Ten Irreligious Questions for Politicians and Others

Posted on by John Allen Paulos

by John Allen Paulos

The separation of church and state seems to be dissolving. It’s becoming increasingly easy for politicians and other public figures to cross the line between expressing their faith and aggressively proclaiming it and its alleged real-world consequences. Although often leading to social strife and intolerance, such overweening proclamations are growing in frequency. They may be cumulative and insidious like the Supreme Court’s recent okay for coaches to publicly pray at the 50-yard line after a game, or they may be all-out assaults such as GOP Congresswoman Lauren Boebert’s “I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.”

Because religion and religious ideas are being so publicly professed, political candidates and others should get used to the free expression of doctrines contrary to their own, in particular to irreligious perspectives. People’s religiosity naturally invites questions about their beliefs and the reasons for them and these questions, I think, should be a bit more pointed than the usual softball queries about the role of faith in their lives.

Below are a few such questions that I would like to see directed to political candidates during debates or press conferences. You can imagine the attendant microphones and cameras, moderators and reporters. The questions may seem commonsensical to many, perhaps jejune to some, but I won’t hold my breath until one of them is asked. Read more »

Swarms in the Brain

Posted on by Charlie Huenemann

by Charlie Huenemann

Today is July 4th, a day when Americans reflect on the value of freedom and the costs and sacrifices required for it. So it is an appropriate day to reflect on America’s deepest political aspirations.

Nah. Let’s talk about our brains. The neocortex is where all our fancy thinking takes place. The neocortex wraps around the core of our brain, and if you could carefully unwrap it and lay it flat it would be about the size of a dinner napkin, and about 3 millimeters thick. The neocortex consists of 150,000 cortical columns, which we might think of as separate processing units involving hundreds of thousands of neurons. According to research at Jeff Hawkins’ company Numenta (and as explained in his fascinating recent book, A Thousand Brains), these cortical columns are capable of modeling patches of our experience (he calls them “reference frames”)  and setting our expectations of what we should experience next, at any given moment. [Note: the remarks that follow are inspired by Hawkins’ book, but shouldn’t be taken as a faithful representation of it.]

The neocortex’s complexity is considerable, but not infinite, and what’s most surprising is that such a relatively small network—you can fold it up and put it in your head—is capable of understanding calculus and making up jaunty little tunes and comparing Kierkegaard to Heidegger, not to mention doing all three in a single afternoon. 

It’s hard to believe that the wide world of human thought can come from such a comparatively small albeit complicated structure, and my guess is that it doesn’t. It’s not that I believe in a soul or immaterial mind or anything like that, but I think that probably there is a lot less going on in our thinking than we think there is. Our thinking and our experience is extremely gappy, and we spackle over the gaps with a paste of fictions, supplied mainly through language and culture. Read more »

What To Do With Your Rage

Posted on by Deanna Kreisel

by Deanna Kreisel (Doctor Waffle Blog)

I assume that if your eye was drawn to this essay, then you are also troubled by feelings of rage. But I don’t want to be presumptuous—there are other reasons to read an essay that promises to tell you what to do with your anger. Maybe you think I have an agenda. Perhaps you have formed an idea of what my rage is about, and you disagree with that figment, and you are hate-reading these words right now, waiting for me to reveal the source of my own rage so that you can write a nasty comment at the end of this post or troll me on social media or try to cancel me or dox me or incite violence against me or come to my house and sneak onto my porch and stare balefully into my front windows or throw an egg at my car or trample deliberately on the ox-eye sunflowers that are bursting around my mailbox or put a bomb in my mailbox or disagree with me strenuously in your heart. There is a wide range of potential negative responses, and I don’t have time to list them all. The point here is that one must contend with them, and that is another reason to feel rage.

But to return to my opening supposition: all of these possible responses are also born of rage, so I imagine that you might benefit from an essay about what to do with your rage even if your rage is rage at my rage.

So let’s begin. Read more »

Love Letters To Trees

Posted on by Mary Hrovat

by Mary Hrovat

Aspens in Arizona (not in Hannagan Meadow). Image by Mike Goad from Pixabay

When the city of Melbourne set up email addresses for trees so that people could report problems, the trees received affectionate fan mail as well as messages about dangling limbs or other hazards. Here are some letters I’d write to trees, if I could.

To the aspens in Hannagan Meadow

I saw you in fall 1979; I’d been married to my first husband for only a few months. We traveled a lot that fall, scouting out places we might like to live out our back-to-the-land dreams and raise a family.

I was only 18, and I’d never lived in the country. I wasn’t sure I was ready for life with cows and chickens and a big garden. Sometimes, especially when we were driving at night through what seemed like the lonelier corners of Arizona, I was frightened at what I’d gotten myself into. Maybe my husband and I both were, but we couldn’t tell each other.

When I saw you, we were halfway up the Coronado Trail Scenic Byway from Clifton to Springerville, in eastern Arizona. This highway covers only 129 miles, but it’s a slow, dramatic drive, up and down through the White Mountains along curves and switchbacks.

We stopped at Hannagan Meadow for a break. You were probably the first stand of aspens I’d seen in fall colors, tall and slender with yellow leaves against beautiful white bark. I loved your brilliance and the movement of your glowing leaves against a more somber backdrop of tall evergreens. I didn’t know much about aspens, but I wonder now if all of you, the aspens I saw that day, are part of a single clonal community.

The sight of you in that meadow, tall and bright in the sunshine, dazzled and comforted me. You called me out of myself and my worries. Among all the beautiful things I saw that fall, you’re the one that has remained most vivid in my memory. I hope you’re still there. I’d like to see you again someday. Read more »

Swainson’s Thrush and the Sockeye Moon

Posted on by David Greer

by David Greer

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
—Excerpt from The Lake Isle of Innisfree, by William Butler Yeats

Our people lived as part of everything. We were so much a part of nature, we were just like the birds, the animals, the fish. We were like the mountains. Our people lived that way. We knew there was an intelligence, a strength, a power, far beyond ourselves…. Everybody had the right to comfort, to security, the right to food, a home, the use of the land. This is because we believed that everything was put here by a great and wonderful intelligence.
—Excerpt from Saltwater People, by Dave Elliott

Pacific tree frog. Photo by David Greer.

Visitors to my cabin in a forest glade on a small island in the Salish Sea almost always remark upon the silence. It’s true, if you’re freshly arrived from an urban community, the silence at first seems absolute and a little overwhelming. It’s only when you quiet yourself that the silence surrounding you starts to come alive with the texture and colour of natural sounds.

Some sounds may seem easily identifiable to visitors if only because their creators are visible. The slow thunk-thunk-thunk of a raven’s wings beating the air as it passes arrow-straight across the circle of blue sky over the glade. The chittering of a bald eagle high in a fir. The cat-like mew of a red-eyed spotted towhee rooting through underbrush. Other noises require more careful observation and familiarity but are instantly identifiable to those who know them. The faint scrape of the jaws of a yellowjacket backing down a cedar post, a grey ball of nest paper slowly enlarging beneath its mandibles. The lazy kre-e-e-eck? deep in a cedar, like a creaking rusty door in a haunted house: the territorial call of a male Pacific tree frog, gold and green and shadow-secluded. The urgent whistling of a juvenile barred owl, harassing its parent for freshly killed flesh. And in the gloaming, not the soft sound of the linnet’s wings, but those of its close cousin the house finch in this part of the world six thousand miles from Yeats country. Read more »

Robots, Emotions, and Relational Capacities

Posted on by Fabio Tollon

by Fabio Tollon

The Talon Bomb Disposal Robot is used by U.S. Army Special Forces teams for remote-controlled explosive ordnance disposal.

I take it as relatively uncontroversial that you, dear reader, experience emotions. There are times when you feel sad, happy, relieved, overjoyed, pessimistic, or hopeful. Often it is difficult to know exactly which emotion we are feeling at a particular point in time, but, for the most part, we can be fairly confident that we are experiencing some kind of emotion. Now we might ask, how do you know that others are experiencing emotions? While, straightforwardly enough, they could tell you. But, more often than not, we read into their body language, tone, and overall behaviour in order to figure out what might be going on inside their heads. Now, we might ask, what is stopping a machine from doing all of these things? Can a robot have emotions? I’m not really convinced that this question makes sense, given the kinds of things that robots are. However, I have the sense whether or not robots can really have emotions is independent of whether we will treat as if they have emotions. So, the metaphysics seems to be a bit messy, so I’m going to do something naughty and bracket the metaphysics. Let’s take the as if seriously, and consider social robots.

Taking this pragmatic approach means we don’t need to have a refined theory of what emotions are, or whether agents “really” have them or not. Instead, we can ask questions about how likely it is that humans will attribute emotions or agency to robots. Turns out, we do this all the time! Human beings seem to have a natural propensity to attribute consciousness and agency (phenomena that are often closely linked to the ability to have emotions) to entities that look and behave as if they have those properties. This kind of tendency seems to be a product of our pattern tracking abilities: if things behave in a certain way, we put them in a certain category, and this helps us keep track of and make sense of the world around us.

While this kind of strategy makes little sense if we are trying to explain and understand the inner workings of a system, it makes a great deal of sense if all we are interested in is trying to predict how an entity might behave or respond. Consider the famous case of bomb-defusing robots, which are modelled on stick insects. Read more »

Post-Colonial Punk: Decolonization One listener at a Time

Posted on by Mindy Clegg

by Mindy Clegg

From the start, punk rock was a translocal phenomenon. Punks in London took influence from their New York City counterparts. The British Invasion of punk inspired a new generation of young North Americans to blast out three chords and embrace DIY. By the early 1980s, punk scenes existed across the western world, into the global south, the Eastern Bloc, and non-aligned world. Many of these scenes went underground as part of the hardcore wave of punk rock. But other punk genres emerged that challenged dominant nationalist or imperial narratives with a bottom-up perspective. Post-colonial punks included artists that sought to employ a punk rock attitude to champion previously colonized and marginalized cultures.

The debate over whether punk is political began with the birth of the subculture. Many of the first wave punk bands are generally understood as non-political. But these “non-political” bands sometimes made political statements. The Ramones mocked President Reagan with “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.”

Read more »

Poetry in Translation

Posted on by Rafiq Kathwari

Five Verses from a Qawwali
Sung by the Late Great Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan

by Rafiq Kathwari

When I ask, how does it rain?
You rap a bead of sweat on your forehead.

When I ask, how does lighting strike?
You glance at me and lower your eyes.

When I ask, how does day meet night?
You veil your face with hair.

When I ask, where does music get its magic?
You spike your talk with honey.

When I ask, what good is yearning?
You snuff a candle with your robe’s hem.

For Annie Zaidi

Jena Paradies: Vision, Synchronicity and the Algorithms of Chance

Posted on by Brooks Riley

by Brooks Riley

Every beloved object is the center point of a paradise. —Novalis

The first full moon I saw after the procedure looked as if it might burst, like a balloon with too much helium. It was just above the horizon, fat and dark yellow —moving slowly upward to the firmament where it would later appear smaller and take on a whiter shade of pale. I could distinguish its tranquil seas, the old familiar terrain coinciding with a long abandoned memory.

It had been a while since I’d seen the full moon this way. For far too many moons, all I had seen were the fractured doubled contours of an indeterminate object in the night sky where the moon should have been. The problem was cataracts, or clouding of the ocular lens.

Advancing age metes out decline in increments. I hardly noticed the changes in my vision. Spending so much time on the internet, I was getting second-hand access to the world and its visual splendor and diversity through photographs and videos—none of which prepared me for the increasing inexactness that met my gaze wherever I went.

***

Even before the bandage came off, the implant’s ID card seemed to confirm it: I am a camera—with a new Zeiss lens made in Jena. Jena is back in my life.

How can that be, when I’ve never visited the city, only passed through its train station on my way to nearby Weimar? As I cautiously open my left eye to a rush of fine details I couldn’t see a week ago, the first words that come to mind are Jena Paradies, the name of the train stop that always made me smile. Jena’s Paradise is a nearby park. Mine is a second chance at sight. Read more »

The Hazy Politics of Wildfires

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Airplane drops fire retardant on wildfire

On the morning of July 22, 2016, an illegal campfire in Garrapata State Park near Carmel, California got out of control. Within a day, the fire grew to 2,000 acres. Within two days the fire grew to 10,000 acres. A month later the fire was at 90,000 acres and still largely uncontained. Ultimately the Forest Service and other agencies deployed thousands of firefighters and spent close to $260 million in an effort to contain it. The fire was finally “contained” three months later in October. During the three months of the fire’s life, bulldozers cut close to 60 miles of roads/firebreaks and aerial tankers dumped about 3.5 million gallons of fire retardant on the flames. The bulldozing and the aerial retardant work had little effect and what really helped put the fire out was October’s cooler temperatures and more humid air.

The fact of the matter is most wildfires go out by themselves.

The effort to fight large wildfires with expensive planes, helicopters, fire retardant, and bulldozers has been likened to fighting hurricanes or earthquakes: it’s costly and mostly futile. While developing fire-resistant lines and fireproofing buildings at the urban-forest interface can be very effective, trying to control massive blazes of tens of thousands of acres is like burning money.

Fighting wildfires is big business. When you stage thousands of firefighters in camps, you need catering services, laundry services, mobile housing, heavy equipment, and fuel. Caterers can gross millions of dollars to support large crews and local landowners make thousands of dollars renting their land and facilities for staging areas. Read more »

Rudolf Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture for our times

Posted on by David J. Lobina

by David J. Lobina

As I mentioned last month, the first thing one notes when approaching Rudolf Rocker’s 1937 book, Nationalism and Culture, is its impressive combination of breadth and depth, thus making it entirely unpublishable today. Not only that, and what’s worse, the book is also rather modern in outlook as well as original. The originality stems from Rocker’s interest in the practical effects of nationalism on the people that have to undergo the typical processes of becoming a “common people” (not something historians care much about), whilst the relevance of the overall account follows from the prescience of some of the ideas defended in the book.

The book itself is divided into two parts and spans nearly 600 pages. Book I traces the evolution of nationalism and its relationship to the expansion of the state, resulting in the reality of the nation-state, while Book II is a critical analysis of the notion that there is any type of homogeneity to any one national identity or nation. Remarkably, Book I anticipates some features of the modern study on nationalism, and something along these lines is also true of Book II vis-à-vis “the linguistic update of nationalism” I offered so long ago now, with the required modifications and adjustments. So let us deep-dive, as the nerds say nowadays.[i] Read more »

Charaiveti: Journey From India To The Two Cambridges And Berkeley And Beyond, Part 51

Posted on by Pranab Bardhan

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

In the middle 1990’s along with journal-editing I did another job in Berkeley which was even more arduous, but also in some ways quite exciting and instructive. I was invited by the campus academic senate to serve for 3 years in a high-powered committee that decided on all appointments, promotions, salaries and merit payment increases for all Berkeley faculty (then roughly about 2,000 in size). This committee is called the Budget Committee in Berkeley; technically it advises the Chancellor, but the latter took our advice in 99% of cases—in the less than 1% cases when the Chancellor did not follow our advice, the rule was that the Chancellor was obliged to meet us in a special session of the committee and explain why he/she would not follow our advice (most often this involved some legal issues) and we had a chance to rebut their arguments.

Working in this Committee gave me valuable insights into the process of how a top public university like Berkeley, even though substantially more constrained in terms of resources compared to the rich heavily endowed private universities in the US like Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Yale, Chicago, etc., could maintain its high ranking in terms of academic excellence in most disciplines. I thought the insights I got from my experience would be of some use in any reform of the public universities in India. I wrote a couple of op-ed pieces in Indian newspapers and gave some public lectures in India with suggestions for reform on the basis of my Berkeley experience, but very few people paid much attention, probably because people thought my ideas were utopian in the Indian context. The Indian public universities have for long been severely hamstrung by political and bureaucratic interventions, overregulation and mismanagement by different governments. (Some years later Jean-Jacques Laffont, a leading French economist, gave me a qualitatively similar account of problems afflicting French public universities.) On top of this the current right-wing government in India has a distinct political-ideological agenda of washing away the remnants of left-liberal ideas from universities, mangling the teaching of history and culture in universities (and schools), and of installing a narrow essentially anti-science Hindu-supremacist nationalist viewpoint. Read more »

Monday, June 27, 2022

Abort All Thought That Life Begins

Posted on by Mike Bendzela

by Mike Bendzela

One tedious outcome of the ascendance of the anti-abortion movement in the United States is having to listen to the tiresome arguments about “the beginning of [human] life.” It’s like being stuck in a dentist’s office waiting for an appointment while nauseating top-forty hits from the 1970s play on a hidden radio.

Not this shit again.

Abortion is an issue my husband and I have never had, nor will ever have to be concerned about, given that neither of us has a uterus. Nor do we have children from previous engagements, who might have to be concerned about what to do with unwanted or malformed zygotes/ blastocysts/ embryos/ fetuses. But the subject is still interesting to me, given that I have existed as each of those entities at one time or another. Read more »

How the Industrial Revolution Played Favorites

Posted on by Rebecca Baumgartner

by Rebecca Baumgartner

In his book Enlightenment Now, when discussing the drastic improvements in quality of life over the past several decades, Steven Pinker says that “the liberation of humankind from household labor is in practice the liberation of women from household labor. Perhaps the liberation of women in general.” The most exciting promise of technology is that it will make being a human slightly less terrible. In the case of household appliances, the claim is that they will make being a woman slightly less terrible.

Once women gained access to new labor-saving devices, the story goes, they were liberated from drudgery. We all seemingly agree that these innovations have given us our time back, shifting the role of the home from a place of production to a place of consumption. What used to be produced at home (often by women) is now purchased outside the home in the form of goods and services. Everybody wins! Progress has leveled the playing field and given women so much free time that they’re at liberty to enter the workforce in historically unprecedented numbers. 

Well, hang on a minute. If these devices were supposed to create so much free time and lead to “the liberation of women in general,” then why do women continue to do significantly more household labor than men? Read more »

We Should Fix Climate Change, But We Should Not Regret It

Posted on by Thomas Wells

by Thomas R. Wells

Climate change is a huge and urgent problem. It is natural to suppose that it is therefore a terrible mistake, an unforced error that we should regret and try to prevent ever happening again.

I disagree. Climate change is the unfortunate outcome of the economic growth that has transformed human civilisation for the better. We cannot regret climate change without regretting the vastly better world for most people that the fossil-fuel powered industrial revolution brought. Nor should we draw the anti-technology lesson that solutions are always worse than the original problems, that humans should retreat to living within the bounds of nature rather than attempting to escape them.

The argument I am trying to oppose is not often made explicitly, but seems to lurk around and underneath the response to climate change, especially among people younger than me. It looks something like this:

P1. Climate change is a huge and urgent problem

P2. Climate change is human-made, the result of the industrial revolution and the striving for economic growth

C1. Therefore, climate change is the result of bad choices based on bad values that we should regret. (This often takes the form of a quasi-religious sense of ‘original sin’ among the climate woke)

C2. Therefore, we should prevent such mistakes from happening again (This further anti-technology/anti-growth conclusion is not drawn by everyone, but is powerful within the environmentalist movement)

Let me take each conclusion in turn. Read more »