El Nino as a Distraction as the E.U. Swelters

It is likely due to natural selection having formed our present-day species overwhelmingly in the hunter-gatherer very, very long period of our species 1.8 million years of existence (agriculture just having begun around 7000 BCE!) that we tend to take notice of a foreground and leave the background along because any threats it holds are immediate. Tigers, for example, become particularly dangerous when they are up close rather than several fields away. During the (Northern hemisphere’s) summer of 2026, as the E.U. was sweltering in successive heatwaves, the El Nino current event in which warm equatorial water in the Pacific Ocean moves eastward readily became a target as the culprit producing the heat far away in Europe. In actuality, according to scientists (but what do they know?), the gradual (i.e., background) warming of the planet’s atmosphere, especially in the Artic as well as in Europe, was behind the heat breaking records in the E.U. as well as in bordering sovereign states like Britain, where on 25 June, presumably in London, an all-time-high temperature for the month of June was recorded. Global warming, once safely in the background, was coming home to roust in the foreground.

The full essay is at "El Nino as a Distraction as the E.U. Swelters."

Free Will and Moral Responsibility

According to Rousseau, we are born free but we live out our life in chains. Although some people subvert background context and foreground personhood such that the chains are believed to be societally imposed as if people are not sufficiently free to transcend or counter the “binding” external strictures of some institution or society, Nietzsche argues that the sovereign individual is lies at the end of an arduous long process by which our species has become bred to be “to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable” and thus certain people can be trusted to be reliable in promise-keeping.[1] Such people are free individuals. They are autonomous even against the “Though Shalt Nots” of moral mores, which had their place as virtual societal straitjackets in the development of the species but are legitimately cast off by people who can be relied upon to keep promises without violating them in the heat of the moment. Such people are individuals, but not narcissists, for the latter calculate each moment as to what lies in their self-interest—the feelings of others be damned if they are in the way. It is ironic that moral responsibility applies to the latter rather than to the autonomous individuals because only the free ones can call their “dominating instinct” a “conscience.”[2] Modern society, at least in the West, could use an elaboration on Nietzsche’s description of the autonomous individual in so far as such a person is antipodal to the herd animals on whom moral responsibility should be imposed because they cannot be trusted, for they are not promise-keepers. St. Paul’s dictum to keep the fools at a distance is ironically in line with the second essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, where the Christian ascetic priest is lampooned for its innate weakness even as it seeks to dominate the strong out of ressentiment.

The full essay is at "Free Will and Moral Responsibility."

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 495.
2. Ibid.