Book Review-How to Live a Good Life. Edited by: Massimo Pigliucci, Skye Cleary, and Daniel Kaufman

The book is also subtitled: A Guide to Choosing Your Personal Philosophy. I was unaware that the personal philosophy was important to me until a few years ago when I read another book by Massimo Pigliucci on the ideas of stoicism. I enjoyed it as it made a massive impact on how I viewed my life and how I am to conduct my daily existence. It was natural that when I saw that he had written another book about personal philosophy, I was interested and seeing what else he had to say. 

This book, however, lays out the many different possible personal philosophy that one can choose as their own. It consists of series of essays written by the practitioners of each one of these philosophies. The authors are also scholars in each of these areas in order to ensure that the scholarship is sound and complete in order to make a good argument in favor of each of the philosophies. The idea is for the reader to go through the entire book in order to be swayed by each of the authors to their preferred personal philosophy. Their job is constrained in a very short format, they are to layout the main tenets of the philosophies that they espouse and to make argument on why we should choose that philosophy as our own. The book is split up into four main parts. 

 Part 1 is split amongst the ancient philosophies from the East. It consists of the big three: Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism . 

 Part 2 is a regarding the ancient philosophies from the West: Aristotleanism, Stoicism, and Epicureanism. 

Part 3 consists of five religious’ traditions: Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, Progressive Islam, and Ethical Culture. 

Part 4 is the modern philosophies: Existentialism, Pragmatism, Effective Altruism, and Secular Humanism. 

I found Parts 1 and 2 to be the most compelling, partly because I am familiar with the philosophies within those two parts. The ancient philosophies of the East are my cultural reference, so the concepts and the argument are well known to me. I particularly enjoyed Owen Flanigan’s essay on Buddhism. 

The ancient philosophies from the West is something that I have spent some time learning and I have some understanding of these philosophies. Even though they did not cover all of the western philosophies, which I found curious. Perhaps they felt that the ancient philosophies are similar enough that they had the coverage that they needed. Pigliucci made a much more convincing case in his own book, of course making his case in a much shorter form is very constraining. Part 3 is what most readers would be the most familiar with, since the Judeo-Christian religions are the major part of the western Canon of religion. Less is known in the West about Hinduism or Progressive Islam but both those essays are quite well written. I personally thought that the Ethical Culture essay was the least convincing of the four in that part of the book. It just did not read like there was enough underlying philosophy to make it a viable and strong personal philosophy. Same could be said for Effective Altruism essay. Much to my chagrin, I found the essay on Secular Humanism less than inspiring. I had followed Secular Humanism many years ago and in reading this essay it reminded me why I did not continue to follow the belief as a personal philosophy. 

 I enjoyed the Existentialism and Pragmatism essays, putting them back to back was a great choice, the material lent itself to a very effortful reading, but at the same time I was able to exercise my thoughts with the mental gymnastics I had to perform in order to understand the essays. Interesting thing to me is that while John Kaag is a natural choice to write the chapter on Pragmatism as he had written American Philosophy: A Love Story, a story buttressed by his search through the books and papers of the founders of American Pragmatism, yet he also wrote Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, a revelatory memoir/travelogue regarding Existentialism. I wonder if the two authors had written their essays in parallel and compared notes, since the chapters complemented each other well. 

The most interesting thing that happened to me as I read each essay is that I had come to agree with much of what was written, while being older, I did not find myself switching to each one of these philosophies as I made my way through it as my younger self would have been tempted to do. Instead I stopped looking for orthodoxy and looked to become a true believer, I was happy to pick and choose amongst all these philosophies to try to create my own personal philosophy. If you were to ask me what is my personal philosophy right now? I could not tell you. What I could tell you after reading this book is that I know which parts of each of these philosophies made sense to me. It is almost like I'm back in my college years trying to find a moral and philosophical path for myself, but instead of looking for a single monolithic belief, I have come to the belief that choosing one from column A and one from column B is not such a bad way to go as far as personal philosophies go. 

Consistency of belief is important of course, the logic and reason behind the belief needs to be aligned, but I find that it is not the only thing. The driving motivation in selecting a personal philosophy is that one needs to be true to one’s self, whatever that is, and no monolithic philosophy can encompass all the nuances and variations of my beliefs. Indeed, that is the only way to go as no one person can be happy in a singular set of belief, because we are so different. I enjoyed this book in fits and starts, not because the authors were incapable of writing cogent summaries of their philosophies and make incisive arguments, it all goes back to the material they start with, that made the most difference. It was a nice roller coaster ride through some very intellectually stimulating philosophies.

Observations: Minneapolis, a death and it's aftermath

In these times of chaos and uncertainty, the murder that happened on Memorial Day in Minneapolis exacerbated our own sense of confusion, anger, uncertainty, and fear.

Today, Friday, after days of rioting and looting, two posts from two different friends on my Facebook time line stood out.

These posts were painful to read because the writers exposed so much of their emotions, their pains, and their fears in their posts. It was a naked, honest, and impromptu exposition about how this heinous act affected the posters. One was from a white man whose name is Justin Pletcher. The other is from a black woman whose name is Deltha Katherine Harbin

Justin Pletcher’s post

https://www.facebook.com/jjp119/posts/10112579068233321

Deltha Katherine Harbin’s post.

https://www.facebook.com/deltha.scott/posts/10102862110993933

Both are heartbreaking to read, both are heartfelt and sincere. While Justin’s story ended with a sense of hope and a sign of hope and understanding, Deltha’s had a sense of desperation, lost hope, and despair.

Justin talks about his experience as a white policeman in a town adjoining Minneapolis. He briefly recites his life experience and how he came to be a policeman.  He very quickly talks honestly about his revulsion and disbelief at what a fellow policeman perpetrated and the emotions that went through his mind. He then proceed to tell of  his serendipitous  meeting with a black man named  Calvin, a health inspector who has  to walk around the neighborhoods and he didn't want people to be calling the police on him because he’s a black man with dreadlocks. Stop for a second. Think about that. He is doing his job and he is afraid of being targeted because he is a black man wearing dreadlocks. This is the United States of America in the year 2020.

Justin meets Calvin and Justin decides to walk with Calvin to get his job done, just to make sure that he was OK. The post is so deserving to be read, so I will skip much of the details, You need to read Justin’s words.

Justin’s narrative and his gesture towards Calvin was heartwarming, as it was inspiring. The story gave me, and I hope all the other readers, hope. At the end of the narrative, Justin tells us that they parted as friends and they hope to continue that friendship. Indeed, it was a bright ray of hope in a very dark time.

Deltha’s story was the complete opposite from Justin’s. She talks about her husband, the love of her life, the father of her children. She talks about all things that made her fall in love with him. She tells us about a night when he went to the gas station to fill up her tank because it was too late, and he didn’t want her to do it in the morning.

Please read Deltha’s story from her posting as well because she deserves to be read. She relates how an older white woman called the police on her husband just because he is black. She tells about how it became an instance of a white woman’s accusation against the black man, and the police believed her words against him even though she had no evidence to make the claim, just that he is a black man. It was not until another white person, a white man, vouched for her husband that he was released. Imagine that, the police refused to believe a black man they did not know but was willing to take the word of a white woman and then a white man they did not know. Let that sink in. This is the moment when all the handy disguises and camouflages disappears, and the inherent biases take over the decision-making process. Given two unknown people, one black and one white, the people in the position of authority chose to believe the white person.

I will give the policemen the benefit of the doubt, that they don’t secretly own white hoods and that they don’t, as they say, have a racist bone in their body, at least not consciously. The problem is that we are dealing with ingrained prejudices, something that is not at the forefront of your consciousness. I am very sure that if you asked the officers why they chose to believe the white people versus the black man, they would have no idea why anyone is so upset, that is just the way they see the world, and that is exactly the problem.

I implore you to read Deltha’s narrative as closely as you read Justin’s because even though both narratives are heartfelt and blunt, Justin made me feel much better about my friends and neighbors, Deltha’s made me angry and paranoid. Justin made me hopeful and Deltha made me understand the problem in a much deeper manner that I had before.

Earlier in the week, when the protests in Minneapolis for devolve into riots, a close friend was expressing his own dismay and frustration with the rioting and looting that went on. He expressed the sentiment of many people: what are they thinking? Why are they destroying their own neighborhoods? Why are they burning businesses, some of the black owned? It is the same sentiment that is expressed time and again during the rioting and protesting after each killing of black people, this happened in St. Louis, It happened in New York City, it happened in Texas. Looting and rioting are obviously not acceptable at any time in a civilized society, I am not condoning any of those actions, especially the actions of those opportunists who took advantage of the chaos, anger, and fear. But, and this is not a WhatAboutism, it is a statement of fact.

I think James Baldwin in his interview with Esquire magazine in 1968, laid it out clearly:

Q. How would you define somebody who smashes in the window of a television store and takes what he wants?

BALDWIN: Before I get to that, how would you define somebody who puts a cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is looting whom? Grabbing off the TV set? He doesn’t really want the TV set. He’s saying screw you. It’s just judgment, by the way, on the value of the TV set. He doesn’t want it. He wants to let you know he’s there. The question I’m trying to raise is a very serious question. The mass media-television and all the major news agencies-endlessly use that word “looter”. On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us, And no one has seriously tried to get where the trouble is. After all, you’re accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it’s obscene.

 The underlaying assumption in my friend’s question is that the looters and rioters don’t realize that they are doing harm to their own future, to their own community, and they destroyed  any chance that they had of redemption by turning public opinion against themselves. What this also assumes is that the system of justice is applied evenly, that lady Justice is indeed blind to all the differences that defines us externally, not giving heed to the fact that justice is meted out by human beings: flawed in their thinking because of the prejudices exemplified in Deltha’s story.

My friend also pre-supposes that we have no precedence to reference, that the black citizens of America have always received some modicum of justice in the legal system created, executed, and operated by white people. It also assumes that legal recourse, review, and exoneration are a regular part of the black citizen’s experience with the American justice system. We know better. We have seen the results from the justice system that is decidedly skewed against all minority citizens, but especially skewed against the black citizens. Strange fruits indeed.

Returning to my friend’s question: are the black citizen’s who chose to riot and loot crazy? Do they not how the system work? Are they just so ignorant and primitive that they are not capable of understanding what is best for them? Or have they been figuratively and literally pinned against the ground so many times, had their necks stepped on by a someone’s knee so many time, and lost their lives so many times that they have lost hope of ever receiving justice from a system that is designed to work against justice for all, but actually gives justice to only those who possess less melanin? In short, have they given up on this system and they figure they had nothing to lose. Maybe they figured that destroying wealth and property, the keystone to the American soul, is the only way to get the attention of those who created this unfair system?

Think about THAT for a moment. How desperate and oppressed must one be in order to believe that their only chance for justice is to destroy whatever they had in order to make progress. It certainly speaks volumes.

Please go back and read Deltha’s post once again. If it gives my melanin challenged friends the kind of sadness and pain that it gave me, it gives me hope, just as Justin’s post gave me hope.  

One more hope is that the next encounter Delitha’s husband has with a white policeman, it is with Justin, and they can both have a laugh at the Karen that called in.