January 31, 2007 – 11:50 pm
In today’s New York Times I ran across an encouraging item: an account of an Internet personality who has developed a worldwide audience — but not with titillating videos, political vituperation, or lowbrow humor, but rather with, of all things, a series of podcasts about Byzantine emperors. His name is Lars Brownworth, and you can read his story here.
Unfortunately, as a result of the article today the servers are swamped, and Iso far I haven’t been able to download more than the first few seconds of the introductory lecture. But it is certainly gratifying to see a history teacher attracting such widespread interest, and I thought readers might like to take a look. The website is here.
January 26, 2007 – 10:40 pm
With apt timing as regards recent discussion of the place of science in our society, the New York Times yesterday featured on its front page a story about Dr. Charles Roselli, a researcher in Oregon who is studying homosexuality in sheep.
January 25, 2007 – 12:45 am
My apologies to all for not getting the job done in yesterday’s post. Our friend Peter had asked this question, which last night’s item stopped short of answering:
Are there some scientific truths which ought not to be revealed?
Reader Kevin Kim, and then Peter himself, have quite rightly held my feet to the fire, and I’ll have a go at it here.
January 24, 2007 – 12:34 am
In a comment on a recent post about intelligence and education, commenter Peter Kranzler asks:
Let’s suppose that you possessed data which proved that a certain race of people were less intelligent than the rest of humanity. To take it outside this realm, let’s suppose that you are a white New Zealander and could conclusively prove that Maoris have an IQ substantially lower than the white population. If you report your findings, you will make life even more difficult for a group of people who have enough difficulties already. It is hard to imagine any good coming from the revelation that Maoris are incapable of ratiocination (or whatever). Do you report your findings? Are there some scientific truths which ought not to be revealed?
This is, as intended, a difficult question, and shows the trap that awaits any of us who insist on too tightly coupling moral and political philosophy to empirical questions of human biology.
January 19, 2007 – 11:34 am
Readers are encouraged to visit The Joy of Curmudgeonry for an excellent piece by “Deogolwulf” on the persistent allure of political revolution.
January 11, 2007 – 11:57 pm
However dreary your day, or stifling your job, just be glad you don’t live in Mogadishu, Somalia. This article from today’s New York Times, by Reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, gives us a glimpse of one of the most wretched places on Earth.
It is easy enough to sit back at aloof and luxurious remove and fling curmudgeonly barbs at the preening popinjays and benighted saps that bray and caper upon the stage, but when one thinks of the intractable misery in this world, the inexhaustible capacity people have for making other people suffer horribly for no particular reason, and the fact that, for most people who have ever lived, their lot has been little but misery, hunger, anguish, and death, it really isn’t funny at all.
January 4, 2007 – 7:14 pm
Richard Dawkins, who seems to be everywhere lately (he’s even been spotted recently in a small town in Colorado), has an Op-Ed piece in today’s Los Angeles Times in which he laments the execution of Saddam Hussein, for some of the same reasons that I brought up in this recent post.
January 4, 2007 – 12:39 am
As I’ve mentioned recently, there is always something at Edge.org to engage the curious mind. One of the more interesting features of the website is the annual World Question project, which consists of asking a diverse collection of thinkers some simple but provocative question, and presenting their responses.
January 2, 2007 – 2:13 am
Dr. William Vallicella, in a discussion at Maverick Philosopher about whether religion is simply a quest for comfort, asked me the following question:
Can an atheist be moral? Yes, of course, in one sense, and indeed more moral than some theists. But the more interesting question would be whether an atheist would have an objective basis for an objective morality. In other words, even if it is true that many atheists are morally superior to many theists relative to some agreed-upon standard of behavior, would these atheists be justified in making the moral judgments they do if there is no God? Perhaps, but the answer to this is not obvious, whereas the answer to the first question is obvious.
While there are those who have tried to devise such a scheme, I think their efforts are misplaced; I will not try to establish an “objective morality” here, because I see no need for one.
December 29, 2006 – 10:20 pm
It appears, in case you have not heard, that the ruthless tyrant Saddam Hussein — under whose monstrous and sanguinary reign hundreds of thousand were tortured and killed, including entire villages upon which he unleashed chemical weapons — is to be hanged within the next few days. At the risk of startling my friends on both the left and the right, I must say that I rather wish he weren’t.
December 22, 2006 – 12:58 am
Readers will have noticed that I have been posting a little more often lately about the “science vs. religion” debate, and that I have perhaps seemed rather more on the side of the skeptics than the believers. Well they’re right, and in private correspondence I have taken, lately, an even more partial view. I think I am going to have to come right out and be a bit of a Grinch about the whole business, even though Christmas is right around the corner.
December 17, 2006 – 4:13 pm
Friday’s post (sorry for yesterday’s service interruption; I had a very long day of recording and mixing) mentioned the “Beyond Belief” convention sponsored by Edge.org, and alerted readers to the availability of streaming video feeds of the presentations. I’ve been watching them as time permits, and the discussions, if not exactly balanced — the speakers generally regard the influence of religion on society as something that we ought be outgrowing sometime around now — are calm, thoughtful, and considerate of the centrality of religion in many people’s lives.
December 15, 2006 – 11:51 pm
I’ve mentioned Edge.org previously; it is one of my favorite spots on the Web. The site’s purpose is to provide a forum where scientists, philosophers, and other thinking types can discuss topics at the intersection of science, technology, and culture, and it attracts some of the world’s brightest minds.
December 14, 2006 – 6:31 pm
I call the attention of readers to two recent posts on the subject of “equality”. The first is by Dr. William Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher; the second is by the inimitable Deogolwulf, writing at his website The Joy of Curmudgeonry. Both make the same excellent point, which I shall reiterate here.
December 9, 2006 – 10:00 pm
As I have mentioned before, my house in Brooklyn is just a few paces away from Prospect Park, a lovely, rolling expanse of forest, lake, and greensward landscaped by the great Frederick Law Olmstead.
December 9, 2006 – 1:51 am
I receive a number of daily newsletters. Among them is one from Physorg.com, a website that serves as a clearinghouse for news on various scientific fronts. The stories are generally brief, rarely very technical, and their purpose is simply to alert the reader to the fact that that some new development or other has occurred in the field at hand; the curious reader may then, having been given the scent, follow it to its source on his own initiative. The whole thing is usually very professionally done, and is an excellent way to keep abreast of current events in science and technology.
Imagine my disappointment, then, to observe that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, the utter incomprehension of which we may sadly take as a “given” among its many detractors in religious circles, is also a source of confusion, even at the broadest and most superficial level, to the editors of the Physorg newsletter. I refer to the following headline, found atop a story in yesterday’s issue:
Do galaxies follow Darwinian evolution?
What is it that bothers me so? Read on.
December 4, 2006 – 1:23 pm
If you haven’t noticed, there are a growing number of scientists, authors, and other thinking sorts who have decided to stand up in public and question the enormous influence that religion still exerts in 21st-century affairs. Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker, and, of course, Richard Dawkins are leading the charge, but others are growing bolder as well, and are adding their intelligent and articulate voices to the gathering chorus. One of these is Natalie Angier, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her science writing at the New York Times, and author of several outstanding books.
December 2, 2006 – 12:16 am
In a characteristically pointed essay, Steven Pinker comments on Harvard’s forthcoming Report of the Committee on General Education. While he is generally laudatory, he has “two reservations”: first, about the characterization of the place of science in a general eduaction, and second, about the “Reason and Faith” requirement in the core curriculum.
November 17, 2006 – 12:09 pm
As noted below, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, the Brights, and other godless infidels have been strengthening their insurgency the Believers. Meanwhile, however, followers of the fourth-largest religious group in Britain are petitioning for official recognition. Story here.
November 16, 2006 – 11:50 pm
There is a gathering groundswell of resistance to the colossal influence exerted on human affairs by organized religion. An increasingly visible and vociferous alliance of scientists, journalists, and philosophers are going on offense — quite justifiably so, given that the world’s intractable conflicts and most deeply seated hatreds seem to be rooted in religious differences, and given the degree to which religious myths are interfering with the teaching of science in our schools, and slowing the pursuit of potentially revolutionary medical research.
November 7, 2006 – 8:22 pm
My friend and kung-fu “training brother” Dan Betz has sent me a link to a remarkable tale about one Michael Oher, a young man from the most unfortunate circumstances imaginable, who, thanks to the intervention of a series of caring and concerned people, has risen from utter abandonment to become one of college football’s brightest prospects.
October 31, 2006 – 12:53 am
When I wrote a few days ago about a pelican eating a pigeon in a London park, I thought I was picking up an insignificant, out-of the-way item that readers would almost certainly not have heard about otherwise. It seems that I was mistaken; a search on Google a moment ago turned up “about 339,000” results, and the story has reverberated through the blogosphere as well. Think of that: a bird eats another bird somewhere in the world, and within a day hundreds of thousands of people, all around the globe, have published some comment on it, which means that the news itself — a bird ate a bird in a park in England — has probably reached tens of millions. This is such an abrupt discontinuity from the entire social history of the human race that I think it bears noticing.
October 21, 2006 – 11:55 pm
Well, we finally made it to Michigan. We caught an 11:45 flight out of Gotham, and got to Ann Arbor in time to join the procession of the faithful down State Street to the Big House, which, just for the record, really is big — It is the largest American football stadium anywhere, and, according to this Wikipedia article, is the 29th-largest sports venue in the world (the larger ones are mostly racetracks). For today’s contest we were joined by 110,923 other spectators, and let me tell you, that’s a fair-sized crowd — numbering only slightly fewer than the population of Ann Arbor itself. And we were not disappointed; Michigan triumphed as expected, 20-6, even without the services of star wide receiver Mario Manningham, who is nursing a banged-up knee.
October 19, 2006 – 11:47 pm
This past Friday, President Bush signed into law H.R. 4411, the Internet Gambling Prohibition and Enforcement Act, which prevents U.S. financial institutions from transferring money to online gambling services. The bill was sneaked, in typical sausage-and-legislation fashion, into the SAFE Ports Act (H.R. 4954 As Amended) for the Senate vote, where it passed 98-0, with two abstaining (Sens. Chafee and Akaka).
October 8, 2006 – 7:00 pm
Thanks to commenter Kevin Kim, I’ve been spending some time poking around in Korean blogs. All cultures, of course, have their odd little quirks and idiosyncracies (the United States is no exception, of course, what with our drive-thru wedding chapels, monster truck pulls, and yen for Mespotamian nation-building), and I’ve run across one that seems to be unique to Korea. No, it isn’t kimchi. I’m referring, of course, to fan death.
October 2, 2006 – 11:24 pm
The other day I ran across an item from the Boston Herald about a jihad-related kerfuffle in France. The story is about a high-school teacher named Robert Redeker, who has been driven into hiding after he published an article in Le Figaro suggesting — how dare he! — that Islam is trying to impose its cultural will upon Europe.
September 27, 2006 – 3:33 pm
I’ve been posting a lot of political items lately; too many, really, as I don’t want political issues to dominate here. I also think I am giving the impression that I am far off on the right, when actually my opinions vary widely on an issue-by-issue basis – I tend to side with the Left on most social issues (gay marriage, church/state, abortion, drug laws, environmental and energy policy), though not all (affirmative action, gun control, border control, and pushing toward socialism generally), and with the Right, specifically the neoconservative right, on one issue only, which is foreign policy, to the extent that US influence is fairly and honestly brought to bear in a struggle against tyranny. I have defended, at length, our our decision to knock Saddam off his perch, but I agree also that the job was catastrophically bungled, and that heads that still issue orders should have rolled. I also share the Left’s low opinion of George Bush generally – his swagger, his smug religiosity, his inarticulateness, his lack of intellectual subtlety, and his inability to admit and correct error – as I have made abundantly clear in any number of posts.
So I’ll try to ease off on the political rants. But not just yet; here’s one more.
September 26, 2006 – 1:48 pm
In my previous post, I mentioned my alarm at seeing so many people taking antidepressant medication. My friend Jess Kaplan, in an email, points out that I have rather glibly lumped together an entire spectrum of mental disorders. He is quite right, and I should address his criticism.
September 25, 2006 – 11:21 pm
I’ve begun to notice that an awful lot of people around here are taking antidepressants. Admittedly, I live in New York City, but still, it seems a little creepy. I haven’t bothered to hunt down any statistics, but even just counting the number of people who are casual enough about it to have mentioned it to me (and I figure it’s safe to say that at least that at least half the folks who take them don’t let on) it’s starting to look pretty rampant.
September 23, 2006 – 11:22 pm
I’ve just come home from the movies. I don’t get out to the pictures as often as most people seem to, and I miss a lot of flicks I know I would have liked. Other activities (reading, writing, playing chess, practicing/teaching kung fu, playing music, introspective brooding, etc.) always seem to win out.
Tonight though, a new documentary by filmmaker Heidi Ewing (an acquaintance of my lovely wife Nina) opened at the Angelika Film Center on Houston Street in Manhattan, and we went to see it. It’s called Jesus Camp.
September 18, 2006 – 11:43 pm
As you’ve no doubt heard, the Muslim world has its knickers in a twist once again, this time over some remarks made by the Pope during the recent “Apostolic Journey of His Holiness Benedict XVI to München, Altötting, and Regensburg”. It’s been making the rounds that the Pontiff suggested that Mohammed, in the later verses of the Qur’an, had wrongly advocated the use of violence in the defense and propagation of Islam. To imply that peace-loving Muslims are prone to violence is, of course, so preposterous that Muslims the world over, in protest of this baseless and blasphemous insult, and in defense of their faith, are erupting in violence once again.
August 23, 2006 – 5:58 pm
One of the greatest benefits of blogging is the opportunity one has to converse with, and learn from, people that one might otherwise never have met. Scott Carson, professor of philosophy at Ohio University and author of the blog An Examined Life, has taken the trouble to respond to my comments on his post about the defensibility of torture. He makes some excellent criticisms of my post, and I am very grateful to him for taking the time to do so.
August 22, 2006 – 11:06 pm
On the heels of yesterday’s depressing link from Eugene, from Duncan Werner comes an item from the Washington Post about the sad state – verging on downright illiteracy – of many of today’s college students. The author, one Michael Skube, a professor of journalism at Elon College, describes a recent experience:
We were talking informally in class not long ago, 17 college sophomores and I, and on a whim I asked who some of their favorite writers are. The question hung in uneasy silence. At length, a voice in the rear hesitantly volunteered the name of . . . Dan Brown.
No other names were offered. The author of “The DaVinci Code” was not just the best writer they could think of; he was the only writer they could think of.
Read it and weep, friends.
August 17, 2006 – 11:25 pm
An item in the English newspaper The Guardian has touched off a heated controversy. The piece refers to the airline-bombing plot that British authorites nipped in the bud last week, and says that the key witness in the case, one Rashid Rauf, a British citizen, revealed what he knew only after he was “broken” under interrogation by Pakistani questioners, which suggests rather strongly that he was tortured. The information obtained, however, most likely prevented the murder of thousands in simultaneous midair bombings. The question, of course, is whether the benefit thus achieved justifies the use of methods from which compassionate people and humane societies recoil in horror.
August 12, 2006 – 10:16 pm
I am downright chopfallen this evening upon hearing some sad news from across the pond: there will be no conger cuddling in Lyme Regis, England, this year.
I’m sure that most of you have been following this exciting sport for ages; perhaps some of you have even been lucky enough to attend in person. But for those few of you who haven’t – perhaps due to a decades-long coma or a lengthy stretch in solitary – here’s the story.
August 1, 2006 – 11:12 pm
One of the little pleasures of growing older – and they are admittedly not numerous – is that you hold things in living memory that, as far as the hyperkinetic larvae who seem to be taking over the world these days are concerned, never even existed. One of these, for doddering old fossils such as your humble correspondent, is the musical satire of Tom Lehrer.
Many on the secular left have for quite a while been complaining, with not inconsiderable justification, of the deepening partnership here in America between fundamentalist Christians and the political right. While I would stop (far) short of characterizing the U.S.A. under the current administration as a “theocracy” as many of my blue-state neighbors might, there is no question that church and state have got awfully cozy lately, a trend that I imagine will be good, in the long run, for neither. From my old friend Jess Kaplan comes an AOL news item about the pastor of an evangelical megachurch who feels the same way, if perhaps for different reasons, and who has quite publicly staked out a contrary position.
Ah, P.J. O’Rourke. If you are old enough you might remember him as a contributor to (in fact the managing editor of) The National Lampoon , way back in the seventies. I hadn’t read anything of his since I read Parliament of Whores some years ago, but while I was absorbing a post of Bill Vallicella’s on the topic of “gender-neutral language” earlier this evening I found, in a comment, a link to a review by O’Rourke of an academic volume called Guidelines for Bias-Free Writing, by Marilyn Schwartz and the Task Force on Bias-Free Language of the Association of American University Presses.
My lovely wife Nina and I spent the evening in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, where the New York Philharmonic Orchestra kicked off their summer concert series with a program of Tchaikovsky and Dvořák.
One advantage of my having toiled for a couple of years at PubSub is that everyone who worked there keeps one eye on the Internet at all times, looking out for odd or interesting items, and when they find them they pass them right along to yours truly. From Jon Mandell comes a link to a vituperative article about Wikipedia, the online resource that seems to be emerging as America’s second-most-polarizing cultural entity, right behind George W. Bush himself (Righteous Swordsman of Freedom, or Chimpy W. Hitler, depending on which side of the aisle you’re on).
My friend Eugene Jen, whose restlessly curious mind makes him a rich source of interesting material, has sent along a link to a story about the great logician Kurt Gödel. Apparently Gödel, in preparing for his U.S. citizenship examination, made a characteristically analytical reading of the document, and realized that despite the Framers’ aversion to tyranny, they had left in place a weakness that might lead, under the worst of circumstances, to the establishment of a dictatorship. It was Gödel’s intention to mention this at his examination, but his good friend Einstein, who had accompanied him to the proceedings, talked him out of it.
The CNN website today carried an interesting little item: an interview with Saddam Hussein’s defense attorney, Ramsey Clark. For those of you who aren’t up on Mr. Clark’s curriculum vitae, he was United States Attorney General under Lyndon Johnson, and played an important role in the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s, but since then has wandered farther and farther into the fever swamps of the extreme Left, and from the Vietnam era forward has happily made common cause with an sordid assortment of America’s foes. He also seems to have, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, an “inordinate fondness” for brutal tyrants, including Serbian thug Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević, Liberian despot and mutilator of uncounted thousands Charles Taylor, and of course the Butcher of Baghdad himself. Clark attended MiloÅ¡ević’s funeral, for example, and announced that “history will prove MiloÅ¡ević was right.” Right to wage a ruthless campaign of genocide, I assume he means.
Yesterday, I made a brief and rather positive reference to the communally written Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia. Today, my good friend David Pauley has sent me a link to an essay, posted at Edge.org by computer scientist Jaron Lanier, that makes some very pertinent criticisms of the increasing fashionability of such examples of Internet “collectivism”. Lanier’s argument is that “hive minds” like Wikipedia are good at some things, but very bad at others, and that the current trend seems to be toward an uncritical embrace of a kind of “digital Maoism” that he sees as potentially quite destructive. Lanier writes:
In the last year or two the trend has been to remove the scent of people, so as to come as close as possible to simulating the appearance of content emerging out of the Web as if it were speaking to us as a supernatural oracle. This is where the use of the Internet crosses the line into delusion.
This is a fascinating and important discussion. Read Lanier’s essay here, and an assortment of responses here.
Today I noticed no fewer than five different people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts here in my ultra-blue neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn. I will be generous enough to assume that they do so out of youthful ignorance, and not out of an informed wish to lionize the ruthless and bloodthirsty Communist revolutionary, butcher of political dissidents, gays, and Christians at Castro’s Cabana prison, who personally executed, with apparent relish, even the children of his political opponents, and who tried to cultivate in his followers “hatred for the enemy, which pushes a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him into an effective, violent, selective, and cold-blooded killing machine.”
I susbcribe to a daily newsletter that sends along little quotations and aphorisms from various religious traditions – each day I get a Hindu one, a Muslim one, and a Buddhist one (the Christian and Jewish ones leaned too much on Old Testament begetting and begatting; they were boring, frankly). This was the Muslim one from yesterday:
When we allow God’s power to pervade all our actions, and submit to his decrees, we shed all anxiety about the effects of our actions on others; we cease even to consider the effects of our actions. When we cease to consider the effects of our actions, we are adopting the attributes of God himself.
-Qushayri, “Risalah”
From “366 Readings From Islam,” translated by Robert Van der Weyer. Copyright 2000. All rights reserved.
In today’s Wall Street Journal newsletter was a link to a recent commencement speech by John McCain, in which he tries to frame the context of political debate, and reminds us that more unites us than divides us. It’s well worth reading, and you can find it here.
Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami was on the Wall Street Journal’s television program, the “Journal Editorial Report”, over the weekend, to discuss the recent conference in Philadelphia honoring the 90th birthday of the great Mideast scholar Bernard Lewis.
My friend Jon Mandell has sent along a link to a story about the rapid rise of blogging in China. It is estimated that by the end of the year exotic Cathay will be home to sixty million online scribes.
Read more here.
What is remarkable to me about the technological revolution of the last few years is the way that it enables us to ignore traditional barriers of scale. Just as we can, with Google Earth, take in the whole world from space, but in seconds swoop all the way down to our own rooftop, with tools like PubSub and Google we can survey the entire Earth-girdling ocean of human expression, and zoom in on any given drop.
It is easy to imagine that some emergent event, some critical mass, must be approaching as the worldwide interconnectedness of everyone with everyone else increases. In chemistry, solvents are used to enable molecules to react; as the reagent concentration increases, the number of reactions per second does too. What we are doing here is putting an ever-increasing number of highly reactive molecules – people – into solution. And the Internet is the solvent.
Sorry, I’m just too tired tonight to write anything worth reading. But I don’t want anyone who has taken the trouble to pay us a visit to go away empty-handed, so here’s an interesting link: a website where author Robert Wright (whose insightful book Nonzero I have just begun reading) has posted video clips of his interviews with an impressive assortment of prominent thinkers.
My friend Mike Zaharee who works in PubSub‘s Granite State Research Kitchen up in Nashua, NH, reminded me the other day that New Hampshire is the only state in which the Right of Revolution is written right into the Constitution. Here it is, Article 10:
Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance ag ainst arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
This is the same state about which Daniel Webster once said, referring to the iconic (and recently departed) Old Man of the Mountain:
Men hang out their signs indicative of their respective trades; shoemakers hang out a gigantic shoe; jewelers a monster watch, and the dentist hangs out a gold tooth; but in the mountains of New Hampshire, God Almighty has hung out a sign to show that there He makes men.