Category Archives: Life

On Vanity

On Vanity – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I reflect on the role of love in balancing between self-praise and community in a discussion of vanity.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, I reflect on the role of love in balancing between self-praise and community in a discussion of vanity.

Today, in Rome the College of Cardinals will convene for the new conclave to elect our next Pope. By the time you read this we may have already seen white smoke rise from the chimney and met our new pontiff by his papal name on the balcony of St. Peter’s. Or more likely when you read this the cardinals will be amid one volley or another of voting rounds and deliberating their right course of action. Since the death of Pope Francis, I’ve felt rebuffed by the electoral speculation over who will be the next pope; by and large I’ve avoided reading any of these articles or watching any of these analyses. On the one hand, in my lifetime these lists of papabili have often been wrong. Francis was an unexpected choice. Yet on the other hand I see a sense of vanity in all this speculation which seeks the political power of the Papacy while ignoring its pastoral nature. I’ve long heard that the eventual choice of Pope is supposed to be directed by the Holy Spirit, whispering perhaps into the ears of the men in red like God did to Elijah in the cave. In my own experience, I’ve seen this most in the realization that the best path for me to take often is the strangest or most winding in character.

It takes a great deal of humility to take that particularly uncertain way in life, to not know where you’re going to end up. You have to learn to trust in yourself and in the people around you to make that path work. I’ve learned to expect things to break, and nothing that I try to work, and to figure out how to move forward in spite of what I’d dreamed and hoped for. I try to learn from my experience even when it is painful or heart wrenching to see dreams vanish and new realities, perhaps less glowing than what I hoped for, take their place. Still, the best way in my experience is to be patient and let things grow naturally around you and within you. The initial instinct isn’t always accurate, yet it should not be discounted either. There are days when the useless is best just to let your mind rest and decide where to go next. The late Renaissance French humanist essayist Michel de Montaigne (he actually wrote “I am no philosopher”) wrote in his essay “Of Vanity” of the men of his own time when France was wracked by forty years of civil war, “a time when it is so common to do evil, it is practically praiseworthy to do what is merely useless.”[1] I am often focused on resolving questions by finding immediate solutions, even if they are smaller steps leading to a greater whole. Yet in recent weeks I’ve found those solutions aren’t always needed or warranted, for they can sift the complexities of a problem so far down that the problem itself slips through the strainer and remains unresolved.

I recognize a degree of vanity here; I figure I have a strong mind and being reasonably well educated that I can attend to any problem and find a logical solution. Yet logic cannot account for humanity in all our chaos and charm. The character and nature of humanity is to spy ourselves in the glass and be marveled by it. We can be so caught in imagining our own glories and our own defeats that we miss the lived moments in between when we are surviving the daily fare and writing even the smallest of verses which will contribute to the song of our lives. I’ve learned to accept that my wishes for things are not always going to happen, and that as much as I warm my soul with dreams of wonders to come those dreams will only be realized by living with the people around me, learning about them, trying to understand them, supporting them, and appreciating them for who they are. Why enforce my own persuasions on you when I could appreciate you, dear Reader, for your own self and your cosmovision? This is a word I only recently learned, I saw it first in Surekha Davies’s new book Humans: A Monstrous History. It seems to originate in Spanish as a way of expressing the way in which reality is subjectively understood through our sensory perceptions. Descartes’s famous maxim for knowledge, “I think, therefore I am” means in this sense that we know what we know because we can perceive it. The cosmos in all its wonder is familiar to us through our sight, hearing, smell, and touch. I would much rather wait to hear your song and listen to it harmonize with mine than pull your voice into my own melody against its own nature.

Montaigne admired those in his generation who kept up the good nature of humanity, its customs, laws, and mores in spite of the world around them losing so much of that common purpose. In quoting Cicero, “not by the calculation of your income, but by your manner of living and your culture, is your wealth really to be reckoned,” the essayist speaks the greater value of a good life enriched by a passion for community and a charitable outlook on our pursuits.[2] While I’m a practicing Catholic, ever striving to be more faithful in my life, I firmly believe with my whole being that the state should be secular, the better to reflect the totality of the people from whom government derives its power. I would be vain to demand that the state reflect my Catholicism at the detriment of all my neighbors, even my fellow Catholics, whose faith is personal and distinct from my own. A good person recognizes this and seeks communion through mutual respect and appreciation. The most central tenant of my faith is that God is love, άγάπη, φιλία, and ἕρως alike in the original Greek, and the greatest expression of this love is in our liberty to make our own lives, our free will. If we are meant to live in this image then surely we ought to lower our pride and our vanity and hail the liberty of those around us to live their own lives and make their own choices?

For much of my life I’ve had a hard time taking criticism. I’m better at it today, yet it still is a something I know I will always need to work on. I’m no longer in a state of mind where I feel that I need to justify my actions or choices to everyone. On the inverse side, several years ago I finally caught myself trying to deflect praise with a witty quip that deflated some of the experience. This is something that I’d been doing for a long time perhaps to not inflate my ego too far. I went through my phase of wanting to be important, wanting to be a leader, and to be at the front of things and today when I am in that position in so many organizations, I’ve found that it’s much more fun to be a part of a team working together to achieve our common ends. Together these twin forces pull me toward a humility that I hope keeps me grounded, in which I’ve allowed myself to experience my successes while embracing the troubles that occurred in the course of those victories.

In my academic career I’ve published to date one public-facing article about my historical zoology research into the three-toed sloth and an encyclopedia entry titled “Amerindians in Brazil” for the volume South America: From European Contact to Independence which was published earlier this year. In both instances, I’ve since found things that I got wrong. It was a bit of a shock at first to realize this. In the case of the encyclopedia entry, I made a rather large error in misgendering a god, the Tupi deity Maire-Monan who I interpreted as feminine following the lead of the sixteenth-century Portuguese authorities, only to realize while I was writing a book chapter last summer about magic in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest the error I’d made. As such, the correction to the encyclopedia entry appears in the footnotes of that forthcoming chapter. Likewise, in the editing stage of a forthcoming article of mine, my first peer-reviewed article to be published, I was presented with conclusive evidence that my prior conclusions that the three-toed sloth found in my sources cannot be definitively identified as a southern maned sloth (Bradypus crinitus) as I’d written in that article “The ‘Sufficiently Strange’ Sloth” for EPOCH Magazine’s June 2024 issue but is in fact more likely either a northern maned sloth (B. torquatus) or a brown-throated sloth (B. variegatus). That prior assertion in favor of the southern maned sloth stands corrected now not only in my forthcoming article “A Sloth in the First French Colony in the Americas” but also in the latest draft of Chapter 3 of my dissertation.

A few years ago, I would have still had significant trouble accepting these critiques out of a strong sense of embarrassment at making such a mistake. In the case of the sloth’s historical zoology, I thought I read all there was to read about the different three-toed sloth species which live in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, yet I was proven wrong by a generous reviewer who even offered a bibliography of where I could look to find more reliable information. Were, I always fixated on the looking glass of my successes I would surely miss the flaws that pronounce my humanity and not see the ample room for growth. I know that I’m not perfect, in fact I revel in the fact. And while my faith exists, I challenge anyone who claims to know definitive things about matters of belief whether they can really know the mind of God, a concept which as I wrote previously in my blog post from 12 March titled “The Divine Essence,” that divinity extends in scale far beyond human comprehension.

These last few years I’ve long felt a sense of disconnect between the two poles of my life. On the one hand in Binghamton, I felt a sense of professional accomplishment, I was at a good university conducting research and teaching, and a part of an academic community, however disparate that community was in practice. Yet I missed my family, I missed the Midwest, my home cities of Chicago and Kansas City became longed for isles of the blessed far to the west on the flatlands beyond the Appalachians. I longed to be active in my parish and to offer my talents to my brother Hibernians in elected office. I missed the regularity of the live music in Kansas City, the greater presence of the Kansas City Symphony in this city than anything I could find in Binghamton. Yet when I left Binghamton at a moment when I know I needed to leave, I found that I gave up more than I necessarily wanted. I lost that sense of professional accomplishment and surrounded myself by friends from beyond the academy who appreciate what I do but don’t necessarily understand the nuances of it. In the last few months, I’ve found something of that professional community through the learned societies that I’m a part of and at academic conferences where once again those two poles seem linked by a common axis. That axis is essential to a good life because it provides the balance which allows the individual to truly live to their fullest potential as a part of a wider community. I’ve known true solitude, a mantra of mine in recent weeks has been the simple Irish phrase, “Is mé i m’aonar,” or “I am alone.” It’s a plaintive call of sorts, yet it’s also a moment to learn from, that as much as I’m used to this existence that I want to grow out of it. Montaigne wrote in “Of Vanity” that “it is pitiful to be in a place where everything you see involves and concerns you.”[3] This is the solitary life, a life where about you all things revolve, and what’s worst about it is that it can be lived in community. Alone together was a phrase I read time and again during the recent pandemic. Yet even then with our need to stay apart we found ways to be together. I spent much of the pandemic years here in Kansas City rather than in Binghamton and still felt far more closely attuned to my professional community and the friends who populate it. 

In these past few weeks, I’ve been happiest when I’ve had that connection with my family and friends, when I’m with other people and experiencing their lives, their passions, their perceptions of our shared world. I put faith in the currency of human connection and community because that is the most valuable coinage I’ve yet seen. All the gold and silver that humanity has ever mined cannot compare with the value of community and the humility it brings out in all of us. I have many highly accomplished, brilliant friends, and I’m delighted to count myself among them. There is some vanity in these friendships, after all we approach each other with our own experiences and stories to share, highlighting the things we’ve done, yet in a good relationship we do so to elevate our friends and encourage them to seek greater things for themselves. I feel fortunate to have met these friends, and to be able to put my talents to use serving our common cause.This week then as the cardinals vote in Rome, I hope they will look not just to their own personal interests, theological bent, or political persuasion. I pray they will listen for that suggestion that seems just strange enough that it could be right, and that they chose a Pope to lead our Church who will continue to build bridges that may close the divides erected for millennia between ourselves and so many of our fellows. I hope for a pope who will be a friend to all, a good diplomat who can unite disparate peoples together into one common cause. May his humility guide him to be the pope we need now in the second quarter of the twenty-first century, and when he is elected may we rise to the occasion to better ourselves.

[1] Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame, (Stanford University Press, 1965), 3.9., p. 722.

[2] Montaigne, Essays 3.9., p. 724.

[3] Montaigne, Essays 3.9., pp. 725–26.

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Montaigne and the Ages of Life

Montaigne and the Ages of Life – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, reflections on Michel de Montaigne’s perception of his changing character throughout his life.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, reflections on Michel de Montaigne’s perception of his changing character throughout his life.

I’m currently reading Philippe Desan’s biography of Michel de Montaigne, the French philosopher and statesman and the father of the essay. Montaigne is an influence for me in how the Wednesday Blog has developed over the last four years that I’ve been writing this weekly. He is also one of the figures on the orbit of my dissertation, and one of the most important sources for critical analysis of the events which I describe in that doctoral work. Philippe Desan in turn is one of, if not the most prolific Montaigne scholar of our time. So, it’s been a delight to read his biography of this man who I’ve gotten to know however faintly through the frame of his Essays in my research.

Most of my work deals with his famous essay “On the Cannibals” found in Volume 1 of that three volume collection. “Des cannibales,” as it’s known in its original French, was published in the first collection of Montaigne’s essays in 1580, and it’s this collection with which I’ve been the most invested in my work. The cannibals of Montaigne’s focus speak to questions of humanity and human dignity which I pose in my dissertation, which is titled “Understanding the Sauvage in André Thevet’s Brazil: 1555-1590.” 

Yet it is in the third volume of Essays where Desan established a crucial connection between Montaigne the man and Montaigne the humanist of the late Renaissance preserved in the amber of his words. In the essay titled “On Vanity” Montaigne poses a fascinating self-reflection looking back at his life as he remembered it and who he was at the time he wrote that particular essay near the end of his days. Quoting here from Donald Frame’s 1965 translation, Montaigne wrote that in the years since he published his first edition of essays in 1580 “I have grown older by a long stretch of time; but certainly I have not grown an inch wiser.” Here whether out of humility or in refutation of Aristotle’s maxim that age and experience begats wisdom, Montaigne sees himself as the same light as before. Despite this, Montaigne continued to observe that “myself now and myself a while ago are indeed two; but when better, I simply cannot say.”[1] This struck me that the essayist could see such a simple yet profound difference between himself as he was when first he wrote and published his magnum opus and the man he later was publishing his third and final volume of essays nearly a decade later.

From my earliest days of extensive writing in my high school years I found myself looking ahead to a time late in my life when I would return to the places of my teenage youth and reflect on what once was and who I’d become. I suppose there’s some vanity of my own in having this profound sense of legacy even from what was then quite an early point in my life. Still, in recent weeks I’ve been reintroduced to younger versions of myself as my family carries out a Spring cleaning and we’ve found decades old boxes of photographs and postcards that I still remember taking and sending yet which haven’t seen the light of day since their capture. I was humbled and heartened to see in particular how loved was the boy I once was, and how inventive and imaginative he could be. Looking at these photos, especially from around my family’s great move from Chicago to Kansas City in 1999, I remember each and every one of them being taken. I remember the sights and sounds, the smells, the prairie winds and the things I was thinking in those first days of my life in Kansas City. These memories have always been there in my mind, yet the subsequent quarter-century has piled many more atop them so that they are now rendered foundations for the memories that comprise me today.

I suspect these days spent pouring over decades-old photos removed some sort of mental block I’d put up out of stress that’s kept my imagination in check in recent months. I longed to have the same expansive dreams and wandering thoughts that’ve populated so much of my consciousness, and now again I find it easy to tap into that deep reservoir which too is built into my memories yet also grows out from them into things which are wonderous and extend beyond the limits of reality toward the possible. Am I then wiser than I was when first I began writing essays in my adolescent and early teenage years? I’d like to think so, at least in some respects. I have a sense of calm today which was lacking in earlier years, and while the stresses of my life are great, as they are for all of us, I know how to accept them and tamper down some of their effects.

Yet in so many ways I do feel that I too am a different person from the kid who moved west all those years ago. Likewise, I see a clear distinction between the student starting high school in the years after the turn of the millennium and imagining his future in the last decades of this century. I’ve learned to live more in the moment in which I find myself, to influence that moment to fit what I aspire it to be. A complex turn of this answer is to consider all the potential lives I might have led, a thought experiment which I’ve considered developing into a short story with some sort of science fiction shenanigans. In one version of this, a broken-down elevator occurring simultaneously across parallel realities as a sort of mirror image resulted in contemporary alternative versions of myself ending up stuck in the same elevator all at once. I could see it either being a bit of a laugh-fest as one version of myself attempted to out-wit the others, or a simmering cauldron of irritation. 

What all this speaks to is the complexity of our personalities. We are all multifaceted with so many different competing thoughts and desires and inclinations and perceptions. I’ve thought more recently that perhaps my academic career would be further along if I limited myself to only focusing on my research, yet then again, I’ve always had multiple hats in the ring so why would I stop doing all these different things now? The Wednesday Blog for one remains a sort of release-valve for me to write about things which I’m curious about yet don’t directly relate to my research. I look to my colleagues, and I see people with similar interests and in some cases similar paths they’ve taken to get to where they are today. Several days ago, when I was dwelling in a particular bout of melancholy thinking about the long winter that has grayed the skies over my own doctoral candidacy when compared to my peers, I felt a sense of pride at noticing just how I’ve persisted in my efforts and my work in spite of all the challenges which the last six years have brought. Perhaps it is this combination of trial and hope which forms a person; it’s what formed me into the historian I am today.

When I started writing the Wednesday Blog in March 2021 I did so because I felt such a profound sense of nostalgic hope at one particular memory that surfaced after a sleepless night amid my comprehensive exam studying that I felt compelled to share it with the world. I know for a fact that I am a different person today than I was four years ago when I wrote that blog post about an Air France commercial I remembered seeing on ITV and Channel 4 five years before when I lived in London. The difference lies in the added layers of experience laid by all the trials which I’ve endured and the hopes which’ve kept me going. When I had such tremendous trouble unlocking my imagination and letting myself daydream in the latter months of 2024, I recognized that I am happier when I allow my mind to wander and craft stories that no one else will ever know. These are often stories of the future I hope I might live and the wonders I might come to know and explore. That imagination, that connection with my own consciousness, is the thread that runs all throughout my life and connects these different versions of myself that I’ve grown into and out of with the passing of time.

When Montaigne picked up a copy of the 1588 edition of his Essais, containing all three volumes of musings, he took a pen to it and steadily began correcting things he found beneath the standards he’d developed at that late moment in his life. I don’t often read my own writing after I’ve finished editing a document. I’ll occasionally return to an old blog post when I’m referencing it in a newer one, and even more occasionally if I’ve cited a source before in a previous paper, I’ll open that paper to aid me in citing the same source again in the research project of the moment. Yet, I rarely sit down just to read my own writing. The last time I did I ended up switching from a PDF file back to the Word document version so I could edit as I read. In fact, when I was moving into my apartment in Binghamton in August 2019, I found an essay I wrote in my sophomore year of high school when I was 15 years old. It was a near 20 page essay that attempted to summarize the history of religion in Britain and Ireland from the Stone Age to St. Patrick. Reading it then at the start of my doctorate and thinking about it as an essay that I might grade, I would’ve given it a low B- or maybe a C+.

I need to remember that my old writing fits into a particular time and place in my life and ought to remain in that setting for as long as I can muster the strength to not try to refine it further. These ages in my life mirror those in everyone else’s, and I hope that as I dream about the ages to come, I will be able to share them and live them to their fullest potential. Montaigne died in September 1592, almost 400 years before my own birth. At that point, he’d made his name in politics and in philosophy. The Wednesday Blog is essentially my collection of essays of varying length and quality. I hope that when I wander off in my own time that my life in all its ages will have been as fulfilled and prolific as the great essayist.

[1] Montaigne, Essais (EB) 3.9.433r, Frame, 736.

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Dominion or Cultivation of Nature?

Dominion or Cultivation of Nature? – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how our relationship with the natural world reflects on our relationships with each other.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkanePhoto by Hariprasad Ashwene, 2024.
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This week, how our relationship with the natural world reflects on our relationships with each other.

A line in the Book of Genesis that comes into play in my dissertation is in the very first chapter of that first book of the Bible in the first Creation story in which God made humanity “after our likeness” and gave us “dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth.” In the context of my research this divine proclamation of human dominion over the rest of Nature in Verse 26 was used to justify the conquest and colonization of the Americas by Europeans beginning in the last decade of the fifteenth century. Here these newcomers from across the sea found worlds that to them seemed less touched by human hands. Brazil in particular stood out for André Thevet, the man at the heart of my dissertation, because its great forests seemed unaltered by its human inhabitants. The Tupinambá had in fact been living and using the great Atlantic Forest for generations, yet to Thevet coming from a France covered by cities, towns, villages, and a countryside that’d been farmed and ploughed for thousands of years he beheld something that to him seemed primeval in this world on the far side of the Atlantic.

I grew up hearing the adage that before settlement of the Midwestern states in the Early Republic and Antebellum decades that a squirrel could travel from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River leaping from tree to tree without ever setting foot on the ground, and that these great forests were ancient and unspoiled by human hands. I now know that while there once were great forests in the old Northwest Territory, the Great Lakes states where I was born, those forests seemed far deeper and darker to the European explorers and colonists of the 17th and 18th centuries because the diseases which their predecessors introduced on North America’s coasts in the 16th century. Those pandemics killed vast potions of this continent’s indigenous populations such that by the Revolution the old indigenous forestry efforts of controlled burns were fewer and farther between.

I was born in the western suburbs of Chicago, a city which is famous for its engineering triumphs that shaped the natural world on which it was built. Chicago stands on the borderland between the Eastern Woodlands and the Prairies. Generations of engineers and innovators created an environment suitable for the building of one of the greatest metropolises in all of human history. I remember as a child listening with a sense of awe and pride to my Dad’s retelling of the story of how engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River at the turn of the last century to keep Lake Michigan, the city’s drinking water source, clean from all the pollution in the river. The western suburbs where I grew up were largely built as bedroom communities for downtown commuters. Our home was 26 miles west of the Loop, which in a preindustrial context would’ve take a pedestrian nearly 9 hours to travel. Wheaton, my hometown, became accessible from the city thanks to the railroad, in this case the Union Pacific which as of time of writing continues to operate trains for Metra through Wheaton’s two commuter stations into the Ogilvie Transportation Center, or Northwestern Station as I knew it. On the Metra you can today get from Wheaton to the Loop in 45 to 50 minutes, making it a viable commute for many. This sprawl is possible because of industry and the ways in which we’ve grown in our civilization with this mentality that we have dominion over nature and ought to use it and change it to our needs.

An even more radical transformation of nature can be found in my adopted home city of Kansas City, a metropolis of 2.2 million built around the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers about 400 miles southwest of Chicago as the crow flies. The land here is a mix of old glacial hills and prairie, yet unlike in Chicago where the city and suburbs were built from the old forests which survive as preserves in various pockets, in this drier region trees normally only grow in those few places where rivers, creeks, and streams flow. Kansas City is on the easternmost edge of the arid western half of North America, and so this region’s original state could not support the same kind of verdant canopy nor the large population which it does today. Brookside is a beautiful place; I love my neighborhood in particular for all the old trees which line our streets. The oldest of those trees were planted by developers working for J.C. Nichols between 1906 and 1950 when he built the Country Club District, of which Brookside is one part. The Kansas City Public Library’s history collections contain photographs of my neighborhood when it was just being built in the 1920s and while I recognize the contours of the hills, I find the lack of tree canopy to be somewhat alien to my recollection.

In developing neighborhoods like Brookside, our ancestors sought to create lived realities which fit what they knew in the Northeast, where too as William Cronon so expertly wrote in Changes in the Land, the landscape there was transformed by the first generations of colonists to resemble something of England, the Netherlands, and France depending on whether the colonists were in New England, the Hudson Valley, or along the St. Lawrence River. I find something reassuring and communal in seeing similar neighborhoods to my own in cities across this continent, from Atlantic to Pacific; this tells me that there are others whose lives might be something like mine, and that I’m not as alone as I often feel. It’s the same reason in fact why I like watching Jeopardy! or the national evening news broadcasts, because I know millions of others are also watching these programs, and maybe even a few people I know & love are among them.

What I hope I’m getting at here is a sense that I have that we’ve built up our world and transformed the nature of the worlds ours replaced in order to better fit some sense of normalcy which has been brought further and further toward the fringe of our world from some idealized source. I for one am drawn to the sense that this source is English, owing to the prevalence of English names in so many of these neighborhoods whether drawn in the Midwestern case from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, or the Old South, or in each of those cases from England itself. Yet with that embrace of a nostalgia for an idyll that may never have fully existed, of the idealized American town whose cultural roots fall in the idealized English market town, do we also carry on the sense of ownership over nature? This dominion after all caused English forests to be so depleted in the early modern period that wood began to be imported from New England and Canada for the building of ships for commerce and war alike.

I’ve grown used to expecting a less than favorable reception from other people. I’m ready to flinch and to put up my defenses whenever necessary. I suppose this is a learned hesitation; I’ve met a lot of people throughout the years who were interested in me only for their own benefit. Recently I loaned out a pen to a friend and immediately reawakened a 20 year old memory of doing the same thing in middle school only for the classmate to declare that pen was theirs now and not mine, leaving me to write the rest of the day with an old stubby pencil that was barely longer than my thumb and forefinger are wide. Last week, I wrote about how traffic even in Kansas City seems to have gotten worse, and the behavior of drivers across the board more aggressive since the recent pandemic. Unlike my Dad who learned to drive in Chicago, I never use my car’s horn out of a general knowledge that in this country other drivers are likely to have guns, and I’d rather my frustration at their conduct remain unannounced to them in the name of self-preservation.

The great trial of the present moment seems to me to be one of ordinary people like you or me just trying to survive amid a deluge of unnecessary troubles brought on by the greed of a few. I believe that before profits or efficiency that empathy must always come first in all our deliberations. I hope for the best intentions in all people whom I meet, and in many cases I see the good in their eyes and posture and in the way they interact with our world. Do we allow for the flood to persist because we are so jaded to the naïve hope that love could actually be the most powerful emotion? I know that love is more potent than greed, and that in the end it’s flame will always burn brighter than one fueled by fear. Yet love requires patience, as St. Paul wrote, and patience is not something which industry can well afford to have.Should we then look for other ways of living? If we are to begin anywhere, it’s to remember that we are natural beings ourselves, yes made in God’s image, yet evolved out of the same natural materials that begat all other life on Earth. I don’t know where the Divine comes into play in any of this, you can read my recent blog post on that topic for more. In fact, I see myself as much a hopeful skeptic as a believer. What I do know is what I’ve experienced, and that is that there is no more powerful emotion than love which burns so bright as to blind the mind and senses to any other voice. I for one love the aspiration and mission of studying how the innate and fundamental in nature was understood in our historic past, and I hope to continue learning more about this. Yet I feel the weight of our world on my shoulders, and like many others who feel isolated from the higher pursuit of wisdom in all its philosophical pulcherity, today I’m just trying to keep that love which I feel burning bright while I also do what I can to survive in this world we’ve built. It is our dominion, which is a triumph to our humanity, yet its roots are still in nature and nature will outlive anything we build.

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Tóg go bog é | Take it easy

Tóg go bog é | Take it easy – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a few words on taking life slower.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, a few words on taking life slower.

Where I grew up first in the Chicago suburbs and later on the western edge of Kansas City, Kansas the average speed limits were around 35 mph (56 km/h). I think there’s something to be said about a life that’s taken at those sorts of speeds, that the speed we drive from place to place reflects in how we approach other aspects of our lives all the same. By comparison, in the year that I lived in London I fell out of practice with my driving, instead I knew how to navigate by walking speed, closer to 3 mph (5 km/h). Perhaps this is one of the reasons that I found Binghamton to be such an incongruent place to live because the average speed limit is 30 mph on the local streets and roads in that valley.

When I learned to drive then, the average speed that I found myself at hovered around 35 mph. Furthermore, I learned to drive on the highways before I learned city driving, as most of my early daily drives were on the highway K-7 between our home in Piper and my high school in western Lenexa, Kansas. It was a 30 minute commute each way to school every day, and one that I don’t remember getting that old too fast. In more recent memory, I found that driving a good 20-25 minutes every day down to the school I taught at in Leawood, Kansas did grow taxing to the point that now I’m less willing to drive quite as far in town as I did even a few short years ago.

I’ve noticed several types of driving and several variations on speed that my car will embody depending on how I’m feeling on a given day. There are times when I am so attuned to my surroundings and to my car, which I lovingly named the Mazda Rua 6 years ago, that it will feel as though we are one in the same, that my car will adjust its direction and speed with the slightest turn of my hands, or the flick of my eyes from one direction to another. This feeling was especially pronounced on my 14 long drives between Kansas City and Binghamton that I undertook between August 2019 and December 2022. On those drives, I would usually keep a steady pace of around 75-80 mph (120-129 km/h) on the Interstates between the Catskills on the eastern edge of my route and the Great Plains to the west. When I’m out on the open road I’ll still sometimes set my car into cruise control at this sort of speed, which tends to be the pace of highway traffic anyway and let the day’s drive go by.

Yet I’ve noticed more and more in my drives around town, I’m not going quite as fast as I used to. I tend to drive a few times per week between my home in Brookside and my place of work in the Crossroads, always on the city streets and always in a decent amount of traffic for Kansas City. Yet the pace of traffic has slowed somewhat; where before I’d keep to that 35 mph threshold, now I’m fine if I’m hovering between 30 and 35 mph (48 and 56 km/h). Just before writing this, I drove home from a haircut with my cousin Richard Morrissey at his salon in Mission, Kansas and I found that I didn’t particularly care that the traffic was going 30 mph, especially when I crossed the border and merged onto the northern reaches of Ward Parkway. Nor did I mind the slower speeds when I decided to turn off that major boulevard and onto a side street that goes up Sunset Hill toward Loose Park where traffic really ought to be moving no faster than 15 mph (24 km/h). I didn’t mind the slower pace because I didn’t feel the need for speed.

My generation grew up with the role models of our parents and grandparents whose generations worked day in and day out for decades and who built our sprawling metropolises in which we need cars to get around. I’ve accepted this world that I was born into and its hurried tempo and made myself far busier than I probably need to be. On a recent day when I had 3 meetings in a row in the span of 3 hours I was struck by the fact that when I was still in Binghamton I was busy but not this busy; that the reason why I’ve not been keeping up with podcasts or TV shows the way I used to is because I simply don’t have as much time in the day for them.

The key here is a learned moderation which goes a long way to what I find is a happier life. There are things which I hope for and want with an eagerness that inspires me to plow on forward yet I’ve learned that the best things I can hope for are those which occur in the quiet moments of calm between those rushing evocations of the modern life. I for one would much prefer to just be an academic spending my days reading and writing about historical zoology and having deep and enriching discussions with friends and colleagues. I would much rather listen to my colleagues about what they’re researching, and about the things they’re learning in their own particular topics. And yet, when I was with my colleagues at the Renaissance Society of America’s conference the week before last in Boston, I felt that I stood out in some ways from them by all the different fires I have going at once. I’ve always been one with many different projects in the works. Even now, alongside this weekly blog and my dissertation I have two articles in the review and editing stage, a third that I’m hoping to submit to a journal soon, two books on the way that I will be reviewing, and a short story I’m plodding through writing. 

On top of this I hold several different committee assignments in the Fr. Bernard Donnelly AOH alongside my primary recording secretary duties. I also work part-time as an usher team captain for the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts and now have somewhat of a hands off approach to my Mom’s efforts in leading and organizing a local progressive protest organization called Blue Brookside. Simply put, I have to persist at this higher speed to keep track of everything.

One of the first phrases I learned when I started studying Irish in 2007 was one which I initially misheard: Tóg go bog é, which translates as “Take it easy!” This is a nice sentiment, and one which I’m trying to live, to be less worried, to inflict less stress upon myself. Perhaps even though I didn’t identify it as such this may well be what I’m trying to give up for Lent this year. You might say it’s working in some stripes yet not in others. What remains is a key question about how I can grow from finding this balance between busyness and nonchalance? Maybe this is something we all need, time away from the constant stream of information and news and worry. I’ve recently begun responding when people talk about social media that I admire those who’ve dropped away from it; were it not such a good way of staying in touch with friends and family near and far I probably would do that too.Let this be a motto for us to aspire to: tóg go bog é, take it easy.

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We, Irish Americans

The Wednesday Blog – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, to conclude what I’ve been saying.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane—Sources:%5B1%5D “Signs,” Wednesday Blog 1.10.[2] “On Servant Leadership,” Wednesday Blog 6.15.[3] Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” Poetry Foundation.
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This week, what does it mean for my community to call ourselves Irish Americans?

When I was applying for universities for my undergraduate studies, I was thrilled that one university allowed me to write in my own answer for “race or ethnicity.” I took out my pen and wrote down “Irish.” That university, Rockhurst, is the one which I chose and attended throughout my undergraduate years, and it remains the one that I list today before the others. Rockhurst holds a special place in my heart because it is so intrinsically linked with the Irish American community here in Kansas City, and it is one of those anchors that’s tethered me to this community where I’ve been able to make my own impact and presence.

That adjective I chose to write however is perhaps more complicated. I am not Irish by birth but by descent, though one generation too far removed to qualify for Irish citizenship in that manner. Still, Irish is a better descriptor of me than the generic American white, a category which my people were only accepted into for the sake of preserving the flimsy-footed tableau that is racism in America. When I moved to London, I was surprised to be confronted with three categories of white to choose from rather than the monolith I was used to. I technically qualified for all three: I have both Irish and British ancestry, yet I am from a country other than those two. I marked the box for White Irish as long as I was living and studying there because it felt the truest to my nature. Yet again, I am not Irish per se; rather I am Irish American, a member of one of the larger camps within the diaspora created out of the centuries of trouble caused by English and later British colonialism in Ireland. In this perspective, my people are victims of colonization, yet here in America we are the colonizers. So, amid all these tangled webs of identity and nature what are we, Irish Americans?

It is notable to me that in France there is no particular legal sense of identifying oneself as anything other than French. Trevor Noah put this well when he spoke about an immigrant who was granted French citizenship by President Macron after a tremendous act of heroic bravery in saving the life of a child. Yet when I’m in France, I find that if people are confused about my name I go toward my heritage to explain why it’s not your typical Anglo-American name, that my family comes from Ireland instead. I hear a similar tone from the varied generations of nativists in this country, even in the writings of President Theodore Roosevelt, a man who I overall admire a great deal, who wrote in opposition to us persisting as “hyphenated Americans.” This country ought to be a melting pot where all of the immigrants and their descendants shed away their own national and ethnic trappings in favor of becoming one people with one common identity. Yet again, I find this perspective runs contrary to my own lived experience.

To be an Irish American means to remember the place where our ancestors came from, and to remember their struggles as they sought to live their lives first at home and later in this place their newly adopted home. To be an Irish American is to remember that we too were the immigrants not that long ago and to offer a warmer welcome to the newcomers than our ancestors often received. For me, to be an Irish American is to have roots in two countries, better reflecting the interconnected and global nature of our world. Yet at the end of the day, we are Americans. In Ireland, I refer to myself as “an American cousin,” with a slight nod to that infamous play of 1865. The Ireland that many of us know is the Ireland of our grandparents and great-grandparents, the Ireland of the revolutionary generation and the twentieth century when our families left to come to this country. The Ireland of 2025 is still the same country, yet it has grown with the last generations into something that many of us find incongruent with our expectations. It is less an island than ever before with more outposts of the global world on its shores.

Our experiences greeting this global world are different because we encountered it here in America rather than in Ireland. We relate to all the peoples of the Earth through our friendships, rivalries, and mutual circumstances with the other diasporic immigrant groups in this country. I’ve wondered for a long while, including in this outlet if we are slowly with each new generation becoming less Irish Americans and more deeply rooted in other tribes in this country. We tend to be more religious than our cousins in Ireland, and as there are less Catholic schools and parishes that are explicitly Irish are we then becoming Catholic Americans more than Irish Americans? Or are we contributing to a general secularization of that larger white American demographic resulting in both our ethnicity and our religion fading into the background of our identities as ordinary Americans trying to survive in an ever more chaotic world? The key here is that our community is diversifying between political persuasions and regional identities and an overall willingness to remain connected to the lives and histories and passions of our ancestors.

I for one have kept in touch with all of that because I believe it is intrinsic to understanding who I am. My Dad grew up under the same roof as his grandmother who came to this country from Mayo in 1920, and the fact that my parents chose to name me Sean demonstrated to me that this history was an important part of who I am even before I really began to understand what it all meant. For the record, I decided to add the fada to my name (Seán) when a little before my 10th birthday I learned that’s how it is spelled in Irish. I’ve devoted a great deal of time to learn the Irish language even though it’s not all that useful here in America because I know that it’s what my family once spoke, and in order to better understand them and by extension myself as well, I decided I ought to use one of my talents and learn it.This week we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day with our usual parades here in Kansas City. I marched in two this year, the warm-up parade on the Saturday before here in my neighborhood of Brookside and the big parade down Broadway in Midtown Kansas City on the holy day itself. Normally, I end the big parade and the holy day itself rather annoyed at how the old caricatures of Irishness and Irish Americanness persist along the route both in the parade and among the spectators. And while I did see some of that, I was more focused on marching with my brothers in the Fr. Bernard Donnelly Division of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH). Many of us continued the celebration of our brotherhood and our common heritage later that day and it proved to be one of the better, and sunnier, St. Patrick’s Days that I’ve experienced in a long time. We, Irish Americans persist in our stubborn identity because we’ve built our communities in this country around our roots. It defines us distinctly from our fellow Americans, and with all good intentions demonstrates to our cousins across the water that we haven’t forgotten about them.

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Homeownership

Homeownership – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a few words on homeownership.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, a few words on homeownership.

For most of my adult life I never really thought that I’d ever own my own house whether through the pure economics of trying to buy a house in the neighborhoods that I like here in Kansas City or in the other cities I’ve applied for jobs in. There have been the odd moments though when homeownership seemed within reach, as a sort of mirage just on the edge of my vision. In these instances, the circumstances that would’ve allowed me to buy a home faded away, yet by getting that taste of the possibility of it this future still feels probable.

The arguments for homeownership are financial, having a stake in the local economy through your home value, and aspirational of having control over your future in this fortress that you can truly make your own. To every man his castle, right? I do have ideas for a dream home, ways I’d decorate it, ways I might even add onto it. There are ways that I could modernize one of the century old homes here in Brookside to be more energy efficient, to run on renewable power, and to feel futuristic for even the 2020s. I want to have lots of color in my home, whether in patterned tilework or in the art that I’d hang on the walls. I also want to have a room set aside as a library for the practicality of needing to store all my books, yet also as a place to work.

There are days when I still sometimes think about the houses I considered buying. Now it’s as if I’m remembering the memory of these places where I was thrilled to imagine myself living. That hope at the heart of all of this is what keeps me engaged and actively trying to move my career forward. Today, writing this it’s hard to imagine me owning a house as my professional life continues to exist in its malaise waiting for things to happen. I’d rather not be so rooted in one place as the potential for my life to wander from place to place is too good to let pass by.

To this end, Jennifer Denbow, a Professor of Political Science at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo made a very strong case for renting or even condo ownership in her recounting of her family’s struggles to buy a home in their city in an article in the February 2025 issue of Commonweal. I usually don’t underline text in magazines, the better to preserve the physical artifact for someone else to read. Yet in this instance, I was drawn to Professor Denbow’s affirmation that living in a multifamily development allows the “building of community and solidarity,” something much needed today. The investment here is in the community itself, less in the property which can drive individuals to support restrictive housing policies which keep the housing stock low and house prices high.

In my experience the reality of this community and solidarity depends upon the people living in close proximity with one another. I knew many of my fellow tenants in my building in London, yet I knew them far better than I did my downstairs neighbors in Binghamton. In London we had more in common, all of us were students––a mix of undergrads and postgrads––and all of us were new to that city and learning about it as we lived in it together. The same could be said for my dormmates at Rockhurst and during my summer study abroad session at Westminster. We became fast friends through our mutual situations and interests. This common bond is necessary if any solidarity is to be achieved.I suppose homeownership for me is one of those standards of American life that wavers in and out of range for me. I might buy a house or a condo someday, but it’s never been a guarantee. I know the sorts of places that I like in the cities where I want to live. Where the next year or two will take me remains uncertain.

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Distractions

Distractions – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

How distractions can be beneficial or detrimental, from a certain point of view.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkaneI recommend you now listen to: On PausesA link to the WBEZ Chicago story referenced in this episode.
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How distractions can be beneficial or detrimental, from a certain point of view.

On February 21st, a story appeared on the WBEZ Chicago website with reactions to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s proposal to restrict cellphone use in all public and charter school classrooms. Mine was the first generation of students to have access to cellphones, and from day 1 it was a noticeable distraction for everyone in the room when someone brought their phone to class. Whether looking at the teacher who was trying to do their job in spite of a new topic to chide students over, or to the other students who see that one of their fellows is challenging the classroom’s authority so brazenly, to the student carrying the phone who now had a ready means of ignoring the teacher and missing out on the lesson, phone use is a problem for all.

In all honesty, I’ve been that student from time to time. In some classes it wasn’t a cellphone as much as it was a computer or a tablet that distracted me from the lesson or lecture at hand. In other cases, it was the unavoidable glow of the screen in the row in front of me shopping for shoes or looking at Spring Break trip ideas that drew my attention away from the topic at hand. Looking back, I recognize a noticeable drop in my attention and focus when these technologies began to enter the classroom, just as I notice now how I stopped reading nearly as many books once I discovered YouTube.

The idea of the distraction is often subjective; sure, in the classroom the student is supposed to be paying attention to the instructor, yet beyond that setting what are all the trappings of life but distractions from other facets which to varying degrees we ignore? This isn’t inherently a bad thing. Considering how troubled our times are fast becoming I have made a point of trying to find happy things to look at every day, and in some instances, I send these along to friends who I hope will benefit from smiling at something no matter how inconsequential.

In WBEZ’s report on student reactions to the Governor’s proposal to ban phones from classrooms the reactions were mixed. Some reactions speak to concerns about staying in touch with parents during the school day, especially in case of safety issues. I understand this point, it speaks to the reality that we’ve allowed ourselves to live in an increasingly dangerous society, and to that danger we need resources to mitigate it all while ignoring the underlying problems. We can distract ourselves from addressing gun violence, yet the shootings will continue all the same.

In my own experience the best classroom settings were those where the students either were mature enough to not pull their phones out in class or where they didn’t have their phones with them at all. In a recent substitute teaching job, I found that I was not only competing with student apathy toward following a sub’s instructions but that I also had to compete with students watching all manner of videos on their phones from Netflix and YouTube to TikTok, Instagram, and Snapchat. I simply can’t compete with these bright screens, and as most schools don’t inform their substitutes of any school policies (which allows students to abuse those policies when a sub is in the room), I’m at a tremendous disadvantage in that position.

Today, as I write this blog post I have one conference presentation I need to write and an article submission that I need to revise. The former needs to be done in the next month and the latter by June 1st. In short: I have things I need to be doing right now, yet I can be more flexible with these extended deadlines and keep the Wednesday Blog going for another week. This publication of mine may seem like a sort of distraction to some of my colleagues, yet I feel it is a tremendous opportunity for me to write about topics that I have ideas about which my research doesn’t cover. After I write and record this blog post I will take full advantage of the good weather today (sunny with a high of 65ºF / 18ºC) and go for a long walk this afternoon. After that, I might look at these two projects again. As I said earlier in this paragraph: I have time to wait on both of them.

Returning to the topic at hand: whereas in my teenage years I found it empowering to have a school-issued laptop which I could use in class, today I yearn more for the days before that technology became so accessible to me for the sole reason that I could focus more on the moment at hand. Perhaps the greatest distraction that we’ve created for ourselves is our indefatigable busyness that keeps us moving at full speed whenever we’re awake. We fear boredom because we haven’t allowed ourselves to spend enough time surrounded by the silence that it brings. I wrote about this in October in the context of pauses in the dialogue of the Kate Winslet film Lee. I don’t know if I have any suggestions for systemic change this week, merely advice that each of us ought to look at what we think is most important for our lives and our enrichment. We only have so much time around, so the best thing we can do is to use it wisely.

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Three Ologies

Three Ologies – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, talking through three terms I’ve historically had trouble understanding: epistemology, ontology, and teleology.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, talking through three terms I’ve historically had trouble understanding.

A major turning point in my life came at the end of 2014 when I decided to drop my philosophy major to a minor and not take the final class that I needed to complete that major. The class in question was Continental Philosophy, and it remains one of those decisions that I regret because it closed some doors for me in the long run even while it seemed like a reasonable decision in the short term. A year later, now working on my master’s degree in International Relations and Democratic Politics at the University of Westminster, I was reminded daily that I really should’ve just taken that last class because so much of what we were studying was based in continental philosophy.

I initially pursued a triple major in History, Philosophy, and Theology and a double minor in French and Music at Rockhurst University. I was quite proud of the fact that up to that point in my seven completed semesters at Rockhurst that I’d been able to juggle those three majors and the two minors while still having an active and fulfilling social life on campus. I went into Rockhurst with several vague ideas of what I might want to do with these degrees when I was finished; notably I remember both considering doing a Ph.D., likely in History, and possibly going from Rockhurst either into the Jesuit novitiate or into a diocesan Catholic seminary to become a priest. The first four years of Catholic seminary is comprised of that philosophy bachelor’s degree, so it felt like a good idea to undertake that at Rockhurst and keep the door open.

Now ten years after I would’ve finished my undergraduate with that philosophy degree, I realize that even as I continued to consider holy orders that I may well have properly begun to close that door in my early twenties, not feeling that the priesthood was the right fit for me in spite of what many people have said. Even then, most of the other professions that I’ve considered have been shrinking in one way or another in my lifetime. It feels here as in so many other aspects of my life that I was born at a high point in our society’s capacity to consider the arts, humanities, and even the sciences and that as I’ve gotten older that capacity has diminished time and again. Even while I continue to be frustrated to remain in these wilderness years, I nevertheless continue to learn and to grow in my understanding of what is possible for me to do in my career.

In the last seven years I’ve reasserted myself as a historian first and foremost, settling into the Renaissance as my period of study in late 2017 and gradually shifting from considering the history of Englishwomen’s education to the history of translation to now the history of natural history. Yet all of these disciplines lie under the common umbrella of intellectual history. My manner of writing the history I craft tends to speak toward French notions of mentality and perception, while the economics I still occasionally encounter in my work speak to Max Weber’s notions of capitalism as a broader Cross-Channel enterprise including Brittany and Normandy alongside England, Picardy, Flanders, and the Dutch Republic. I’m beginning to try out a new method of writing history that draws on the natural sciences to better understand the animals and other natural things described by my Renaissance cosmographers and natural historians.

Amid all of this, three words continue to appear, three words which I have often had trouble remembering their meaning. These three are epistemology, ontology, and teleology. In spite of my training in Ancient Greek, I still have trouble keeping these three apart. They represent three central tenants of philosophy which help make sense of how we understand things. It may not sound like the strongest topic for a riveting podcast episode, but for those of you listening bear with me.

Descartes’s tomb, photo by the author.

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It distinguishes things which are justified from mere opinions. This theory of knowledge considers propositions about facts, practices which form knowledge, and familiarity with an object thus allowing the subject to know it. This word episteme in Greek (ἐπιστήμη) translates into English as both knowledge and science. Science itself is a word which at its core refers to knowledge, for the root Latin verb sciō means “to know.” We know for instance that we exist because we can recognize our existence, in Descartes’s famous words “I think, therefore I am.” I made a point of visiting Descartes’s tomb in the Abbey Church of St. Germain-des-Prés when I was in Paris in October 2023 because so much of my own philosophy is Cartesian in its origins. I reject the principle that we could be living in a simulation on the grounds that based on what we can know and perceive we are not inclined to accept such a suggestion.

The second of these words is ontology, a branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. This word derives from the present participle of the Greek to-be verb εἰμί. I stand by my assertion that the life we are living is real because we can recognize it in large part because the best explanation that I’ve found for the course our history has taken is reliant on us having the freedom to decide the courses of our own lives. This free will explains how a society can seem to take steps backward even while the chaos those retreats cause is to the society’s detriment. The method which I am developing in my research to understand the nature of historical animals using modern scientific research is ontological in character. I can test if this method will work by applying it to particular individual animals who appear in the historical record and determining their true character by a process of eliminating candidate species until the animal’s own species is determined. In this search for the nature of these animals I hope to prove that the historical past, before the development of the scientific method in the seventeenth century, is valuable to the natural sciences as a means of understanding the longer-term nature of other animals during the period in which human influence upon nature was growing toward the Anthropocene which we find ourselves in today.

I like to think of ontology in the linguistic context of how the copular to be verb appears in our literature. Think, for instance, of how God is identified in the Bible. In the story of the burning bush, the Divine is referred to as “I Am that I Am,” or rather the purest expression of existence. For this reason, when I was an undergraduate in my theology major, I began to refer to God as the Divine Essence owing to the root of essence in the Latin copular verb. English recognizes a far wider set of states of being than does Irish. Where in English I might say “I am sad,” in Irish I would say “sadness is upon me,” or “Tá brón orm.”

The third of these words is teleology. This is the explanation of phenomena in terms of their purpose rather than the manner of their invention. Τέλος (telos) is the Greek word for an end, an aim, or a goal. The purpose of something’s existence then is at focus here. I do question this idea that we have a specific purpose in life, perhaps because mine has not gone quite how I expected. In my Catholicism, the most teleological concept we retain is the idea of a vocation either to holy orders, marriage, or to the single life. The teleology at play here speaks to some sense of destiny which I feel stands in opposition to our free will. Perhaps there is some purpose to life, at its initial conception in the first moments that matter began to form in the void that became our Universe, yet I do not believe that I can perceive any intended influence beyond the flick of the first domino at the Big Bang. We may not even be sure that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything, after all there had to be energy to build up to cause such a tremendous explosion in the first place. In a theological view I would point to the Incarnation of Jesus as an example of telos in our history, I am a Catholic after all. My lingering question is where should that theological teleology interact with the other ways of knowing?

I’ve written here before about my view that belief and knowledge are two distinct yet interrelated things. One must believe in one’s senses to know, yet there are things in which one can believe without knowing which one cannot know without believing. The prime example of this is God; “I believe in One God,” it’s something I say every week at Mass in the Creed, “Credo in unum Deum,” in the Latin original of our Roman Missal. Yet God alone is a tremendous challenge to know because God is both paradoxical and far greater than the extent of my knowledge. For this reason, we had the Incarnation, as we recite in the Creed:

“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,

The Only Begotten Son of God,

Born of the Father before all ages.”

For God to be knowable God needed to come down to our human level in the person of Jesus, God the Son. This was Jesus’s telos, to be known, to be heard, and as we believe restore faith in God and cleanse humanity of original sin. Here there is a collision of belief and knowledge, where something clearly happened about 2,000 years ago because a new profusion of faith occurred, beginning in Judaea and spreading around the Mediterranean World in the Roman Empire and beyond to become Christianity. That new religion adapted to fit the cultures it encountered, so as to be more acceptable to its new converts. Today that collision continues in the Eucharist, the most sacred of all seven sacraments, in which we Catholics alongside our Orthodox brothers and sisters believe that God becomes flesh again in the sacramental bread and wine. Can we know that it happens? Not by any scientific measure, yet something does happen. That something is perceptible through belief, and it is the Great Mystery of the Faith that has kept me in the Catholic Church in spite of the ecclesiastical politics and divisions of our time.

My Irish Gaelic ancestors understood Christianity in their own way, aspects of which survive into the present day. That collision of belief and knowledge looks to some lingering folk belief, or superstition if you will, that I’ve inherited of particular days in the calendar when the worlds of the living and the dead could collide. We see this most pronounced in the old Gaelic calendar on Samhain, which developed through Catholicism into Halloween, the Day of the Dead, and All Souls’ Day around the beginning of November. I see All Saints’ Day fitting into this as well, after all the Saints are our honored dead all the same. Likewise, Bealtaine, the celebration of the coming of Summer at the beginning of May is also the Catholic celebration of the Crowning of Mary, something I attended at Rockhurst on several occasions.

What in all of this can I actually know? I know the stories that have survived from before St. Patrick and the coming of Christianity to my ancestors 15 centuries ago, even if those stories are Christianized in some way or another. I know this just as much as I know that Jesus existed in the first century CE because there are effects of these stories in the lives and histories that are remembered down the generations. If these stories have any teleology, it’s to teach us lessons about life that our ancestors learned so that we might not have to face the same trouble all over again. The folly of humanity is that we are resistant to having a clear purpose or end to our aims. Through our free will we know that there are always many options to choose between.I don’t know if I made the right choice in dropping that philosophy major at the last moment. In many respects, it was a poor decision. I learned from that experience and many others in my early life to stick with things until their conclusion. This learning is something that has been tested to grow beyond mere opinion through belief into something that is verifiable. When I look at my prospects in my doctoral program, I always decide to stick with it because I don’t yet know what my prospects will be like once I’ve earned it, something that I do know having 2 master’s degrees and a bachelor’s degree to my name. I have gained a great deal of epistemic experience through all these memories that have informed the nature of my character. Yet where they lead I cannot say, for the purpose of my life is something I continue to decide day by day.

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On Numbers

On Numbers – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, how numbers are both a universal language and symbols representing deeper meaning.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog:https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week, how numbers are both a universal language and symbols representing deeper meaning.

Consider, if you will, what meaning a number holds if unaffixed to an object for calculation or counting? What does six mean if disassociated from the rest of its sentence? Some numbers are recognizable for their meanings due to the broader cultural connotations held by those definitions. A learned reader who sees 3.14 written on a page will recognize that as the first three digits of the value of π, yet without the decimal a Midwesterner will recognize 314 as the telephone area code for the City of St. Louis. Similarly, while 23 holds significance as Michael Jordan’s jersey number to millions if not billions of us who remember the greatest Bull play around the millennium, to others 23 is just another prime number.

Numbers in themselves can only exist beyond the abstract if they account for something. The life is blown into the Music Man’s best known song by the “76 Trombones”; Professor Harold Hill’s exhortation to the people of River City, Iowa would’ve fallen flat if he called on them to raise the funds and enthusiasm for “76” alone. Perhaps the patriotic connotation of that number, 1776 was the year of this country’s birth, might’ve stirred some hearts, but a number alone cannot bring a parent to tears quite as well as hearing their child blow the life out of a trombone for the first time.

It generally annoys me to hear numbers be used with minimal context. I don’t always know what the speaker is referring to when I hear a given number, and in that instance while mathematics may be the universal language the way we use it requires greater linguistic framing. Language can readily transform numbers that otherwise would be subordinated into defined objects of their own. Consider the penny; on the one hand it is merely 1/100th of a dollar in this country or 1/100th of a pound in the U.K. Yet a penny saved is a penny earned, and if Poor Richard’s maxim is to be believed a penny in itself is something beyond its diminutive status in hard currency. The value of the penny has shrunk a tremendous amount in the last century to the point that for the last quarter-century it’s cost the U.S. Mint more to make an individual penny than the value of the penny itself.

The penny is in a less stable place today because of inflation and our society’s transition toward digital currency. How often do you see products priced at 1¢ in stores anymore? With all electronic payments for things, no coins or banknotes are needed to complete the transaction. The unfortunate incident of coming up a few pennies short when paying for something is no longer a problem unless your card is denied. Yet for the cash-users among us losing the penny means they can no longer aim for exactness when paying for things. If a product is priced at $4.99 and you give the cashier a $5 bill you won’t get that penny back. I’d probably shrug it off, but still, I’d feel a twinge of unfulfillment and a residual sense that that shop now owes me money, even if it’s practically worthless. There lies the one great flaw in this plan: the penny is so ingrained in our culture; it’s been one of our coins since independence and even before then pennies go back to Charlemagne’s denarius (thus why in pre-decimal Britain and Ireland the penny was abbreviated d.) The Carolingian denarius of the 8thcentury CE was in turn borrowed from the Roman denarius which was introduced during the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE). So, the penny has been around far longer than most other coins we use here in the United States, and its name transcends this country where it represents 1 cent. The penny still gets used in Britain as the 1 pence coin, there even that word pence is another plural which is synonymous with our pennies.

My photo of the Ha’penny Bridge from August 2016.

In older songs and stories, we still remember when the penny was valuable enough to be subdivided into ha’pennies, or half a penny. At that time, the British penny was worth 1/240th of a pound, in a pre-decimal system that was replaced in 1970 with the current pound-pence system. Dublin’s Ha’penny Bridge is named for the tolls that used to be collected to cross it. Even smaller denominations of the pre-decimal pound such as the farthing (1/4d.), and half farthing (1/8d.) were also minted. Clearly then the penny had more value in the past than it does today. I was struck when I moved to London in 2015 how you could still find goods for sale in the groceries priced less than £1, especially bread. That is almost unheard of in my own country anymore. I think this also speaks to a broader transition in the way we think away from older pre-decimal systems toward ones that work better for computers. After all, the primary method by which we interact with numbers anymore is through our computers who tend to do most all of the calculations for us.

One effect of that shift is that fractions now feel less practical. I was taught fractions in school well before being taught about decimal places in what now feels like one of these pre-decimal holdovers. To an extent I still think in fractions, perhaps thanks to our continued use of the quarter (1/4th) among the coins of the US dollar or the weighing of meat in fractions of a pound. Fractions on their own require that they represent a portion of another number, they cannot exist independently. ¾ is three-quarters of something, yet again here context is key. A musician will look at that fraction and read it as ¾ time, or a 3 beat measure where the quarter note gets the beat. Yet again there: this refers to a quarter note. That musical note may be the default note that gets played, with the ascending and descending scales of note length from that point, yet it still is ¼ of the length of a whole note. I love how in English we’ve mixed Latin and Germanic terms together to describe quarters, halfs, wholes, and such. This word quarter is Latin in origin, coming from the ordinal number fourth in that language: quartus. A quarter then is a fourth of an object.

I remember learning my fractions in school, and I still use them a great deal in my daily life. They’re practical when I know the total number of objects I’m dealing with and when I need to subdivide those objects to ensure maximum efficiency or spread. If I have 4 slices of bread left and I know I won’t be able to make it out of the house for a day or so because of snow, I’ll portion those slices out, so I don’t run out until I have the next loaf in hand. For tangible things that exist in the physical world comparing them as fractions (that is dividing the portion by the whole) helps me understand the numbers I’m dealing with.

Yet again, the quotient produced by that division, the result of that fraction is almost always written in decimals. I think of decimals as a product of the development of the metric system in the late eighteenth century. They are fundamentally more rational, and easier to program into a computer. Rather than asking a computer to translate from the more human fraction one can instead speak to the computer in its own language and let it do its computations faster and more efficiently. Today then, I use decimals far more than fractions. What’s more, each decimal number can exist independently of any other figure. 0.25 is simply 0.25, it’s not inherently a quarter of something else. When I see that price tag of $4.99 in the shop, I think of it as just a hair below $5, and am willing to hand over a $5 bill despite that being worth more than the product I’m buying. If I get my penny back or not is less of a concern, after all in this decimal mindset the penny is almost worthless, so what’s the bother if I lose a few cents here or there? Consider that sentence again though: a penny is a cent, or 1 percent of a larger number, namely $1. Even here when contemplating the penny as 1 cent or $0.01 it is still 1/100th of a dollar. Sure, eventually losing those pennies in every transaction will add up, but it’s going to take long enough that it doesn’t register as a problem for me.

Percentages are another sort of number that’ve grown in importance in my thinking in recent years. We mostly encounter percentages in tipping these days. There’s a tender balance here between tipping a percentage digitally or a whole dollar depending on the initial value of the bill of sale. When doing my own mental math, if I get a rough idea of what 20% of something will be I might decide to round up to the nearest whole dollar when writing a tip on a receipt. Yet those tip screens we see at nearly every business changes the dynamic slightly. Instead of leaving room for that rounding up they offer us the exact sum of 20% of the total bill down to the nearest cent. There’s something lifeless yet efficient about this. This is a number to be sure, yet it represents something human and social that ought to be seen in that light rather than just numerically.Mathematics is the purest language, it’s the one most often looked to as a solution for how we might communicate with other intelligent life who surely wouldn’t know how to speak any of our human languages. Yet all numbers are infused with emotion and have a myriad of deeper meanings than the sum of their parts. In balancing budgets, we could just look at the numbers and cut where seems fitting, yet there is always a human side to every budget line. Each cut is something taken away from someone, a potential line of funding removed that otherwise would’ve contributed to someone’s livelihood and helped them make something new and exciting. Numbers can and do reflect people, and they always have. They can exist in both the abstract as just numbers and the real as representations of people and objects. More often than not, we see them in the latter context. The mathematician is warranted to consider the human in their calculations, lest they clip one cent too many and leave too many of us people without the values we need to survive and thrive in this world we’ve built for ourselves.

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On Social Media

On Social Media – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, some thoughts on the divestment of our social media attention and why I choose to use different platforms for different sorts of messages. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane Photo of the author by Hariprasad Ashwene, 2024.
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This week, some thoughts on the divestment of our social media attention and why I choose to use different platforms for different sorts of messages.

I’ve been an active social media user since May 2008 when I created my Facebook account at the young age of 15 years old. I remember not being sure what to expect from Facebook when I opened my account, yet my Mom opened her own account at the same time as me and we jumped into it together. I see the big turning point in my time on Facebook as 9 October 2016, the night of the 2nd Presidential Debate that year. Leading up to 2016 I’d gotten a reputation among many friends that was voiced by my London flatmates in 2015 that if they wanted to get an idea of what was going on they’d look at my Facebook to see what news stories I’d posted that day. Yet after that second debate, I noticed a significant drop off of people who were interacting with my posts about the news, and in the years since the overall interaction level hasn’t picked up again since even as I’ve connected with more people on that website.

Today I have 10 social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter,[1] Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, Mastodon, Threads, Snapchat, and BlueSky. I also have 8 professional accounts of a similar vein to social media on Research Gate, Academia.edu, the Knowledge Commons, BE Press, and on the fora hosted by the Linnean Society, History of Science Society, and the American Historical Association. Traditionally, my professional and personal social media activity was shared on the same accounts; I’d post about the Cubs and my research on Twitter, a longtime home of academia online, yet in the past year I’ve begun to rework things a bit. Today, I use BlueSky for my professional social networking within academia. 

Facebook feels like the daily broadsheet of my online presence; it’s my original foray into social media and where I have 17 years of posts up and online. Yet today Instagram is where I am most active socially. There’s been a notable migration of my fellow millennials away from Facebook toward Instagram in the last decade, and whereas readership of my Facebook is restricted to my Facebook friends only I’ve allowed my Instagram profile to remain open to the public. This probably caused me some trouble when I was teaching the middle schoolers in the Fall 2023 semester, and today many of them still regularly view my Instagram stories. What I decided to do was rather than censor myself and limit their access to my Instagram, I would instead take a more curatorial role and be mindful of what I shared on my Instagram stories, making sure it was appropriate and thought-provoking for them. My Snapchat account is the most limited of all my social media accounts: I only accept connection requests from relatives and a very small number of friends there. I still occasionally browse Reddit, especially the Star Trek subreddits, but in the last 6 months I found it was becoming less enjoyable to read and today I only really open that app when I need to do something but am not in the mood to read a book or a magazine. Meanwhile, I’ve only recently begun feeling comfortable posting comments to YouTube videos, I had a handful of very bad experiences doing this in my early years of public comment fora on sites like that of the Kansas City Star and Trip Advisor where I learned quickly that a lot of people take the anonymity of the Internet as permission to be uncivil.[2] As with any place for public comment whether online or in the real world, I try to keep to the principle of only saying something if I feel it’ll contribute to the conversation.

As for the newcomers: like many others I opened a Mastodon account in 2022, and like many others I quickly found Mastodon to be unnecessarily confusing and haven’t opened the app in at least a year. Threads holds some potential in my mind, though like Mastodon I barely use it. I opened my BlueSky account in November 2024 when I was at the History of Science Society conference in Mérida described in Season 4 of the Wednesday Blog, and began connecting with other academics. I decided from Day 1 to cultivate my Blue Sky account as a purely professional account without any hobbies or personal anecdotes. This has limited how much I use the app, though I do use it on occasion.

On the topic of the Wednesday Blog I have an automatic distribution set up with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Threads, and I manually post each week’s blog post on Instagram and Twitter. Because this isn’t necessarily an academic venture I don’t promote this publication on Blue Sky. There’s also a Wednesday Blog Patreon, which you can join for $5 per month!

One of the big conversations of today is whether to close our social media accounts as the corporations who own these sites are increasingly accepting the problems they cause in our society, in the lived world, yet have dropped the mask of caring and continue their play for greater profits bare-faced and defiant in exposing themselves. In the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential Election I saw an immediate flood of false information appear on my Twitter account, which I wouldn’t have noticed if it didn’t appear among the silent notifications that I get daily over that app from the Kansas City office of the National Weather Service, and the handful of academics and other people I follow who are still on Twitter. With the recent announcement by Meta––the owners of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads––that they would cease their work with third-party fact checkers so as not to upset the new President caused a flood of comments about people dropping their profiles on Meta’s social media sites in protest. I haven’t seen as much false information on there yet, thought I expect it will appear.

I for one have considered shutting down most of my social media profiles off and on since 2016, because I understand and generally agree with all my friends and relatives who’ve done just that. Yet while I see a tremendous utility in these social media sites in allowing me to stay in touch with friends and relatives near and far, I see a far better reason to keep these accounts active: I will not be intimidated into silence by their shifting interest in the public good. I often hear the response to the suggestion that we can still have a reasoned debate between people who disagree being that it’s just not possible with how polarized we are today. That polarization is in large part thanks to social media for pushing forward the loudest and most outrageous voices of today just as the yellow journalists of a century ago did the same.

I had many a Facebook argument in my first decade on the platform, and in some cases, they were the primary way that I ended up interacting with people who I knew from school, college, or beyond on the site. I established a simple rule for comments on my profile: I will only delete a comment, “unfriend” someone, or block another account if they intentionally insult myself or someone else who they are communicating with in the comments on my profile. To date I’ve only blocked two other users. I believe we ought to respect differences of opinion when they are based in fact & reason and that as much as social media has been a tool of disinformation so too we can use it to inform and counter the outright lies being spread on these sites.

Social media truly shrank the globe for me and myriad others. Before I began using Facebook in 2008 while I would watch news broadcasts from beyond the U.S., particularly from the BBC on PBS and BBC America, I still was mostly reliant on handwritten and typed letters being sent by air mail to communicate with anyone beyond this country. Now, I keep in regular communication with friends & relatives on every permanently inhabited continent. I’ve been fortunate to stay in touch with some dear friends of mine who I haven’t seen in nearly a decade or more because of how our lives have led us apart; that contact has been sustained and fulfilled through social media.

Let me conclude with a note of data security. I would rather keep all of my social media accounts active because the risk present in someone else or a bot recreating an account in my name is great enough that I don’t want to risk it. I’ve cultivated this garden, and now I don’t want to see it wither. I’d rather use the tools owned by these corporations that actively support forces, ideas, and people who I disagree with in order to circumvent their power over me. I know that their websites aren’t necessary for me to live, even if they’ve grown to become such an ordinary part of my daily life. Yet I continue to use them as an act of self-expression standing for the ideals that I believe in: curiosity, honesty, hope, and optimism.

[1] I still won’t call it X.

[2] I went through a few different words here first.

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