Enjoying the view from Limbo
It is standard among today’s professoriate to teach Plato’s Apology with perplexity or mock-sophistication, agonizing over efforts to make sense of the charges against Socrates, seeking to persuade the students (and themselves) that those charges as recorded — impiety and corruption of youth — were “trumped up,” or perhaps merely a cover story for more immediate personal or political motives. For Athens was a...
This cloudy autumn morning, I took a short stroll around the university pond with my wife. One of the many simple delights of the place is the small troop of geese, along with one lonely Muscovy duck, who are the pond’s permanent residents. The long-necked white male goose is a strikingly handsome fellow, and clearly has the protective instincts of an alpha male....
Recently, I offered a somewhat optimistic reflection on the condition of humanity (some may have regarded it as pessimistic, but I thought I was being rather generous), entitled “When You’re Tired of Humans.” The gist of it was that the human race is, as far as one can tell, the only species that, on a species-wide level, consistently acts against its own natural...
To be fair, there are always a few humans out there who redeem the race and its history — perhaps upwards of two or three hundred of them living on the planet at any given time, to speak optimistically — but then, alas, there are the rest of the lot. From the “leaders” on down (in exactly that configuration), humanity often seems a...
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