Bill Vitek

We are each and all of us playing the music of the spheres in the Big Bang Orchestra, which doubles as our hearth and home.

The Pandemic Armchair Philosophy Blog welcomes the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 crisis, but a “return to normal” should refocus us on a long list of global climate emergencies, social injustices, and tottering democratic institutions.

About 40 years ago, Wes Jackson at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas asked this radical question: Why can’t we have perennial grains? Since grains make up about 65% of worldwide calories, why not develop perennial versions?

With nearly eight billion people on the planet, we aren’t going back to hunting and gathering. But around the world, often under the banner of agroecology, people are using modern science and traditional knowledge to develop ways of farming that are less ecologically and socially destructive.

Voltaire gives readers a glimpse of the overwhelming weight of the universe and the worst abuses imagined by human beings. And he does it in a way that we can hold them in our hands, smile at their absurdities, remain fortified against their eventualities, and work to plant and grow new ideas and systems…

How do we live wise and virtuous lives with all of our human frailties laid bare by a pandemic?  Hume, I think, would answer: with others, with humor and kindness, and with constant checks on the assumptions and certainties we hold too tightly and too often in opposition to others, be they viral or human.