by Paul Braterman

Within a single week, the raging Canadian wildfires have provoked opposite reactions from different wings of US evangelism, both claiming that their position is based on Genesis, with The Atlantic reporting on the churches’ deep political divisions. Statistical analysis confirms (is anyone surprised?) that July’s unusual heatwave across the northern hemisphere is almost certainly linked to human-caused climate change, which has also caused serious water shortfalls and aridification in the Colorado River basin, and is destabilising the North Atlantic system of currents on which the UK and northern Europe indirectly rely to keep Arctic weather at bay. Meanwhile, the fallout from the unexpected result of a by-election in a London suburb has exposed the dangerous vulnerability of climate policy to political disruption.

The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Nature, channelling the Heartland Institute, tells us (July 19, 2023) that we are mistaken in associating Canada’s wildfires with global warming, assuring us that “[t]he truth is hard data, as opposed to climate model-generated speculation, belies [sic] the link between climate change wildfires and the recent heatwave.” If news outlets say otherwise, that is either the result of ignorance, or, worse, because they are “in the bag of climate alarmism”. Wildfires happen every year anyway, smoke darkening the skies over the US Atlantic seacoast is not unprecedented (the article quotes a total of nine precedents in the last 300 years), and New Yorkers are only seeing the smoke because of the way the wind happens to be blowing. The actual causes of the fires include inadequate management, as well as “short-term weather conditions such as a drought in some regions, less winter snowfall and warmer temperatures,” as if these had nothing to do with global warming. And ruling out “model-generated speculation,” reasonable though it may sound, would make scientific explanation impossible in any area, since explanation always involves comparison of observations with a model. Read more »

by Raji Jayaraman

Unspeakable horrors transpired during the genocide of 1994. Family members shot family members, neighbours hacked neighbours down with machetes, women were raped, then killed, and their children forced to watch before being slaughtered in turn. An estimated 800,000 people were murdered in a country of (then) eight million. Barely thirty years have passed since the Rwandan genocide. Everywhere, there are monuments to the dead, but as an outsider I see no trace of its shadow among the living.

Colleagues chat in the office. Ordinary Rwandans go about their daily business. Walking down the street, eating at restaurants, driving motorcycles, selling wares, chatting, laughing. So much laughter everywhere. How? How is it possible for people to get on with their lives as nothing ever happened, when trauma must be etched in the memory of almost every living adult in the country? How do you casually interact with people who, for all you know, are directly implicated in the murder of those you loved? It is a mystery to me. I am baffled and wonderstruck all at once.

When studying colonial history in school, I remember learning that in Rwanda, the Tutsi minority ruled over the Hutu majority for ages. It made sense to me when the genocide was explained as a contemporary, albeit extreme, manifestation of a centuries-old enmity. The Kigali Genocide Memorial’s audio guide disputes this origin story. It claims that while the Hutu and Tutsi did constitute different groups with important class differences, historically there was a great deal of fluidity between them through both intermarriage and economic mobility.

Visitors to the memorial are informed that it wasn’t until German colonizers arrived in Rwanda during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that the sharp distinction between Hutu and Tutsi was codified with the help of pseudo-science. We are shown chillingly familiar pictures of Germans using callipers to measure the length of Tutsi and Hutu noses, distances between their eyes, and sizes of their foreheads. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Back in 1987 Jared Diamond wrote a piece for Discover Magazine titled “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” In it, Diamond argued “the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.” Hunter gatherers, Diamond wrote, ate better, worked less, lived longer, and had fewer diseases than farmers. “With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.”

I have come to a similar (and related) conclusion. In this piece and the ones that follow I’m going to argue that the second worst mistake in the history of the human race was the adoption of the rule of law.

The official website of the US court system says:

Rule of law is a principle under which all persons, institutions, and entities are accountable to laws that are:

• Publicly promulgated
• Equally enforced
• Independently adjudicated
• And consistent with international human rights principles.

The idea rests on three assumptions. It assumes we are capable of determining what the rules should be. It assumes we are capable of arranging the rules into a complete and coherent system. And it assumes we are capable of applying the rules of that system fairly and justly. The  evidence does not support those assumptions. Read more »

Barbara Chase-Riboud. Untitled (Le Lit), 1966.

Charcoal and charcoal pencil on paper.

More here and here.

Current show at MoMA.

by Rebecca Baumgartner

Imagine someone sitting cross-legged on the floor and breathing deeply. Now imagine someone sitting on a couch and playing a video game. 

Which of these is mindfulness and which is escapism? What differentiates them? Why does one seem healthier or more virtuous than the other? And what assumptions about human cognition and flourishing does that assignment of virtue rest on?

Mindfulness adherents tell us we can savor the present moment by noticing all our physical sensations in great detail: the textures we feel, the sounds we hear, the sensation of our breathing, and other forms of physical feedback. Our personality and ego take a backseat to simply being present to what’s around us.

My contrarian view is that this hyperfocus on minutiae allows the person sitting on a mat meditating to escape everything in their life that isn’t sitting on a mat meditating. Wanting to escape is not the problematic part; the issue is that we’re deceiving ourselves that it’s not escapism. Meditating and other forms of mindfulness offer a metaphysical escapism that lets you pretend for a while that you are no more than an organism receiving inputs from your immediate surroundings, with no interpretative or meaning-making capabilities. This is why certain types of meditation and other mindful states are described as “no-mind” states. 

While meditating, you’re not an adult with responsibilities or a personality or justified reasons to be angry or sad – no, you’re something much simpler and easier to control: a Mars rover or a rat in a Skinner box, simply responding to stimuli and gathering data from your surroundings, making no judgments, having no desires, and keeping emotional reactions in check. If your mind does break the rules and have a thought (and it always will), you are supposed to observe it impersonally, as though it’s a cloud passing high above that has nothing to do with you. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

A recent study in Public Understanding of Science found that

… Republicans and evangelical-identifying individuals perceive more social threat from scientists. Viewing scientists as a group posing a social threat was associated with having less accurate science beliefs, support for excluding scientists from policymaking, and support for retributive actions toward scientists …

One of the co-authors of the study, Ariel Hassell, suggested that the study demonstrates that, “When people position science as something we should be for or against, believe or disbelieve, we lose sight of the fact that scientific research is a process.” She continued:

Often new evidence renders previous knowledge incorrect or irrelevant … Distrust, criticism and debate, when done in good faith, are part of this process and should be engaged with rather than demonized or weaponized. Otherwise, as our study shows, people may begin to see science and scientists as a social or political threat, inhibiting society’s ability to address large scale problems like hunger, disease and climate change.

It strikes me as correct to see this study as offering evidence that it is unhelpful to criticize as irrational those communities that reject scientific consensuses. I’m not sure that a further lesson from the study, however, is to suggest that “science isn’t something to be for or against.” Instead, it would be more useful to find a way to reorient those communities so that being informed about — and being in agreement with — elite scientific opinions would contribute to higher social status. That is, it seems to me that we SHOULD be finding ways to encourage more communities to perceive science as something they should be FOR. (Indeed, only then – as the study itself shows – will they appreciate “the fact that scientific research is a process.”)

I take this to be one of the lessons emerging out of my recently published paper, “An Idle and Most False Imposition: Truth-Seeking vs. Status-Seeking and the Failure of Epistemic Vigilance.” (It’s available as open access article here.) Here’s why. Read more »

At the train station in Bozen, South Tyrol.

by Nils Peterson

One of the easy metaphors, easy because it just feels true, is that life is like a river in its flowing from then to whenever. We are both a leaf floating on it, and the river itself. Boat maybe. Raft more likely. But those who know such things say there is a river beneath the river, the hyporheic flow. “This is the water that moves under the stream, in cobble beds and old sandbars. It edges up the toe slope to the forest, a wide unseen river that flows beneath the eddies and the splash. A deep invisible river, known to its roots and rocks, the water and the land intimate beyond our knowing. It is the hyporheic flow I’m listening for.” The person speaking is Robin  Kimmerer, a biologist, professor and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. It’s from her book Braiding Sweetgrass.

I’ve used the river image often enough in my own writing when thinking about my life and the lives of others, but now I’m wondering if what I was really trying to do was to find a way to listen to this deeper river, to get a sense of it as it winds its way to, well, Is there such a thing as the hyporheic sea? There must be and therefore all my sea images really float on that sea beneath the sea. Robin says, “One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.” Well, yes. This is the poet’s understanding too, and I think it is the basic understanding of language, maybe of consciousness. 

I’m thinking now of a girl I dated my junior year in college. I had to come back to school a little early because I sang in the choir and there was a special program early that we had been asked to sing for. The football team also came back early for its fall practice. This girl in addition to being a singer was a cheerleader. It worked out that fall that she went out with me every other weekend. A football player took her out the in-between weeks. I was a year younger than my class and very shy. I had just started to do things on the campus, act in plays, write for the newspaper, join the creative writing club, finding out how much I loved literature. I enjoyed talking with her. Maybe we held hands, but the truth was she awed me. I was continually surprised she was out with me.  Read more »

by Derek Neal

There is a scene near the end of First Reformed, the 2017 film directed by Paul Schrader, where the pastor of a successful megachurch says to the pastor of a small, sparsely attended church:

You’re always in the Garden. Jesus wasn’t always in the Garden, on his knees, sweating drops of blood. No, he was on the Mount, in the temple, in the marketplace. But you’re always in the Garden. For you every hour is the darkest hour.

The small-town pastor, played by Ethan Hawke, is in a state of constant suffering and isolation. His son, who he pushed to enlist in the army, has been killed in combat; his wife has left him; his home contains no furniture or decoration; he drinks heavily and writes in a journal; he rejects all those who try to help him; he is dying from cancer. Despite all this, he is a good pastor and cares deeply about the people he serves.

In another recent Paul Schrader film, The Card Counter (2021), the titular character played by Oscar Isaac is another man who is “always in the Garden.” He, too, drinks heavily and keeps a journal; he drives from city to city by himself, playing blackjack at various casinos before moving on to avoid attracting unwanted attention; he stays in budget motels and covers the furniture with sheets; he has no friends and no fixed home. Read more »

by Gus Mitchell

‘Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.’ Henry James apparently spoke these words to his nephew Billy James in 1902. TV personality Mr. Rogers later took it up – with an intriguing preface: ‘There are three ultimate ways to success: the first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.’

There is something revealing about that reformulation, from the beginning, to the second half of the twentieth century, that least ‘kind’ of all centuries. It holds true today as well. Kindness has become one of the indispensable buzz-virtues (or, as I conceive them, ‘word-virtues’) of our moment – see also ‘creativity’, ‘community’, ‘care’, and so on. The ubiquity of these words often masks a troubling lack of useful definition or resonance, not to mention the kind of morality-washing used to justify a great deal of lazy thinking and acting. Words in the place of a meaning. This trend has been helped on its way by an enthusiastically hijacking and hollowing by corporate or political instigators, whose interests are opposed to any genuine realisation of these ideals.

In a (no doubt vain) attempt to not be judged by some as callous or psychotic in this essay, let me preface everything to follow: the inherent qualities, the real virtues enshrined in words such as these, are ones I cherish. I’m not attempting to persuade anyone not to ‘be kind’, as you commonly understand it. Instead, I hope that by illuminating the fuzzy blubber gathering around these word-virtues – a blubber enshrined in the mimetic mindlessness of the internet – might help one see more clearly that, by them, we are selling ourselves short. Read more »

Maria Berrio. From the series “In A Time of Drought”.

More here and here.

Current show in Boston.

by Akim Reinhardt

The Lede: Wombats ate five children at a drive thru restaurant in Omegosh, Texas last week.

The Body: A wisdom of wombats, on the run from massive fires in their Australian homelands, surrounded five children at a Checkers drive thru and lectured them on the disproportionate impact of the U.S. carbon footprint, before devouring them sans cutlery. Normally herbivores, the marsupials said later that they were eating young American child meat to make an ironic statement about climate change. Afterwards they were taken into custody and assigned a public defender. When reached for comment, their lawyer said the wombats were planning a hunger strike while in prison.

Ending: Does Jesus want us forgive the wombats, or blame the children? Perhaps we can do both.

*

The Lede: There’s someone in California who might like you.

The Body: California is home to nearly 40,000,000 people. One of them may like you. Like, really like you. That’s according to Cletus Nerdtoster, professor of probability statistics at California Polytechinc State University, who says chances are there’s someone in the Golden State who has the hots for you.

“Can’t rule it out.  There’s just so many goddamned people here.”

But what to do about it?  Nerdtoster has fewer insights into how to actually meet that person.

“I met my wife at the library. But if you’re not here in California, I guess that wouldn’t work.”

Nerdtoster says he is unfamiliar with how dating apps work.

Ending: Do you even want to be liked? Read more »