It’s a very busy week, and there will be scant opportunity for writing for the next day or two, so it’s Shameless Filler time once again.
This cheeky item certainly qualifies, I think.
What? You sophisticates are in no mood for such lowbrow japery? Well then, waste your time instead with the hosts of my favorite radio show, Car Talk, who would like you to meet their staff.
Satoshi Kanazawa, writing at Psychology Today, discusses an interesting scientific finding, namely that intelligent people drink more alcohol.
Over at Mangan’s today there is an engaging discussion about his essay. Dennis’s commenter Pat Hannagan takes issue with Kanazawa’s assumption about the correct order of precedence as regards beer-making and agriculture:
Kanazawa says:
The production of beer, which relies on a large amount of grain, and that of wine, which similarly requires a large amount of grapes, could not have taken place before the advent of agriculture around 8,000 BC and the consequent agricultural surplus.
This is a common error in our thinking. The theory goes 1) there was an agricultural revolution 2) things arose out of that revolution, like beer production.
The truth is the opposite as follows: 1) man discovered beer (should be a worldwide national holidays for that great event), 2) in order to produce beer the agricultural revolution was the consequence.
A worldwide holiday hardly seems sufficient, but yes, it would be a start.
Mr. Hannagan continues:
In another context, as Lee Harris notes, “Intellectuals tend to forget that ethical ideals do not pop up out of the human head but first manifest themselves in practice.” Harris’ example is that of the modern notion that Adam Smith “invented” capitalism whereas, what happened was that when Smith discussed the manufacture of pins, in The Wealth of Nations, “he is delineating the essential component of an actual process that had evolved as a way of making more pins in the same amount of time.”
So, just as Smith did not invent capitalism, but rather he noticed it about him and wrote about it (rather well of course), the agricultural revolution did not invent beer production, but was as a result of beer production.
From beer comes all Western civilisation. Mock it, deride it at your detriment, for it is the root of all we have achieved. Beer makes, and made, us human!
As Oz Clarke describes it, in his and James May’s excellent series which I highly recommend Oz & James Drink To Britain (you can watch it here on YouTube):
That, means, that people actually started living in places, in communities, not because they wanted to do things like having houses and things but because they wanted…to brew…beer. And once they were in communities they then wrote poetry, and symphonies, and invented the steam engine and started going on caravan holidays. That! …is civilisation, and the reason for civilisation is because we wanted…to drink…beer!
True or false, it’s as good a creation myth as you could ask for.
In Thursday’s post I took the measure of the river of data that my plugged-in life brings my way, and noted that, as much as I like having access to it all, I’m finding it almost impossible to keep up with its ever-increasing volume. (“Drinking from a fire-hose”, we used to say at PubSub.) The pressurized, round-the-clock information-bath in which we now marinate our brains is an environment completely unlike anything ever experienced by our ancestors, and I think it’s fair to say that it constitutes a major change in the evolutionary “fitness landscape”.
When an organism’s environment changes, there is stress. The average genotype of the species is no longer situated atop its local fitness “peak”. If it can make the adaptive move to the new niche, selection pressure will provide the necessary impetus. But if getting to the new peak requires a descent into a deep valley, the necessary change may be beyond the organism’s capacity to adapt.
Might this fall’s impending conservative landslide actually help Barack Obama’s chances for re-election? Victor Davis Hanson, in an essay over at NRO, makes the case that the Transformer-In-Chief might be in a position to benefit from the economic lift that a conservative Congress would provide, while telling his progressive base he’s still true to his (and their) core principles.
It’s an interesting notion, though I think we can still be audacious enough to hope for change in 2012.
Read it here: The Obama Rope-a-Dope.
As much as I love the Internet — I’m a keen consumer of information, and I don’t know how I spent the first four decades of my life without it — it sure is getting hard to keep up.
I have a personal email account, and a work account. In order that I don’t miss time-sensitive office emails, I’ve set things up so that my office email server forwards everything to my personal account. And because I can’t access my personal email server from the office (thanks to blocked ports in the corporate firewall), I have a GMail account as well, to which all incoming mail for my personal account is forwarded. Between all the office emails and personal correspondence, I probably get at least 70 or 80 items a day. Sometimes it’s people sending me interesting links they’ve found, which of course I want to read.
I subscribe to about half a dozen science-news digests, and ten or so political ones, from both sides of the aisle. (Barack Obama’s PR machine sends me a couple of things each day, too). I get breaking-news bulletins and daily summaries from several major news outlets, too. I’m a junkie for this stuff, and the Internet is a seductive “enabler”: you visit a site, read an interesting story, and then you notice that they have a free newsletter you can sign up for with a click or two. Why not? After all, you’d hate to miss the next fascinating item.
Because I write software for a living, I get a couple of daily tech digests. And my music-biz connections net me newsletters and bulletins from various studios, the Recording Academy, and whichever friends of mine have gigs coming up.
Then there’s martial-arts stuff; I belong to a couple of MA newsgroups that spit out items every day or two, or sometimes more often than that.
I play postal-style chess on Red Hot Pawn. I don’t have a lot of games going right now, but when I do, I get an email every time somebody moves. I also belong to the Internet Chess Club, which sends out a newsletter a couple of times a week.
Blogs send me email too. Whenever anyone comments here, or a new user registers, I get a notification. Also, if I’ve gone off to some other blog and left a comment, I’ll usually subscribe to the comment thread to see what comes in after. Sometimes I get email updates for threads I’ve commented on ages ago. (And of course, most days there’s a post to be written.)
I almost forgot about instant messages. I know plenty of people, and I have IM accounts on Yahoo, Skype, GTalk, and MSN Messenger, as well as our office Communicator. I get lots of IMs if I have those applications running, but I usually have them turned off.
I belong to several social-networking sites: Facebook, LinkedIn, and a couple of others. I get email from them too, just like everybody else.
I guess that’s about it for what comes in automatically, but there’s also stuff that I feel the need to go out and fetch. I like to read the paper every morning on the subway, and then there are a lot of blogs out there that I try to keep up with. There are maybe a dozen that I visit every day.
On top of all that, there are books to read. I can’t seem to pass a sidewalk bookseller without picking something up, and of course now that I have a Kindle, whatever new and interesting book that happens to catch my eye (or this or that old tome) is just an effortless click away.
We subscribe to a few magazines; I try to look at them before the next issue arrives. (I don’t always make it.)
I’ve just got a fancy new cell-phone. It’s an HTC “Incredible”, and I have to say it is pretty incredible. It is sleek and dense and black, like an iPhone, and it is connected not only to other telephones, but also to the Internet, which it displays on an amazingly sharp little touch-screen. It is also connected to my personal email server (to which, as mentioned above, all my office mail is automatically forwarded as well). And like all cell-phones these days, it sends and receives text messages (of which, I’m glad to say, I still receive blissfully few). Whenever something new arrives, it blinks. It blinks all the time.
When I was a kid, there was a phone on the wall in the kitchen of our house. (There was also an extension in my parents’ bedroom.) If somebody called, and nobody was home, the phone would just ring for a while, and then stop. There was no answering machine. If you tried to call us, and one of us was on the phone, you got a busy signal, and you had to try later. If I called one of my pals to see what he was up to, and nobody answered, well, that was that; I would just get on my bike and go out looking around to see where everybody was.
As for getting hold of information: we had a lot of books in the house, and a good encyclopedia. But if what you wanted to know wasn’t in there somewhere, then you were pretty much stuck. Sometimes you’d get on the phone and call someone who might know. Often, though, you just had to accept the fact that you couldn’t find out the answer. Maybe you’d look it up the next time you were at the library, if you remembered the question.
We had a TV. We got about seven channels. To find out what was on, you looked at TV Guide, a slim weekly magazine. If you wanted to see a movie, you went to the theater.
There were books to read; sometimes I read the newspaper. Once in a blue moon I got a letter in the mail. Email, cell phones, websites, cable TV, GPS, instant messaging, social networking, blogging, text messages, tweets, podcasts, .mp3s — and even videotapes and CDs — didn’t exist. Amazingly, we didn’t even realize they didn’t exist. They never even entered our minds.
I remember going to my father’s lab when I was about nine years old. He mostly used a slide rule for his work, but he also had a great big Friden desktop calculator. It was a big beige slab, about the size of a desktop PC, with a little cathode-ray-tube display that showed a stack of numbers. It could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and I think it could also do square roots. It was the most incredibly amazing thing I had ever seen, and I couldn’t get enough of it. My dad wanted to show me around the lab, and tell me about the things he was working on, but all I wanted to do was watch this fantastic, futuristic machine add numbers.
All of this seems pretty unbelievable now. How could we have existed in such a profoundly different world and not have been, in some fundamental way, completely different people, living completely different kinds of lives? Looking back though, I don’t see it that way: it was all perfectly normal, and that’s the way I remember it. But after a week in that environment now, most of us would be gasping for air. We are radically transformed — and if it is the way we humans communicate, and how we use and acquire information, that defines us, then we are almost a different species, I think.
Are we better off? I guess we are — or at least, I don’t think I could go back. But it’s getting hard to keep up.
If the Tea Party is, as I’ve suggested, an American Salafist movement, then it seems natural enough for it to quote the Prophet in justification of its own existence. (Of course the Tea Party’s “Prophet” is not one man, but many: namely, the Founding Fathers, peace be upon them.)
To that end, here’s a piquant morsel from a note Thomas Jefferson wrote to Abigail Adams in 1787:
“The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere.”
As a generally conservative sort of blogger, I write a lot about how important it is to defend our traditional American culture against its many foes, foreign and domestic.
But in case you’ve forgotten just what it is we’re fighting for, have a look at this inspiring clip, courtesy of the indefatigable JK.
We’ve been just about completely mum on the clash-of-civilizations front for the past couple of months, so here’s an update.
The blasphemy trial of Geert Wilders resumed in Holland today. No sooner had it got under way than the presiding magistrate, Jan Moors, made a snarky comment about the defendant, prompting Mr. Wilders’s attorney to ask that the judge recuse himself on account of bias. (What a splendid bit of onomastics, by the way, that the judge overseeing the trial of a European man who dares to defy the conquest of his homeland by Islam should be named “Moors”!)
Read about today’s doings here.
Meanwhile, Mr. Wilders gave a speech in Berlin over the weekend. (For offering the invitation to Mr. Wilders, his host, René Stadtkewitz, was expelled from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat party. Ms. Merkel’s official position is that Germany had better just get used to accelerating Islamization.)
Here is some of what Mr. Wilders had to say:
We must realize that Islam expands in two ways. Since it is not a religion, conversion is only a marginal phenomenon. Historically, Islam expanded either by military conquest or by using the weapon of hijra, immigration. Muhammad conquered Medina through immigration. Hijra is also what we are experiencing today. The Islamization of Europe continues all the time. But the West has no strategy for dealing with the Islamic ideology, because our elites say that we must adapt to them rather than the other way round.
There is a lesson which we can learn in this regard from America, the freest nation on earth. Americans are proud of their nation, its achievements and its flag. We, too, should be proud of our nation. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was very clear about the duty of immigrants. Here is what he said: “We should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else ”¦ But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American. ”¦ There can be no divided allegiance here. ”¦ We have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.’
It is not up to me to define what Germany’s national identity consists of. That is entirely up to you. I do know, however, that German culture, like that of neighboring countries, such as my own, is rooted in judeo-christian and humanist values. Every responsible politician has a political obligation to preserve these values against ideologies which threaten them. A Germany full of mosques and veiled women is no longer the Germany of Goethe, Schiller and Heine, Bach and Mendelssohn. It will be a loss to us all. It is important that you cherish and preserve your roots as a nation. Otherwise you will not be able to safeguard your identity; you will be abolished as a people, and you will lose your freedom. And the rest of Europe will lose its freedom with you.
Is this a message, as many would characterize it, of “hate”? No, it is nothing of the sort. Mr. Wilders makes clear that he bears no ill will toward Muslims as human beings (in sharp contrast to the revilement, for example, of Jews as “apes” by both the Nazis and many Islamist ideologues):
Before I continue, and in order to avoid any misunderstandings, I want to emphasize that I am talking about Islam, not about Muslims. I always make a clear distinction between the people and the ideology, between Muslims and Islam. There are many moderate Muslims, but the political ideology of Islam is not moderate and has global ambitions. It aims to impose Islamic law or Sharia upon the whole world. The way to achieve this is through jihad. The good news is that millions of Muslims around the world ”“ including many in Germany and the Netherlands ”“ do not follow the directives of Sharia, let alone engage in jihad. The bad news, however, is that those who do are prepared to use all available means to achieve their ideological, revolutionary goal.
What Mr. Wilders understands — and what Western political and academic elites have either failed to see, failed to accept, or failed to acknowledge — is that not all jihad takes the form of violent assault, and that terror attacks may indeed, for some time to come, be global jihad’s least effective tactic. Under the rubric of “outreach”, Western leaders warmly embrace “moderate” Islamic organizations such as OIC, CAIR, and others, because these groups have officially distanced themselves from terrorist jihad, and are therefore seen as natural allies to be wooed by Europe and America. But the goal of these institutions is nevertheless the same as that of violent Islamist outfits like al-Qaeda, al-Shabab, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Taliban: namely the expansion of Islam into every corner of the dar-al-Harb, the disestablishment of decadent Western culture, and the replacement of secular law by sharia the world over. The rift between such “moderate” Islamists and the terrorist fringe is little more than a dispute over tactics and timing. (Please note the distinction between “Islamists” and “Muslims”.)
The aim of this non-violent, “dawa” jihad is clear enough, as can be seen in this internal memorandum from the Muslim Brotherhood (the ideological engine behind organizations like CAIR, MSA, ISNA, OIC, IIIT, NAIT, Hamas, etc.):
The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the means. The Ikhwan [the Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.
You can read the rest of Mr. Wilders’s speech here.
Finally, and with a hat tip to Bill Vallicella (who has been writing often lately about the West’s relations with Islam), here is an excellent essay by Joseph Bottum on the Ground Zero mosque.
Sam Harris is about to release a new book, called The Moral Landscape.
Dr. Harris has been working for a while now to try to put morality on an objective footing (something I think can’t be done). His premise, if I may sum it up with extreme brevity, is that there are some moral systems that are more conducive to human well-being, and others that are less so — and so the search for an optimal moral system becomes a pragmatic, empirical question, and falls squarely within the purview of science.
I haven’t read his book, but he has spoken about this elsewhere, and it is the same argument that Steven Pinker gave when I met him briefly in Wellfleet a couple of years ago and asked him his opinion on the topic. It is entirely understandable that prominent atheist intellectuals like Harris and Pinker would like to find a way to offer an objective grounding for morality, as the obliteration of such a foundation has made marketing their product rather more difficult, at least here in America.
The idea seems to center on the enormously useful idea, long familiar to evolutionary theorists, of a “fitness landscape” with peaks and valleys representing, in abstract form, the niches available to natural selection. Species will tend to occupy the peaks, and as the peaks shift, the species tends to adapt accordingly. (When a peak (i.e., a niche) disappears altogether — as for example, happens to the “arboreal insectivore” niche when a forest is cut down — the species can’t adapt fast enough to cross the valley to the next available fitness peak, and goes extinct.) Another way to put it might be to say that the peaks represents islands of viable designs in the sea of possible genotypes.
Sam Harris’s suggestion is that there is also a moral “fitness space” that defines peaks and valleys of human well-being. If this is so, then it begins to offer an objective basis for comparison of various moral systems. Harris’s point seems to be that some moral systems will be seen to tower over others.
It’s a nice idea, and I will read his book, but I wonder about a few things.
First, it seems that Dr. Harris is arguing that some moral systems occupy quantitatively higher “peaks” in the well-being landscape than others. But what metric does one use to measure “well-being”? Biological fitness offers the obvious yardstick of reproductive success. What altimeter will Harris use to measure the peaks in his moral landscape? Material wealth? Liberty? Spiritual satisfaction?
Second, peaks in these kinds of abstract spaces are local maxima. Species tend to remain on local peaks even if there is a much higher one across the valley, for the simple reason that every direction from where they currently stand is down — and the valley floor, which must be crossed to get to the next peak over, is lethal. Even if Dr. Harris can confidently devise some acceptable metric for comparing the fitness score of known moral systems, how can he know that whatever one he ends up recommending is not merely the highest peak in the visible neighborhood? (I imagine he would concede that this is indeed a possibility, but that his system at least allows us to make an objective comparison.)
Finally, I am sure that Dr. Harris would agree that what contributes to human “well-being”, however he chooses to measure it, is a contingent fact of nature. If it turns out, as an empirical fact, that the moral system that leads to the greatest well-being according to his yardstick includes slaughtering your enemies and enslaving their women, or killing and eating sickly babies, etc., then presumably he will be impartial enough to declare that system the summum bonum. “Good”, then, becomes “whatever maximizes some well-being factor X”. This result — that if a moral system based on pediatric cannibalism had turned out to be a strategy that maximizes X, then baby-eating would be morally “good”, and objectively so — is going to be a very hard sell to a great many people, I think.
But I haven’t read the book — it comes out on the 5th — so perhaps Dr. Harris has anticipated these questions, and has satisfying answers to them. I wonder what they could be.
It’s been a busy couple of days, and I haven’t had much of the solitary time that brooding and writing requires. Today, for example, we spent gallivanting around the city, and at one point we found ourselves harborside in the out-of-the way Brooklyn neighborhood known as Red Hook.
The weather was splendid, and we took a little stroll along the waterfront. There appeared in the harbor a truly colossal cruise-ship, the biggest I’ve ever seen. I snapped a photo of it. I have no idea what ship it is, or where it was going. Here it is:
Not much of a post, but it’s the best I can do for today.
Here’s an item that I am trying to get my head around: According to Raphael Bousso at the University of California, there are physical constraints that make an eternally expanding universe impermissible.
Cosmologists have been bickering over the fate of the universe since its expansion was confirmed by Edwin Hubble back in 1929. On the assumption that the forces at work were purely gravitational, boffins worked for decades totting up all the mass they could find, which total they then used as a term in an equation also containing ever-more-accurate values of the Hubble constant (the current rate of expansion). There were three possible outcomes: a) the amount of mass was not enough to slow the universe’s expansion, so it would expand forever; b) the amount of mass exactly balanced the outward momentum, so the rate of expansion would asymptotically approach zero; or c) there was so much mass that the expansion would eventually stop, reverse itself, and end with a Big Crunch (possibly followed by a new Big Bang).
(These scenarios, by the way, described different spacetime geometries. In model a), the curvature of space is considered to be negative, like a saddle; in c) it is positive, like a sphere; and in b) it is flat.)
For a long time cosmologists had a sneaking suspicion that the answer would turn out to be b): that the total mass in the universe exactly balanced the momentum of its expansion. But in the late 1990’s everyone was completely gobsmacked by the discovery that the expansion of the universe seemed not to be slowing as expected, but was actually accelerating, for reasons that are still far from clear.
And that’s how matters have stood since then: scenario a) was declared the winner, and the universe would just go on and on, its constituent parts spreading farther and farther apart, growing colder and colder and darker and darker. Eventually the stars would die, and there would only be blackness everywhere as their lifeless cinders drifted through the void, forever.
Nice, right? Sounds like a nice quiet way to wrap things up, after all we’ve been through. Well, don’t get your hopes up, because according to Dr. Bousso and his chums, there are good reasons why you can’t have an eternal universe, no matter how dull. Instead, he says, something has to come along and bring down the curtain, and his team has estimated that it is actually going to happen pretty soon: in about 3.7 billion years, that is, or roughly the same amount of time the Earth has been around.
This doesn’t mean you can keep your library books, and I don’t think even Outlook 2010 lets you make calendar entries that far in advance, but it is still rather a shock.
Bad news for Cubs fans, too.
In a recent column, David Brooks had this to say about the scope of government nowadays:
The heart of any moral system is the connection between action and consequences. Today’s public anger rises from the belief that this connection has been severed in one realm after another.
Financiers send the world into recession and don’t seem to suffer. Neighbors take on huge mortgages and then just walk away when they go underwater. Washington politicians avoid living within their means. Federal agencies fail and get rewarded with more responsibilities.
What the country is really looking for is a restoration of responsibility. If some smart leader is going to help us get out of ideological gridlock, that leader will reframe politics around this end.
Philip K. Howard has thought hard about the decay of responsibility and what can be done to reverse it. In a series of books ranging from “The Death of Common Sense’ to “Life Without Lawyers,’ Howard has detailed the ways our political and legal systems undermine personal responsibility.
Over the past several decades, he argues, a thicket of spending obligations, rules and regulations has arisen, which limits individual discretion, narrows room for maneuver and makes it harder to assign responsibility.
Presidents find that more and more of their budgets are precommitted to entitlement spending. Cabinet secretaries find that their agenda can’t really be enacted because 100 million words of existing federal rules and statutes prevent innovation this way and that. Even when a new law is passed, it’s very hard to tell who is responsible for executing it because there is a profusion of agencies and bureaucratic levels all with some share of the pie.
These things weaken individual initiative, discretion and responsibility. But the decay expands well beyond Washington. Teachers don’t really control their classrooms. They have to obey a steady stream of mandates that govern everything from how they treat an unruly child to the way they teach. Doctors don’t really control their practices but must be wary of a capricious malpractice system that could strike at any moment. Local government officials don’t really govern their towns. Their room for maneuver is sharply constrained by federal mandates and by the steady stream of lawsuits that push them in ways defying common sense.
What’s needed, Howard argues, is a great streamlining.
Yes, that’s the problem, all right, and Alexis de Tocqueville saw it coming almost 200 years ago. In a prescient passage from Democracy in America he described exactly where we find ourselves in 2010 (I’ve quoted this passage before, but it so aptly describes what Brooks laments that I thought I’d post it again):
The sovereign extends his arms over the whole society; he covers its surface with a web of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules through which the most original minds and the most vigorous souls are unable to emerge in order to rise above the crowd; it does not break wills but softens them, bends them, and directs them; it rarely forces men to act, but constantly opposes itself to men’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from coming into being; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, it presses down upon men, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and it finally reduces each nation to no longer being anything but a herd of timid and industrious animals, whose shepherd is the government.
I have always believed that this sort of regulated, mild, and peaceful servitude, whose picture I have just painted, could be combined better than one imagines with some of the exterior forms of liberty.
If there is a fitter description of what ails us, or of what the conservative uprising in America today is pushing back against, I haven’t seen it.
Yesterday’s paper had an item about a computer virus, Stuxnet by name, that has found its way into industrial networks around the world, most particularly in Iran. So sophisticated was the virus that it seemed to all that it was probably the work of a government agency — and the likely suspect, given the apparent target, is Israel.
Our reader JK has sent along a link to a post over at In From The Cold (it’s on our sidebar, but I’d missed this one) that offers something of an insider’s look. Here.
Poking around in the news this evening, I saw that UFOlogist Robert Hastings had held a news conference today with a number of retired Air Force servicemen. The panel claimed, in no uncertain terms, that they had had first-hand close encounters with strange flying machines at various nuclear-weapons sites, that they had been ordered to keep mum about it, and that in their minds there was simply no question that these vessels were of otherworldly origin.
I’m generally very skeptical indeed about the entire spectrum of paranormal claims, from spoon-bending to reincarnation to Supreme Beings, but I have always felt that out of the whole lot, the possibility that there are indeed ETs buzzing around seems easily the least far-fetched. That there is other life “out there” somewhere is, I’d say, almost a statistical certainty, and the only solid argument I know of for thinking that UFO claims are all balderdash is the technical challenge of navigating astronomical distances in a commuter-friendly fashion.
I realize, of course, that there are very substantial Einsteinian objections to the idea of faster-than-light travel, and I understand them well enough to admit that I haven’t the slightest notion of what a possible usable loophole might be — but given that much that was once “obviously impossible” is mundane today, I’m reluctant to declare extraterrestrial visitation an obvious impossibility solely on the basis of this technical limitation, however insurmountable it may seem at our current level of scientific and technological advancement. (After all, the Droid smartphone I just bought works on principles that were utterly undreamt-of until very recently, and not so long ago it would have seemed like sorcerer’s magic.)
Moreover, although I’ve never had any convincing experiences of my own along these lines, I do know people who have — and they are people I know well, whose veracity I have no reason to doubt; they were ordinary visual experiences, made extraordinary only by their content. And recently, though I won’t go into any details about this, I’ve also been introduced to certain parties who had what one might call a “special connection” to some of the hush-hush government research that took place in the years after WWII.
So all in all, I really don’t know quite what to say about all this; it’s nagged at me all my life. I’m well aware that this is a topic that is catnip to kooks and oddballs (indeed, as Woody Allen has pointed out, some UFO “witnesses”, when pressed, will admit to being members of both groups). I realize also that there never was more fertile soil for attention-grabbing hoaxes and paranoid (or wishful) self-delusion. And maybe I’ve just been reading too much Charles Fort. But at this point I have to say that if I had to place a bet, I’d wager that at least some of these sightings are genuine. (There, I said it.)
Anyway, here’s a CNN clip of today’s press conference. We report, you decide.
I’m curious, though: there are a lot of smart, thoughtful people who visit this blog. What do you think?
Readers will know that we genuflect to a pantheon of drum gods here at waka waka waka. I’ve mentioned my current fave, Gavin Harrison, on several occasions, and readers have also sent along, from time to time, video clips of some formidable subordinate deities.
But judging by what I’ve just seen, Olympus may soon be under new management. Have a look here.
We’ve been off the air for a couple of days, due to workplace emergencies and, last night, a concert by the British prog-rock band Porcupine Tree at Radio City Music Hall.
The concert was fabulous: the band were in mid-season form, and Gavin Harrison’s mind-boggling performance was worth the price of admission all by itself.
The workplace emergencies I could have done without.
Following on yesterday’s item about the death of the great Richie Hayward, the Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten gives us another decedent to mourn: the English language. Cause of death: email, texting, bloggers, and the decline of large-scale, professionally edited journalism.
We read:
The language’s demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing health had been evident for some time on the pages of America’s daily newspapers, the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally been measured. Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely.
In the past year alone, as the language lay imperiled, the ironically clueless misspelling “pronounciation” has been seen in the Boston Globe, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Deseret Morning News, Washington Jewish Week and the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times, where it appeared in a correction that apologized for a previous mispronunciation.
On Aug. 6, the very first word of an article in the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal was “Alot,” which the newspaper employed to estimate the number of Winston-Salemites who would be vacationing that month.
The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of “spading and neutering.” The Miami Herald reported on someone who “eeks out a living” — alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a “doggy dog world.” The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of “prostrate cancer.”
Some will say that Mr. Weingarten is over-exaggerating the problem; that English isn’t really in such dire straights. Others could care less. But as a daily blogger, faultless English is my stock and trade, and I think that for all intensive purposes he’s right.
That’s my opinion, anyway. What’s your’s?
Here’s a sad item that I missed while I was disconnected last month: drummer Richie Hayward, who since 1969 was the rhythmic anchor of the incomparable rock/blues/funk band Little Feat, died on August 14th of liver cancer and pneumonia. I was a huge fan of both Hayward and the band, and I am very sorry indeed to hear this news.
I got to work with Richie exactly once: on a two-day soundtrack session back in 1988 or so, at Cherokee Studios in LA, for the movie Bull Durham. The project was a real treat — the players included Dr. John, Bonnie Raitt, Little Feat bassist Kenny Gradney, and the great tenor player Bennie Wallace — but the biggest thrill of all for me was the chance to record Richie Hayward, on whom I had had a “drummer’s crush” since Little Feat’s founding. He turned out to be an easy-going, friendly fellow with a crackling sense of humor, and I liked him very much.
To us drummers, Richie was a giant, and he will be sorely missed. His New York times obituary is here, and there is a Wikipedia article about him here.
While I was poking around online looking for reactions to Richie Hayward’s death, I found one that stood out, on a fine blog I’d never run across before. The site is called Parking in Bitterman Circle, and it is the home of one Aron Michalski, who is a musician and roadie. He writes very well indeed, and I recommend his site to all.
Mr. Michalski’s post about Richie Hayward is titled The Drummer for Planet Earth’s House Band, and that about sums it up. You can read it here.
Also, imagine my surprise when I saw that the previous item on Mr. Michalksi’s blog was about Cape Cod’s own house band, the Incredible Casuals, who have been pummeling eardrums at the Wellfleet Beachcomber for the past 30 summers. (I’ve mentioned them myself in these pages, here and here, and the lovely Nina and I had in fact just taken in their penultimate Summer ’10 gig at the ‘Coma the weekend before Labor Day.) Read all about them here.
Tired of watching things go to hell here in America? Well, a change is as good as a rest, they say, and instead of brooding about our declining fortunes here at home, it might be refreshing to focus for a minute on how very badly things are going overseas. Our indefatigable sources have sent along two links.
The first concerns our latest arms deal with the Saudis. If you haven’t heard, we are selling them about $90 billion worth of advanced weaponry. Why? To maintain a regional balance of power with surging Iran. (It’s almost enough to make you miss Saddam.)
This is about as icky as it gets. While the Saudis, who view us with nothing but contempt, are busy with one hand buying military technology they could never in a million years have developed for themselves, with the other they are funding the overthrow of our civilization through a worldwide campaign of Wahhabist dawa. And where did they get the money in the first place? From selling us oil.
The second link concerns our impending loss of air supremacy, a result of massive development efforts by Russia and swaggering China, and our own abandonment of F-22 Raptor production (see here, for example, and here). We read:
The U.S. Air Force’s former top intelligence officer warned a roomful of generals this week that the U.S. has lost its air power advantages and is dangerously ill-prepared to stop the gap-closing efforts of China and Russia.
Lt. Gen. David Deptula, a former F-15 pilot, challenged Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ fundamental belief that U.S. air power vastly overmatches any foreign military.
…His presentation attempted to reopen more than just the F-22 fight, warning that from surface-to-air defenses to air-to-air fighters, the U.S. was letting others catch up. These future threats, he said, are now current.
It has long seemed to many observers that it was imprudent to halt manufacture of the still-unmatched F-22 in favor of the lesser F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, and now it seems the consequences are becoming apparent. I’m sure things are getting warm at the DOD.
I’ll tell you what, though: I’ll bet the Russians and the Chinese haven’t got one of these.
Writing a novel? I’m certainly not, but if you are, you might be interested to read a brief outline, by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood, of the scope of available plot-lines. (Thanks to my daughter ChloÁ« for providing me with the link.)
You can read Ms. Atwood’s exposition here, if you like, but I’ve also reproduced the whole thing below the fold.
As readers may be aware, the nation’s economy has languished in dark depression for some time now. What can be done? Trillion-dollar Keynsian stimulus packages? A moratorium on government expansion, along with tax relief for the productive? Opinions vary.
Branding consultant Richard Smith thinks he may have the answer: redesign the dollar. Here.
Making the rounds yesterday was a video clip of some of the most astonishing flying I’ve ever seen. I didn’t even know things like this were possible.
The accompanying email offered the following information:
This is all real and there is no trick photography.
Not only is the airplane unbelievable but the pilot is also taking g-forces between about +8 and -4.
The airplane is an Edge 540 manufactured in Guthrie, Oklahoma.
The engine is 540 cu. inches, 10.5:1 compression ratio, has a Cold Air induction System and is fuel injected …. engine preparation done by Barrett Precision Engines. It makes 320 BHP @ 2850 RPM and weighs 385 lbs. The airplane can fly inverted until it runs out of gas.
The pilot is Kirby Chambliss – he is a Red Bull pilot and Captain for Southwest Airlines.
Download the clip here.
We’ve just had some very violent weather here in Brooklyn and other parts of Gotham. It all happened in the space of a few minutes, late this afternoon. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen. Many, many trees are down, cars smashed, etc., and I believe at least one person was killed.
There are photographs here. Many of them were taken only a few blocks from my house.
Tea Party candidates made a strong showing in primary elections yesterday, and as a conservative sort myself I can’t say I was sorry to see it happen. The American people are roused to righteous anger, and by all indications, there are going to be an awful lot of wigs on the green come November.
Of course, Islam, another terribly polarizing topic, has lately been front and center too.
Here’s something I’ve been thinking about:
As the power and range of the Caliphate began to decline after its apex in the late Middle Ages, and an ascendant West began to push back against the Islamic empire with growing vigor and success, a great debate arose within the ummah. How could this be happening? How could mere infidels prevail against God’s mighty armies? How could people living in darkness and ignorance vanquish the Light of the World?
The crisis produced two opposing factions. One held the view, however distasteful, that in order to restore the power and glory of the Islamic enterprise, it was necessary for the ummah to humble itself a bit — to study the infidels’ ways and methods, and to adopt those ideas, technologies, and arts of war that had lately, and increasingly, given the unbelievers the upper hand at Islam’s bloody borders. Yes, it was shocking to imagine that civilized Muslims have anything to learn from unwashed heathens, but the plain fact was that the heathens were getting on top, and if the ummah would not learn from its defeats, all would likely be lost.
Nonsense, said the other side. All that the Caliphate needed to regain its former glory, they argued, had already been given to its people by God’s last Messenger. In the Koran and the hadith lay the answer. The problem was not that the Muslim world had been too inwardly directed, too withdrawn into tradition, to learn needed lessons from the infidels, but rather that it had not been faithful enough, and so had grown apart from God’s sheltering heart, from His wise guidance, and from His mighty hand. The faith needed no increased exposure to, and contamination by, the damnable ways of the infidel — instead, what it needed was purification.
Long ago, when a youthful, vigorous ummah had been rightly guided by the Prophet and his companions, it had been invincible, but over time Islam had become distorted, diluted, and dissipated by the meddling, shortsighted leadership of lesser men. Only by returning to the true source of Islam’s strength could things be put right — and that meant paring away hundreds of years of doctrinary accretion, and bringing every aspect of Muslim life back into congruence with the only sources of guidance known to be perfect and complete: the literal words of God, as revealed in the sacred text of the Holy Koran, and the ideal model of the perfect Muslim life, as exemplified by the words and deeds of the Prophet and his companions.
This latter view, known as Salafism (from the word salaf, referring to the Prophet’s inner circle) generally prevailed, and Islam — its face turned backward toward its long-dead founders and its immutable, sacred Book — entered a long, slow decline, as Western civilization gradually, and then explosively, created the modern world.
The nation that in time rose above all others to dominate that modern world was the United States. By the late twentieth century it had achieved prosperity and military power far beyond anything imaginable in the ancient world.
But things have begun to change. By key measures of health, wealth, and power, America’s pre-eminence is fading, while the strength and influence of other nations has grown. Once the leader of the world by almost any standard, America now, it seems to many, is at best primus inter pares. In global affairs, we are mired in endless and unproductive wars. At home there is ennui, disharmony, sloth, and economic, moral and cultural decay.
The crisis has produced two opposing factions. On one view, the answer is to humble ourselves a bit: to approach the rest of the world not as leaders, but as equals; to talk less and listen more — and, softening our traditional American pride, to learn to act less individually, and more collectively; to become more like Europe, say, and less like the Wild West.
Nonsense, says the other side. All that America needs to regain its former glory, they argue, has already been given to its people by by the Founding Fathers. The problem is not with our core ideals and principles of individual liberty, limited government, free enterprise, personal responsibility, and English-speaking, Judeo-Christian culture; it is that we have failed to live by them. What is needed to restore America to its lost glory is not to surrender our political and social culture, but to purify them.
Long ago, when a youthful, vigorous America was rightly guided by its founding ideals, it had been invincible, but over time the American system has become distorted, diluted, and dissipated by the meddling, shortsighted leadership of lesser men. Only by returning to the true source of America’s strength can things be put right — and that means paring away at least a century of governmental accretion, and bringing every aspect of American life back into congruence with the best source of guidance available to us in these troubled times: our sacred Constitution, and the correct understanding of its meaning, as exemplified for us by the words and deeds of the Founding Fathers.
The Tea Party, then, is essentially an American Salafist movement. The comparison may seem unkind, but it needn’t be seen that way, for there is no general truth as to whether rededication to founding principles is wise or foolish. It depends on the quality of the principles themselves, as well as the historical context — and, as is true always and in everything, it depends on one’s aim.
Back in July we looked at the details of an onerous provision hidden deep inside the recent health-care bill. It was a little booby-trap requiring that businesses file 1099-MISC forms for all purchases over $600 — mandating an enormous compliance burden on small businesses, in an effort to bleed enough private-sector money into the public fisc to make Democratic claims about Obamacare’s deficit-neutrality a smidge less mendacious. (Visit the link above to see how the sleight-of-hand was done: the provision was not inserted directly into the bill, but was discreetly slipped in as a reference to modifications in a completely different piece of legislation.)
Nobody seems to have noticed this “popcorn surprise” before the health-care bill was passed, and now many of the bill’s Democratic supporters have joined Republicans in an effort to remove it. A parliamentary maneouvre by Nancy Pelosi stymied the effort in the House, but today the Senate is having a go.
Learn more here.
Some longer posts still being under construction, all I can offer tonight is a link or two from the Shameless Filler grab-bag.
First, I’ll bet all of you who frittered away the Cold War years in our nation’s amusement arcades did so secure in the knowledge that Our Side must ultimately triumph, due to our lop-sided advantage in video-game technology. After all, to name just a few, we had Donkey Kong, Pac Man, Frogger, Q*bert, Galaga, Space Invaders (and to seal the deal: Missile Command). What did the Russkis have? Just boring old chess, and those dorky nested dolls.
Well, we did prevail, of course, but it turns out it was a much closer thing than you may have thought. Learn more here.
What’s that? Too shameless for such somber times? Well then, on a more serious note, our reader JK has sent along a link to something a little less frivolous: Letters of Note, a website that describes itself as “an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos”. Go and have a look.
Oh, and before you go: what the hell is this?
Thanks to Kevin Kim for pointing out an HTML problem with last night’s post: the WordPress engine didn’t like some empty ‘div’ tags I had sprinkled in to add space at the bottom, and had completely mangled the website. I had published the post, taken only the most cursory glance, switched off the computer, and hadn’t logged back on until early this afternoon.
An enduring, and endearing, marvel of our species is how hard we are willing to work to produce something truly ghastly. Example here.
You may have heard about the recent rescue of the Magellan Star from pirates in the waters off Yemen. Here, if you’re interested, are the details, by way of Information Dissemination and our indefatigable sources.
Tonight a cold front has moved through the Northeast, and suddenly it feels like fall outside, which is always just fine with me. If there’s one thing I detest (and longtime readers will know that’s something of a lowball estimate), it’s a hot September. But right now there’s a cool, crisp breeze coming through the open window, and after the beastly summer we’ve all been through, it is very refreshing indeed.
Meanwhile, the little clash-of-civilizations drama that has had everyone all wound up of late has descended into low comedy. Terry Jones, the tinpot Florida preacher who absurdly set the world on fire by threatening to do the same to a few leaves of paper, is now jerking his captive world-wide audience back and forth like a yo-yo as he waffles about whether he’s actually going to Do the Deed or not. As I understand the latest dispatches, he either did, or did not, make some sort of arrangement with Feisal “Good Cop” Rauf about the location of that triumphal mosque, in consideration of which he might, or might not, be willing to stay his hand, thereby sparing the world further (yawn) Muslim ire. World leaders, media titans, and the commanders of the world’s mightiest army tremble with helpless anxiety as an utterly insignificant little pisher from Gainesville toys with a book of matches.
I don’t think I have ever seen anything like it in my 54 years.
The latest update seems to be that the august Mr. Rauf, saintly builder of bridges, uniter of riven cultures, America’s official knight-errant of tolerance, and a man without an ulterior bone in his body, isn’t about to let this malignant little mountebank, this upstart farceur, this small-bore sky-pilot, upset his protection racket — in which the “deeply sensitive” Imam, though yearning with all his heart to move his triumphal 9/11 victory mosque somewhere else to ease America’s spiritual anguish, must sadly keep it right where it is for the sake of “national security”. Mr. Jones, therefore, seems likely once again to be making his incendiary statement on Saturday.
I know what you are thinking: this has really gone beyond absurdity; it is a disgraceful media and political circus. What we need is a wise and sober figure, some universally respected solon of unimpeachable sagacity and gravitas, to discipline these squabbling children, and bring this whole embarrassing mess to a swift and dignified conclusion.
Wait! Our prayers may have been answered. We have just learned that Donald Trump has waded into the fray, and will soon put things to rights.
With a hat-tip to reader JK, here’s my favorite campaign video of the season.
It’s always rather a jolt getting back to Gotham after a long absence. Autumn is, as the old song reminds us, a fine time to be in New York, but I must say the adjustment was especially jarring this time around, and today the place seemed noisier, dirtier, and more chaotic than ever. Sirens wailed. Rats scurried. Construction workers dropped a great load of sheet-metal on the sidewalk directly behind me, with a deafening crash that nearly stopped my heart. Indigent muck-scutcheons bickered on the street. Strap-hangers jostled and sweated. When I finally found a seat on the subway, it was next to a deranged woman who glared at me and ranted incoherently.
I’ve been living here since 1978, when I moved from a 145-acre farm near New Hope to a tiny studio apartment on the Upper West Side, and I still think this is the greatest city in the world. But maybe, after 32 years here, I’m starting to have had enough of cities altogether: that amazing New York energy that I used to feed on so voraciously now seems a little less digestible, and I find myself more deeply nourished these days by the sea, the sky, the stars, and silence.
Speaking of indigestion: when I eventually managed to find enough room in the subway car to open my morning paper, it was only to discover a wily and unctuous Op-Ed piece by that Imam Feisal Rauf on the subject of his Ground Zero victory mosque — and when I got home, there he was again, being interviewed on CNN. I have a thing or two to say about both essay and interview (in particular that Mr. Rauf’s purported rationale for not moving the project amounts to little more than blackmail) but I think I’ll leave it for later. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I have a one-track mind, and anyway, tonight I’m still trying to un-harsh my mellow.
We’re back from our August break, and after some catching-up, should be getting back to normal operations around here.
(Gotham, I must say, seems a very crowded and messy place. I just can’t wait to ride the subway tomorrow morning; I’ve hardly even worn shoes for almost a month.)
Speaking of shoes: some time ago we noted a macabre series of events in the Pacific Northwest. As Holmes might have said, the game, whatever it is, appears still to be afoot.
Well, we made it. Having dropped four-and-a-half inches of rain into the lobster pot I left out on the deck, Earl, hurtling northeast into oblivion, is now watering the meadows and forests of the Canadian Maritimes. In its wake, the weather today in the Outer Cape is splendid: clear, dry, breezy and cool, and everyone is much relieved to have been spared a direct hit. (Amazingly, the power didn’t even go out.)
So, back to loafing for another few days.
Meanwhile, with the summer winding down, the mind goes wobbling back, however foolishly, to worldly matters. If you are interested, here’s a soberingly pessimistic article about the realistic prospects of conservatism in America, even given what all observers agree will be a bad November for the Left. An excerpt:
What will change?
Will ObamaCare be repealed? Almost assuredly not. There is virtually zero chance that the Republicans will control both houses by the two-thirds majority necessary to override Obama’s certain veto of any repeal effort.
Will illegal aliens be deported and the Mexican border sealed? No. Sen. McCain (whose signature legislation sought to make First Amendment freedoms illegal during election campaigns) will join forces with Obama and Sen. Graham to grant amnesty to the 12 to 15 million illegal aliens already here, during a time of 10% unemployment.
And another:
What would a truly conservative America look like? It is unrealistic to argue, as some conservatives and Tea Partiers do, for a return to Jeffersonian libertarianism, no matter how desirable that may be. If conservatives were able to scale the power of today’s federal leviathan back to “merely” post-New Deal levels, it would be an enormous achievement.
Let us suppose for a moment that the conservative goal was merely the preservation of the cultural values and international status of the America of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era (arguably the apogee of American power and influence). What, then, would be on the conservative agenda?
-A civil rights movement based on individual equality, not group entitlements and reverse discrimination against whites and Asians;
-Mandatory military training and conscription;
-A muscular foreign policy in which America stands up to its enemies, as JFK did during the Cuban missile crisis, rather than the Obama foreign policy posture of a beaten dog piddling in submission;
-Balanced or low-deficit budgets, with social spending limited to pre-Great Society “safety-net” minimums;
-A non-P.C. acknowledgment that enemies (then communists, now Muslim fanatics) seek to use America’s freedoms as a tool to destroy it from within;
-The unapologetic deportation of illegals, e.g., Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” in 1954;
-The maintenance of American industrial and technological superiority;
-Social issues such as abortion and homosexuality left up to state legislatures as the Founders intended, rather than declared “constitutional rights” by activist judges;
-The public acknowledgment of a nonsectarian “civic religion” based on the Judeo-Christian tradition; and
-Unions investigated by the federal government for corruption and racketeering, and a non-unionized public sector.
Conservatives must be under no illusions that the Left would regard such an agenda as “fascist” and react violently if such an agenda ever came close to being implemented.
I could certainly quibble with some of those bullet-points (I’m sure some of you would quibble with them all), but it’s a thoughtful essay, and worth a look.
The Outer Cape is battening the hatches in anticipation of Hurricane Earl, which will be passing by here later today. We’re already getting bands of heavy rain, and the wind is picking up.
The tide will be high as Earl approaches, and the heavy seas are expected to do a lot of damage to the area beaches, which were already thoroughly scoured by last winter’s wrathful nor’easters. Several houses along the high marine escarpment on the backshore have already gotten perilously close to the bluff-edge in recent years, and this is not going to help.
We are tucked away on the lee side of the peninsula, and the storm appears to be tracking slightly farther east as it moves north, so we’ll probably be fine, though we may lose power for a few hours or days.
If we don’t make it, though: thanks, readers. It’s been a pleasure.
We are still “off the grid” on the Outer Cape, paying the least possible attention to events in the news, and switching on our electronic gadgets as infrequently as possible. (If Hurricane Earl pays us a visit this weekend, we likely won’t be switching them on at all.)
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.
I’ve been too busy relaxing to have any time for writing, so for tonight here’s another interesting item for you to watch: Philip Zimbardo on The Secret Powers of Time.
For tonight, two videos.
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.
We’re having quite a storm here on the Outer Cape tonight, with heavy rain, temperatures only in the upper 50’s, and 50-mph wind gusts. At dusk we went to Newcomb Hollow beach, where the Atlantic was foaming white halfway to the horizon, and the northeast wind was so fierce that I could hardly get the car door open.
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.
We’ll be on a reduced schedule here until a day or two after Labor Day. I’m sure the world will still be going to hell, but I’m not going to pay any attention for a couple of weeks, and will only be posting sporadically, if at all.
As always, please feel free to browse our archives, and to try the “Random Post” link at upper right.
Our cyber-pal Kevin Kim has gathered up a nosegay of posts spanning the gamut of opinions about the Ground Zero mosque. I haven’t written much about it myself — obviously I don’t want to see it built — but I will say that the proposal has done more to get people speaking frankly about Islam than anything I can remember, including 9/11 itself.
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.
As Christopher Hitchens publicly stares death in the face, Bill Vallicella offers an excellent meditation on the man, on men such as he, and on mortality. Hitchens will live on, in some sense, in his writing, but as Bill points out, that is cold comfort. Woody Allen summed it up:
“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.
It’s Shameless Filler time!
For tonight:
The marvelous Curta calculator, creepiness from Japan, and a 2010 update for a classic computer game.
Back again soon.
We’re in Wellfleet for a few weeks. Yesterday was a beautiful day out here — not too hot, with low humidity and a cloudless sky, an indescribably welcome relief from the sweltering summer we’ve had in New York City. By ten or eleven in the evening the temperature was down in the lower sixties, and with the new moon, the sky was inky black and alive with stars.
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.
Here is the latest dispatch from Christopher Hitchens, who, as I’m sure you know by now, is up against metastatic esophageal cancer.
I’ve been awfully busy the past couple of days, and haven’t had much time for writing. (If all goes well, however, I won’t have to be a wage-slave much longer: I’m working on a brand-new idea that’s sure to be a gold mine. It’s a social-networking site for gay Christians; I’m going to call it Faithbook.)
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.
In an apt follow-on to yesterday’s post, computer scientist Jaron Lanier contributed an Op-Ed piece to today’s Times on what he sees as a budding secular religion — a kind of soteriology-by-Singularity that has taken root, he argues, amongst our technological elite. We are far too quick, Lanier writes, to see a kind of transcendence in our gadgets, and to impute to them qualities — foremost among them genuine intelligence and autonomous intentionality — that they simply do not possess, and are not, in his opinion, likely to possess anytime soon.
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.
I’ve previously mentioned the idea of the Technological Singularity, which I described as the belief that:
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.
