Travelogue 1060 – September 28

Rainy Day Sophistry

Out one café window, it was raining. Out the other, it was not. I swung my head one way and then the other, trying to make sense of it. The barista watched me out of the corner of her eye, wondering what new variety of strange behaviour she had to witness. But it was true: sunny one way and showering the other. Cross the street and you were dry. She shrugged and knocked the grounds out of her portafilter.

Life is a game of adaptation. Before I take the girls to school, I check the skies; I check the forecast; I gather our rain gear. I gauge the movements of the clouds. I time our exit like a surfer catching a wave, hoping the lull in the rain lasts just long enough for our trip. I have developed a fine barometric sensitivity for rain. I smell it coming. I search the skies continuously like a fugitive.

A skill is a measure of change. It was formed as a response to the world. The human, as a bundle of skills, is the measure of all things.

It was Protagoras who first said, “Man is the measure of all things.” He was a sophist, according to the historians. In two different dialogues written by Plato, Protagoras the Sophist was put in his place by Socrates, the Non-Sophist. I’m sceptical of the labels. I’m also sceptical about Plato’s Socrates. I don’t think it detracts from Plato’s incredible achievement to admit that he very likely created a version of Socrates that fit into his program.

This is what I think about the sophists. They have come down to us in historical record as somewhat despicable figures, having lost the long-term propaganda war. They are portrayed as relativists, if we can be allowed borrow a modern pejorative.

It’s not enough to accept the caricature. Young men wanted what they had to teach. In societies in which business and policy were decided in the marketplace and the forum, rhetoric was a necessary skill. The thrust of their teaching was skill-building: rhetoric and applied logic. Skills teachers focus on problem-solving and the solutions are pragmatic, not theoretical. Skills teachers focus on pushing boundaries and asking questions. They all had their different methods and their different styles, but they agreed on empowering students to handle debate, public speaking, and critical thinking. Several made extravagant claims about their own knowledge. Imagine, a teacher who lives on tuition fees bragging about his knowledge!

Let’s compare now the Socratic method, setting aside the conclusions that Plato forced Socrates to reach. The method consisted of questioning, defining terms, pushing boundaries, and applying logic. The outcome? He was charged in the courts of impiety and the corruption of the youth of Athens. I think the line between Socrates and his competition is less categorical and more one of branding. He was perhaps just the best of the sophists, after all, not the alternative to the sophists.

Travelogue 1059 – September 24

The Measure is Man

I’m still reeling from the final episodes of “Better Call Saul”. No spoilers: it’s not because of any specific plot twist or surprise. It’s because the whole series was so affecting, and the final episodes so perfect in their logic. The writing in this series was truly impressive.

Result: I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Saul. Surely more attention than a TV show deserves. Or is it? We are still a species that tells stories. Just because we tell them digitally doesn’t mean they are fundamentally more evolved than cave paintings. More sophisticated and complex doesn’t mean categorically different.

Reading about the ancient Greeks and watching Saul has led me to thoughts about the sophists. The sophists were public philosophers in sixth- and fifth-century BC Greece. History’s main charge against the sophists, Plato and Aristophanes here playing the part of 80s Republicans, was relativism. The sophists called themselves teachers, and what they taught was rhetoric, and what they taught about rhetoric was that any point could be argued. The conservatives cried foul.

The early sophist Protagoras famously said, “Man is the measure of all things.” When I first read that, years ago, I confess that I didn’t think too deeply about it. It seemed one of those cryptic ancient Greek aphorisms that read simply like a paean to humanity.

There’s more to it. Study the larger context, study the language of the passage, and it seems to be a statement that the individual human determines his or her truth. There’s apparently some debate about whether Protagoras meant that the human mind determines fact or determines value. For example, there’s a difference between declaring it’s winter and declaring it’s cold as winter. (If there are any real philosophers reading this and cringing, please forgive me.)

I’m a fan of Plato, and yet I find myself wanting to defend the sophist. Maybe it’s because they were teachers, among the first in history to make more than a fleeting appearance on the stage. And the impression they made was far-reaching. In some senses, the main thrust of all that beautiful Greek culture and wisdom that we have taken as foundational for two millennia was pedagogy. They were a race of teachers.

Travelogue 1058 – September 12

A Sense of Taste

Starbucks wouldn’t have been our first choice. We were on our way to an evening hockey practice. We were running early, so between Metro and tram we stopped for a snack. As soon as we were in the open, we were caught in a rain shower. We ducked into the Starbucks at the central library.

We were among the first in the rain-shower line, and so we scored a nice table along the wall. Much of the place seems worn and sweaty. Starbucks cafes seem to age more quickly than other cafes. Is it an illusion of the décor, the dark colours and the wood? Best to keep café interiors bright, particularly in this climate.

Three weeks of perfect attendance for both girls is a big achievement. We’re celebrating. It’s been a very positive start to the school year. Of course, it’s only the beginning of the year, and the temps are still warm; three weeks now doesn’t mean what it does in November. But still. We’ve already had one near-miss. Little Ren’s teacher came down with COVID last week.

Baby Jos wanted a chocolate muffin. I wanted a chocolate cookie and an espresso. We watched the rain come down. We munched on our snacks. At some point, I had an alarming realization. I took another bite; I took another sip. I wasn’t tasting anything. I panicked. I called Menna. “I’m not tasting anything!” “Oh, no,” she cried. Should I pull out of the hockey practice and run home? Menna thought I should.

I mulled it over after the phone call. Baby Jos would be disappointed. And I didn’t want to set the wrong tone at the start of her hockey season. I had no other symptoms. The rain was passing. I resolved we should try. If at any point I felt feverish or short of breath, we would turn back, even if we were at the gateway of the hockey club.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. The rain had ceased. Baby Jos ran onto the field, and I snuck away to the clubhouse. There, I decided on an experiment: one coffee and one of their very tasty brownies. In fact, the brownie was yummy as ever. The coffee wasn’t bad, either. Aha, I thought. I was going to be fine.

The moral to the post-pandemic story: it’s not COVID; it’s just Starbucks.

Travelogue 1057 – September 5
Turning On the Lights

First there was light. That was on my mind. In summer, when I awoke, there was sunlight. Now I have to turn on the lights.

In the eastern windows there is some light in the sky, the faint start of the day. But outside my door, facing west, the sky is dark. This is my first sighting post-solstice of stars in the morning after I awake, when I open the front door. It’s sobering.

Today is predicted to be the last hot and dry day before storms move in. You feel the tension and suspense. There’s a crackle in the air. Hazy clouds are coming and going. People are enjoying the weather, riding their bikes to work, sitting on their balconies. With a change in the air, the Dutch are relishing the last of the ending period before preparing for what’s coming.

The news from Germany is the passing of a €65bn package to help families and companies with energy costs this winter. This tops the news on British news sites, but I have to scroll surprisingly far among the headlines of Nos, my usual morning Dutch source, to find the same. I have seen little about Dutch government plans for the looming energy crisis.

Sometimes, even in the presence of beauty, I marvel at the resilience of the human psyche that finds within itself as a mass, and within themselves as individuals, the motivation, the hope, yes the energy - the light on a winter’s morning, – to see their way to the front door, to the Metro station, to their workstations. The metaphor is the end of summer. Or, more likely, we are the metaphor for the season.