Essay: Keep Your Goodness

Keep Your Goodness

The very last time I talked to my father, he ended the call with, “Keep your goodness.”   Since his death in 2023, I’ve had time to meditate on this.  A simple take is that we humans face key crossroads in our lives, forks of momentous import that alter our intimate souls, and yet also those around us, our environment, and sometimes greater scenarios.  In part, our self-identity is defined by our relationships.  Both to ourselves and others.   Do we or don’t we act with virtue? 

Sometimes a choice is especially urgent and vital.  Exigent moral options delineate lives and fates, branching outward to combine with the decisions of many other people, changing the topology and morphology of Earth.

I am going to focus on an application of this sort of “Keep your goodness.”  The American people hold a current privilege, which is also a grave responsibility and weight:  whether each of us will fight against or instead bow down to the fascist candidate for president of our country, Donald Trump. 

Will we vote and vocalize against him?  Or wither in the silence of acquiescence, or as an outright accomplice to darkness?  

Kit's wisdom will accompany us on this philosophical journey.

 

My father’s background and perspective

My father had a nickname that he always preferred and that was Kit.  As a teenager in the 1940’s,  Kit read Plato’s Dialogues and The Republic.  It sparked in him so much interest that philosophy became his love and vocation.  A graduate of Cornell and tenured professor, he published many articles, as well as two books:  “Unreality: The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects” and “Language, Reality and Mind.” 

The cover art for the latter is a 14^th century engraving by Andrea Pisano, part of the external wall of the Florence Cathedral.  It depicts Plato and Aristotle in spirited argument.

My father eventually sided with Aristotle, agreeing with him that reality is grounded in the physical though intricate:  embodied in in fusion of matter and mind that we, simply enough, refer to as a person.  Persons (which might include some animals) are the center of things, where it all comes together. 

Plato, unlike Aristotle, did not favor the physical dimension.  He famously likened our existence to that of prisoners in a cave, hostages to illusions, who could only see shadows of the true reality outside our grim encasement. 

Both Plato and Aristotle, however, saw humanity’s highest purpose as the pursuit of the Good, and both emphasized the advancement of virtue in the sense of a harmony, whether intrapsychic or social, to cultivate the flourishing of soul and society. 

Compare these views, steeped in ethics, with today’s political and economic zeitgeist, which embraces self-interest in pursuit of power and profit.  The Good is entirely secondary, if not tertiary or non-existent, to this hunger of egoism, in which the modus operandi is to expropriate, dominate, exploit and consume in a theater of ruthless competition. 

This is the mindset of those predominant in positions of global power in our times.

My father, following the classic Greek philosophers, believed that our highest purpose was not money or power, but to advance our understanding of the Good.  Always the assiduous scholar, he wrote every day, morning and night.  For the last decade and a half of his life, he strove to finish a book that laid out what he believed to be the best form of government.  In its scope, the project was a grand task, similar to Plato’s The Republic [1]. 

With the Good serving as a strategic sextant, the best government in my father’s estimation is this:  a full-throated democracy that embraces empathy and compassion for each and every person.  In the spirit of Rationalism, the innate dignity of the human condition necessitates an array of benefits, including free healthcare and college, as well as a universal basic income (UBI). 

Kit's position, one could argue, is an elaboration of John Rawls' famous tenet in distributive justice:  maximize the well-being of the worst-off socioeconomic class.

Many would consider Kit, as many do Plato, an idealist.  His head in a cloud of lovely ideas and yet oblivious to daily toil, travail, and strife.  In rebuttal, note that free healthcare and college already exist in some countries.  UBI is being tested as I write this, in the United States and elsewhere.  It is not myopic but prescient to seek a better, plausible way of living.  Given the threat of fascism today, it is not only laudable but crucial for the continuance of civilization.

Far too often, cynics, both myopic and fallacious, dismiss the possibility of progress, waving the red herring of ‘human nature'--as if this mysterious term consigned us to automatic damnation.

 

Democracy or Fascism

Kit was troubled by the rise of fascism, especially here in the United States, spearheaded by one Donald Trump.  As I write this, Trump could win the Presidency in November, which I believe will destroy our republic, and along with it the establishment of human rights that my father cherished. 

At the moment, however, social momentum is with his challenger, Kamala Harris, who if elected will be the first woman and also South Asian President.  The USA has had a Black President before (Barack Obama) and so Harris, who is also Black, would be the second. 

Her victory would indicate that Obama was no fluke.  It would lay a second steppingstone of precedent, thereby forming a trendline into the future, heading away from White patriarchy.  It would, furthermore, demonstrate that the racist backlash to Obama’s victory in 2008 was not a death knell for progressive freedoms.

A Harris victory would reinvigorate and re-establish the foundation of the United States as a democracy; and thereby lead the world forward ethically.  We are in desperate need of moral maturity.  It is our only way to manage the hydra necks of technology, which elongate and branch, year by year, to break new barriers in wondrous yet fretsome sectors:  robotics, genetics, nanotech, artificial intelligence, hypersonic nukes, and more.

Imagine this hydra of technology in the hands of someone like Donald Trump, a narcissistic dictator whose only loyalty is to his own malignant, disordered ego; whose ignorant modus operandi is might-makes-right, schoolyard bullying, and quid-pro-quo nihilism.

I have witnessed how quickly and fecklessly the leaders of the Republican Party succumbed to the threat and the seduction of fascism.  Fascism offers them status in a corrupt hierarchy, if they bootlick the ‘messianic’ leader.  It threatens them with violent expulsion, if they dare protest even a scintilla.  I have witnessed the metastasis of Evil in our country over a ten-year span:  the hate- and fear-mongering that spurs invidious ‘otherisms’:  the rhetorical reduction of human beings to “animals,” “vermin” and “poisons.” 

This evil rhetoric encourages and fosters violence through what is now commonly called “stochastic terrorism.”   When you rave in animosity to an audience of tens of millions of fanatic followers, decreeing that certain sorts of people deserve to die, a small yet very real percentage of those followers will take hateful action, whether to harass, assault or murder.

 

The Good

I believe that a significant part of what Kit meant by “Keep your Goodness” concerned democracy.  Furthermore, he would approve of the capital letter in “Good.”   Both Plato and Aristotle believed in a rational Good, which is to say an optimal situation of flourishing, one approachable through a universal language of science, critical thinking and moral emotion.

Scientific claims are both verifiable and falsifiable.  Critical thinking eliminates fallacies and fosters adaptive, meticulous argument.  Moral emotion wields the wisdom of the humanities, speaking from the heart as well as the head.

Kit was a practical philosopher.   He layered his Aristotelian foundation with common-sense pragmatism (Dewey) and language use (Wittgenstein).  Given these frameworks, it is safe to assume that Kit envisioned change as gradual yet cumulative, an ongoing transformation of our collective consciousness, coupled with concomitant improvements in the quality of governance.    

If this sounds grandiose, it is actually nothing new.  Our collective consciousness has been evolving for thousands of years.  As technology advances, human awareness leaps.  The more powerful we become, the more our attitudes craft the very nature of the Earth.  Our thoughts become self-fulfilling prophesies.  We instantiate our greatest hopes or, sadly, our worst fears. 

Will we create demonic-looking robots that cow citizens to bow at the feet of a ‘divine’ dictator?  Or will we design AI that helps us approach more mature ways of living, perhaps through computer simulations of various approachable utopias?

My father’s advice, if honored, can save us from fascism and what will follow.  If enough of us in America 'keep our goodness,' we and our posterity are on the path toward a brighter future.  Conversely, if we vote a fascist onto a newly minted throne, all of humanity trembles, in no small part because America has the world's strongest military.  

Dictator Trump will summon and effectuate what he always has:  corruption, chaos, division, cruelty and avarice.

For my father, though, the reason to choose the Good was not about personal benefit.  An idealist looks beyond ego.  To choose the Good speaks to the very nature of reality, of what we want the fabric of things to be.  A choice of Good speaks to the planet, the galaxy, and the universe.  We celebrate and seek the Good because it is where ethics, beauty, health, joy and courage converge toward a singularity:  a lovely harmony which marries passion and reason within the sublime.

 

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10/3 eds

8/22 eds

8/21 ... Needs more work but I wanted to get this up on my bd