2009. Seems Like We've Done this Dance Before.

One of the benefits of having a brilliant and adventurous daughter is this: when she returns the borrowed camera it is loaded with really interesting photographs. Things I have never seen and places I will never go. The municipal clock shown here is in Prague. I especially like the four attendants standing along side, medieval witnesses to the last four or five centuries. I do not know the particular history of this clock but maybe one of my readers will.

Over the next few days I will write about the conflict that exists between certainty and mystery. Civilized societies have always needed to balance these psychological quantities, and as we look back at western history we may see moments when the conflict is most strident and the contrasts most sharp. I think we are moving through a similar moment now, and I believe that the philosophical posture our society assumes will have much to do with our children's future.

Let me begin with a thought from Bertrand Russell. One does not need to read very far in his History of Western Philosophy to encounter the conflict. He sees the rise of enthusiastic religion as a reaction against the enervating constraints of a severely logical Greek society:

It is evident that this process can be carried too far, as it is, for instance, by the miser. But without going to such extremes, prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Bacchus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of everyday preoccupations. Much of what is greatest in human achievement involves some element of intoxication, some sweeping away of prudence by passion. Without the Bacchic element life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous. Prudence versus passion is a conflict which runs through history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side wholly with either party.