Reflections on Reaching 95

Unaccountably, still alive at ninety-five, I decided to reflect on my life and my evolving philosophy, taking note as to whether I’ve developed any insights or refinements in my thinking since I wrote “Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years,” the essay featured on the home page of this website. 

I’m going to try to avoid having my reflections distorted by the heaviness I feel as a result of how our country has been spinning into an abyss. The “last best hope on Earth” has been grievously degraded by an autocratic regime headed by an unprincipled, corrupt, fascistic demagogue supported by a Congress and a Supreme Court controlled by people who have shed allegiance to our constitutional democracy in favor of increasing their wealth and power, promoting their respective illiberal ideologies, assuaging their deeply held resentments, or some combination of the above.

Our federal and state governments and much of the media have become increasingly controlled by ultra-rich individuals for whom Trump and his loyalist subordinates are avatars in the power centers of government. By exercising their leverage to bring about Trump’a election and perpetuating his tenure in office, an appalling proportion of American power-wielders have revealed themselves to be permeated with rot.

What I’ve reflected about most since writing “Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years” is the subject of Christine Korsgaard’s book Self-Constitution, the lesson of which is that if you don’t exercise constitutional rule over yourself — if you don’t adhere to a virtuous moral framework (or, as Korsgaard, following Kant, puts it, act only in ways that could meet the test of a universal moral law) — you will be ruled by a “heap of impulses.”

Donald Trump experienced the great misfortune (which became the misfortune of all of us) of becoming composed of little else but a heap of impulses that propel him without regard to the U. S. Constitution, statutory law, basic decency, or the noble sentiments and aspirations that most Americans have thought of as expressing the true nature of our country. 

[to be continued}