It’s already well-known that affluence and education are positively correlated with any number of desirable outcomes: longevity, general health and happiness, that sort of thing. Now we find that it not is only disadvantageous to be poor and ignorant, it hurts. Story here.
I’ve accumulated an awful lot of books over the past half-century: I can never part with them, and add several each week, it seems. I’ve got lots and lots of books about history and philosophy and science, but there are hundreds of odder ones as well — and one that popped off the shelf into my hand the other day fits that description nicely. It’s just the sort of thing we elitist Northeastern intellectual snobs enjoy: highbrow “inside” humor of a shamelessly Eurocentric sort.
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April 29, 2008 – 10:15 pm
It is always interesting to me to see which of these posts will generate comments, and which will not. Often a probing and painstakingly drafted essay on a subject of ancient and universal interest will attract no more notice than, say, an important scientific discovery or a bit of good news from Iraq; but dash off two hasty paragraphs about a civil servant with no brain, or simply let it be known that you’ve started reading a book by a conservative columnist, and we’re off to the races.
George Orwell, in his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote: “The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’. ” Little has changed since then.
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April 25, 2008 – 11:45 pm
Sadly, today seems to have been entirely consumed by worldly distractions, and with a busy weekend coming up, we’ll likely be off the air until Sunday or Monday. Apologies to all.
April 24, 2008 – 11:26 pm
This entry is part 3 of 15 in the series
Free WillWhen we talk about the question of free will, it often seems that we approach the subject rather differently from the way we would look into any other unanswered question about the world. Usually, when we don’t know about something, we ask “what is going on here?”, and examine the observable phenomena, form hypotheses, put them to the test, and so forth. But with the questions surrounding determinism and how it might affect our lives, this productive convention is often stood quite neatly on its head.
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April 23, 2008 – 10:50 pm
According to this story in today’s New York Times, Europe is looking to increased use of coal to meet its energy needs. As you might imagine, this news is not being received warmly by those who are concerned about levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. However, according to this item by Australian scientist-engineer Philip Chapman, we soon may wish we’d burnt more of the stuff.
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April 22, 2008 – 11:17 pm
Our commenter Jeanie Oliver has asked why the overwhelming majority of comments at this website are from men, and I’ve often wondered the same thing. I know that there are more than a few female readers out there, and if you are one of them I just want to make it clear to you that you are most welcome. As I mentioned in reply to Jeanie’s remark, my fondest wish for this website is that it be a salon, not a soapbox; my goal in scribbling these posts is not publicity, but conversation, and this place can feel rather like a boys’ boarding-school dormitory at times. I certainly have plenty of opinions about things, but many of them are almost certainly wrong, and my only hope of making any progress in the time I have left is to have intelligent people, of both sexes, to talk about them with.
April 22, 2008 – 10:41 pm
This entry is part 2 of 15 in the series
Free WillYesterday’s musings about free will led us to the question of where our decisions actually come from. Even in our own inner experience, our choices seem simply to float up into our consciousness, and indeed, experimental results strongly suggest that our awareness of our decisions comes after they are already made. Our commenter Pat Goldsmith remarked upon his consciousness “observing” and “using” his thoughts — and, interestingly, “taking the reins”, which agrees with the notion that we only have a sort of veto power over our volitional choices, which themselves bubble up from unconscious processes. In other words, then, our consciousness is at most a bridle, not a spur. (As V.S. Ramachandran put it, compared to what we usually imagine as “free will”, this seems more like “free won’t“.) Likewise, commenter Jess Kaplan remarked that as far as free will is concerned, our ex post facto consciousness of our decisions is “neither here nor there”. We seem, then, to have moved toward the view that whatever might turn out to be necessary for our decision-making, consciousness seems not to be on the list.
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April 21, 2008 – 11:57 pm
This entry is part 1 of 15 in the series
Free WillThe question of free will has been in the air around here lately, and more than one voice has been heard decrying the awful prospect of determinism. I have a rather blithe attitude toward the problem: I don’t think there’s any need to be upset by the notion that our minds are a product of our brains, which are themselves physical systems that operate according to the same natural laws that govern the rest of the world. But my insouciance regarding this matter is, apparently, a minority view. So I think it would be profitable all round to ruminate on this in public, and see where it gets to.
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April 20, 2008 – 11:35 pm
…but not forthcoming, I am afraid. Worn out and feeling a little under the weather, I am neglecting my duties here for at least another day. Apologies to all.
April 18, 2008 – 10:48 pm
As suddenly and astoundingly as ever, it is Spring again in New York. The weather these past few days has been simple perfection, and the trees and flowers, having awakened in a celebratory mood, are getting about their morning’s work with extravagant exuberance. But not all is renewed, and even as the living world stirs and quickens, we must pause to mark two sad events.
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April 17, 2008 – 11:43 am
Having toiled at my Midtown office until 3:15 a.m. last night — and with a joint-locking seminar to attend this evening at the kwoon, and a long mixing session coming up on Saturday — published content may be rather thin these next few days. I apologize: in particular, I owe the estimable Deogolwulf a better explanation of why our lack of free will, as traditionally (and implausibly) imagined, isn’t such a big deal — but there are only so many hours in the day.
April 15, 2008 – 11:12 pm
What is strange to me now, after 15 years of steady Internet use — during which time an truly ungraspable immensity of information has become available to all — is when there is something I can’t get hold of online. Sometimes it is a particularly obscure quotation, or passage from a book that I would rather paste than transcribe. At other times it is a person I would like to track down, or of whom I want to see a picture. Tonight it’s a band by the name of Baxter’s Glass Eye.
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April 14, 2008 – 10:54 pm
An awful lot of people attach tremendous importance to the notion that our decisions are somehow the uncaused product of our consciousness: that they happen not amongst the deterministic web of brain tissue, but impose themselves on that tissue, somehow, from without. I’m not one of them.
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April 14, 2008 – 12:23 pm
We note with sadness the death of this great scientist. He was one of the giants of 20th century physics, and mentor to an extraordinary assortment of disciples. His New York Times obituary is here.
April 12, 2008 – 10:08 pm
It’s my birthday this weekend, on Sunday, April 13th. (I’m 52.) I’ve been taking a little break: just reading and puttering around up here in Wellfleet, and scrupulously avoiding any serious brainwork or controversial posts (I love the rough-and-tumble of a good debate, but the little grey cells needed a rest). So here’s another undemanding item.
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Last Tuesday’s New York Times carried a tragic and fascinating story. It was about Anne Adams, a scientist who was sticken by a degenerative and ultimately lethal brain disease called FTD, which is an acronym for frontotemporal dementia. The disease attacks particular portions of the brain only, with the effect that as the damaged parts atrophy other parts grow and thicken to pick up the slack. Because of the functional differention of different brain regions, this means that as deficiencies develop in some abilities, for example speech or mathematical reasoning, other talents may emerge, in some cases remarkable musical or artistic creativity. In Dr. Adams’ case, the disease gave her a gift for painting.
But the strangest part of the tale has to do with Dr. Adams’s growing fascination with the music of Maurice Ravel. Go and read about it here.
Here’s another item from Physorg.com: it appears that there might have been something to the old saying after all.
I’ll be traveling later today, and off the air until tomorrow at the earliest. So for now, here is an enormous, time-wasting distraction to keep you occupied.
Since the Big Bang was first proposed as a cosmological model for our universe — a model that has since been accepted with confidence by the astrophysical community — it has been assumed that it might well be impossible in principle to say anything about the state of the world prior to the initial singularity. But according to a story in yesterday’s Physorg.com newlsetter, a promising theory known as Simplified Loop Quantum Gravity now suggests that the previous iteration may have left readable traces in our present environment, and that this relic information indicates that the previous go-round was a time-reversed mirror image of our own.
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If you’re like me, you like nothing better than tucking into a heaping plate of short-snouted seahorses. Problem is, they’ve become annoyingly rare. Well, I’ve got good news! Story here.
While looking over the latest from our friend The Stiletto (who, by the way, has just been chosen as a Webby Awards Official Honoree for her “tart” political commentary), I ran across a story about Arizona’s efforts to deal with its enormous influx of illegal aliens. I was struck by one passage in particular:
[E]nough immigrants have left that the government of Sonora, the Mexican state bordering Arizona, has complained about how many people have arrived on its doorstep.
Read the story here.
As a paternalistic and morally deficient bigot, I of course have a collegial interest in the ideological shortcomings of others — an interest that is not limited to my own species. So I was gratified when a recent item over at Dennis Mangan’s place led me to an engaging and informative piece about the extent to which my own failings of social conscience are replicated throughout the animal kingdom. Have a look here.
I must apologize to the reader for the lack of variety around here lately; our little clash of civilizations has occupied me almost exclusively in recent days. I’m afraid that this post will not interrupt the streak, but it will be brief: I just want to call attention to an outstandingly informative series of posts about Islamism that our friend Jeffery Hodges has been offering over at his website, The Gypsy Scholar (as proudly featured on our sidebar). You can start with today’s offering about suicide bombing, and work your way backward through the links.
As long as I am to be pilloried as a racist and reactionary xenophobe anyway, I might as well carry on. Here’s the latest cave-in, this time from Britain.
No matter what your reaction — snarling in defiance, as are the conservative voices of the West, groveling in awe, as are the liberal governments of Europe, or exulting, with growing confidence, as in the mosques and madrassas — radical Islam is rising. Those who see it, rightly, as a potentially lethal threat to all that Western civilization stands for, argue for a variety of responses: restriction of immigration, economic boycotts, intolerance of non-assimilation, expulsion of seditious agitators, ethnic profiling, intellectual debate, military intervention, and the republishing of cartoons. One hears somewhat less, however, about another sort of response, one that might be the most effective of all: the education and empowerment of Muslim women.
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In a recent post, Silence!, we remarked upon the indictment of an Austrian politician, Susanne Winter, for her having suggested that there might have been a whiff of sexual impropriety in the Prophet Mohammed’s taking of the six-year-old Aisha as his wife (though to his credit, he did not consummate the marriage until she was nine). We first learned of the story by way of the website Gates of Vienna, which exists for the purpose of reporting on the current phase of the “very old war” between Islam and the West.
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I’m sorry to have been off the air yesterday; I spent a long day with the promising young band Bulletproof Soul at Avatar Studios, mixing some of the material we recorded a few weeks ago. I am also working at the office all day today, so can’t write at length now either — but it appears that our recent post about the distinction between democracy and government-by-consent has sparked a discussion that it would be interesting to continue.
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Christopher Hitchens weighs in, with customary acerbity, on Hillary Clinton’s audacious Tuzla whopper. Here.
I have often, in posts having to do with foreign policy, expressed the sentiment that it is in our interest to foster “democracy”. It has occurred to me, however, in the course of a recent conversation, that the essential point is to promote regimes that rule with the consent of the governed. I’m not sure that this is an important distinction, but it might be, so I thought I’d make it.
For the crime of expressing dissatisfaction with his government, Chinese freethinker Hu Jia has been sentenced to prison, despite an international chorus of protest. His wife remains under house arrest.
Meanwhile, when not distracted by its ongoing bludgeoning and suffocation of Tibet, China preens in the global spotlight as the host of the impending Olympics. It would behoove the rest of us not to show up, I think.
We’ll all sleep a little better knowing that monsters like these are off the streets. Story here.
Although I am not a theist myself, and sympathize broadly with the current crop of prominent atheist authors, we obviously cannot ignore the central role that religion has always played in the organization and cohesion of human groups. I think, along with Sam Harris and others, that it ought to be possible for human societies to arrange their affairs so as to have the communal and cultural benefits that religions offer while moving beyond the supernatural fantasies that are traditionally at their core. The Unitarians are an example of movement in this direction, and the interesting fact that our friend Kevin Kim can function as a Presbyterian elder despite being a nontheist is reason for optimism as well.
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My friend Salim Ismail, with whom I have just enjoyed a delightful lunch, has introduced me to a marvellous website that I must share with you all. It’s called Idle Words, and features the writings of one Maciej Ceglowski, who seems to get around a bit. You can find it here, or from today forward, on our sidebar as well.
With a hat tip to Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna, we offer yet another frightening example of the withering of essential Western liberties under the steady pressure of Islamism. The latest gesture of craven appeasement comes from Austria, where a politician has been indicted for expressing an unfavorable opinion of Mohammed’s having married a six-year-old girl.
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One of the little advantages of living in the pre-Internet world was that it was far easier to flatter myself, in my cleverer moments, that I’d had an original idea. It now requires only a trivial exertion to confirm that I haven’t.
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As long as we’re on the subject of spineless capitulation to religious extremism, here’s a relevant post over at Gates Of Vienna.
March 31, 2008 – 11:42 pm
On the opinion page of today’s New York Times was an insightful essay, by business editor Eduardo Porter. In it Mr. Porter makes the case that to the extent that societies are fragmented along ethnic, racial, linguistic and religious lines, they are less inclined to support public spending for social programs. While this may be good news for conservatives opposed to Utopian social-engineering schemes and confiscatory redistribution of wealth, it is also, insofar as it reflects a reluctance to pull together as Americans when necessary for the common cause, bad news for a nation of immigrants.
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March 31, 2008 – 11:06 pm
I have often expressed the opinion that the United Nations, though an appealing notion, is so feckless and corrupt, and so utterly devoid of any real power to inhibit the ambitions of scoundrels and tyrants, that the civilized nations of the world might simply be better off without it. Certainly the United States would; at the very least there’d be more parking available in Midtown.
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March 31, 2008 – 12:35 am
Like may others I am an admirer of Winston Churchill, and have lately been reading an excellent book by the managing editor of Newsweek, Jon Meacham. It’s called Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship, and as you can imagine from the title, it chronicles the enormously important friendship between Churchill and FDR during a critical passage in the history of the civilized world.
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I tend to be a fairly hard-nosed naturalist, as readers may have noticed. This arises from an inveterate intellectual conservatism: I think that the most parsimonious approach to understanding the world around us is to try to explain the phenomena we observe — the “phaneron”, to use Charles Sanders Peirce’s lovely word — in terms of the productive theoretical models we already have. We continually test our theories against new observations, holding their feet always to the fire, and when inconvenient results strain them to the breaking point — as, say, the Michelson-Morley experiment did for Victorian physics — we can be confident, before discarding them, that they have had a fair shot.
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By now you have probably heard the tragic story of young Madeline Neumann, a home-schooled girl who died of easily remediable diabetic ketoacidosis because her parents thought it better to pray for her recovery than to seek medical treatment. Her mother, who says that said that she and her family “believe in the Bible and that healing comes from God”, is making the best of a bad situation:
“We are remaining strong for our children,” Leilani Neumann said. “Only our faith in God is giving us strength at this time.”
This is criminally insane. Read the story here.
Debating philosophical or religious questions in the blogosphere can be awfully unproductive; it shows you why some of the same questions that vexed the ancients are still confounding us today. People with different fundamental assumptions live in inner worlds that are quite irreconcilable: words mean different things to different speakers, and often serve only to highlight these differences while doing nothing to bridge them. For a splendid example of all this, have a look at this protracted comment thread over at the Maverick Philosopher, which starts out as a post about recent atheistic critiques of religion.
March 28, 2008 – 12:12 pm
Once again I pause to mark with sorrow the anniversary of the death of my mother, Alison Calder Pollack, a truly extraordinary woman who left us two years ago today.
Time softens grief’s sting, but not its ache.
March 28, 2008 – 10:23 am
The Dutch politician Geert Wilders has released his short film Fitna, which is harshly critical of Islam. If you are interested you can watch it online here.
March 27, 2008 – 11:41 pm
The lawyer, actor, writer, economist, professor, former Nixon speechwriter, and game-show host Ben Stein is starring in a new movie, called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, that challenges the Darwinian account of life’s history. It was given a screening in Minneapolis on March 20th, and among those attending were Richard Dawkins, who had actually consented to be interviewed for the film before he knew what its angle was going to be, and the biologist PZ Meyers, author of one of the world’s premier science blogs, Pharyngula.
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March 26, 2008 – 11:55 pm
Today’s Times carried a front-page story about Muslim families who, wishing to maintain control over their children so as to prevent their exposure to decadent Western notions, have taken to withdrawing them from the educational system. In most instances it is, unsurprisingly, the daughters who are kept apart.
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March 25, 2008 – 12:35 pm
From our friend Jess Kaplan comes news of a new breed of bank robber. Story here.