Believing in Truth

-- By Tom Phillips 

Rudy Giuliani: "Truth isn't truth"

It’s happening more and more these days – people saying things that just a few years ago would have been considered insane.  At a recent party, a young female stranger – a graduate student – asked me, “What do you think about the post-truth moment?”  My flustered answer: “I’m against it.” 

On the street and even in church, on hearing that I used to write for CBS News, people have cheerfully piped up: “Oh, fake news!”  Absolutely not, I tell them.  I never knowingly wrote a word of fake news.  Oh, they reply, but you’re retired.  How about the people writing now?   

I am a member of two establishments -- the press and the church -- that depend for their existence on the idea of truth.  Both are under siege by a new wave of old politics that values visions over facts, slogans over reason, personality over truthfulness.  The press is in danger of being discredited, the church of being co-opted.  And so far, the press is holding up better, more resistant and resilient.

I Liked It Better When ... #6

-- By Tom Phillips  

Beach Haven, 2018

I don't like to rail against modern conveniences and comforts – don’t want to go back to washing dishes or clothes by hand, or typing stories and correcting them with white-out.  But I liked it better before beach houses were air-conditioned.  

Our guest blogger Linda Given makes the case for a salty air and the sound of surf:  

My parents both grew up in New Jersey and as a result, I’ve spent time at the Jersey Shore since I was a very young child.  One of my first distinct memories being there is of sleeping in a little bedroom under the stairs of a rental house, with my window open, feeling the ocean breeze and listening to the waves rolling back and forth along the shore.  In the morning, I heard seagulls and footsteps and the occasional car. Some sixty years later I’ve just returned from a beach vacation and things have changed!

Pinker's Paradise

-- By Tom Phillips

Harvard professor Steven Pinker is out with another of his weighty books about how the world is getting better all the time. This one's called "Enlightenment Now." Readers should appreciate his contrarianism; his mass of statistics about the world's rising prosperity, improving health, reduced violence and increasing personal satisfaction is a welcome antidote to studies that show humans growing more lonely, pessimistic and frightened.

There's a fly in the cream, though. While Pinker's global stats generally show that happiness rises along with income, here in the United States, the pursuit of happiness has ground to a halt.  In recent decades, Pinker reports, American men have gotten no happier, while women have actually grown less happy. This could simply reflect the stagnation in middle-class incomes since the 1970s.  But happiness is not an isolated phenomenon -- it reflects much broader societal trends.

My Road to Germany

--  By Tom Phillips

Gestapo Prison Cell -- Koln 

Among my must-see destinations on the road to dotage are some I've spent my life avoiding --  places in the world that frighten me. And the scariest has always been Germany.

Born in 1942, my first idea of Germans was just "the enemy," the ones who started this all-consuming war. Then in 1946, right after the war, we moved to London and I learned what was meant by blitzkrieg. Bricks and half-bricks were scattered everywhere, cranes were excavating craters where buildings had been. An army manual showed how an incendiary bomb pierces the floors of a home, then blows the place up. I drew picture after picture of planes dropping bombs, blowing homes and people to bits.

Back in America at age twelve,  I read the diary of Ann Frank and felt her terror of the Gestapo. It seemed incomprehensible that anyone would want to kill such a peaceful, brilliant child. Germans struck me as uniquely ruthless and sadistic people. And as I grew up, my fears were intensified by my affection and admiration for Jews, who were my best friends, teachers and mentors.

Still, it was clear that Germany did not equal Nazism. History showed it was the very center of western civilization, the seat of philosophy and the arts. How it turned monstrous was a conundrum without a clear answer. Some of my fellow students had no qualms about visiting Germany, but many, like me, were afraid.

Still, I was amazed to learn that some Jews actually went back after the war, to live in the nation that had tried to exterminate them. And recently I read about Jewish writers, artists and intellectuals  thriving in Germany, despite continued incidents of anti-Semitism.

If they could go, I should. So this summer, on vacation in the Netherlands, we planned a short side trip -- a weekend in Koln (Cologne) on the Rhine. The prospect filled me with violently mixed emotions. What would we see?

In a Spin (Circumambulation #2)

-- By Tom Phillips

A few years back, just starting out on the Road to Dotage, I wrote about the benefits of walking around in circles -- the spiritual practice of circumambulation. That essay described walking around various holy sites in India, and later circumambulating an elephant sculpture in New Jersey. As one's dotage advances, the circles get smaller. And so it is that this year I have ended up in the most minimal of all circular paths -- turning on a dime, AKA whirling.

I had only whirled once before -- in the 1970s, at the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in Poona, India -- where a friend and I were visiting out of curiosity.

My most ecstatic time was in the whirling class, where we learned the basic technique of the Sufi Dervishes. Contrary to all my previous learning and experience, I found if you keep one foot in the same place and your eyes on a level plane, it’s possible to spin around indefinitely. We beginners did it with one foot planted and the other pushing around in a circle, as if we were riding a scooter on a dime. We held one arm straight and looked out over the fingertips. I felt no dizziness at all. The world, trees, buildings, clouds and sky, just rolled around over and over again like the walls of a whirlpool. The picture was not blurred at all, just moved faster and faster, round and round.

This experience was so deep and inexplicable that I never tried it again after we left the ashram, and to this day don’t know if I could repeat it. It seemed like a magical window, opening on an area of truth that could not be set down in words...  (from "A Beginner's Life.")