After reading four children books that said the prey of Komodo dragons sometimes died after a bite because the dragons' mouths are so full of bacteria, I now discover that the dragons are in fact venomous.
Thinking on this, I remembered one of the reasons I am skeptical about all "knowledge." I had a science text book in the third grade that said Mercury always keeps one face toward the sun. It does not, and this had been discovered around the time I was born. I never trusted a textbook again.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Let Iran get the Bomb
If Iran wants the bomb, they are going to get it. The only thing we could do that might stop them would be an oil embargo, and since the Europeans and Chinese have already said that is not an option, there is really nothing we can do.
We could bomb their known nuclear facilities, or let the Israelis do it. But everyone who has thought seriously about this option has said that it won't work and will in the long run only make Iran more determined to get the bomb. The Atlantic staged a fascinating war game of various scenarios in 2004, which you can read about here. The bottom line of those experts was that by bombing known facilities we could slow the Iranian program by forcing them to disperse into smaller, more secret sites, but not stop them. They also highlight the many ways Iran could strike back, e.g., by using suicide bombers against US assets in Iraq and Afghanistan. The situation in Afghanistan is especially critical now, and Afghanistan is a place where the US and Iran have in fact worked together; Iran and the Taliban hate each other, because the Taliban are fanatical Sunnis who oppressed Afghanitstan's Shi'ite minority. But if we bomb Iran, that could easily change. Now there is a new assessment from the CSIS of the possibility of an Israeli strike, and it is equally sobering; James Fallows has a summary here. Key line from the study: "The more there is an Israeli threat to the survival of the regime in Iran, the more Iran will be determined to acquire nuclear weapons."
I think the Israelis are being foolish to get so upset about an Iranian bomb. Yes, some members of the Iranian leadership believe in a future apocalypse, but so do many members of the US leadership. That is quite a different thing from starting a nuclear war. Our experience with nuclear standoffs is that they tend toward stability and can deter conventional war, and that is what I think would happen between Israel and Iran. No doubt a nervous Israeli would here say, "easy for you to say, you are not threatened with nuclear annihilation," but to that I respond, yes, but I was until 1989, and I lived with it just fine.
I don't find the prospect of an Iranian bomb nearly as scare as the Pakistani bomb, which already exists, or the North Korean bomb, which sort-of exists (their test was mostly a failure). Nuclear weapons will only disappear when we find a way to put an end to wars between states. As long as there is the threat of war between states, states will develop nuclear weapons, and by making so many threats the Israelis and their US "friends" are only bringing the Iranian bomb closer.
We could bomb their known nuclear facilities, or let the Israelis do it. But everyone who has thought seriously about this option has said that it won't work and will in the long run only make Iran more determined to get the bomb. The Atlantic staged a fascinating war game of various scenarios in 2004, which you can read about here. The bottom line of those experts was that by bombing known facilities we could slow the Iranian program by forcing them to disperse into smaller, more secret sites, but not stop them. They also highlight the many ways Iran could strike back, e.g., by using suicide bombers against US assets in Iraq and Afghanistan. The situation in Afghanistan is especially critical now, and Afghanistan is a place where the US and Iran have in fact worked together; Iran and the Taliban hate each other, because the Taliban are fanatical Sunnis who oppressed Afghanitstan's Shi'ite minority. But if we bomb Iran, that could easily change. Now there is a new assessment from the CSIS of the possibility of an Israeli strike, and it is equally sobering; James Fallows has a summary here. Key line from the study: "The more there is an Israeli threat to the survival of the regime in Iran, the more Iran will be determined to acquire nuclear weapons."
I think the Israelis are being foolish to get so upset about an Iranian bomb. Yes, some members of the Iranian leadership believe in a future apocalypse, but so do many members of the US leadership. That is quite a different thing from starting a nuclear war. Our experience with nuclear standoffs is that they tend toward stability and can deter conventional war, and that is what I think would happen between Israel and Iran. No doubt a nervous Israeli would here say, "easy for you to say, you are not threatened with nuclear annihilation," but to that I respond, yes, but I was until 1989, and I lived with it just fine.
I don't find the prospect of an Iranian bomb nearly as scare as the Pakistani bomb, which already exists, or the North Korean bomb, which sort-of exists (their test was mostly a failure). Nuclear weapons will only disappear when we find a way to put an end to wars between states. As long as there is the threat of war between states, states will develop nuclear weapons, and by making so many threats the Israelis and their US "friends" are only bringing the Iranian bomb closer.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
women and happiness
According to this weighty review of the available data, women in the western world have gotten less happy since the 1970s. In the 1970s women reported being happier than men, but that is no longer true.
The authors of this study offer no explanation for their finding. Now I have to say that I am dubious of this kind of research, which I think records changes in what people think they should say instead of how happy they really are. But to the extent that it is true, I think the explanation is given on page 1 of this study: "Female labor force participation has risen to record levels both absolutely and relative to that of men."
Working more doesn't make most people happier. As the working world becomes more and more a sort of racket in which underlings toil harder for minimal gains while their bosses get obscenely rich, in which employers have no loyalty to their employees or their communities, and in which more and more people do abstract bureaucratic tasks instead of making something, work will more and more become a source of unhappiness.
The authors of this study offer no explanation for their finding. Now I have to say that I am dubious of this kind of research, which I think records changes in what people think they should say instead of how happy they really are. But to the extent that it is true, I think the explanation is given on page 1 of this study: "Female labor force participation has risen to record levels both absolutely and relative to that of men."
Working more doesn't make most people happier. As the working world becomes more and more a sort of racket in which underlings toil harder for minimal gains while their bosses get obscenely rich, in which employers have no loyalty to their employees or their communities, and in which more and more people do abstract bureaucratic tasks instead of making something, work will more and more become a source of unhappiness.
Still arguing god with Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish wrote an annoying essay about religion, which I complained about last week. This week he is back at it, responding to what must be a tiny sample of the comments he received. He has fun with this by picking shrill atheists who confirm, by their shrillness, everything he said about shallow atheism. But instead of responding seriously to the issues they raise, he tosses out further obfuscation.
He goes back again to the notion that scientific knowledge rests on a kind of faith:
In his first piece, Fish offered this description from Terry Eagleton of the kingdom of God:
Fish likes being a Christian, and finds life without theological underpinnings empty. Which is ok by me. But as an intellectual, he feels that he has to be able to defend his faith intellectually, using the kind of arguments he regularly deploys in his essays. I wonder if he can even see how weak his arguments appear to someone who lacks his vision.
He goes back again to the notion that scientific knowledge rests on a kind of faith:
Thought itself — the consideration of problems with a view to arriving at their solutions — requires chains, requires stipulated definitions, requires limits it did not choose but which enable and structure its operations....Yes, science depends on all sorts of assumptions, from cause and effect to the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematics in describing the world. But Wittgenstein demolished the facile equation of religious faith with a scientist's assumptions more than 70 years ago, saying "the house of science supports its foundation." Using the assumptions of science, you can launch a probe to Saturn and it will end up in exactly the orbit you predicted, and while this proves nothing it is strong evidence that cause and effect are real things. There is no equivalent evidence for the existence of god.If there is no thought without constraints (chains) and if the constraints cannot be the object of thought because they mark out the space in which thought will go on, what is noticed and perspicuous will always be a function of what cannot be noticed because it cannot be seen. The theological formulation of this insight is well known: Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11). Once the act of simply reporting or simply observing is exposed as a fiction — as something that just can’t be done — the facile opposition between faith-thinking and thinking grounded in independent evidence cannot be maintained.
Pking gets it right. “To torpedo faith is to destroy the roots of . . . any system of knowledge . . . I challenge anyone to construct an argument proving reason’s legitimacy without presupposing it . . . Faith is the base, completely unavoidable. Get used to it. It’s the human condition.” (All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly.) Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith.
In his first piece, Fish offered this description from Terry Eagleton of the kingdom of God:
a condition of justice, fellowship, and self-fulfillment far beyond anything that might normally be considered possible or even desirable in the more well-heeled quarters of Oxford and Washington.Yet when readers complain that Fish's religion is "Polyanna-like, happy-days optimism", he protests. Certainly there is much darkness in a Christian view of the world, but if Eagleton's notion of the kingdom of God is not wildly optimistic, what is? Is not the Christian promise of eternal life in paradise not the most optimistic possible idea? What could go beyond it as something to be hoped for?
Fish likes being a Christian, and finds life without theological underpinnings empty. Which is ok by me. But as an intellectual, he feels that he has to be able to defend his faith intellectually, using the kind of arguments he regularly deploys in his essays. I wonder if he can even see how weak his arguments appear to someone who lacks his vision.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Civil War Ending in Sir Lanka?
This would be kind of amazing, if true, since the war has lasted 26 years:
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka – The Tamil Tigers admitted defeat Sunday in their fierce quarter-century war for a separate homeland as government forces raced to clear the last pockets of rebel resistance from the war zone in the north.One of the reasons it has been so hard to achieve peace in this conflict is that both sides feel like embattled minorities. The Sinhalese are the majority in Sir Lanka, but they are vastly outnumbered by the Tamils of India. Indian Tamils funded the Tamil Tigers and supplied them with a safe refuge in exile. Tamil Tiger supporters were so powerful in India that when the government tried to shut down the flow of arms and money to the rebels they assassinated the Prime Minister. I wonder if events in India were somehow behind the change of battlefield fortunes in Sri Lanka. If not, I suppose the rebels must have simply gotten tired and given up.Far from the battlefield, thousands of Sri Lankans danced in the streets of Colombo, celebrating the stunning collapse of one of the world's most sophisticated insurgencies. But with rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran still at large, the threat of renewed guerrilla warfare remained.
Several rebel fighters committed suicide when they were surrounded, but it wasn't clear whether Prabhakaran or other leaders were among them.
The Tamil Tigers once controlled a shadow state complete with courts, police and a tax system across a wide swath of the north. By Sunday, troops had surrounded the remaining rebels in a 0.4-square-mile (1-square-kilometer) patch of land and were fighting off suicide bombs and other attacks, the military said....
The rebels have been fighting since 1983 for a separate state for Sri Lanka's ethnic Tamil minority after years of marginalization at the hands of the Sinhalese majority. More than 70,000 people have been killed in the fighting.
President Mahinda Rajapaksa has said that after defeating the rebels, his government will begin talks toward power sharing and political reconciliation between the two communities. But many Tamils are skeptical that the victorious government will be willing to make real concessions.
At their height, the rebels controlled 5,400 square miles (14,000 square kilometers), nearly one-fifth of this Indian Ocean island nation.
They had a conventional army complete with artillery batteries, a large navy and even a nascent air force, funded by an estimated $200 million to $300 million a year they made from smuggling, fraud and appeals to Tamil expatriates. They also carried out hundreds of suicide attacks — including the 1991 assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi — and were listed as a terror group by the U.S., European Union and India.
crowded
It's getting crowded in the robins' nest. While I was working in the yard yesterday I watched the mother and father robins working with hardly a pause all day long to catch bugs for their babies. Raising four must be very hard for them.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Star Trek
I saw the new Star Trek movie Thursday night. It was entertaining, and I was surprised by the way it ended. But I kept thinking that I had seen everything before. Some of that was because I have seen all the other Star Trek movies, and this movie made allusions to them. But I was more struck by a sense that every action sequence looked like a dozen or a hundred similar scenes from other movies: fight scenes on platforms so the characters can end up hanging from the edge by their fingers, cars that go off cliffs, sparking control panels. Perhaps this is one of the disadvantages of aging, that I have simply seen more movies than there are new ideas for filming them.
Garden, May 16, 2009
The front garden, with the Zephirine Drouhin rose in full bloom.
The south garden, irises and peonies just starting to bloom.
Iris and a pink shrub rose.
Clara with the clematis in the herb garden.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Thursday, May 14, 2009
Renzo Piano in Chicago
Renzo Piano's addition to the Chicago Art Institute is open, and the NY Times has a slide show.
I am intrigued. A building for the display of modern art ought, I think, to be modern in style, and given that constraint -- which of course guarantees that I won't love the result -- it looks like Piano has done a good job. The building seems to be full of natural light, even though it must be filtered to protect the art works. And instead of creating some kind of monstrous sculpture that dominates its site, relegating the art to the background (I.M Pei in Washington, Gehry in Bilbao), he has built a gallery designed to display works of art. I find such modesty very becoming in a famous architect.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Knowing Doesn't Help
Great little piece by David Brooks on the ongoing longitudinal study of 268 men who entered Harvard in the late 1930s, a reaction to this longer essay in the Atlantic. The study's long-time director, George Vaillant, says that relationships are key to long-term happiness: "happiness is love," he says. But he has been divorced twice and has troubled relationships with his children: "There was a civil war in the family," says one of his daughters.
Knowing what would make you happy doesn't necessarily make it easy to do.
Many of these men served in World War II, and I was struck by the finding that the more combat they saw, the more likely they were to suffer from mental illness later. Even the best of good wars was a horror for many who survived it.
Knowing what would make you happy doesn't necessarily make it easy to do.
Many of these men served in World War II, and I was struck by the finding that the more combat they saw, the more likely they were to suffer from mental illness later. Even the best of good wars was a horror for many who survived it.
The Body is a Strange and Complex Thing
Exercise seems to help the body manage glucose, so doctors routinely tell everyone at risk of diabetes to get more exercise.
Exercise causes the cells to release oxidants, which do lots of molecular damage and may (or may not) be one of the main causes of aging.
So maybe the way to get the best outcome would be to exercise more but also take lots of anti-oxidants, like Vitamin C and E, to curb the damage caused by oxidants.
Alas, a new study seems to show that if you take lots of anti-oxidants, exercise no longer has any effect on your body's ability to handle glucose. The potentially harmful release of oxidants seems to be key to the healthful effects of exercise on diabetes.
Whenever I read that this or that (anti-oxidants, say) is the key to health, I roll my eyes, because our bodies are machines of a complexity far beyond anything we can really understand. Tinkering with one system may cause a whole cascade of changes to others. Better, I think, just to focus on the things we understand from millennia of experience: that an active life, a moderate diet, and a positive attitude all correlate with health and long life.
Exercise causes the cells to release oxidants, which do lots of molecular damage and may (or may not) be one of the main causes of aging.
So maybe the way to get the best outcome would be to exercise more but also take lots of anti-oxidants, like Vitamin C and E, to curb the damage caused by oxidants.
Alas, a new study seems to show that if you take lots of anti-oxidants, exercise no longer has any effect on your body's ability to handle glucose. The potentially harmful release of oxidants seems to be key to the healthful effects of exercise on diabetes.
Whenever I read that this or that (anti-oxidants, say) is the key to health, I roll my eyes, because our bodies are machines of a complexity far beyond anything we can really understand. Tinkering with one system may cause a whole cascade of changes to others. Better, I think, just to focus on the things we understand from millennia of experience: that an active life, a moderate diet, and a positive attitude all correlate with health and long life.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Life in the Iron Age
Interesting study of ten skeletons from central Asia, dating to around 500 BC:
Skeletal remains of Pazyryk warriors unearthed in a recent archaeological excavation in the Mongolian Altai offer a unique opportunity for verifying ancient histories of warfare and violence given by Herodotus in the fifth century BC. The Pazyryks were Iron Age nomadic groups associated with the eastern Scythians and known from burial site discoveries on the high steppes of the Altai (Central Asia). The aim of this paper is to analyze the evidence for bone trauma provided by the skeletal remains of these Pazyryk warriors with a particular focus on violence-related injuries. The sample consists of 10 individuals, comprising seven adult males, one adult female and two children. Seven individuals exhibited a total of 14 traumatic injuries. Six of these injuries (43%) showed evidence of bone remodelling and eight injuries (57%) were morphologically compatible with a perimortem origin. Twelve injuries (86%) were related to interpersonal violence, most likely caused by weapons similar to those found in Pazyryk tombs (battle-axes, daggers and arrowheads). Five individuals, including the female and one child, exhibited evidence of violent death. Furthermore, one individual also exhibited evidence of scalping. Despite the small number of Pazyryk skeletons analyzed, the pattern of traumatic injuries observed appears to be in agreement with that documented in conflicts related to raids or surprise attacks, and not a result of routinized or ritualized violence. These findings contribute new data to osteological evidence from Scythian burial sites.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Thursday, May 7, 2009
A Poem
Rhetorical Figures
Tom Christopher
When a sentence is composed of two independent
clauses, the second being weaker than the first,
it is called One-Legged Man Standing. If it
purposefully obscures meaning, it’s called Ring
Dropped in Muddy Creek, or if elegantly composed,
Wasp Fucking Orchid. There are words behind words,
and half the time our thought spraying out like water
from a hose, half the time banging inside our heads
like a wren in a house. When a sentence ends
unexpectedly because someone has punched
the speaker in the face, its Avalanche Sudden.
When instead the speaker is stopped with sloppy
kisses, it’s Dripping Cloud. Not to be confused
with Dripping Cone, when someone overturns
the table, or Bird Pecking the Mountain, when
the sentence goes on for an hour and a half and ends
in a shaking death. If the speaker lies in the driveway
so drunk on cheap wine that one listening cannot
get close to the meaning and thus runs away again,
claiming, “For the last time,” it’s Pregnant Dog
Cooked in Sun. If the speaker sells everything for
an old convertible and drives out into the desert
with unintelligible shouting to the pissed-off stars:
Aching Stones Laughing. Forced incongruent words
are Fishes on Fire, and are beautiful but bring us
no closer to the Truth or the Cosmos or the All,
so either we tour Europe looking for the bodies
of saints or drink all night playing Johnny Cash LPs.
Everything we have said, we have said all our lives.
Same for what we haven’t said. Learning the terms
doesn’t help, we’re still filled over the rim with longing.
Already in this room there is Clamshell Moon, Barn
House Burning, Cow Lowing the Field, One Hundred
Village Bells, Moth Flurry. Somewhere above, a Torn
Shirt, a Peasant Girl Crying, a Baby Dropped Through
Smoke to Voices Shouting. Not much further a Cat
in Heat, a Wailing Street, and in the end Tree Frogs
Blazing Reeds with Sound.
Tom Christopher
When a sentence is composed of two independent
clauses, the second being weaker than the first,
it is called One-Legged Man Standing. If it
purposefully obscures meaning, it’s called Ring
Dropped in Muddy Creek, or if elegantly composed,
Wasp Fucking Orchid. There are words behind words,
and half the time our thought spraying out like water
from a hose, half the time banging inside our heads
like a wren in a house. When a sentence ends
unexpectedly because someone has punched
the speaker in the face, its Avalanche Sudden.
When instead the speaker is stopped with sloppy
kisses, it’s Dripping Cloud. Not to be confused
with Dripping Cone, when someone overturns
the table, or Bird Pecking the Mountain, when
the sentence goes on for an hour and a half and ends
in a shaking death. If the speaker lies in the driveway
so drunk on cheap wine that one listening cannot
get close to the meaning and thus runs away again,
claiming, “For the last time,” it’s Pregnant Dog
Cooked in Sun. If the speaker sells everything for
an old convertible and drives out into the desert
with unintelligible shouting to the pissed-off stars:
Aching Stones Laughing. Forced incongruent words
are Fishes on Fire, and are beautiful but bring us
no closer to the Truth or the Cosmos or the All,
so either we tour Europe looking for the bodies
of saints or drink all night playing Johnny Cash LPs.
Everything we have said, we have said all our lives.
Same for what we haven’t said. Learning the terms
doesn’t help, we’re still filled over the rim with longing.
Already in this room there is Clamshell Moon, Barn
House Burning, Cow Lowing the Field, One Hundred
Village Bells, Moth Flurry. Somewhere above, a Torn
Shirt, a Peasant Girl Crying, a Baby Dropped Through
Smoke to Voices Shouting. Not much further a Cat
in Heat, a Wailing Street, and in the end Tree Frogs
Blazing Reeds with Sound.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Homo Floriensis
For anyone curious about the "hobbit" skeletons from Flores in Indonesia, there's a good write-up at the NY Times. It's a very mysterious problem: how did such a primitive hominid, apparently more closely related to the Australopithecenes than to Home Erectus, get to Indonesia, and are the skeletons associated with the very sophisticated stone tools found nearby?
Monday, May 4, 2009
Rainy Day
It rained Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, and all day Sunday, and it has been raining off and on all day today. I have been sick with a miserable cold, so the world and I have been in much the same mood. It has been cozy, but I am ready for my cold to be gone and the sun to come back out. Alas, I don't think I will be well for a few more days yet, and the five day forecast shows a good chance of rain every day.
Second Spring
One of the delights of living in this part of the world is that we have two Springs, each with its own personality and delights. First comes the spring of forsythia, daffodils, magnolias and cherry trees, with a chill in the air and the threat that a late frost might cut off the blossoms in their prime. Then, a week or so after the last cherries are gone, comes a second burst of color led by the dogwoods, azaleas, tulips, and crabapples. The threat of frost is long gone in this season, and the coming humid heat of summer can be felt on some afternoons. Second Spring was well under way in Georgetown last week when I took these pictures.
What religion doesn't do
Annoying little essay from Stanley Fish, in the form of a review of a book by Terry Eagleton, poking fun at atheists for being shallow. Atheists are shallow because they don't consider really deep questions, have a pseudo-faith in progress and science, and don't understand the beauty of the New Testament.
I agree with Fish and Eagleton that some atheists have a shallow faith in reason and science. But that, I say, is not a fair criticism of reason or science, but simply follows from the fact that most people are shallow. Certainly science by itself does not make a better world, just one with better medicines and bigger bombs. But Fish and Eagleton seem to have an equally peculiar faith in the transformative power of religion:
Eagleton's annoyance with atheists is crystalized by his view of Christ's sacrifice. To Eagleton, atheists are blind to “the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.” I don't know, I always found Jesus very interesting and his story quite moving. But if you want to talk about transformation, I don't see it. Before the eighteenth century the world trundled along pretty much as it had since the invention of agriculture, with very little in the way of fundamental change. Since 1700 the world has been transformed by science, technology, capitalism and bureaucracy. Maybe not for the better, but it has actually changed a great deal. I fail to see how religion ever changed much of anything.
But the reason I wanted to write about this essay was the question of hubris. Believers and atheists are always accusing each other of excessive pride, and I think the dispute is an interesting one. Here is Eagleton, via Fish:
By theological questions, Eagleton means questions like, “Why is there anything in the first place?”, “Why what we do have is actually intelligible to us?” and “Where do our notions of explanation, regularity and intelligibility come from?” The fact that science, liberal rationalism and economic calculation can not ask — never mind answer — such questions should not be held against them, for that is not what they do.I might quibble with the notion that items two and three on that list are not susceptible to scientific analysis, because people try all the time, but I grant that nobody has succeeded in giving a rational answer to any of them. The thing is, religion doesn't answer them, either. "The universe exists because God made it" does not answer any questions, it just changes the question to, "Why is there God and why did he make the universe?" I don't see how anything is gained by that. The substitution of one mystery for another is not understanding.
I agree with Fish and Eagleton that some atheists have a shallow faith in reason and science. But that, I say, is not a fair criticism of reason or science, but simply follows from the fact that most people are shallow. Certainly science by itself does not make a better world, just one with better medicines and bigger bombs. But Fish and Eagleton seem to have an equally peculiar faith in the transformative power of religion:
Religion, Eagleton is saying, is . . . after something else. After what? Eagleton, of course, does not tell us, except in the most general terms: “The coming kingdom of God, a condition of justice, fellowship, and self-fulfillment far beyond anything that might normally be considered possible or even desirable in the more well-heeled quarters of Oxford and Washington.” Such a condition would not be desirable in Oxford and Washington because, according to Eagleton, the inhabitants of those places are complacently in bondage to the false idols of wealth, power and progress. That is, they feel little of the tragedy and pain of the human condition, but instead “adopt some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human progress” and put their baseless “trust in the efficacy of a spot of social engineering here and a dose of liberal enlightenment there.”Whoa. Now, I grant you, modern liberal thought has moved back from trying to create paradise. Yes, we deal in partial ameliorations of the pain and injustice of life, not a transformation that would end them. That is because we deal in reality, not fantasy. The kingdom of God is a nice fantasy, but it isn't coming. We made it up, and it will never exist outside our own heads. The point of human thought and effort ought to be, it seems to me, to deal with the world as it is, not the world we imagine. To Eagleton, we reject the possibility of a perfect kingdom because we are distracted by false idols of progress and materialism. I think we reject such a possibility because it is in fact impossible.
Eagleton's annoyance with atheists is crystalized by his view of Christ's sacrifice. To Eagleton, atheists are blind to “the kind of commitment made manifest by a human being at the end of his tether, foundering in darkness, pain, and bewilderment, who nevertheless remains faithful to the promise of a transformative love.” I don't know, I always found Jesus very interesting and his story quite moving. But if you want to talk about transformation, I don't see it. Before the eighteenth century the world trundled along pretty much as it had since the invention of agriculture, with very little in the way of fundamental change. Since 1700 the world has been transformed by science, technology, capitalism and bureaucracy. Maybe not for the better, but it has actually changed a great deal. I fail to see how religion ever changed much of anything.
But the reason I wanted to write about this essay was the question of hubris. Believers and atheists are always accusing each other of excessive pride, and I think the dispute is an interesting one. Here is Eagleton, via Fish:
“The language of enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy,” all in the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty suburbanism that produces ever more things without any care as to whether or not the things produced have true value. And as for the vaunted triumph of liberalism, what about “the misery wreaked by racism and sexism, the sordid history of colonialism and imperialism, the generation of poverty and famine”? Only by ignoring all this and much more can the claim of human progress at the end of history be maintained: “If ever there was a pious myth and a piece of credulous superstition, it is the liberal-rationalist belief that, a few hiccups apart, we are all steadily en route to a finer world.”So atheists are proud because they think they can solve all the worlds problems without divine aid, that they can understand the mysteries of the universe using their own minds, and that they can make up their own sources of value and meaning as they go along. But a secular humanist might respond that it is the religious who are proud, because they think that God made them in his image, giving them some special status in the scheme of the universe; that that they will live forever; that they already know the secrets of the universe, since the explanation of everything is written down in their scriptures. Setting aside the ways most people of all sorts fall short of the moral demands of their creeds, I think that what both ask is somewhat similar. Religion asks that we humble ourselves before God. And does not science, properly understood, ask us to humble ourselves before the unquestionable reality of all that is?
Saturday, May 2, 2009
An Instance of the Fingerpost
I just finished a very interesting book, An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears. I learned about the book from an old acquaintance's Facebook list of his five favorite books, which I would say shows that such exercises do sometimes have uses. Looking it up, I discovered that Iain Pears is also the author of a series of mysteries involving an art dealer, which I tried once and despised. But I found descriptions of Fingerpost so intriguing that I ordered a copy anyway. My take on Pears now is that having written Fingerpost, which must have involved a gigantic effort of research and writing, and become a noted author with a reputation he could cash in on, he decided to write some books that involved no effort at all. Hence the very thin mysteries, which I advise you to avoid.
An Instance of the Fingerpost is set in 17th-century England, and it is narrated by four 17th-century people, two of whom are real historical persons. The four narrators all describe the events surrounding the death of an Oxford fellow named Robert Grove. Each has his own ideas about what happened and why. At least three of them are wrong. One is an Italian visitor, who goes first I suppose so he could describe things about 17th-century England that no native would ever remark on. The narrators all have distinctive personalities, which are quite believable as the personalities of 17th-century people. This is very impressive but also sometimes tedious, since all these men are strongly sexist, if not downright misogynist, all look down on the lower classes, and all strike a 21st-century reader as religious fanatics. Two of them are also such jerks that sometimes I had trouble slogging through their stories. The Italian visitor is interested in medical research, and 17th-century medical research is not for the faint of heart. But their stories intersect in a marvelous and believable way. Each sees the things you imagine he would see and draws the conclusions you imagine he would draw. It must have taken an enormous amount of planning and diagramming to lay out the details of who saw what, when, leading each to his own ideas about Grove's death, and making each narrator's conclusions plausible to a reader who already knows the conclusions of others.
If a very long mystery set in 17th-century Oxford and London, involving religion, politics, and science, told from multiple points of view, sounds interesting to you, by all means find a copy of An Instance of the Fingerpost, because it is really a marvelous book.
An Instance of the Fingerpost is set in 17th-century England, and it is narrated by four 17th-century people, two of whom are real historical persons. The four narrators all describe the events surrounding the death of an Oxford fellow named Robert Grove. Each has his own ideas about what happened and why. At least three of them are wrong. One is an Italian visitor, who goes first I suppose so he could describe things about 17th-century England that no native would ever remark on. The narrators all have distinctive personalities, which are quite believable as the personalities of 17th-century people. This is very impressive but also sometimes tedious, since all these men are strongly sexist, if not downright misogynist, all look down on the lower classes, and all strike a 21st-century reader as religious fanatics. Two of them are also such jerks that sometimes I had trouble slogging through their stories. The Italian visitor is interested in medical research, and 17th-century medical research is not for the faint of heart. But their stories intersect in a marvelous and believable way. Each sees the things you imagine he would see and draws the conclusions you imagine he would draw. It must have taken an enormous amount of planning and diagramming to lay out the details of who saw what, when, leading each to his own ideas about Grove's death, and making each narrator's conclusions plausible to a reader who already knows the conclusions of others.
If a very long mystery set in 17th-century Oxford and London, involving religion, politics, and science, told from multiple points of view, sounds interesting to you, by all means find a copy of An Instance of the Fingerpost, because it is really a marvelous book.
Friday, May 1, 2009
commuting is hell
From Jonah Lehrer:
And isn't it interesting that people are so bad at knowing what will make them happy? In every study we overvalue getting material things like big houses and nice cars and undervalue friendship, connection, and mental engagement.
A few years ago, the Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer announced the discovery of a new human foible, which they called "the commuters paradox". They found that, when people are choosing where to live, they consistently underestimate the pain of a long commute. This leads people to mistakenly believe that the McMansion in the suburbs, with its extra bedroom and sprawling lawn, will make them happier, even though it might force them to drive an additional forty-five minutes to work. It turns out, however, that traffic is torture, and the big house isn't worth it. According to the calculations of Frey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. The reason long commutes make us so unhappy is that the flow of traffic is inherently unpredictable. As a result, we never adapt to the suffering of rush hour. (Ironically, if traffic was always bad, and not just usually bad, it would be easier to deal with.) As the Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert notes, "Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day."This makes sense to me. Riding the train takes longer than driving and is expensive, but it takes almost all the stress out of my trip to Washington. Without the train I couldn't stand to travel so far every day.
And isn't it interesting that people are so bad at knowing what will make them happy? In every study we overvalue getting material things like big houses and nice cars and undervalue friendship, connection, and mental engagement.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
a chilling argument against torture prosecutions
From Tyler Cohen:
At many blogs (Sullivan, Yglesias, DeLong, among others) you will find ongoing arguments for prosecuting the torturers who ran our government for a while. I am in agreement with the moral stance of these critics but I don't agree with their practical conclusions. I believe that a full investigation would lead the U.S. public to, ultimately, side with torture, side with the torturers, and side against the prosecutors. That's why we can't proceed and Obama probably understands that. If another attack happened this would be all the more true.I can certainly imagine an American jury refusing to convict a torturer who says he did it to protect their families.
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