It all comes to an end sometime in the middle of next week, when we decamp back to Gotham, and sadly reapply our shoulders to our respective wheels. Until then, though, things will be awfully quiet here at waka waka waka, and the best I’m likely to do is the occasional item like this.

The first shows you the state of the art of autonomous walking robots; I think you’ll agree that they are coming along nicely.

The second is a live-in-the-studio performance by the Fab Faux. If you haven’t heard of them, they are five of New York’s top session players (including the ubiquitous bass ace and studio joculist Will Lee, who has enriched and enlivened more than a few of my own sessions over the decades) who got together a few years ago to play the music of the Beatles as well as anyone possibly can. It went so well that they’ve been doing it ever since, all over the world.

In this clip they play Side Two of Abbey Road: no overdubs, no auto-tune, no studio hanky-panky, just five amazing musicians playing music they love. This is a real treat, folks. Here.

Now it’s late, the house is quiet and dark, and the pine trees outside are whistling and moaning. The gale is alive and full of sea; when I go outside it feels as if I’m standing on the deck of a ship.

Out here, on this slender wisp of sand, the great ocean all around you never lets you forget that you, like Cape Cod itself, are just a fleeting thought.

As always, please feel free to browse our archives, and to try the “Random Post” link at upper right.

Here.

Another thing this controversy has done has done has been to bring into sharp distinction two views of America that have been the subject of much debate for some time in conservative circles, but not so much elsewhere. Ross Douthat (how do you pronounce that name?) summed it up very well in a recent Op-Ed piece:

There’s an America where it doesn’t matter what language you speak, what god you worship, or how deep your New World roots run. An America where allegiance to the Constitution trumps ethnic differences, language barriers and religious divides. An America where the newest arrival to our shores is no less American than the ever-so-great granddaughter of the Pilgrims.

But there’s another America as well, one that understands itself as a distinctive culture, rather than just a set of political propositions. This America speaks English, not Spanish or Chinese or Arabic. It looks back to a particular religious heritage: Protestantism originally, and then a Judeo-Christian consensus that accommodated Jews and Catholics as well. It draws its social norms from the mores of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora — and it expects new arrivals to assimilate themselves to these norms, and quickly.

The term generally used to described the first view of America described above is that we are a “proposition nation”: it’s the view that all that is essential about America is a revolutionary set of abstract principles. This view — that America owes its greatness to an ennobling philosophical vision conceived by an extraordinary assemblage of men, a vision that has succeeded beyond the wildest imaginings of its Founders precisely because of its universality — is very appealing, and it is a majority view on the Left. But there it has taken on another aspect as well, namely that America’s greatness and prosperity are due only to those abstract principles, without regard to the culture in which they are instantiated. To put that another way, the assumption is that so universal are these abstractions, so generally do they address the yearnings of every h. sapiens, that they will bring forth the same fruit without regard to the particular soil in which they are planted. Furthermore, the extended assumption goes, such is the transformative power of these abstract principles that any human minds, once conditioned by them, will thenceforth function as entirely interchangeable parts in the machinery of society. Ties of ethnicity, religion, language — all the things that have been, throughout history, what has bound societies together, and rent them apart — simply will no longer matter, save as something resembling hobbies. E pluribus unum, we are reminded (although that motto refers only to the joining of the States into a new Republic); such is the greatness of the Constitution that it carries forward, into a sunlit future, all that really matters about human nature, leaving behind only those primitive urges and emotions we can do better without. There is no shortage of metaphors to reach for here: one can see the Constitution as a great sieve, lifting our better nature from the murk, or as a decanter that pours, from history’s bitter lees, the clarified wine of human reason and virtue. It’s a splendid vision of human progress, and it’s easy to see why so many people believe it with such righteous ardor, and defend it so jealously. I used to do so myself.

I have come to realize, though, as my shadow lengthens eastward, that as uplifting as all this is to contemplate, it is also terribly naive. Yes, America’s founding principles are the very root of its greatness — in that sense the first view of America is quite correct. But the second view is correct as well: the soil from which the flower springs, and the climate in which it is nurtured, are every bit as essential to its vitality as the seed the Framers planted.

Both views of America are essential to understanding its uniqueness, its exceptional place in history, and its prospects for the future. But to assert the importance of the second view contradicts the fashionable, “extended” version of the first — the idea that America’s greatness is due only to its founding abstractions, and in no important way to its historically predominant culture and ethnicity. So offensive is this contradiction to educated society nowadays that to insist upon it is to be marked as a bigot, a xenophobe, a racist, a Know-Nothing, a Yahoo (and a morally reprehensible one at that, as I find out from time to time in my email).

This marks an essential distinction between current-day liberals and conservatives. Conservatives, for the most part, readily acknowledge the power and importance of America’s philosophical foundation. But they also realize that culture matters, and that no nation, even one inoculated against faction and injustice by the Constitution, can thrive if it is not the homeland of a united culture and people. Liberals, however, insist — with the force of taboo — that such claims are not only wrong, but despicable. The propositions are sufficient, they tell us.

Well, we will see how this goes. Facts are stubborn things.

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”

Bill argues, as so many have, that regardless of the truth of their belief, the faithful come out ahead in such dark hours:

What would Hitch lose by believing? Of course, he can’t bring himself to believe, it is not a Jamesian live option, but suppose he could. Would he lose ‘the truth’? But nobody knows what the truth is about death and the hereafter. People only think they do. Well, suppose ‘the truth’ is that we are nothing but complex physical systems slated for annihilation. Why would knowing this ‘truth’ be a value? Even if one is facing reality by believing that death is the utter end of the self, what is the good of facing reality in a situation in which one is but a material system?

It is awful to watch death stalk this outstanding mind, to see a light that burns so brightly about to be extinguished. Hitchens continues to give interviews: here is a recent one with Charlie Rose.

For tonight:

The marvelous Curta calculator, creepiness from Japan, and a 2010 update for a classic computer game.

Back again soon.

I give my father a call most nights before retiring. He is in his mid-eighties, wheelchair-bound, and lives in California with my brother and my nephews. Years ago he and my mother had a house in Chatham, down at the “elbow” of the Cape; they loved it out here, and it was one of the hardest things for them to leave behind when they moved to southern California in 1985.

I rang him up from out on the deck, and knowing how much he missed this place, I tried to bring him into the picture. I described the cool sea breeze, the whirr of the crickets all round, and behind that, the faint susurrus of the water moving against the harbor shore, a third of a mile away. I told him what a dark night it was, the sky clear and Bible-black, the Milky Way paving a lambent arc through the zenith, and the stars glittering like jewels.

He said that one of his favorite things about the Outer Cape had always been the dark night sky, and that when he and my mother were there they loved to lie outside at night, just looking.

And then he said:

“On those clear nights you don’t just see the stars, you feel the stars.”

Nice, Dad. I liked that very much.

Things should settle down in a couple of days. Till then, please feel free to browse our ever-expanding archives, or give the “Random Post” link a whirl.

Lanier is quite right that we technorati, who are godless heathens almost to a man, still cannot help but yearn for transcendence. We are only human, after all, and the notion of the Singularity, based as it is on an apparently accelerating pace of progress and the extraordinary triumphs of Western science, does cause a stirring in some of our breasts that traditional religious myths no longer do (for many of us, they never did). Might we really, in our lifetimes, conquer Death itself? Might we soon read the book of Nature’s innermost secrets? Might we be the ones, finally, to lift the veil of mystery that has vexed and confounded Man through all the sorrowful ages since he first lifted his eyes to the stars?

Well, it would certainly be nice. And for an awful lot of people these days — those of us who grew up reading Foundation and Childhood’s End rather than the Bible — man-made salvation is the only game in town.

Lanier argues that all this is nothing more than the same hope and faith that animates the more conventionally religious. It’s like the bubble under the contact paper: press it flat over here, and it reappears over there. But our computers aren’t transcendent, not at all — as a programmer I certainly know that well enough — and as magical as they may seem, they don’t do anything more than what we humans, with an intelligence that still defies simulation, let alone replication, tell them to do.

This has been a persistent theme of Lanier’s, and while I think he presses too hard on it sometimes, there is much truth in what he says, and it’s important to have people like him around.

One quibble: in Lanier’s essay he mentions the Singularity University (of which my friend Salim Ismail is the director) as a temple of this new “religion”. He describes it as follows:

The influential Silicon Valley institution preaches a story that goes like this: one day in the not-so-distant future, the Internet will suddenly coalesce into a super-intelligent A.I., infinitely smarter than any of us individually and all of us combined; it will become alive in the blink of an eye, and take over the world before humans even realize what’s happening.

But this really isn’t a fair description of Singularity U., I think. From what I understand it has very little to do with any sort of visionary Omega Point, and nothing whatsoever to do with “preaching”; its purpose is to get a lot of inordinately smart and creative people, of divergent backgrounds, to spend a few weeks together in intensive cross-disciplinary workshops, working on difficult, practical problems, and to see what comes out. Its aim is to promote what William Whewell, and later E.O. Wilson, called “consilience“, and from what I understand it has been doing a very good job of it.

That aside, though, Lanier’s essay is worth your time. Read it here.

the convergence of accelerating accomplishments in nanotechnology, medicine, genetic engineering, computer science, neurobiology, and artificial intelligence will soon result in a cascading series of mutually supportive breakthroughs that will amount to a discontinuous historical disruption, the anthropological equivalent of the “singularities” at the heart of black holes.

There are those who find this notion exactly wrong, however. One of them is Scott Locklin, a financial analyst living in Berkeley, California, who, in an article at Alternative Right entitled The Myth of Technological Progress, argues just what the title suggests: that the pace of real technological progress has slowed, not accelerated, in the past few decades, and has in some instances — such as the abandonment of our manned space program, and the cessation of supersonic passenger flights — even reversed itself.

While I do think that Mr. Locklin too blithely dismisses areas of genuine, transformative progress — for example the stupendous increases in computing power that have, I think, led to qualitative, even revolutionary, changes in the way we live — as mere tweaking of decades-old ideas, he certainly makes some provocative points. He is quite right, for example, that a great many things that we were promised, ages ago, were “just around the corner” still haven’t materialized: artificial intelligence, a cure for cancer, and useful nanotechnology, for example. We still run our cars by burning dirty, messy oil, because we still haven’t figured out how to make low-cost, energy-dense batteries. And so on.

So which is it? Are we barreling headlong toward the Singularity — or, having solved all the tractable problems, are we now stuck on the hard ones, and beginning to stagnate?

Read the article here.

Look for lots of wonderful new rights to be discovered buried in the Constitution — things that mysteriously escaped the attention of everyone for 221 years. Look for lots of ingenious new constitutional reasons to be found for the further expansion of federal power into the lives of citizens. Look for further judicial support for favoring foreigners over citizens, minorities over majorities, the freakish over the normal, and notions thought up last week over principles that have served us well for centuries.

In the same broadcast (well, podcast), Mr. Derbyshire also commented on the controversy surrounding the Cordoba victory mosque at Ground Zero. He read an open letter from a group called the Muslim Americans Against the Ground Zero Mosque:

Muslim Americans Against the Ground Zero Mosque has been founded to represent the many thousands of Muslim citizens of the U.S.A. who oppose the building of a mosque close to the Ground Zero site in New York City. We understand that under the liberty that all Americans enjoy, private landowners and private organizations have every right to enter into contracts without government interference. However, we understand, as the movers of the mosque project seem not to understand, that it is not always wise to do something one has a right to do.

We further doubt the entirely private nature of the transaction between Abdul Rauf’s “Cordoba Initiative” and the owners of the site where the mosque is to be built. If, as we very strongly suspect, funding for the transaction is coming in part from foreign governments, claims that this is a private exchange that should be of no interest to any agency of the U.S. government, are compromised.

The main reason we are opposed to the mosque, however, is that the building of it in this location would be an act of gross insensitivity to our non-Muslim fellow-citizens. Insensitivity is not against the law, nor should it be. It does, though, create rancor and tensions that a society can well do without if it wants to be peaceful and harmonious.

Muslims are regarded with unease and suspicion by many Americans. Muslim citizens should do what they can to dispel those suspicions. The Ground Zero mosque does not dispel them; it inflames them. If Abdul Rauf would announce that in view of the sensitivities involved, he had decided to build the mosque elsewhere, that would be taken by non-Muslim Americans as a gracious act of accommodation to widely-shared feelings. The credit would reflect on Muslim Americans in general, to the benefit of all citizens and the furtherance of social harmony.

We, Muslim Americans Against the Ground Zero Mosque, therefore urge the organizers of this project to withdraw their present application and find a less controversial location for their cultural center.

It was good to hear this letter read on the air; it was refreshing to hear American Muslims express such concern for the unfavorable impression this plan makes on their fellow citizens, and such sensitivity to the pain it inflicts upon those thousands whose loved ones were murdered, in the name of Islam, at this hallowed site. It made me think: What if I’ve been wrong about all this? What if a gracious, “moderate” form of Islam really is taking root in the West, in a new, cosmopolitan, 21st-century form that really does want to forgo Islam’s 1,400-year-old history of conquest and expansion, of bringing the dar-al-harb into submission under Allah, by the sword if necessary, as explicitly commanded by God? Most importantly, what if such an Islam might struggle to displace its retrograde predecessor everywhere in the world, starting right here in the West? This could be the sign I’ve been waiting for.

What’s that? Oh, wait a moment. Derb continues:

That’s the end of the press release. [Pause] [Laughter] ["Just screwin' with ya …"] Yes, I was just screwin’ with ya, listeners. I made it all up. There was no such press release, and there is no such organization as Muslim Americans Against the Ground Zero Mosque.

The reason there is no such organization is that there are no Muslim Americans against the mosque. Well, a few scattered individual voices have been raised, by Muslims like Shoaib Choudhury at the Hudson Institute and the gent quoted in Dorothy Rabinowitz’s aforementioned article, but these are regarded as crazy heretics by their co-religionists. Muslims want the mosque; or, if this is not the case, Muslims opposed to the mosque are awfully slow making their voices heard. If, as we are told, the mass of Muslims are decent, considerate people who just want to live in amity with the rest of us, why do we never hear from them in situations like this?

OK, once again please: Will someone spell out for me the advantages Western countries have enjoyed by allowing mass settlement of Muslims?

Meanwhile, in case you missed it, here’s the much-quoted essay by Dorothy Rabinowitz about the mosque, and about the offensive, patronizing condescension with which we have been lectured about it by Mayor Bloomberg and others of our ruling class.

Well, not so fast: it’s not as easy as all that to grow a crowded, backward nation into a global economic colossus, and they may still have a few kinks to work out.

On the other hand, as mentioned in a recent post, China has been making startlingly rapid progress lately in matters military, and shows no sign of slackening the pace. With a hat tip to reader JK, here’s the latest on that unsettling topic.

But as bad as it is right now in Gotham, the heat and humidity are, apparently, even worse down South, if such a thing can be imagined. From our Arkansas bureau chief comes this illustrative dispatch.

For details, see Auster’s post, the item he linked to, and the letter itself.

See for yourself, below.

Seven years old!

Story here.