Spreading the Light

There are two ways of spreading light:
to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.

— Edith Wharton

In the early 1920s, Professor Edith Stein was assistant-teaching at the University of Freiburg alongside her mentor, the renowned philosopher Edmund Husserl.

Their aim was considered subversive at the time: to train a generation of scholars to dissect "lived" human experiences—everything from falling in love to walking the dog, encountering a Rembrandt to eating a sandwich. Professional philosophers rarely thought about such things. 

Stein's own interest lay in dissecting empathy—our lived experience of others—which to her mind was the key to self-knowledge. Her interest stemmed, in part, from her work as a nurse in a field hospital during World War I, after which she told a friend, "I realize now that my life is no longer my own.”

A once-devout Jew turned atheist, Stein believed through philosophy she could shed light on the existence of souls—an effort her mentor encouraged ("The life of men is nothing else than a way towards God," Husserl later told her). But while visiting a friend's home, Stein read a borrowed copy of the autobiography of a nun, Saint Teresa of Ávila. It convinced her to convert to Catholicism. Stein then quit her university job and began to lecture throughout Germany, not on Catholicism, but feminism—talks that made her famous. Twelve years later, Stein entered a Carmelite convent in Cologne, planning to live a secluded life writing philosophy books.

But politics intervened. Hitler's persecution of Jews prompted the nuns to transfer Stein in 1938 to a convent in Holland, where they thought she'd be safe. And she was until 1942, when Holland's bishops condemned Nazi anti-Semitism from the pulpit and Hitler, in retaliation, ordered the arrest all Jewish converts in the country. Stein was taken in a boxcar to Auschwitz, where she died in the gas chamber. Her body was cremated, like 1,018,350 others.

In 1987, Pope John Paul II—another of Husserl's followers—beatified Edith Stein. That same year, a two-year-old girl in Boston mistook Tylenol for candy and swallowed the equivalent of 16 lethal doses. The girl's parents begged everyone they knew to pray to Stein to intercede on their dying daughter's behalf. They did, and the girl recovered within days.

''I'm not saying it was a miracle,'' her doctor told The New York Times. ''I'm saying it was miraculous. I'm Jewish. I don't believe per se in miracles, but I can say I didn't expect her to recover.''

Two years later, the pope canonized Edith Stein as Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. He remarked in English that day, ""Edith Stein stands out as a beacon which casts its light amid the terrible darkness which has marred this century. To her prayers before God I entrust all who suffer for the sake of justice and human dignity."

The Real Reason 'Bewitched' was Cancelled

Democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

— Isaac Asimov

I've had it with the truthies, trash and trivia that's vying for my overtaxed attention.

Once intriguing, the big news sites and social media networks have become cyber cesspools.

My New Year's resolution: to boycott them.

The last straw was a click-bait headline that dogged me yesterday: "The Real Reason 'Bewitched' was Cancelled."

I don't need—or care—to know why ABC executives scrapped a TV sit-com 46 years ago.

Worse, I resent being told the "real" reason was adultery, when in fact it was low audience share.

It's time for all good people to call a halt to America's romance with anti-intellectualism—the willful "dismissal of science, the arts, and humanities and their replacement by entertainment, self-righteousness, ignorance, and deliberate gullibility," as executive coach Ray Williams puts it.

We should take no pride in the fact Americans choose to be gullible and uninformed.

We should only take comfort in the fact that millions of the most gullible and uninformed are killing themselves with drugs, alcohol and guns.

Butcher's Bible

Democratic theories of government in their modern form
are based on dogmas of equality.

— Madison Grant

Madison Grant was a New York City lawyer who in 1916 published The Passing of the Great Race.

Grant's work flew off booksellers' shelves after Science and The Saturday Evening Post both praised it, and climbed steadily to become an international best-seller.

The Passing of the Great Race attributed every benefit of civilization to the efforts of the Nordic race, and every threat to those benefits to people of other races. 

Based on its claim of Nordic superiority, the book argued for the end of immigration and equal rights and the start of a national eugenics program designed to foster "obliteration of the unfit."

However, thanks to the protests of anthropologists like Franz Boas and Margaret Mead—who produced compelling counter-evidence that showed race had no bearing on culture—the arguments made by The Passing of the Great Race soon fell from favor, and Madison Grant lost his following.

But not completely.

One day in 1934, Grant received a letter from a prominent German, who thanked him for writing "my bible." 

The letter was signed by Adolf Hitler.

From Here to Eternity

As it liberated Rome in June 1944, the US Army came upon the American philosopher George Santayana, missing from his adopted homeland for over three decades. 

The 80-year-old had been living in Italy in poverty, boarding at a Catholic nursing home and writing an autobiography.

A reporter for Life photographed the philosopher on a park bench and asked his opinion about the war.

"Of war he knew nothing," Life's reporter wrote: "I live in the eternal."

America's sorry state has fatigued me to a degree where I'm ready to "do a Santayana" and check out of public affairs.

The kleptocrats who run this country can have their plunder, for all I care. 

Screw them.

Beginning today, I live in the eternal.

Will you join me?

War on Words

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

― George Orwell, 1984

Two decades ago, two child development specialists tracked the weekly growth in the vocabularies of 42 children over 30 months. They discovered a child's socioeconomic status determined her vocabulary's breadth―and her test-scores later in school.

So not only does family of origin determine academic success; words do, too.

So why destroy them?

After a public outcry this week, the head of the CDC denied that President Trump banned the use of seven words by her agency: diversity, entitlement, evidence-based, fetus, science-based, transgender, and vulnerable.

But, as it turns out, new style guidelines imposed by Trump do ban the seven words―and that CDC is by no means the only agency under the thumb of the president's word-police.

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings,” the German poet Heinrich Heine said. And where they have destroyed words?

But fear not: resistance is facile.

Invent a word every day. 

If you need inspiration, follow Fritinancy, a blog dedicated to new-word formation.

Be like Shakespeare or Dickens or Orwell (who once wrote, "What is wanted is several thousands of gifted but normal people who would give themselves to word-invention as seriously as people now give themselves to Shakespearean research"):

• Shakespeare invented the words articulate, barefaced, baseless and watchdog.
  

• Dickens invented the words coffee-imbibing, messiness, sawbones, and seediness.
  

• Orwell invented the words newspeak, prole, thought-police, and unperson.

My new word for the day?

Automadon.