Hundred of years ago in Europe, during that period which we refer to as the Enlightenment, human beings began to replace many of their former superstitious beliefs with ideas that were the product of some of the most exquisite uses of human reason ever attempted by man.   Our Founding Fathers were products of the Enlightenment and they clearly believed that the nation they were creating was grounded in the principles of  natural reason (Jefferson’s self-evident truths).

The Founding Fathers would probably be dismayed to learn that, well over 200 years after this nation was established, so many of its citizens—and even a good number of its elected officials—would have mindsets that seemed much better suited for the Middle Ages than the 21stcentury.  

For example, the clear scientific consensus on climate change—the view held by well over 99% of reputable climatologists—is that our planet is warming, that this warming trend is a consequence of the amount of carbon that human beings are spewing into the atmosphere, and that, unless we  cap carbon emissions in some significant way (and how to do this is subject to legitimate dispute), the consequences for our future generations will be dire.   Those are the scientific facts, plain and simple.  And yet, despite all the hard evidence we have about climate change, a significant number of Americans either believe that the planet is not really warming at all, or, if it is, this has nothing to do with human behavior.  One Republican senator, James Inhofe, went so far as to call climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the  American people.”  And he’s the former chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment, no less!
 
We’ve also know for quite a long time that our planet is billions of years old, that human beings as a species only evolved from lower forms of primates about 200,000 years ago, and that the dinosaurs were long
 gone before we came into the picture. However, a significant number of Americans—almost all evangelical Christians and the majority of Republicans—believe that the world was created literally in seven days and that human beings were placed on this planet by God on the seventh day.  In order to explain the messy problem of dinosaur fossils that seem to predate human existence by millions of years, creationists have argued that humans and dinosaurs actually co-existed on the planet.  There’s even a creationist theme park in Kentucky that shows children in primitive garb happily riding on the backs of friendly dinosaurs.   If you think that these views are held only by the most ignorant Americans, guess again.  Marco Rubio, who is very likely to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2016, recently responded when asked how old he thought the earth was, “Whether the earth was created in seven days, or seven actual eras, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to actually answer that.  It’s one of the great mysteries.”  Keep in mind that there is a very good chance that this individual could be the next President of the United States of America!
 
There have always been irrational people in American society, but in the Age of Obama, they seem to be climbing out of the woodwork.  From the very beginning of Obama’s presidency, there were people (again a majority of Republicans and evangelical Christians) who passionately believed he was a Muslim (he never
was), a socialist (not even close) and that he was not really a U.S. citizen (even after the State of Hawaii produced his U.S. birth certificate).  
 
For Americans like these, reason, logic, and evidence don’t matter at all in terms of their beliefs. They are convinced instead by the proclamations of authority figures (religious leaders or political pundits like Rush Limbaugh), by the literal teachings of their sacred texts (the Bible, of course), and by their own dread of living in a world inhabited by people whose skin is a darker shade than their own or whose worldviews aren’t shaped by traditional Christian faith.   It’s that basic underlying fear of a world in change that has these Americans clinging for dear life to their antiquated religious beliefs and to the Republican Party, which has for all practical purposes become the home for those who belong to the cult of extreme irrationality.

We can, of course, laugh at the silly, superstitious beliefs of know-nothing Americans, and dismiss these views as being the products of defective minds.  But the men and women who hold such views now effectively control one of the two major political parties in the United States—a party, which very soon could once again be in charge of the U.S. government—and have a strange-hold over the education of children and the teaching of “science” in many parts of the country.   What is needed, then, is the same kind of intensive campaign on the part of those of us who embrace the wisdom of the Enlightenment as has been waged for years now by the forces of irrationality.  
  
Fortunately, those who are part of the cult of irrationality are a dying breed.  They tend to be old, white, less educated than the mainstream population, and confined to those parts of the country like the Bible Belt, where ignorance and superstition are positively embraced (or at least tolerated). The very know-nothing attitudes that are indicative of membership in the cult of irrationality also means that these individuals will be less likely to  compete in an economy in which the possession of openness to new ideas,
 tolerance of differing viewpoints, and effective critical thinking ability will  determine economic success in the information age.

 But this doesn’t mean that we can’t weep for the children who, through no fault of their own, are being raised in families and communities in which the cult of irrationality dominates.  It is precisely for these innocent children—many of whom will grow up wishing that they could ride on the backs of dinosaurs just like their ancestors did—that we need a concerted campaign to reclaim a primary role for reason in American society.  The consequences, if we fail to do this, will be the existence of a ermanent underclass of backwards Americans who cling to old-time religion and fixate on the joys of the next life, because the world and the pleasures it has to offer has ultimately passed them by.

To be human means to love, to experience regret and loss,  and to aspire to transcend the existential limitations of our mortal  being.  It also means—more  prosaically to be sure—having to eliminate the liquid and solid wastes that have  built up in our bodies as a result of the process of consuming food and  drink.  In the not too distant  past, people would have eliminated such wastes in an outhouse (basically a big  hole in the ground with four walls placed around it), in an open field or  stream, or by simply throwing such waste out of the windows of their squalid  tenement apartments.  Only in  recent history have human beings had the luxury of evacuating their food waste into toilets and flushing these waste products miles away from where they are living.

 None of us, I’m sure, would like to return to pre-toilet days.  And, provided our toilets are connected to modern sewage treatment systems, the consequences of our modern methods of waste elimination are convenient for society and much more  beneficial for local ecosystems than simply disposing of our waste products in whatever hole in the ground we are able to find.  

But, in our effort to forget that being human also means having to piss and crap, we have created a system to dispose of solid and liquid waste that is so inefficient, so wasteful of the most precious resource that our planet provides us, that we literally commit an act of ecological evil every time we flush our toilets.  

Before you think that I’m exaggerating, consider these facts:  If you live in a home built before 1994 (the vast majority of homes in the United States), each flush of your toilet consumes 3.5 gallons of water. The average person in such a household, therefore, wastes 19.5 gallons of water per day and 7,135 gallons of water per year simply flushing their toilets.  If the typical household includes four people, that household, then, is responsible for wasting 78 gallons of water each day and 28,540 gallons of water each year.

Consider further that water is our most precious natural resource; that we human beings are made up of over 50% water, and without a clean, steady supply of this precious liquid, we simply couldn’t survive as individuals or as a species.  Finally, consider the fact that many parts of the world—and many parts of  our own country—have been experiencing severe drought conditions as a result of climate change.  It has been suggested that water will become such a contested commodity in the 21st century that thewars of the future may very well be fought, not over access to oil, gas, gold, or silver, but over access to a reliable supply of potable water.  
 
And most of us are content to waste 3.5 gallons of this “liquid gold” every time we relieve our bladders!

The solution to this problem doesn’t involve having to squat in our backyards (the neighbors probably wouldn’t appreciate that very much anyway).  The easiest solution is to replace older toilets with more efficient models that waste less water.  New toilets have a tank capacity of 1.6 gallons of water—more than enough to flush away whatever comes out of our bodies. Better still, European-style toilets are made with dual flush options, so less water is used to flush liquid waste than solid.  If money is an issue, a free solution is simply to put a 1 or 2 liter soda bottle filled with water into your toilets tanks, which will reduce the
holding capacity of the tank and automatically use less water.

The most important thing that we can do, however, is to stop thinking about water as a free resource with no consequences attached to its use.  While there is a constant amount of water on the planet and in our atmosphere, making waste water potable enough to drink requires building enormous water purification systems that are energy intensive (Singapore has been experimenting with this).  Even in a country as wealthy as the United States, building enough purification systems to “reclaim” all of the water we waste flushing our toilets would be prohibitively expensive.   The solution then is conservation, not reclamation.

This demands that each of us develop a new relationship with water that recognizes just how precious this resource is.  If something is truly precious to us, we wouldn’t consider simply flushing it away without any further thought. 

I used to take a group of students to West Virginia as part of our Appalachia Project every summer. The two Catholic nuns who were in charge of our group spent a significant part of the students’ orientation educating them about how important it was to live in harmony with the local ecosystem.  They then went into a lengthy discussion—much to the student’s dismay, I’m sure—about their system for flushing the toilet.  The students were instructed that, if they absolutely had to use the toilet in the house (as opposed to using the outhouse), they had to follow the following rule: “If it’s brown, flush it down; if it’s yellow, let it mellow.”  It took the students quite a while to get used to this system (their natural inclination, of course, was to flush immediately regardless of whether the waste they produced was brown or yellow), but eventually they got into the routine.  The students probably didn’t continue this practice when they returned to “civilization” (as they called it), but for a while it certainly did make them conscious of an issue
they probably never gave much thought to before. 

So, the next time you feel compelled to eliminate waste products from your body, you may want to consider if the flush you are about to produce is, in fact, absolutely necessary (if it’s yellow, could it stand to mellow for a while?), or, at the very least, whether that flush is wasting much more water than necessary to achieve your desired goal of getting what you eliminate from your body out of your house with reasonable efficiency.

Then we can discuss just how much toilet paper you absolutely need to wipe your posterior before you even consider flushing the toilet.  But that’s a topic for another post.

2012 is now officially over.  Although the year saw some glimmers of economic recovery on the horizon and an Obama victory over the forces of rabid conservativism, it was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a very good year for our country or for the planet.  On the East Coast two events in particular caused the year to end on such a disturbing note, that you almost can’t blame people for wanting to move on as quickly as possible to 2013. These events, of course, were the destruction caused in the mid-Atlantic region by Hurricane Sandy in October and the shooting of 20 school children and 6 adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut just a few weeks ago.

Both these events can legitimately be described as tragedies.  In the storm lives were lost, thousands were left homeless, and there was billions of dollars in property damages.  At Sandy Hook innocent children and teachers were murdered by a deranged young gunman, Adam Lanza, who also took his own life and that of his mother.  The only appropriate response to either of these tragic events is to feel immense sympathy for the victims and offer them as much emotional and financial support as we can to help them deal with their losses.

But there are two important lessons that we should take away from events like these.

The first is existential—the real recognition that human life is inherently tragic, that horrific things happen all the time to very good people, and that the attempt to insulate ourselves from the tragic nature of life is a fool’s quest.  Indeed, one could argue that the entire life project of many Americans is precisely to try to forget as much as is humanly possible just how tragic life can be.  We spend much of our time engaged in the most frivolous sorts of activities—shopping for unnecessary creature comforts, gorging ourselves on unhealthy food, traveling all over the world, building huge homes for ourselves and our bloated families—all in an attempt to forget that human life is inherently vulnerable and transient. 

The simple truth is that, as human beings, each of us will experience the death of loved ones as a regular occurrence, we will suffer physical and emotional pain as a normal part of living our lives, we will know failure, loss, and rejection, and we will eventually get sick and inevitably die.  And all this must be done alone, because no one else can live our lives for us and no one else can suffer and die for us.   It shouldn’t take a wall of water from the Atlantic Ocean sweeping our homes away or the murder of innocent school children to make us understand the tragic nature of the human condition; daily existence itself should teach us that—if we didn’t incessantly try to cover over this fact. 

In the end, however, try as we might to ignore the tragic nature of the human condition, ultimately we can’t really escape from it.  Even the “Real Housewives of New Jersey” will get fat, will get old, and will die.  And their children will die.  And their children’s children will die.  All of the riches and pleasures of the American consumeristic lifestyle can’t disguise the fact that all we really amount to at the end of our lives is a hunk of rancid flesh fit only for the consumption of the meanest parasites.  That is the inevitable conclusion of our all too brief time on this little planet of ours and there is not much we can really do about it. 

Were we to embrace the inherent tragic nature of our human condition, instead of constantly trying to run away from it, I’m convinced that we would all be much happier for it in the end.  And the happiness I’m talking about is not the shallow sort that comes from buying a new Ipad or designer outfit.  It’s the happiness that comes from understanding that life is precious, that our time on the planet is fleeting, and that we should try to live the most meaningful existence we can, “for we shall not pass this way again.”

The second lesson, I believe, that we should take away from these two events is that, despite the inevitably of tragedy in our lives—or perhaps precisely because of it—we have a moral duty to do what we can to minimize the amount of unnecessary tragedy that innocent human beings are forced to experience.  We also need to seriously consider how our own selfish, materialistic, consumeristic—i.e., American—lifestyles may contribute to making the tragedies that are the price we pay for corporeal existence more severe or more common than they might otherwise be.

Hurricanes, for example, are inevitable.  And, as long as there are severe hurricanes, people will die as a result of them, and property will be destroyed.  But just because hurricanes are part of nature, that doesn’t mean that we Americans are totally blameless for the swath of devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy.  Many climatologists, for example, believe that Sandy would not have been quite so destructive if water temperatures had not been artificially raised because of the climate change that we are responsible for.  We should also reflect on the fact that American taxpayers essentially subsidize those who live in hurricane prone areas by providing them with government insurance that allows them to live on barrier islands, where no one probably should be permitted to live.  The question that we need to begin to ask ourselves is what we collectively are going to do about facts like these to ensure that fewer Americans die as a result of disasters like hurricanes.

Similarly, there will always be insane people among us who are prone to violence.  Arming every citizen in the county won’t prevent mass shooting, nor will putting a police officer in every school in the country.  But we might begin to question our obsessive need to cut taxes at all costs, even if this cost is the kind of community mental health counseling that might have identified Adam Lanza as a troubled individual and provided him with the kind of help he desperately needed.  Similarly, we might begin to reflect upon a gun culture in the United States that allows mentally ill individuals in many parts of the country to buy assault weapons with no background check.  Perhaps it’s time to start questioning whether our first amendment rights are—or need to be—as absolute as the NRA would like them to be.  If assault weapons and their ammunition were impossible to come by, Adam Lanza might still have been responsible for the death of innocent lives, but 20 children and 6 teachers probably wouldn’t be dead right now.

Ultimately, you and I are responsible for the misery, suffering, and death caused by both hurricane Sandy and the shooting at Sandy Hook.  We are responsible not because we could have prevented events like this from happening, but because our mindless commitment to a selfish materialistic American lifestyle has made these events far more catastrophic than they needed to be.

The question is what, if anything, are we going to do about it? 

Piece written for the Spring 2013 Molloy College Magazine

When I agreed to accept a position in the philosophy department at Molloy College in the fall of 1996, I had very few lofty expectations about my career.  I had just received my doctoral degree, and after a thoroughly enjoyable stint as Campus Minister at Molloy, was offered the opportunity to join a department with only two other full-time faculty members—Dr. Stephan Mayo and Dr. John Yanovitch.  The office space we shared in the basement of Kellenberg was cramped, cluttered, and filled with 1970s chachkas that the senior members of the department still love;  our department budget was non-existent, and worst of all, even during the best of years, we never had more than a few majors at any given time.  

My experience at Molloy was not all that much different from young colleagues of mine at other institutions.  There was the perception that philosophy was an obtuse, antiquated discipline that did little or nothing to prepare students for the real world.  All around the country, the once revered discipline of philosophy was being treated like an unwanted step-child—abandoned, ignored, underfunded, and, as a result, underpopulated with majors. 

But only a few years ago all that began to change.  All of a sudden, talented students at Molloy literally began to knock down the doors of the department to inquire about becoming philosophy majors.  From one major five years ago, the department has recently seen the largest increase in the number of philosophy majors in its history.  We now have 26 majors and a dozen minors.   More amazing still, these majors are some of the brightest students in the college, with some of the highest GPAs of any students at Molloy (Most of our current philosophy majors, in fact, are also members of Molloy’s highly selective honors program).  Within four years, we went from a situation in which it was virtually impossible to offer classes for majors, because there were so few of them, to one in which fifteen or twenty majors will be in classes together discussing Plato’s metaphysics or the ethics of Kant at such a lofty level that one might think that they had entered a graduate program in philosophy.

But the question that I continually get asked when I loudly proclaim these achievements to my colleagues is, “what accounts for this rather amazing turn of events?”   During one of the worst down-turns in our American economy, at a time when one would expect student s to flee from humanities majors like philosophy in favor of much safer vocational majors, why is it that so many students at Molloy are intentionally choosing to major in “the first science?”

I think that there are many answers to that question.

First and foremost, the Philosophy Department in recent years has benefited from having one of the strongest collections of faculty members in its history.  Besides Drs. Yanovitch and Mayo, two charismatic teachers who have been beloved by students for decades, the department recently added two dynamic younger members—Dr. Howard Ponzer and Dr. Eliza Rapaport—both of whom just happen to be outstanding  educators  and who have made it their mission to convince students that a philosophy major is worth considering. 

But the Philosophy Department is also benefiting from a nationwide trend in which some of the best and brightest students in the country are choosing to major in philosophy because they recognize the major has a cachet that can actually help them achieve goals like getting into Law School or Medical School or securing a job with a Fortune 500 company.   And they’re not wrong in this perception either.  Philosophy majors, in fact, are now among the best prepared students entering graduate and professional schools (National Institute of Education study).  They consistently score higher than any other major in the verbal, math, and analytic sections of standardized test (Graduate Record Examination data).  Finally, it has also been reported that joint philosophy-business majors typically advance more rapidly than co-workers who possess only a business degree (New York Times).

Ironically, the major that just a decade ago was perceived to be useless and irrelevant seems to have become the very discipline that is needed most by the American economy, because a degree in philosophy assures the kinds of strong critical thinking and oral and written communications skills that businesses, hospitals, law firms, and governmental agencies are looking for in college graduates.

For the first time, this positive message about the benefits of a philosophy degree seems to be getting out to students, which, I believe, in large part accounts for the boom in philosophy majors and minors at Molloy.  Stephanie Iwanciw, a dual philosophy-psychology major, for example, reports that, since she wants to go into a doctoral program in psychology immediately after college,  “majoring in both psychology and philosophy sets me apart from other applicants for graduate school and offers a better opportunity for jobs in a highly competitive field.”  Eric Haslbauer, an Accounting major, agrees with this assessment.  Eric, who was convinced to minor in philosophy after taking a class with Professor Ponzer,  says that being a philosophy minor has proven to be a resume-builder and credits getting a desirable USB internship to the great interest that his interviewer had concerning his minor.  “Presentation, speaking, critical-thinking, and writing clearly are vital to my career-goals,” he says, “and being a philosophy minor shows that I have mastered all these skills.” 

In the end, however, I think existential and moral motivations may play as big a role in whether students decide to become philosophy majors than even financial ones do.  The philosophy majors that I’ve had the pleasure to teach recently are certainly intelligent and also highly ambitious.  But, living through the recent financial crisis that our country has experienced and witnessing the toll that it has taken on those around them has made these students perhaps more reflective and self-aware than typical college students.   Like all other college students, philosophy majors are definitely interested in getting a decent job after college, but they’re also deeply concerned with questions about the moral good, truth, human freedom, and justice—questions that unfortunately seem to have fallen out of favor in our recent past.

In this sense, I think that the Philosophy Department’s gain in majors over the past few years is ultimately society’s gain.   And, I for one, am delighted to be part of the resurgence of an ancient discipline that has proven once again just how much it has to offer human society.