 

First thought: “Books have always been threatened” might seem to echo the challenging or banning of book content but actually has to do, we learn quickly, with the way the physical book is threatened by the physical world. It’s a specific example of the general truth of the law of entropy. Put simply, in time, things fall apart, order becomes disorder.

Second thought: Some things fall apart faster than others, and some books fall apart faster than others. As a dealer in used, old, and rare books, I see this on a daily basis. Cheaply produced novels from the early 1900s, e.g., much-beloved adventure novels collected by those who read and loved them when young, are often characterized by brittle pages turned brown with time. A cheaply made book is like an old, cheaply made violin: Quality not inherent at the beginning does not accrue over time. On the other hand, books originally printed on high-quality paper and bound with care can last for centuries. They are living messengers from past generations of human beings and can still speak to us today. What a miracle!

 

Third thought: My late husband, the Artist, could usually identify a book club edition right away when he picked it up, without needing to look for a blind stamp on the lower back board or checking the dust jacket to see if it lacked a price. He could feel the difference in the bargain edition’s flatter spine. He had both an eye and a feel for quality in materials and production in all manner of objects. It was the reason for his large collection of beloved Harris tweed sportcoats (34 of them!), and it broke my heart when local consignment shops had no interest in these garments because they were more than a year old. Well, yes, Harris tweed clothing is not “fast fashion,” to be worn a couple times and discarded! The garments are made to last! 

(Thank heaven one young Leelanau man, much taller than the Artist, was able to wear one of David’s sportcoats. He has a pair of the Artist’s cowboy boots, too. I’m glad there are some people who recognize and care about quality in all realms of human life.)

 

Fourth thought: In the story of book conservation, I cannot help seeing a metaphor. It is natural to me, personally, to see truths of inert materials naturally extending to the world of life, and it is natural to human language in general to work this way, but I’ll not be taking up that larger topic today. I’ll just tell a little story to illustrate my point.

 

Many years ago, editing a book on welding for a faculty member in a university school of engineering, I was struck by the way the writer’s facts about chemistry worked as metaphors for human connections. Some pairs of metals, I learned, can never result in a strong and lasting bond. No matter what degree of skill the welder brings to the task, that weld will always be weak. Different pairs when welded together, however, form a strong and lasting union. That is, some metals are, as it were, antagonistic to each other, like those little Scottie dog magnets—and others have such a natural affinity for each other that when welded together they are as strong as if they had never been separate. Think true friendship. Think strong marriage. Think soulmate. 

 

And so, as metaphor, I see in those quoted paragraphs on book conservation a truth applicable to American government today. It is not only the quality of human “materials” that is problematic (to put it mildly) in the current White House administration. Lack of experience is a problem, too, as is the abandonment of any criteria of qualification, other than partisan—no, more like personal--loyalty in crucial and essential government appointments. But beyond ignorance, inexperience, and lack of skill is the deepest, most chilling problem: These people have no loving concern for their work. They are not careful conservators of what has been laboriously constructed over almost 250 years “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Instead they seek to destroy what generations have built. Dismantle, if you want a gentler word, but there doesn’t seem to be any gentleness in an approach aimed at inducing trauma. This is the standard shock-and-awe approach employed elsewhere by our country but only now unleashed on the U.S. federal infrastructure.

 

I always seek to end each of my posts on a positive note, and that’s difficult this week, as a gang of unelected young men wet behind the ears has been given free rein to run roughshod through the financial data of every American, but maybe revisiting the Second Law of Thermodynamics can cheer us up. Did you follow the link to watch the video? If not, do it now. I’ll wait….

 

Okay, ready? At the moment, our country has pretty clearly descended into chaos, and chaos is a hallmark of despotism. In the interest of remaining calm, let’s step back and simply call it disorder. Our political system is horribly disordered at present. Things are not just falling apart,  but are being torn apart. Think vandals in a library. The destruction is intentional, not accidental, and order will not be spontaneously restored.

 

But there is still hope! Hope lies in the fact that the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems, and human beings are not a closed, isolated system. As a species, as a nation, as the population living in this present moment, we are continually drawing energy from other sources, and this energy is available for rebuilding and reordering society, as has been done in the past following periods of chaos and destruction. 

 

The arts are a source of energy on which we can draw, as are skilled craft, any manual work done with loving care, care for the earth and its creatures and each other, and so on and on. I have no plans to become a book conservator, but I do care for books that come into my little world, and I also care for the people who come to my shop seeking books, conversation, strength, and community. I try to use language with care, in this blog and elsewhere. Even if we are stumbling around in the dark much of the time, it’s important for us to do our best, whatever we are doing. Our poor, beautiful, irreplaceable gift of a world is so in need of our loving care!

 

Also, while this may seem a contradiction of the laws of energy, I find that when I expend energy in positive directions—when I focus on my writing (as I have been doing here) or contact my members of Congress or simply prepare a satisfying meal or play Frisbee with my dog—I do not feel my strength and energy depleted but renewed. And yes, the natural world around us is available as a source of strength.

Beautiful, life-giving sun!

This is the good news: I am not a closed system, and neither are you. The earth’s human population is not a closed system. We have sources of strength and energy all around us. Draw on them now! 

And that's my positive message for today from Northport. Bon courage, my friends!

Where all the women are trying to be strong!

The President Is NOT a Pragmatist!

What I write today will matter to very few of you. It’s one of those boringly sincere attempts at clarification that generally meets with the response “Oh, who cares?” In this case, who cares other than philosophers? Well, that would be me, so I care, and if anyone else has the patience to bear with me for a few paragraphs, you have my heartfelt gratitude in advance. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

 

The president and his chief henchman in the Senate are often called “pragmatists” because they will do “whatever works” for their immediate gain. People applying the label to them believe that “whatever works” to win some particular victory, score points over opposition, solidify (if only temporarily) a position (however specious the support for it) – those people think that’s exactly what and all that pragmatism is. 

 

They are wrong. 

 

While those who call the president a “pragmatist” are clearly using the word in the casual, loose, inaccurate sense currently bandied about, the term is wrongly used in a much more important sense that would evidence knowledge of the history of philosophy – and I’m not asking the American public to go back and read Plato, for heaven’s sake, only to have some small, even superficial nodding acquaintance with America's most important contribution to world philosophy, a contribution as recent as the 20^th century. Twentieth century – remember that? Unless you’re an adolescent or a child, there should be something familiar there.

 

Sorry, that was sarcastic. Let me begin again. 

 

The modern school of thought that came to be known as pragmatism, while forerunners of it can be found all the way back to Ancient Greece ("nothing new under the sun"?), originated right here in North America, with honors generally going to logician and experimental scientist Charles Sanders Peirce ((1839-1914). Peirce was by most accounts a difficult and eccentric individual, but he recognized that scientific research could not be carried out along the lines suggested by Descartes, wherein an individual begins an inquiry into truth by doubting everything, but instead requires a community of investigators who begin their investigations with the assumption that reality exists independent of opinion. 

 

I ask you, does this sound like the president’s approach? 

 

Pragmatism as applied to science simply is the much-vaunted scientific principle: based on what we know at the beginning, we predict the results of an experiment and then test our predictions. 

 

If a proposition is true, then anyone who investigated the matter long enough and well enough would eventually acknowledge its truth: truth is a matter of long-term convergence of opinion. “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed upon by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.

-      The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, 1995

 

Do not be misled by the phrase “convergence of opinion” and see in it truth as something conveniently made up out of whole cloth. Truth in science is subject to empirical testing. It is provisional, in that future testing can always uncover errors and thus increase knowledge, but Peirce, please note, did not doubt an underlying, pre-existent reality. It is because of reality that extensive experiments by a scientific community can uncover truths.

 

Most of us are not experimental scientists and are more familiar with the name John Dewey than that of Charles Sanders Peirce. John Dewey, I note, has long been made a whipping boy by certain conservative voices, but most of them (in my opinion, because that's what you get here, but I will not leave that opinion unsupported) are whipping a straw man they call “Dewey,” and not the philosopher I know at all. 

 

John Dewey (1859-1952) was concerned with social issues, including education and politics, and he brought the philosophy of pragmatism to bear on these issues. How so? He believed human beings investigate questions of right and wrong by setting up and testing hypotheses about issues, always keeping in mind that conclusions might require future revision. In other words, we learn through experience. Does that sound dangerous? 

Dewey was no wild-eyed mad scientist! He viewed all of human history as having already tested basic rights and wrongs. So we have no need need to experiment to learn that lying or murder or cheating are wrong. Human history has already made those experiments. In this, I believe Dewey remained Kantian, and we see the Golden Rule here, also, as Kant appealed to it in his various versions of the Categorical Imperative.  

 

Dewey on education is a huge subject, and although it is there that his critics generally aim at the straw man they construct, education is a side issue for me today., so I’ll merely quote again briefly from The Oxford Companion to Philosophy:

 

…Dewey focused on the nature and practical improvement of education, arguing that children cannot be understood as empty vessels, passively awaiting the pouring in of knowledge, but must rather be seen as active centres of impulse, shaped by but also shaping their environment.

 

Now I suppose if you see children as empty vessels waiting to have knowledge poured into them, you might find Dewey a wild-eyed radical, but who that has ever been around children – or ever been a child! – could hold the view that children are passive, empty vessels? Really?

 

Actually, I once knew an otherwise very intelligent person who believed that “doing” philosophy (as we all said in graduate school) consisted of “learning the moves” from the best teachers available. The best teachers were necessary because, this person believed, a student could never be (do) better than his or her teacher. I was amazed by such a view. A student unable to criticize? To me, that implied a student unable to think! And so, I ventured to inquire, you believe Western thought has been getting stupider and stupider since Socrates, because all of Western philosophy comes down to us through a succession of teachers and students who began at the feet of Socrates? Yes. Well, I didn’t buy it then and never would.

 

The pragmatists would never have bought such a view of philosophy or anything else, either. They believed in the progress of thought, in the growth of knowledge, and the gradually increasing enlightenment of human beings. --There are times, I acknowledge, when it is difficult to believe in progress of any kind. At least, it does not seem a steady march forward, does it? But that too is a big topic for another day. 

 

My main twofold point today is simply that (1) pragmatism is a serious, native-born American philosophy; and (2) pragmatism is not “whatever works for a single individual” – to score a point, win the pot, or whatever. Pragmatism has to do with the advancement of science and the betterment of society. 

Cheating and lying, blaming and name-calling undermine our trust in one another and would, as strategies adopted by us all, make our institutions unworkable. These strategies are not pragmatic! They may be the moves of an egotistical opportunist who can’t see further than tomorrow, but they do not serve to further the cause of business or government or science or ordinary life in civilized society or anything that might be called progress. 

President Obama was a pragmatist, and his first concern was for the United States and for all Americans. The Republican-led Senate, however, cared more about blocking any positive achievements that might reflect well on a Democratic administration than with across-the-aisle cooperation to make gains for ordinary Americans. Now, for all President Trump’s bellowing “America First!” his impulsive, richocheting utterances and shifting, unstable, momentary alliances illustrate something very different. 

In short, to call the current president a “pragmatist” is to give a good American philosophy a very bad name.