Meditation

Fortune favors the prepared mind. You throw yourself in the way of opportunity, and then you fit yourself to take advantage of that with which fate presents you.

You want to be bold, you tell yourself. Experience teaches us that experience teaches us. One develops a sense of Right and Wrong in much the same way one develops a sense of balance: throwing oneself out there, scraping your knees when you fall. You… feel what is right: every correct step increases your confidence; every misstep is a corrective, a lesson.

Barry Goldwater famously said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.  Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” To the chronic procrastinator, cautious hesitation is deadly sin.

Do what thy manhood bids thee do:
from none but self expect applause.
He noblest lives, and noblest dies,
who makes and keeps his self-made laws.

An Idle Speculation

First: an increasingly acceptable and mainstream evolutionary approach to understanding human behavior.

Second: an also increasingly prevalent, and possibly extreme, embrasure of occult and mystical explanations in rejection of reason and science.

Prediction of the first: a sterilization of the fruitfulness of evolutionary explanation, as it continues to exclude the possiblity that evolutionary explantions themselves demand a "missing element," an arrow, a telos that transcends the limits of naturalistic explanation.

Prediction of the second: a rejection in the mainstream of the overly-emotional, overly-irrational occulto-mystical trends towards "approaching" spiritual matters.

The hopeful synthesis: an increase, in a segment of the population, of an openness to a "scientific approach" to the spiritual; the acknowledgment that science needs the religious attitude, as much as the religious attitude needs science.

Question to self: is Dennett's new direction an indication of the first observation, or the hopeful synthesis? Dennett strikes me as the uber-intellectualist; on the other hand, he has a track record as a maverick. But I don't have time to read his stuff....