An Eclectic Humanist

This episode concludes the two-part series on Early Modern Feminism by skipping across the Eurasian landmass to look at a precise contemporary of Jane Anger, the Elizabethan thinker and writer we looked at last week. Li Zhi was a cantankerous thinker and writer who suffered neither fools nor dogma gladly, and who was not afraid to take on some of the most deeply held prejudices of his society. He was deeply studied in the so-called “three schools” of Chinese culture—Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism—and used this knowledge to craft an argument for the equality of women and men that, though it contradicted the tradition of the very conservative society in which he lived, remained true to the logic of its guiding worldviews. He offers a critique of patriarchal institutions, explores the recognition of human equality in the Confucian historical cannon, and deconstructs gendered social distinctions through the lens of Chan/Zen Buddhism. For his trouble, he died in custody but served as an inspiration for subsequent generations. One of my greatest intellectual and ethical heroes: I hope you enjoy his story.

This episode and the next one lean hard into the “eclectic” side of “Eclectic Humanist.” Following up on the series on Roe v. Wade, I'd like to turn the clock back a few hundred years and look at a couple of examples of Early Modern feminism. There is, after all, an ongoing and unabashed effort from the religious right to turn the clock pretty far back, so it may be useful in the context of women's rights to take a glimpse into the world before the advances made by four centuries of feminist writing and activism. This installment takes us to Elizabethan England. We start with a discussion of women's status in the society of the day, including justifications for the subjugation of women in the words of the men who made them, then look at some specific legal restrictions to which women were subject. The main focus, though, is the writing of the little-known Jane Anger, to my mind the first English feminist. While her work is short, it is rich in terms of both arguments and rhetoric, preempting in some ways the arguments made some 200 years later by Mary Wollstonecraft. What I look at in particular here is her critique of the ways in which theological arguments are used to support misogynist positions, and her rejection not just of the arguments, but of the types of argument, that separate medieval from modern thought. Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/hartzmann/no-time-to-die License code: NHAGIVYDFPYQFCS3

This episode wraps up, for now, the series I've been doing on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It discusses the marriage of White Evangelical Christianity with the anti-choice cause in the wake of that 1973 decision, and begins to address the influence of the Christian nationalist ideology known as Dominion Theology on American politics generally and the Republican Party and White Evangelical Christianity specifically. From here, we jump into some statistics, specifically statistics on the ongoing decline of religious affiliation in the US, and the pressure that the projected continuation of this decline puts on today's aspiring theocrats to establish their new Promised Land before the demographic window closes on them for good. I try, as well, to offer a few thoughts on the role the overturning of Roe v Wade might play in the establishing of the American theocracy that we are now watching unfold, and reversing the decades-long trend of emptying pews. The episode wraps with a brief discussion of my own reasons for the position I've taken on this issue—really, kind of a rant. I hope you find it interesting and useful. Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/hartzmann/no-time-to-die License code: NHAGIVYDFPYQFCS3

This episode is the second installment in a three-part sequence on the US Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the anti-choice position generally. We begin, this time around, with a discussion of the ethics of belief, and the question how how responsible we might be for the positions that we hold. Next, we dive into the status of the fetus relative to that of the mother in the contexts of personhood, and human and legal rights. From there, we plunge into the position that the Bible adopts relative to both babies and the unborn, and yes, abortion itself. Hope you find it useful. Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/hartzmann/no-time-to-die License code: NHAGIVYDFPYQFCS3

This episode is the first of three devoted to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In this installment, I address questions of bodily sovereignty, and look into statistics relevant to abortion ranging from the 1930s to the present. The episode paints a picture of what the pre-Roe US looked like in terms of abortion access and maternal mortality, thus giving a clear indication of the world to which anti-choice activists and judges are trying to return their society. I also address the effectiveness, or rather the ineffectiveness, of abortion bans in reducing incidence, as opposed to more legitimate approaches such as education, contraception, and access to health care, and begin digging into the deep intellectual dishonesty of anti-choice rhetoric—a theme to be pursued in subsequent episodes.

This episode re-introduces a project that I had effectively abandoned about a year ago. As such, I'm treating it as a new beginning and laying out my reasons for starting again, most importantly the threat to humanism, and human well-being, currently posed by the religious right. This decision is a direct response to the US Supreme Court's move to usurp the bodily sovereignty of anyone who happens to have a uterus—a legal theft of agency that will almost certainly continue on matters of same-sex marriage, trans rights, and even contraception, and that absolutely must be opposed. Accordingly, I also give some indication of how I might like to pursue things moving forward. In short, this brief episode is a way of getting to know each other, or in some cases maybe getting to know each other again. The actual content begins next episode, and I hope you will check it out.

This episode, continuing last week's theme of COVID-19, human nature, and social responsibility, begins with a random encounter in the woods. It then wanders through some speculation on Hobbesian and Confucian state-of-nature arguments, a brief digression into primatology, and some thoughts on North America's ongoing epidemic of selfishness and sociopathy that our fractured responses to the coronavirus, particularly among the “muh freedum” crowd in their active undermining of adequate public health measures, has brought to the surface. Of course, as merely pointing out a shortcoming is not particularly useful, I also suggest a possible remedy to this selfishness epidemic, arising from a more nuanced understanding of human nature than is common among both anti-maskers and the far political right. It would appear that, this time around, I felt like highlighting the “eclectic” facet of the “Eclectic Humanist.” Hope you enjoy it, or at least that you don't get whiplash.

This episode, my first in about six months, was prompted by the ongoing flood of disinformation, dishonesty, and shear infantile selfishness among anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers. In short, I take on a topic that I proposed to a class back in the spring of 2020, just after lockdown began: to offer a Confucian response to the pandemic, Using the classical thinker Mengzi/Mencius as a touchstone, this episode argues for a theory of human nature from which compassion, social responsibility, and intellectual humility naturally emerge. This discussion continues in the next episode as well, from a slightly different perspective, as these issues have been very much on my mind over the last many months, as I'm sure they've been on your minds as well, but don't worry: I have several other subjects on the agenda, which I look forward to exploring with you. For now, I hope you enjoy this little outing, and find something useful in it.

This episode kicks off a new sequence, or maybe a couple of new sequences. I've been wanting to explore both Buddhism and the figure of the cyborg since first starting this little project. As it turns out, by starting with Buddhism, I can do both at the same time as much of my take on both cyborgs and post-humanism generally is rooted in that and other non-Western schools of thought. So what I think I'm going to do is devote a few episodes to the Diamond Sutra, a short and quite important Buddhist text, both for its own sake and to lay the foundation for a broader exploration. It presents a vision of human nature that, I think, poses serious challenges to a number of assumptions that Western worldviews tend to take for granted. After this sequence, I may look at one or two other worldviews that I haven't addressed yet, and then segue into the post-human themes I also want to roll around in. As for the current installment, it sketches out some of the basics of Buddhism generally and Mahayana Buddhism specifically, so that the Diamond Sutra itself will make more sense when we dive into it next week. I hope you find it interesting, whether you are here strictly for the immediate subject matter or also for the longer narrative.

This episode concludes our little traipse through Lucretius's On the Nature of Things. In Book 6, Lucretius implicitly addresses the sufficiency of a naturalistic worldview in the making of great art, then brings us face to face with the concrete reality of dying. In describing a historical plague in Athens, he describes in painful detail the double agony of illness and fear to which those living in terror of postmortem judgment are often subject. In doing so, he addresses the ethical question, current in many modern societies, of prolonging a life beyond the point where the only reasonable prospect is continued suffering. In short, he seems to be laying the groundwork for what we now call “death with dignity.” But why? Why conclude a poem of consolation with a grueling description of physical and psychological suffering? Well, I won't offer a definitive answer, but it seems to me that, in addressing the origins of the world, of life, of humanity, and of society, it would then have been dishonest to have left out questions of mortality. An account of life that leaves out an account of death would necessarily be incomplete, as would such an account that shied away from the pain of dying. Looked at this way Lucretius seems to be offering his naturalistic perspective as an antidote to the real suffering caused by belief in the supernatural. We may not be able to alleviate the suffering of the body in the days leading up to death, but we can, it seems, both alleviate our mental suffering regarding our postmortem trajectory, and also have grounds for not prolonging life beyond the point where the only possible outcome is continued agony.

In Book 5 of On the Nature of Things, Lucretius presents a naturalistic account of the origins of life and, quite frankly, the origins of species in a well articulated explanation of evolution by natural selection. While he of course lacks the observational mechanisms that we now possess, or that Darwin possessed, he was pretty solid in the broad strokes, and it is probably worth noting that Darwin was familiar with this poem. He also offers accounts of both technology and civilization (both of which involve the question of language) that, like his account of life itself, owe nothing to the imagined divine. In these accounts, which knowingly contrast with both Classical and Old Testament mythologies, our drive and ability to know are neither gifted from nor opposed by those perennially threatening fictions from on high, but rather are emergent properties of us, therefore of life, therefore of matter, therefore of the Cosmos, itself. His narrative of technology is particularly interesting as this is poetically interwoven with his narratives of both evolution and civilization in a way that strikes me, at least, as anticipating contemporary notions of the feedback loops by which complex systems often develop. Of course, to stand scrutiny, a naturalistic description of humanity must also account for such matters as laws and the arts, which Lucretius does by proposing an early version of the social contract on the one hand, and on the other, his description of the arts as mechanisms by which we come to both know and appreciate ourselves and the world in which we live. Bound up in this book, from beginning to end, is an account of a naturally emergent human dignity, and a beautiful and compelling picture of true piety as being directed toward the Cosmos itself, and toward our own wondrous nature.

Ever wonder how we know things? Lucretius certainly did, and he also recognized that, without a naturalistic account of knowledge, his proposed Cosmos consisting of nothing other than matter and void would be a non-starter. He argues, necessarily, that all knowledge comes through the senses, and accordingly proposes an empirical epistemology that foreshadows the modern scientific method. He addresses the means why which our senses often seem to deceive us, and argues that, even with its uncertainties, the provisional knowledge offered by empiricism is always better then the illusory certainties offered by religion. One of the principle positions that Lucretius takes on in this book is the so-called teleological argument: the notion that some intent preceded our being generally, and our sense organs particularly. He argues instead, correctly, that function emerges from form rather than predating it. In other words, we don't have eyes so that we can see, but rather, we see because we have eyes. The teleological argument, in other words, indicates an inversion of cause and effect. To partially illustrate the point, I offer a bit of an experiment that you can perform on yourselves. This part of the argument anticipates his discussion of evolution, which follows in Book 5. Also notable in this book, on the topic of senses and knowledge, is Lucretius's understanding of sex and love, his non-binary understanding of gender, and his notion, which seems to anticipate Freud, that much of our cultural activity consists of a redirection of erotic impulses. Oh, and he also has advice about sex positions.

In Book 3 of On the Nature of Things, Lucretius addresses the idea that inspired Dante to consign Epicurus to the sixth circle of Hell: that the soul is not immortal. In making his argument, Lucretius makes a compelling case, given the observational capacities of his time, for the mind as an emergent material phenomenon, a position borne out compellingly by modern neuro-science. In making this case for the physicality and thus the mortality of the mind, which he posits as one component of a soul consisting of both mind and spirit, Lucretius also gets into areas pertaining to mental health, a matter of urgent current interest. These questions relate closely, I think, to the real psychological dangers posed by the stigmatization of mental illness on the one hand and religious threats of eternal damnation on the other. The episode therefore ends with a somewhat personal take on the clear and present danger that a non-naturalistic understanding of the mind and soul poses to human wellbeing.

In this episode, we continue our exploration of Lucretius's humanist masterpiece, On the Nature of Things. In Book 2, Lucretius begins to explore what it means to live in a Cosmos in which divine interference lays no role and all phenomena are subject to natural laws and naturalistic explanation. Beginning with the smallest objects that can be observed with the naked eye, he leaps inward toward the question of free will and then onward to questions of what current thinkers refer to as emergence—the arising of higher-order behaviours that are not predictable from observing initial conditions and components in complex systems. He offers an explicit discussion of what the divine actually is and why we have no need to worry about it, offers a welcome debunking of the “teleological argument” that the world was made for us or that any intention lies behind our being, and concludes with a refreshing and reasonable argument for the existence of extraterrestrial life. Not bad for the first century BCE. Enjoy.

This episode begins our hands-on discussion of Lucretius's Humanist masterpiece, On the Nature of Things. Book One (of six) presents the best surviving Classical argument for a purely material cosmos consisting of nothing but atoms moving in a void. The argument is the first step in both an overall understanding of how the Cosmos works and, perhaps counter-intuitively, a consolation in which the poet eases his friend Memius's fears about death, most particularly the fear of everlasting torment. The calamity against which he argues throughout the poem is religio—translated as both religion and superstition. Accordingly, Lucretius presents a vision of the Cosmos in which the supernatural plays no active role, in which both matter and void are uncreated and infinite, and in which neither the Earth nor any other location is at the centre: a Cosmos of infinite potential in which life is not unique to some privileged location but rather an inevitable consequence of the behaviour of matter over time. All quotations are from A.E. Stallings' translation, the most beautiful English rendering of this poem that I've encountered, available from Penguin.

Greetings, folks, and welcome back. This kick-off to Season Two begins with a brief catch-up as it's been a couple of months since we've been in touch, and then jumps right into the subject matter with which I'd like to begin the year. The topic of the first few little talks will be what, to my mind at least, is the most important work of ancient Western Humanism to have survived the bonfires and vandalism of the early Christian era: Lucretius's great didactic poem, On the Nature of Things, which provides the only surviving account of Epicurean thought written from an Epicurean point of view. Lucretius presents us with a Cosmos consisting solely of matter and void, argues against any supernatural agency in either cosmological or human affairs, presents organized religion as a blight on both society and the individual, argues for empiricism as the most valid epistemology for generating knowledge of the natural world, lays out the atomic theory of matter, depicts an infinite Cosmos working consistently to the same principles, presents an early version of the theory of evolution, dispenses with the ever-destructive association of pleasure with “sin,” lays out a version of ethics that his modern inheritors would go on to develop as the social contract, and even makes an argument for death with dignity. And, particularly relevant to our own society at this particular time, he argues strenuously against any superstitious or religious self-delusion (the Latin word religiotranslates as both “superstition” and “religion”) during a mass infectious disease crisis. In short, he is one of my intellectual heroes. This talk lays out some background and context for the poem and its reception in the Modern period. Subsequent talks will address details of the text itself, hopefully enough to spark an interest in reading it. And if you do decide to read it, the translation I recommend is A.E. Stallings' translation, available from Penguin, which renders the original Latin hexameters into rhyming English hexameters rather than the prose for which many other translators opt, and is a genuine pleasure to read simply on its own poetic merits. Enjoy

Today is Remembrance Day in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Britain, and Veterans' Day in the US. So, for this episode, as an act of remembrance, I will simply be reading several poems and a chapter from a great and devastating war novel, written by soldiers who served on the Western Front. I am confining the location and time largely for historical reasons but also for personal ones as the field of literature to choose from would otherwise be overwhelming. so instead of aiming at broad coverage now, I will optimistically assume that there will be future annual episodes on this theme, each focusing on a different area, conflict, or period. While I will not say I hope you enjoy these selections--I did not enjoy recording them, to be honest--I do hope that they offer some insight into the realities of war that can only arise through listening to those who have been there. This episode is dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, John Hay Wilkie, who served first with the Royal Scots and then with the Seaforth Highlanders. Grandpa was wounded at Ypre in May 1915, and by the end of the war had seen service not just in Europe but also in the Middle Eastern campaign. This day 102 years ago, he was somewhere in Turkey.

So the US election has been called, and it's all over but the temper tantrum. What do we do now? Where do we go? Well, speaking as an outsider, my first impulse is to rejoice in the triumph of electoral politics over authoritarianism, and I will stand by that impulse (fight me). My second impulse, though, is to ask what those Americans who have lived under Trump and Trumpism for the last four years are entitled to, and the first two words that come to mind are gratitude and compassion. Had they not voted that fascist MF out of the White House, the whole world would have paid the price both politically and environmentally. And over the last four years, many of them have been traumatized, and many of them have died, as a direct result of their "president's" fascist politics. So be kind, folks. Be gentle. I am officially declaring this "International Hug an American Week." Seriously, they have it coming. It's been a hard fight.

As the US election closes in, I find myself unable to think about anything else. So, having attempted a couple of other ideas and failed to complete them, I've surrendered to the zeitgeist and recorded an election episode, as much an exorcism of my ambient demons as anything else. The talk ends up revolving around the political philosophy of the ancient Confucian thinker Mencius (Mengzi), but as much as anything, I think it might be an attempt at community, a reaching out to others at what I believe is a critical moment not just in American history but in world history. Be well, folks. Be safe. And vote.

Here, finally, is the concluding installment in the "Attack of the Fundamentalists" sequence. This one takes a bit of a turn from what I'd originally intended, which had been simply to outline the history of Christian Dominionism inthe US, and instead speaks more broadly about the ongoing cultural conflict between the religious right and reasonable people on such subjects as apocalypticism and the looming American election. It seems to me that the discourse between the religious right and the more progressive elements of society, which has been building in tension and vehemence for many years now, is coming to a head as the demographic tide that throughout my own childhood and early adulthood favoured the Christian fundamentalists, finally turns against them. Looking at these and other factors, and considering the flow of history a few weeks out from an election in which the most religious country in the "First World" faces a choice between remaining the backward-looking parody of itself that it has become under Trump and under the prolonged influence of the religious right, or moving forward and once again rejoining the community of nations, I find myself both anxious and hopeful for the future. While I very well could be wrong, I think the Evangelicals and fundamentalists in the US have overplayed their hand, especially in their fantasy-based response to COVID-19, and are--failing ongoing and powerful attempts at voter suppression--about to be handed their reality-denying asses on a plate.

This episode departs from the ongoing series on the rise of Christian Fundamentalism to just plunge, stream-of-consciousness style, into some thoughts that have been occupying my mind lately. It is quite personal, so maybe not for everyone, and simply presents an hour's worth of talking through various thoughts on subjects such as lockdown, mental health, personal loss, optimism, 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, and the human capacity for meaning-making, subsequently edited down to about a half-hour talk. It is unscripted and unplanned, and so rambles a bit, but in playing back the final edit, I think it communicates something that I want to communicate. Hope you like it.

Well, folks, I've finally managed to finish the third installment in the Attack of the Fundamentalists series, and I do apologize for the delay. This one roughly spans the time period of the Cold War and touches, in a helter skelter fashion, upon a handful of road markers along Evangelical Christianity's rise to power: McCarthyism, rock and roll, the sexual revolution, feminism, Roe v. Wade, and the merger of the Christian Right with the Republican Party. The narrative here is a little looser than in the last couple of episodes, but several strands will be picked up again and hopefully tied together when I conclude this sequence next episode with a discussion of Christian Dominionism along with its objectives, strategies, and effects. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this latest installment. Look for the next one in about two weeks, after which I hope to be back on my originally intended weekly schedule.

Damn you, Darwin! This episode picks up the challenge to religious authority posed by modern science, focusing specifically on the emerging knowledge of the age of the Earth in the 19thcentury and, most importantly, on Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. While a literal reading of the Old Testament suggests an age of about 6,000 years for both the Earth and the Cosmos, and while the Genesis creation myth presents animals being created in specific and stable “kinds,” by the end of the century, neither position would remain viable. And while many in the religious community found, and continue to find, ways to accommodate their faith to the growing body of knowledge presented by the various sciences, many, on the other hand, chose and continue to choose to reject both the conclusions and the methods of modern science in favour of a retreat into the comfortable and increasingly counter-factual certainties of myth. By the first quarter of the 20thcentury, this retreat from reason and evidence had already become a salient and politically powerful feature of American Christianity, as shown both by the Revivalist Movement and, most dramatically, by the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, which marked the first high profile showdown between the competing discourses of modern science on the one hand, and a newly energized Christian fundamentalism on the other. These twin trends of intellectual retreat and political advance would continue throughout the 20th century, as we will see in the next episode, to define much of the character of what we now refer to as the religious right.

Time to throw down the gauntlet... Few threats to human and global well being are more pressing than religious fundamentalism. At least in North America, no social force is more closely associated with such anti-humanist phenomena as science denial (environmental, medical, etc.), authoritarian politics, persistent racial inequality, denial of rights and equality to gender-nonbinary people, and women's bodily autonomy. And I have been watching this force unfold in real time since the late 1970s and the days of Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. I've watched the Religious Right attain a degree of political and social clout that threatens virtually every forward movement that society has made in the last couple of centuries, and that has already undermined education to such a degree that the majority of North Americans must now be considered scientifically illiterate. We are now witnessing the cost of that scientific illiteracy as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds in a once-great society where the idiot fringe has become a mainstream loudmouthed gun toting disease vector. This ideology therefore constitutes a clear and present danger. As for this episode, it is here where I dive into full blown opposition to the religious right: the single cause to which, for my entire thinking life, I have been most consistently and completely committed. Accordingly, this piece is the first in a linked sequence that traces the rise of modern Christian Fundamentalism as a response to both the epistemology and the findings of the Scientific Revolution. This episode sketches out the Scientific Revolution itself, from Copernicus through Bruno, Kepler, Bacon, and Galileo, to Sir Isaac Newton, chronicling the process by which the view of the Cosmos inherited from the Medieval world and clung to by early modern Church is demolished and ultimately replaced. The next episode will turn closer to home, exploring such Earth-centered discoveries as geological deep time and Darwinian evolution, and getting into the specifics of the Fundamentalist backlash agaisnt the discoveries arising from three centuries of modern science. The third episode (and perhaps a fourth) will address the rise of Protestant Fundamentalism as a political force, and culminate in a discussion of one of the most virulent religio-political ideologies currently threatening both human and global well being: Christian Dominionism. I hope you enjoy the ride. P.S. I apologize for my mispronunciation of Epicurus's name. I didn't catch it until the final edits were done, and the episode is already late going up, so I don't want to compound the delay with another recording session.

In the second part of the Mythic Meanderings sequence, I dig into two end-of-the-world myths: the biblical narrative culminating in Revelation, and the Norse Ragnarok tale. These myths, and the differing understandings of human nature, the divine, and time underlying and articulated in them, have a certain amount of common ground, but oppose each other in important ways. They present quite different notions of human worth, and of the source and possibility of meaning in life. As an atheist and metaphoric pagan, I lean toward the Norse myth, and honestly, one of the reasons I hold these two up together is to dispense with the notion, common in Western society, that the various displaced polytheisms in our various cultural heritages are, as we are often told, intellectually immature or primitive. There are rich metaphors in both of these myths, and both offer complex and sometimes challenging notions of the meaning and worth of an individual human life.

This episode took on a life of its own. Simply put, it is a look at several mythologies in which I explore such elements as time, creation myths, the nature of the gods, and the nature and construction of the other. It ranges freely across several different bodies of thought—Sumerian, Christian, Hindu, Daoist, Greek, Roman, and Celtic—and therefore gives a taste of the way I hope to address the humanist approach to myth throughout this series. As a humanist and an atheist, of course I do not believe in any of the gods I discuss, but what I find interesting and useful in them is the light they shed on the minds from which they emerged, and on the differing mental and social paths down which they might lead. Of course, a single podcast that I've always intended to keep under an hour is not enough to address such a wide array of material in detail, and in fact, there were other questions I also wanted to ask, and other narratives I wanted to explore, such as the Norse Ragnarok myth. These will show up next episode, in Mythic Meanderings 2.

This episode plunges into contested territory. In many countries, people are calling for the removal of monuments to slavery and genocide while others decry these demands as an assault upon their "culture." It occurs to me that Nietzsche, in his early work On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, has something worthwhile to say on the subject, so that is the exploration I've undertaken this week. What is our relationship to history? How does it shape us, and how do we shape it and thus ourselves? Who controls the narrative, and what happens when narratives butt heads? And who among the disputants has the fortitude to bear up under history's ever increasing weight?

This episode ended up taking me on an unexpected journey. When I started out, the plan was simply to tell the story of the Six Nations First Nation near Brantford, Ontario applying for membership in the League of Nations in 1923, and the underhanded ways in which the government of Canada, and especially Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, opposed and punished them for their application. But when I finished that part of the recording, the episode seemed incomplete, and as I sat at my desk, staring at my bookcase and wondering what I might do to turn the tale into more than a mere historical lecture, the name Beth Brant and the title of her first collection, Mohawk Trail, kept tugging at me, as did the fact that Scott was not merely a bureaucrat but also a highly regarded poet in his time. Would a comparison of texts be a useful way to bring the story more fully to life? Maybe, but how much better would it be if there were a family connection between Beth Brant and the Mowhawk war chief who, with his sister, established the Six Nations First Nation and after whom the city of Brantford is named? Well, it turns out there is. So it turns out that I was able to explore the questions at the heart of this episode not merely from a bureaucratic and historical perspective but also from the deeply human perspective of literature, and to do so through the work of the arch villain of the story, himself, on the one hand, and a bearer of the protagonists' heritage on the other. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you find it as enlightening to listen to as I found it to make.

In this episode, I give a brief history of Canada's genocide against First Nations with a particular focus on the infamous residential schools. The episode touches upon important pieces of Canadian legislation, and discusses a number of the methods by which first the colonial and later the federal government has tried to eliminate Canada's Indigenous population both culturally and physically. Listener discretion is advised.

My venture into humanist podcasting series continues with this discussion of Jacinda Ardern and Donald Trump with reference to the Confucian notion of "moral charisma" as the two leaders offer very different responses to both domestic and global crises. In Confucian thought, the conduct of the leader,for good or bad, affects the character of the entire society over which he or she has authority. Few contemporary societies illustrate this notion better than New Zealand on the one hand, and the United States on the other, in their radially different responses to the crises currently besetting the world.

This episode considers the ongoing Black Lives Matter demonstrations, which I support and in which I am participating, from a Confucian perspective, particularly with reference to Mencius (Mengzi). Mencius would be deeply critical of a regime that, on the one hand, has established such an inequitable system as the one in which many minorities find themselves, while on the other hand has effectively criminalized their response to such inequity. His argument is based on the essential goodness of human nature (to be addressed in future episodes), and the responsibility of the regime to cultivate that nature in everyone living under its authority, or at least to foster conditions in which individuals have sufficient time and circumstances in which to cultivate it in themselves.

A quick introduction to my new podcast. What I hope to do with this little project is to explore a wide selection of humanist thought, both ancient and modern, and apply it to questions and concerns of contemporary life. The aim is both educational and political. Humanism is currently under threat, particularly from fundamentalist religion and authoritarian politics, and this series is a part of my response to that threat. In this episode, I just lay out my overall sense of what the project is and where it might go. More focused content starts with Episode 2.