As it happens, your humble correspondent was approached on the street by a Washington Post reporter yesterday, an affable young fellow who asked for an opinion about Wednesday’s events. I did offer a few observations, which found their way, with some looseness as to accuracy and context, into today’s edition.
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Recently blogger Dennis Mangan, the proprietor of Mangan’s Miscellany, offered his readers information suggesting that animal products in the diet are the cause of numerous health woes. It grieves me to offer more grist for his mill on this one, as I am a carnivore’s carnivore ((I’ve even considered attempting a diet that consists solely of animals that are themselves carnivores, just to get right up on the tippy-tippy top of the food chain.)), but he might be interested in this, which accuses meat-eaters of causing global warming.
Well, after all the excitement in midtown yesterday, things are mostly back to normal, save for a few “frozen” blocks right around the site of the explosion (including, sadly, all of the places I usually go for lunch). We all know that one of these days we’re in for the real thing again, but this wasn’t it — and so we get right back to our routines, with just an occasional glance over our shoulders.
Life goes on, unless it doesn’t.
I can see why living in New York City isn’t for everyone, and today was a good example. If nothing else, the weather, as is so often the case around here this time of year, was awful. Gotham is currently straddling a stalled frontal boundary, and with customary perversity we are just on the warm side of it, so the air is thick with greasy moisture. It wasn’t as hot today as it often gets around here this time of year, as it managed only the middle eighties, but under these Amazonian atmospheric conditions that’s plenty: one is miserable even standing still, and copious sweating attends the slightest exertion.
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Here’s a stunning headline, from the Toronto Star:
Toronto’s Population Ages
What were they expecting?
In Peter Berkowitz’s response to Christopher Hitchens’s god Is Not Great, he make some worthwhile points, but also trots out some familiar and flimsy ones as well. Let’s have a go at those first; we’ll take up his better arguments — and he does indeed make some — in a subsequent post.
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In today’s Wall Street Journal is an essay aimed at the advancing ranks of atheist authors. The names mentioned are Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Victor Stenger, but the brunt of the artillery is directed at Mr. Hitchens (who is evidently a friend of the author, Peter Berkowitz, a fellow of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution). It is a good response, and raises a number of worthwhile points. I expect that Christopher Hitchens can be counted on to respond, but I have a few comments to make as well, which I will offer shortly. Meanwhile, read the Berkowitz item here.
Given recent comments and emails, I should probably clarify my thoughts about religion’s place in the world. Though I have written rather disapprovingly on the topic lately, and although I do indeed think that religion is, and has been, an enormous retrograde influence on civilization’s progress (some lovely music and architecture notwithstanding), and an inexhaustible wellspring of sanguinary conflict and brutal repression, I have never argued, as some seem to think, for its forcible abolition. Not only would that be just as wrong, in just the same way, as the many dogmatic and bullying excesses that organized religion itself has been guilty of throughout its long and shameful history, but it would also, quite obviously, be utterly impossible to achieve. It’s an absurd idea, and I certainly didn’t mean to give the impression that it’s what I had in mind.
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It is a poorly kept secret that I am deeply skeptical of religious beliefs and institutions. The empirical question of whether their net effect is a boon or a blight upon our wretched species is, one could conceivably argue, still an open one, and I do acknowledge that religion provides a harmless existential anodyne for many people, one that it might indeed be cruel to deny them. But every glance at the news — not only the rivers of blood spilled each day over religious disputes worldwide, but also the cheap and tawdry spectacle of US politicians, their eyes glinting with ambition, elbowing one another out of the spotlight to bray about their “faith” — inclines me toward the view that civilization as a whole would be far, far, better off if we could somehow just be shut of the whole sodding mess once and for all.
A little while back the polymath Jonathan Miller presented on the BBC The Atheism Tapes, a series of interviews with some very intelligent and articulate unbelievers, along with, for balance, a prominent theologian. Like almost every other video clip in existence, these conversations have found their way to YouTube. Below is a list of the people Miller spoke with, and links to the interviews.
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With a hat tip to Kevin Kim, here is a wonderful example of the power of punctuation to alter the meaning of written English.
On Sunday, the New York Times published a long editorial, The Road Home, declaring the US effort in Iraq an utter failure, and insisting that we withdraw forthwith. Many agree. Of course, many of those who agree do so more from a visceral loathing of this administration and distrust of government in general, an inchoate pacifism and aversion to military action of any sort, or a view of the US as a swaggering bully with no moral standing, than from a sophisticated understanding of the labyrinthine historical, political, diplomatic, cultural, religious, strategic and tactical complexities of this extraordinarily difficult engagement. But, that said, complementary prejudices animate many of those on the other side, and there are certainly many sophisticated observers who do indeed share, in whole or in part, the pessimistic position taken by the Times.
The opposing viewpoint is expressed with succinctness and clarity by Victor Davis Hanson, who responds to the Times editorial, point by point, here.
Regardless of your opinion as to whether the action in Iraq was justified in the first place (I am of the opinion, along with Tom Friedman and others, that it was, but that the postwar management was catastrophically bungled), this is an agonizing and crucial debate; we stand now at a major historical crossroads. Whatever your current view of the way forward — and reasonable people may differ — Hanson’s essay is worthwhile reading.
Those of you with an interest in astronomy, and a fondness for order, might like to take a look here.
In a post a while back I explained why I don’t own an iPod or similar such gadget, the main reason being that I don’t enjoy the acoustic isolation they impose. Well, it turns out that there’s another reason you might want to doff those ear goggles from time to time; learn more here.
We seem to have been delivered, however briefly, from the suffocating heat and humidity that have tormented us for the past few days. During the afternoon a robust frontal boundary made its way Gothamward across the Keystone and Garden States, and at about 5:30 or so the sky turned as black as an old bruise, the heavens burst asunder, and a cataract of rain pelted the sizzling sidewalks with such force that it bounced knee-high. I’m sure that in our northern suburbs, and other places where trees can live, many were blown down — and doubtless there are those in such leafy districts who are without electrical power as a result — but here in the city the relief is palpable, and I am sure I speak for many others when I say that after another day or two of the weather we’ve just had, Death himself, in any but his most appalling forms, would have been greeted warmly at the door.
I’ve spent thirty summers in New York City, and know beyond hope that this is just the fleetingest lull, a moment’s ease whose purpose is only to enhance the effect when Torquemada seizes his instruments once again. But hey, we’ll take it.
I’m not quite myself tonight. Not only has the ghastly heat and fetor here in Gotham reduced me to a gibbering wretch, but at the end of the day I visited my periodontist, Dr. Louis Franzetti, who implanted two small screws in my upper jaw as part of an ongoing cakehole-reconstruction project roughly on the scale of Boston’s Big Dig. Dr. Franzetti is a man of Christlike mercy and incomparable skill, but in the dolorous aftermath of such a skull-piercing I have decided to forgo mental acuity in favor of the palliative blessings of organic chemistry. So no post tonight.
I wouldn’t want you to leave empty-handed, though! So here is a little video clip I’m sure you will enjoy, with a hat tip to Dr. F. himself.
The other day, my mind restless with the somber news of the world, and its echoes of familiar themes, I took from the shelf The Gathering Storm, the first book of Winston Churchill’s incomparable six-volume History of the Second World War. I say “incomparable” because there is really nothing else like it in all of historical literature: an account of the greatest armed conflict of all time, written by a man who was not only one of the foremost masters of the English language ever to lift a pen, but who was also the man who led, by his command of the spoken word, his enormous military expertise, and the sheer power of his personality, the armies of freedom to their ultimate triumph.
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I’m a peaceable fellow, but it was not without a wee quickening of my Scottish heart that I read (with a tip of the tam o’shanter to Dennis Mangan and his commenters) of the reception given a couple of jihadists recently up in Glasgow.
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More stern stuff from Hitchens on the British terror plot, here.
Alright, so much for “Back in Black”. Thanks to those who contacted me to tell me how much they disliked that new theme; I’ll find something else.
I was tired of the old look. What do you think?
[Note: I had experimented with another visual theme, but nobody liked it, and I soon reverted. So this post might make little sense now.]
I don’t comment over at Bill Vallicella’s website any more, but I still follow the conversations there, as they are often interesting, and attract a number of intelligent participants.
Bill has put up an odd post today, however, which he calls The Humanity Delusion, in an obvious swipe at Richard Dawkins’s atheist manifesto The God Delusion.
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Well, after such a plangent cri de coeur, it’s time to lighten up a little; one thing I always find amusing is to have a look at the search keyphrases that have brought folks here. Here’s a sampling of the current year’s crop:
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I am going to have to stop reading the news one of these days, I think. What it brings me, day in and day out, is a bitter harvest of suffering and misery, gathered from all the world over, and it is getting to be more than I can bear.
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I recently promised readers a glimpse into my latest literary purchase — a 1936 publication called The World’s Best Jokes — and here it is. (We are on holiday at the moment, and I am simply too worn out from lying on the beach in the warm July sun, and from consuming draft beer and broiled lobsters, to tackle any weightier issues tonight.)
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The Washington Post offers us an interesting and disturbing glimpse into the private life of President Bush; it is an odd life of isolation, and, one has to imagine, a kind of desperation as well. From the article:
After reading Andrew Roberts’s “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900,” Bush brought in the author and a dozen other scholars to talk about the lessons. “What can I learn from history?” Bush asked Roberts, according to [Irwin M.] Stelzer, the Hudson Institute scholar, who participated…
…Much of the discussion focused on the nature of good and evil, a perennial theme for Bush, who casts the struggle against Islamic extremists in black-and-white terms. Michael Novak, a theologian who participated, said it was clear that Bush weathers his difficulties because he sees himself as doing the Lord’s work.
Reassuring, no? Read the story here, and then look here to see why Lynne Olson, the author of a recent book about Winston Churchill, thinks that Dubya, who idolizes Churchill, actually has more in common with Neville Chamberlain than Sir Winston.
We’re spending a few days at our seaside retreat in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on the outer extremity of Cape Cod, and today found the memsahib and me poking around at a local flea market. I’m always on the lookout for odd books, and after I had already, with reluctance, been talked by my better half out of spending $14 on a well-kept copy of a lavishly illustrated tome from 1898 entitled Our New Possessions — about the then-recent US acquisition of the Phillipines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii — I slyly dropped a fin for a slim volume called The World’s Best Jokes, by one Lewis Copeland, copyright 1936. I always enjoy antique joke-books, and this looks like a real corker.
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Over at Dr. William Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website there is a dicussion thread underway, prompted by a silly item in the New York Times about cognitive neuroscience and the soul. In the original article, the author, obviously unfamiliar with the labyrinthine convolutions of mind-body philosophy, embarrasses herself with the following:
But as evolutionary biologists and cognitive neuroscientists peer ever deeper into the brain, they are discovering more and more genes, brain structures and other physical correlates to feelings like empathy, disgust and joy. That is, they are discovering physical bases for the feelings from which moral sense emerges ”” not just in people but in other animals as well.
The result is perhaps the strongest challenge yet to the worldview summed up by Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who divided the creatures of the world between humanity and everything else. As biologists turn up evidence that animals can exhibit emotions and patterns of cognition once thought of as strictly human, Descartes’s dictum, “I think, therefore I am,’ loses its force.
I winced when I read this. As Bill V., an unrepentant dualist, correctly points out, it is the purest hogwash. It is so incoherent that, as scientists often say of a poorly organized hypothesis, “it’s not even wrong”.
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No-one should be surprised by the grumbling on the Left about the Supreme Court’s decision on racial discrimination, for reasons that hardly need enumeration here. In broaching the subject at all I am on thin ice, as a white male: a member of a morally stunted, congenitally tainted group that is deemed in many circles utterly disqualified from discussions of prejudice, inequality, and so on. But, if I may press on anyway, and act the provocateur to my many friends on the sinistral side of the aisle, the decision is correct. Here’s why; it’s really quite simple, as Chief Justice Roberts and the concurring justices understood.
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Michael Moore is on his (presumably steel-reinforced) soapbox once again. In his newest movie, Sicko, he brings his folksy propaganda style to bear on the American health-care system, which is, he alleges, fundamentally inferior to the socialized arrangements in place in other countries, including even the tyrannized and impoverished nation of Cuba (whose “revolutionary” medical infrastructure we glanced at in an earlier post.)
For a different perspective, see this essay in today’s Wall Street Journal.
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Today’s Physorg.com newsletter (which I enthusiastically recommend as an excellent source of news about all branches of science) had an interesting item about social hierarchies in fish. As is so often the case with discoveries of organizing principles in nature, the research is likely to help us understand not just the particular system under examination (in this case reef colonies of gobies), but ourselves as well.
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A little while ago we opined that, odd as it may seem, here in America the particulars of a politician’s faith matter less than that he have some sort of religious affiliation. Quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal, Mitt Romney seems to agree:
I think the American people want a person of faith to lead the country. I don’t think Americans care what brand of faith someone has.
It’s nice to have explicit confirmation from such a prominent public servant, but a bit disappointing nonetheless. One can still hold out hope that an avowed faith in, say, centaurs, or the John Frum cargo cult, would cause a few raised eyebrows among the electorate, but perhaps not.
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I should probably have done a bit more research before posting the preceding item; the legalities in this case are clearer than I had realized.
Most states, including Ohio, consider “non-therapeutic” abortions after 24 weeks to be unlawful; it appears also that the Ohio criminal code considers the “unlawful termination of another’s pregnancy” to be murder. So it seems that under Ohio law, Mr. Cutts can plausibly be charged with the murder of Ms. Davis’s fetus in this case, as her pregnancy had advanced beyond the legal threshold. The relevant sections of the Ohio Revised Code are here (abortion) and here (homicide).
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As noted by Steven Pinker in his introduction to the 2007 Edge Question, there are some topics that one ventures into at one’s own risk. Here’s one:
The police in Canton, Ohio, have just arrested one Bobby Cutts, Jr., for the foul and gruesome murder of Jessie Davis, who was due to give birth in two weeks or so. The case captured the nation’s attention over the past few days, in part because of the horrifying eyewitness testimony of Davis’s son, a mere toddler, who told the police that “Mommy was crying”, and “Mommy’s in the rug”.
The news services are now reporting that Cutts, himself a police officer, is to be charged with two murders: the unfortunate woman herself, and the fetus she was carrying. And it is this legal construction that I am curious about.
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We had a real treat Thursday night: the Celebrate Brooklyn outdoor-concert series presented a performance by the Richard Thompson Band at the Prospect Park Bandshell.
If you aren’t familiar with Richard Thompson, you should be: since his early days as a member of Fairport Convention back in the 60’s, he has been regarded as one of the world’s most gifted and passionate singers and songwriters, and he is also a preeminent master of both the acoustic and electric guitar. It is hard to pin him down musically; his influences range from the traditional folk music of his native Britian all the way through blues, R&B, and psychedelic rock. He is also blessed with an enormous baritone voice, a rich and expressive instrument that just seems to get better with age.
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While poking around at Andrew Staroscik’s brand-new biology weblog Mixotrophy, I found a link to a remarkable presentation, by one Blaise Aguera y Arcas, from this year’s TED Conference. He is describing a new image-display technology called Seadragon, which is in turn the engine that powers a new system, Photosynth, that programmatically assembles tagged photos found on the Web into astonishing, zoomable, 3-D mosaics. I’m no sibyl, but I’ll be surprised if this isn’t an important new technology.
Each year the website Edge.org — which I will recommend once again to you all, as it is one of the Web’s most stimulating destinations — asks the intellectual community a carefully chosen question, presents the answers on its website, and then gathers them together into a book. Previous questions have included What Questions Are You Asking Yourself?, What Do You Believe is True, Even Though You Cannot Prove It, and What Is Today’s Most Important Underreported Story? (you can see the whole list here).
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We don’t often offer video selections in this space two days running, but time, unfortunately, does not permit a lengthy post today. So here is a remarkable glimpse of the vicissitudes of life on the veldt, featuring a herd of Cape buffaloes, a hunting party of lionesses, and even a crocodile or two. Place your bets.
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Here’s an odd little item that popped up in the news yesterday: a strange ball of light (which, curiously, seems to cast a sort of shadow) moseying around the parking lot of the First Judicial Courthouse in Santa Fe, NM. It was picked up by a surveillance camera, and the video has been making the rounds. Charles Fort would have approved — and in fact the Fortean Times also carried the story. Have a look.
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With a hat tip to Peter Hankins, today we take a look at a simple yet outstandingly accurate piece of meteorological technology: the Weather Stone.
The late Victorian era was a time of smug certainty in the scientific world. The Darwinian revolution had the God of the Gaps on the run, technological innovation was accelerating briskly, and the great intellectual cataclysms of the 20th century — relativity, quantum mechanics, and Gödel’s theorem, foremost among many — were still nothing more than dim smudges on the horizon.
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Among the books and periodicals I have hoarded here at home are quite a few old issues of National Geographic: I’ve been a subscriber since the early 80’s, and don’t throw them away. I’ll often pull out an old copy in an idle moment, and yesterday I was looking at one from December 1988. The theme was Our Endangered Earth, and one of the stories was about the Urueu-Wau-Wau, an isolated tribe from the western Brazilian rain forest.
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Today I drove my son Nick up to Becket, MA, in the heart of the Berkshires, where he will be spending the summer as a counselor at Camp Becket, a healthy and wholesome place if ever there was one. This morning my car was parked several blocks from my home, and as I was walking over to get it at about 7:45 a.m. I noticed several cardboard boxes on the sidewalk, overflowing with books. Though I was already running late, I was drawn as irresistably as a twister to a trailer park, and spent a few minutes rummaging around. As it turned out this was not the usual curbside assortment of fad diets, lurid bodice-rippers, and outdated sports almanacs, but appeared to be the abruptly and ignominiously discarded library of someone of considerable intellectual depth. There were dozens — perhaps more than a hundred — books on philosophy, science, mathematics, and computer science, and I gathered up a handful and headed on, frustrated that I didn’t have more time, and making a note to myself to stop back by when I was back from the drive to Becket.
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The prominent Swiss Muslim theologian Tariq Ramadan is a controversial figure: to some, he is an important moderate voice, one that could do much to heal the deepening rift between Islamic and Western culture, while to others his call for an assimilable, Europeanized form of Islam masks a more radical agenda that is closer to the aims of his grandfather, Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and of the radical Islamist intellectual Sayyid Qutb, who was a comrade of Ramadan’s father Said.
Now Horace Jeffery Hodges, whose engrossing weblog The Gypsy Scholar is linked to on our sidebar, has written an excellent series of posts examining Tariq Ramadan’s ideas and influences. If you have an interest in the history, philosophy, and personalities that have shaped the current phase of this ancient struggle — and how could you not? — you should go and have a look. The series begins here.
One of the warmer and more persistent disagreements between liberal and conservative viewpoints in recent years has been over the commingling of religion with politics. We hear a steady drumbeat from the Left alleging that the Bush cadre is trying to turn the USA into a “theocracy”, and in academic circles, where the prevailing attitude toward religion is pitying scorn, if not downright hostility, conservative Republicans are as rare as hen’s teeth. Meanwhile, in the opposite corner, reactionary firebrands like Ann Coulter inflame the pious with books such as her recent screed, Godless.
So it was interesting to see CNN present a program over the weekend in which the current crop of Democratic presidential aspirants fed the electorate great helpings of santimonious treacle in an effort to demonstrate that their worldview was informed not only by the shrewd and worldly calculus of political advantage, but also by the sine qua non of American public life, namely “faith”.
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We are back from San Francisco, having enjoyed ourselves immensely. We stayed at the highly recommended Huntington Hotel, on the Matterhorn-like eminence known as Nob Hill, with a delightful view northward over the Bay from the 10th floor. We dined at a succession of splendid restaurants (in particular I recommend Venticello and Rue Lepic), and took long walks all over town, hammering in pitons as needed. We saw some old friends, and took an enchanting stroll through Muir Woods, a redwood forest just a few miles beyond the Golden Gate. The weather was, by my lights, perfect: in the sixties each day, with a fresh and invigorating breeze straight from the cool Pacific.
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We will be gone for a few days: my lovely and patient wife Nina and I are off to San Francisco to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. I may have a moment here and there to write, but quite possibly not. We’ll be back at the beginning of next week, but meanwhile, please browse our voluminous archives, or visit the outstanding websites listed on our sidebar.
Today, June 4th, would have been my mother’s 72nd birthday. I thank again all of you who offered so many kind words of support during her last days, which were chronicled in these pages a little over a year ago. She was a truly exceptional woman, and we miss her terribly.
We call your attention to a recent addition to our sidebar: Duff and Nonsense, a website maintained by one David Duff, who lives and writes, I believe, in Ireland. Mr. Duff has commented on some recent posts here at waka waka waka, and upon following the links back to his own site, I spent a pleasant interval poking around. He writes lightheartedly, with clarity and style. Do pay a visit.
Well, it’s begun again: the annual descent into Hell that is summer in Gotham. Today got up to around 90°, with life-threatening humidity, and a pitiless white sky. These are, of course, optimal conditions for moving furniture up and down several flights of stairs, which was how I spent much of the afternoon, as my daughter was moving into her new apartment.
As a result, I am spent. There will be no post today.
In the J. Robert Oppenheimer speech about Einstein that was the subject of yesterday’s post, we find the following paragraph:
Einstein is also, and I think rightly, known as a man of very great good will and humanity. Indeed, if I had to think of a single word for his attitude towards human problems, I would pick the Sanscrit word Ahinsa, not to hurt, harmlessness. He had a deep distrust of power; he did not have that convenient and natural converse with statesmen and men of power that was quite appropriate to Rutherford and to Bohr, perhaps the two physicists of this century who most nearly rivaled him in eminence. In 1915, as he made the general theory of relativity, Europe was tearing itself to pieces and half losing its past. He was always a pacifist. Only as the Nazis came into power in Germany did he have some doubts, as his famous and rather deep exchange of letters with Freud showed, and began to understand with melancholy and without true acceptance that, in addition to understanding, man sometimes has a duty to act.
Having no recollection of this correspondence between these two great thinkers, I was interested to track it down — and I was also struck by the timeliness, and relevance to matters currently under discussion here, of the final phrase above: “…in addition to understanding, man sometimes has a duty to act.”
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