Is it 1984 yet?

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
George Orwell. 1984

When I read George Orwell’s 1984 back in high school, I wasn’t troubled so much by the idea of Big Brother watching everything. Now we have TIVO that watches what you watch and Homeland Security can tap anyone’s phone and nobody seems concerned. No, what made Orwell’s vision of the future seem unlikely to me then was the notion of an endless war with a shifting identity of “the enemy,” sometimes one, sometimes another. Americans would never fall for that, I figured.  

Well, I was wrong, wasn’t I? Who is our enemy? Who are our citizen-soldiers fighting in Iraq? The Ba'athists? They're just a ring around the tub. The Sunnis? No, they’re our allies now. The Shi’ia? No, they’re the Iraqi government, which we support. Muqtada al Sadr? Sometimes we’re allies; sometimes enemies. Bush has it confused. McCain is confused. So it’s no surprise that the people are confused. 

Scott McClellan’s admission today that he participated in a grand smokescreen in the run-up to the war only confirms that we are deep into 1984-land.

For an analysis of where this all leads, there is this from the LA Times:

The 'Long War' fallacy
Andrew J. Bacevich
May 15, 2008

Donald Rumsfeld is today a discredited and widely reviled figure. Robert Gates, Rumsfeld's successor as defense secretary, is generally admired for manifesting qualities that Rumsfeld lacked -- a willingness to listen not least among them. Yet on one crucial point, the two see eye to eye: Both believe that the United States has no alternative but to wage a global war likely to last decades.

In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, Rumsfeld wasted no time in telling Americans what to expect. "Forget about 'exit strategies,' " he said on Sept. 28, 2001, "we're looking at a sustained engagement that carries no deadlines." Speaking at West Point last month, Gates echoed his predecessor's assessment: "There are no exit strategies," he announced. Instead, Gates described a "generational campaign" entailing "many years of persistent, engaged combat all around the world."

For the U.S., the prospect of permanent war now beckons.

Well into the first decade of this generational struggle, Americans remained oddly confused about its purpose. Is the aim to ensure access to cheap and abundant oil? Spread democracy? Avert nuclear proliferation? Perpetuate the American empire? Preserve the American way of life? From the outset, the enterprise that Gates now calls the "Long War" has been about all of these things and more.

Read the whole column at www.latimes.com/news/opinion/ la-oe-bacevich13-2008may13,0,7251551.story

The joys of springtime

One down, one to go. This foal is only 2 days old. His name is Kid. Susan's mare Kate is expecting any day now so we'll have two little ones frisking around.  Spring sure is a lot of work, but it also has its joys.

10 theories of social change

From San Francisco, PZ sends another way to look at the concepts that shape our world (re: the May 20 post: Shakespeare’s world and ours). This is from the Truthout.org website and looks at the big concepts that govern our view of what drives social change. 

Why Change Happens: Ten Theories
Tuesday 13 May 2008
by: Sara Robinson, The Campaign for America's Future

One of the grandest - and most frustrating - things about carrying on the great democratic conversation via blog is finding out how many of your fellow citizens (including many who are nominally on your side) turn out to be looking at the world from a completely different set of assumptions than you are. In fact, there's simply nothing like the Internet if you want to be thrown together with people who have ordered their entire lives around fundamental propositions that would never have occurred to you if you lived to be 100. Behold your fellow earthlings, in all their bizarre and twisted glory....

A lot of these disconnects have to do with all the weird and wonderful theories people have about why change happens. Because we each have our own pet theories of how the world works, different people can look at the same situation, and come to completely different conclusions about what's likely to happen next. Since these often unspoken understandings are among the things futurists are trained to look for, I thought I'd offer a short taxonomy of the various assumptions people bring to their thinking about what drives social change.

See the 10 theories at www.truthout.org/article/why-change-happens-ten-theories.

Yi Fu Tuan and the God of physics

Thanks to Harry for sending this link to Yi Fu Tuan’s site: http://www.yifutuan.org/dear_colleague.htm. He asks an interesting question about why physicists see God in the universe but biologists don’t, so I have copied the entire (short) post below. The link also gives access to his archives, etc.

May 10, 2008
Dear Colleague:
In 1950, I listened over the radio a debate on "Science and Religion" between the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, an agnostic, and classicist Dorothy Sayers, a Christian. Although my sympathy lay with Sayers, I thought Hoyle had the better argument. So imagine my surprise when I learned later that Hoyle came close to accepting Intelligent Design. He was forced to that view by the delicate beauty of stellar nuclear reactions. How could a process so remarkable be just a happy accident? In exasperation, Hoyle is reported to have said, "The universe is a put up job." Hoyle's astonishment is the rule rather than the exception among great physicists of our time. Einstein spoke of the regularities of nature, mathematically precise, as "reason incarnate." He threw around the words "spirit" and "God" rather freely in his philosophical and popular writings. "Every one who is seriously engaged in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that the laws of nature manifest the existence of a spirit vastly superior to that of men." Spirit? What spirit? Stephen Hawking wrote: "If we find the answer to [why it is that we and the universe exist], it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason—for then we should know the mind of God." To Max Planck, originator of quantum theory, "There can never be any real opposition between religion and science...They are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never relaxing crusade against skepticism and against dogmatism, against unbelief and superstition...[and therefore] 'On to God!'"

Isn't there something strange and counter-intuitive in the views of physical scientists? They, after all, study inanimate matter and forces. What room is there in their work for life, much less intelligence, mind, and God? So why do they keep introducing these metaphysical, quasi-religious ideas? Why aren't they all aggressive atheists? Now, if I didn't know better, I would say that biologists are inclined to favor religion and use freely the words "spirit" and "God." They, after all, study life, something that is extremely rare and rather mysterious in the universe. But no. With the exception of Charles Darwin himself, the militant atheists of his day and ours are biologists. Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, is an outstanding example.

I find this difference between physicists and biologists puzzling. The only explanation I can come up with hinges on "beauty." Physicists are struck by the beauty—the mathematical elegance—of natural laws. Biologists, so far as I know, never see anything beautiful in what they study: not only is ecology messy, even the DNA is complicated, untidy stuff. Life is ugly because it is a product of evolution. A lot of redundancy is built into life's functions to ensure its survival. The "God" of biologists—if biologists ever get to postulate such a being!—is an engineer, not a mathematician. The engineer, having just designed a bridge that perfectly adapts to a specific set of conditions, then more or less arbitrarily adds a factor of ten to its tensile strength, just so that it can survive a once-in-fifty-year blizzard! No wonder bridges are so clunky and ugly. No wonder, dear colleague, we—built by nature or God the engineer—are so ugly. Such uglinesses don't require that we postulate "intelligence" or "God."
Yi Fu

Shakespeare's world and ours

There’s no reason I’m thinking about Shakespeare today except that I was recently in his hometown. But it occurred to me that most of us are familiar with his plays and find him very perceptive about human nature and a generally wise guy. But what would it be like to hold a conversation with him? Consider all of the concepts that we take for granted in our worldview of which Bill was completely ignorant. Here are 25 that I thought of this morning:

1. The age of the earth
2. Radioactivity
3. Bacteria and the germ theory of disease
4. Oxygen
5. Evolution
6. Space (rather than ether)
7. Blood circulation
8. Neanderthals
9. The speed of light
10. Ice ages
11. Gravity (the theory of)
12. The atom
13. Rock stratification indicating age
14. Right brain / left brain
15. Plate tectonics
16. DNA and genetic inheritance
17. How sex makes babies
18. Why the sun is hot
19. Psychoanalysis and the subconscious
20. Dinosaurs
21. The big bang theory
22. Meteorology / how weather happens
23. The finite nature of natural resources
24. Calories
25. The on/off switch

My guess is that in the first five minutes of our dialog, we would get stuck on a concept that we think of as essential to understanding our relationship with the natural world, but that would be entirely unfamiliar to Shakespeare.

At least he knew, or could have known, that the Earth orbits the sun, since Copernicus published that opinion about 50 years before Shakespeare was born. On the other hand, Galileo Galilei was ordered by the Church to shut up about heliocentrism in the same year Shakespeare died, so it wasn't exactly accepted fact in all quarters. 

So the next time we are tempted to think we have the ultimate answer to any question at all, I guess we should stop and ask what fundamental concepts we might be ignorant of that our colleagues from 2408 (if humanity lasts that long) will consider basic to understanding the world. Just a thought for the day to put things in perspective.

Chowder head

Somewhere I heard about this book, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky, and thought it might be a good recommendation for the Drinking & Reading Society, it being about the natural world and man’s relationship to it and all. Fortunately, I listened to it on tape first. There are way too many recipes and pointless meandering interviews with former Labradorean fishermen and not enough science or even history.

The only real lesson is to remember that people not so long ago thought cod were inexhaustible – like the buffalo, the northern forests, and hundreds of other inexhaustible resources that now stand exhausted. I suppose it’s useful to have one more example, but haven’t we learned this lesson yet? I suppose not; while changing tapes I happened to catch Rush Limbaugh’s daily rant to the effect that “People, there is no such thing as global warming. Humans aren’t doing anything to harm the planet.” Maybe he should read Cod.

But, so you don’t have to, I have included this 5-star review off the Amazon website from Cloudia in Seattle:

There's a cartoon in Matt Groening, the nine types of professors. One is the single-minded type, as in "The country that controls magnesium controls the world!" His main drawback is that he could be right. Cod sort of reminds me of that.

You may not have known how important or popular this particular fish was to most of our ancestors in Western civilization, but, according Kurlansky, Cod was practically like bread. It was easy to fish, there was a ton of it, and once Europeans learned the various ways of drying it (with cold and/or salt) all people could think about was trading this staple. Yes, Kurlansky's book is single-minded, and at times you might forget this is a fish tale. When the Vikings found America, what where they looking for? And how did they manage to sustain themselves through the long ocean voyage? The answers are of course, cod. Kurlansky also has a few outlandish things to say about another favorite topic of his, the Basque, who it appears had been regularly fishing for Cod in Newfoundland long before Columbus found America. They were really good at keeping a secret, you see.

Fortunately, there's a serious, or, at least more socially acceptable side, to Kurlansky's fish story. The fishing trade really is threatened. You can no longer practically walk on Atlantic cod. Even Icelanders who found their entire economy changing from one of sustenance to a first world service economy, during the two world wars, have a difficult time protecting their dwindling stock. If Aldous Huxley's grandfather, Thomas, asserted in the 19th century that cod would never become extinct, it was only because he could not imagine the rapid technological changes which would turn fishing into harvesting, and the classic practice of drying fish into freezing it, on board the fishing boats themselves. Good-bye bacalao, hello fishsticks.

It's a sad tale as ways of life dwindle and change, and even the very essentials of human existence that have lasted for thousands of years go unheard of by the post-industrial society. But are we really evolving into something better? Kurlansky peppers his narrative with quotes from notables throughout the ages and interesting, if often archaic, recipes.

OK, so now you don’t have to read the book unless you really, really want to.

Bad year for bluebirds

Today I removed another empty bluebird nest. Two days ago it had a tiny mass of naked wriggling bluebird chicks a few hours old. Now there's no sign of chicks nor birds. No remains of any kind, which suggests a snake or similar varmint. This box was on a metal pole, but that's no guarantee against intruders, especially snakes. The other nest that had eggs is also empty, although the birds have started a new nest. I'm not terribly hopeful. The later in the season, the poorer the chances they will survive. Meanwhile, there are eggs in the box behind the house, but that's on a wooden post and besides it's much too close to the wrens (no, we don't keep wren houses, but they are prolific anyway) which means the odds are against success in this box too. That makes three nests with eggs or chicks destroyed by predators this spring - two by land and one by air. It's been a tough spring all around.

Religion? Like, oh, wow!

In today’s Times, David Brooks raises the topic of how neuroscience is affecting the debate between science and religion and sees changes in store for both. In sum, he says:

We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution and it’s going to have big cultural effects. In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day.

Here’s the link to his column: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/opinion/13brooks.html

Brooks recommends reading Andrew Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser.

I don’t know Newberg’s latest book, Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth, but I read his earlier work, Why God Won’t Go Away, and found it interesting in a technical sort of way. It explores the brain states that exist during religious ecstasy and meditation and concludes that these states are the result of turning off the parts of the brain that orient us in space, thus giving us the “spacey” feeling of being everywhere and nowhere that we recognize so well from being stoned. Religion? Oh, wow!

No morel to this story

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. We had a record snowfall that didn't melt until mid-April. The month was 11 degrees colder this year than last, according to the power company. We had double the average amount of rain. So I shouldn't be surprised that morel season has been a bust for us. We saw one and couldn't even bear to cut it. Too cold. Soil too cold and wet. Everything grew at once and late. I didn't even have enough mint in the herb garden to make mint juleps for the Kentucky Derby. We always have a big bunch of mint growing by Derby day. Not this year. Fortunately, I still had a little of my magic mint infusion left from last summer. But really it's not the same as fresh mint. And it really isn't spring without morels.

Bozo design

I was thinking about my April 30 post God and Homo sapiens, a report on University of California Irvine professor, Francisco J. Ayala, a former Dominican priest who argues that, "If God has designed organisms, he has a lot to account for” in a moral sense. It's kind of the argument, How could a good God create evil? I think enough theologians through the ages have dealt with that question (albeit not very convincingly) that we don't have to revisit it here.

My argument is practical, not moral. If a designer was intelligent enough to create nuclear fusion, dark energy, hummingbirds, 17-year cicadas, etc., then how come she botched so many things that a moderately bright 5th grader would have done better? A competent engineer, given adequate resources, designs things to work, not just OK, but damn near perfectly. So, given infinite resources, how come the intelligent designer sort of cobbled things together? I'll give only one example - the placement of the human trachea in front of the esophagus requires that every drop of liquid, every crumb of food traveling toward the stomach has to pass over the windpipe. In theory a little manhole cover comes down and covers it up, but not always. That's why thousands of people die from choking on a morsel of steak, etc. Can you say Heimlich? Assuming that an intelligent designer designs organisms to live, not to die from trivial accidents, this constitutes an argument against intelligent design. If you can't accept evolution, your choice isn't ID, but BD, Bozo Design.

Blaming God vs the government

I will admit that, other than admiring Obama’s speech on race immediately after the Jeremiah Wright nonsense surfaced, I have not followed the so-called controversy, nor have I actually seen Wright as he has dug the hole deeper and deeper on CNN. However, in the wake of Barak Obama’s near-victory in Indiana and blowout in N. Carolina, I thought it was interesting to see this observation from http://scienceavenger.blogspot.com:

The reason the Wright endorsement is a problem for Obama, but the Hagee endorsement isn't a problem for McCain, is because Americans have a great tolerance of lunacy coming from ministers, so long as it is a particular brand of lunacy. Hagee's just happens to the acceptable variety, and Wright's isn't. What's the difference? Wright left out the intermediary: God. He forgot the Golden Rule of American society: statements with "God" in them should be tolerated. 



Fact is, you can pretty much get away with saying anything as long as you blame it on Jesus. Thanking Jesus for winning a boxing match never ever gets the "You think Jesus would help you beat the shit out of someone else" retort it deserves. Praising the same God who apparently decided to destroy your town with a tornado for deciding not to kill YOUR child today is seen as somehow loving and sweet. So why not Hagee's claim that Yahweh hates fags and New Orleans, or Robertson's claim that God hates the ACLU. Those claims are certainly not MORE deranged than thinking the creator of the universe helped your kick hook inside the uprights for the game-winning fieldgoal. 



Wright made the mistake of attacking the United States directly, accusing it of being responsible for 9/11, and really, in a basic, animalistic evaluation of the facts, it's the most reasonable (or least loony if you like) thing he said. But you don't do that in our society, not without giving the gods the blame. Nor do you claim government scientists created AIDS to commit genocide. That's the real demented thing about all of this. God is supposed to be so benevolent and perfect, whereas the US government has a host of flaws and sins on its record. Yet it is deemed OK, by the most pious and anti-government among us, to blame God for people dying, but not the US government.

A question with no answer, but they will anyway

The Templeton Foundation’s third heavy question in its ongoing series is Does science make a belief in God obsolete? And once again, the foundation has recruited a panel of, well, heavies, to answer.

Steven Pinker says yes, if by "science" we mean the entire enterprise of secular reason and knowledge (including history and philosophy), not just people with test tubes and white lab coats. He actually said more than that. If you want to read the rest of his response and find out what the rest of them said, go to : http://www.templeton.org/belief/ The panel includes:

Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, O.P., a Dominican friar, the Archbishop of Vienna, Austria, a Member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Congregation for Education of the Roman Catholic Church, and was lead editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

William D. Phillips, a Nobel Laureate in physics, a fellow of the Joint Quantum Institute of the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy, chairman of the department of physics at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, Pakistan, and is the author of Islam and Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for Rationality.

Mary Midgley, a philosopher with a special interest in ethics, human nature, and science, and is the author of Evolution as a Religion and Science as Salvation.

Robert Sapolsky, the John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Professor of Biological Sciences and professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University. He is the author of Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, The Trouble with Testosterone, and A Primate's Memoir.

Christopher Hitchens, the author of God Is Not Great and the editor of The Portable Atheist.

Keith Ward, a Fellow of the British Academy, an ordained priest in the Church of England, a Canon of Christ Church, Oxford, and the author of The Big Questions in Science and Religion, Pascal's Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding, Is Religion Dangerous?, and Re-Thinking Christianity.

Victor J. Stenger, emeritus professor of physics and astronomy, University of Hawaii, adjunct professor of philosophy, University of Colorado, and the author of seven books including God: The Failed Hypothesis—How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.

Jerome Groopman, the Recanati Professor of Medicine at Harvard and author of How Doctors Think.

High on intellectualism

This is a cool blog posted by John F. McGrath, who teaches a course on science and religion at Butler University. It's worth keeping up with his stuff in any case, but I thought this entry from Monday, April 28, would tickle some of you. The blog is exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com/

The Top 100 Intellectuals Meme

I've been tagged with a meme, even though I still have an earlier meme I haven't got to yet. John Hobbins draws attention to Foreign Policy's top 100 intellectuals. I am at least vaguely familiar with the writings and/or work of less than half of them - which isn't good, I presume!



John Hobbins (who apparently has a different idea of "fun" than most other people I know) suggests that we do the following with the top 100: (1) a list of all those I could carry on a conversation with based on things I’ve read by them; (2) a list of those I’ve spoken with in person or corresponded with; (3) authors any self-respecting intellectual must read if she hasn’t already.



(1) Amartya Sen, Samuel Huntington, Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Ignatieff, Lee Smolin, Niall Ferguson, Robert Kagan, Daniel Barenboim, Thomas Friedman, Garry Kasparov, David Petraeus, Michael Spence, Pope Benedict XVI, Francis Fukuyama, Steven Pinker, Richard Posner, Charles Taylor, Howard Gardner, Noam Chomsky, J. Craig Venter, Al Gore, V. S. Ramachandran, Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Dennett, Juergen Habermas, James Lovelock, Salman Rushdie, Vaclav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, Slavoj Zizek. In some cases, the conversation would be short, and would go something like "Oh hi, nice to meet you, I read something by you a long time ago, I can't remember what it was called, or the details of what it was about, but it was really good..."



(2) V. S. Ramachandran (spoke at Butler). I clearly do not hobnob with the upper crust of intellectualism on this planet, although I do read their books, and articles, and watch them on documentaries...



(3) I'll make some recommendations rather than try to figure out which ones are "must-reads": Amartya Sen (his book The Argumentative Indian I would highly recommend. It explores the pluralism of the Hindu tradition), Lee Smolin (The Trouble With Physics helps put string theory in a historical context and helps us make sense of the tangled (pun intended) confusion we sometimes feel when faced with modern physics), Richard Dawkins/Daniel Dennett/Christopher Hitchens (no need to read them all, since they overlap so much, but no one should talk about religion, atheism and science in our time without having read some of the "new atheists"), James Lovelock, E. O. Wilson, Bernard Lewis, Thomas Friedman. And presumably anyone who can make it through Charles Taylor's The Secular Age deserves to be considered an intellectual, every bit as much as does anyone who can write a book that addresses an important topic in such a voluminous and meandering style.



If you're reading this you clearly think this is fun, and so if you haven't been tagged by someone else, consider yourself tagged, and let the "fun" begin!


I guess I don't have to worry about being an intellectual. I only count 23 on the list of 100 who I have either read or know enough about to hold a conversation. How many have you read? You can find the list of 100 here: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4262

Cap Times?

I know they were shrinking the staff and the paper, but did they have to shrink the name too?