Prometheus Unbound

The purge of moderate Republicans from the Republican Party continues:

That’s just what the Republican Party needs: fewer female politicians okay with gay equality! It’s getting worse for the Republicans, isn’t it?

Here’s the lowdown from MSNBC:

Hoffman’s rise infuriated leaders of New York’s Republican Party, who insisted Scozzafava was a good fit for the district which favored Obama last year, but is one of the few still held by Republicans in the Northeast.

A sign of anxiety and nostalgia?

Conservatives in a time of advancing liberalism are escaping into the “Galt’s Gulch” of Ayn Rand’s fiction. This at the Ayn Rand Institute website:

“The spike in sales of Atlas Shrugged more than a half century after its initial publication is truly remarkable,” Dr. [Yaron] Brook pointed out. “Annual sales of Atlas Shrugged have been increasing for decades to a level not seen even in Ayn Rand’s lifetime. Sales of the U.S. paperback editions averaged around 70,000 copies a year in the 1980s, and doubled to about 140,000 copies a year in the current decade. And the pace of sales has been accelerating recently, reaching an all-time high during the novel’s 50th anniversary in 2007, surpassing this mark in 2008, and on course to set another record in 2009.” Almost 7,000,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged have been sold since it was first published in 1957.

That first publication date of 1957, and the fact that Atlas Shrugged is more popular now than ever, might be a source of pride for the Ayn Rand Institute, but the fact that American conservatives are returning to this novel at all suggests to me a retreat from the 21st century—and a turning back towards the 20th century, and to an era in which white Baby Boomers have a lot of nostalgia. The antiquated gesture is akin to imagining liberals in large numbers, nostalgic for early 20th century progressivism, reading John dos Pasos during the Bush years. It wouldn’t have been a sign of liberal strength that such a novelist was being rediscovered, but a sign that liberals were oversimplifying, and withdrawing psychologically from the challenges and perplexities of their own era.  

It works really, really well. This today in Spiegel:

The researchers who develop vaccines hope, of course, that their products will work. This time around, however, even the developers themselves were surprised to see just how effective their products have turned out. Researchers from the Novartis pharmaceutical company, testing their swine flu vaccine this September, were astounded to find that just one dose was sufficient to produce copious antibodies in their inoculated patients. Similar news had already come from China, and GlaxoSmithKline followed shortly afterward, finding the same held true for its vaccine, which Germany is putting into effect as of this week. Unexpectedly, the company found a second shot for adults was unnecessary. The researchers who develop vaccines hope, of course, that their products will work. This time around, however, even the developers themselves were surprised to see just how effective their products have turned out. Researchers from the Novartis pharmaceutical company, testing their swine flu vaccine this September, were astounded to find that just one dose was sufficient to produce copious antibodies in their inoculated patients. Similar news had already come from China, and GlaxoSmithKline followed shortly afterward, finding the same held true for its vaccine, which Germany is putting into effect as of this week. Unexpectedly, the company found a second shot for adults was unnecessary.

But they don’t have trick or treat bags, do they? Did kids used to go around and shill for candy back then?

Link with more of these:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/opiummuseum/4033581631/in/set-72157622380888091/

Brilliantly and thoroughly here. And here’s a cherry on top:

In terms of politicians, second to Barack Obama, I’ve always liked Jerry Brown, and it looks like he’s got a clear path to becoming Governor of California next year. This today at Salon.com:

If everything continues to go well for Jerry Brown, California could have a very familiar face as its next governor. Brown now has a clear path to the Democratic nomination . . .

Here’s Jerry Brown talking about clean technology:

And the original Tiny Tim:

Hattip: CCM104

Oh, and the original, original Tiny Tim:

It’s okay to be different.

Sometimes we think that if we could just have a stunning visual demonstration of something we believe in, that it would convince the nonbelievers in our midst. So it is that alien enthusiasts fantasize about UFOs on the White House lawn, and Evangelical enthusiasts fantasize about Jesus coming in the clouds (“See, we told you so!”).

But what, then, do atheist evolutionary biologists, whose beliefs about evolution are resisted by large majorities of the human population, fantasize about? Well, if you are Richard Dawkins, you fantasize about the recovery of prehuman primate species as an example of something that would “change everything.” 

But would the recovery of, say, a Neanderthal from recovered genetic material, or the creation of a genetic hybrid between chimps and humans really “change everything”?

Though Richard Dawkins thinks it might, I’m not so sure. Most persuadable and reasonably educated people already know that the Earth is old, that evolution occurred (and is occuring), and that we share a common ancestor with other hominids. They’ve seen artist reconstructions of these creatures. They’ve seen images of their bones. And they have read what science writers have to say about them. I think it would be a shock and novelty to see, for example, a real Neanderthal baby in a human crib, and it would be a fascinating story following its birth—and it would have a Truman Show quality to it—but I just doubt that it would cause an earthquake in the psyche of most people.

I think that Dawkins is being a bit naive about how a piece of evidence functions in the minds of the determined-to-be unconvinced. I would guess, for example, that most fundamentalists, though rocked backward a bit by news of the birth of a baby Neanderthal, would ultimately be unswayed to believe in evolution by such an event. Fundamentalists are very, very good at ad hoc  reasoning, and would quickly come up with some bullshit to explain the cute little baby Neanderthal.

I can think of a quick rationalization that would preserve their worldview already: “See—the book of Revelation is full of monsters—and scientists are creating the very monsters that will mark the last days!”

See how easy that was?

Happy Halloween!

The heart intervenes. This today in Spiegel:

In 2001, imam Mohammed El Fazazi of Morocco preached that it it is a Muslim obligation to “slit the throats of non-believers” in a Hamburg mosque. Among his listeners and star pupils were Mohammed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh and Marwan al-Shehhi, three of the men who participated in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. Today, eight years later, Mohammed El Fazazi has foresworn acts of terrorism against Western targets. “I admit that I went too far and overshot the target,” he wrote in an open letter to his daughter, who lives in Hamburg, and Muslims living in Germany. Muslims living in Germany, he said, should draw attention to themselves and their issues through “peaceful demonstrations, strikes and protests that are far removed from indiscriminate attacks” and the “killing of innocent people with the argument of killing kuffar,” or non-believers.

Know hope.

Make way.

If you’re a Democrat hoping to hold off the Republicans from retaking one (or both) of the houses of Congress in 2010. This today at Politico:

The nation’s gross domestic product grew at a seasonally adjusted rate of 3.5 percent for July through September – the first growth since the spring of 2008, the Commerce Department said Thursday. That marks a sort of unofficial end to the recession that has bedeviled President Barack Obama since he took office. Economists credited the growth to consumer spending – up 3.4 percent – fueled in part by government stimulus, such as the popular Cash-for-Clunkers car-buying program.

Know hope.

It might be, especially if you think of acts of faith as akin to fantasy. Faith, like fantasy, may function to do real work in the psyche. I think this observation of Ethel Spector Person, from a book of essays titled Imagination and Its Pathologies (MIT Press 2003, p. 116), though concerning fantasy, can also be thought of as a kind of defense of faith:

Daydreaming often signals recognition of an emotional reality previously denied. . . . Perhaps most important of all, daydreaming lends solace in sorrow and pain. Fantasizing a happier future may permit us to bear an untenable present rather than be overwhelmed by depression and feelings of hopelessness. Therefore fantasy’s chief benefit may be that it allows the fantasizer to hope, to trust in the future, even in a seemingly hopeless situation.

The above passage on fantasy strikes chords similar to those that I hear in the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, as when he writes:

Human vitality has two primary sources, animal impulse and confidence in the meaningfulness of human existence. The more human consciousness arises to full self-consciousness and to a complete recognition of the total forces of the universe in which it finds itself, the more it requires not only animal vitality but confidence in the meaningfulness of its world to maintain a healthy will-to-live. This confidence in the meaningfulness of life is not something which results from a sophisticated analysis of the forces and factors which surround the human enterprise. It is something which is assumed in every healthy life. It is primary religion. Men may be quite unable to define the meaning of life, and yet live by a simple trust that it has meaning. This primary religion is the basic optimism of all vital and wholesome human life.

If fantasy and faith are near of kin, perhaps Don Quixote is the proper model for human existence. What do you think? Is Don Quixote a comic figure, a tragic figure, or an admirable figure worthy of our emulation?

Is faith the performance of a fantasy in which the pirouettes multiply as the audience, slack-jawed, applauds? Are people of faith (I’m thinking in particular of someone like William Blake here) kind of like the characters in Jack Kerouac’s novels, burning with mad human beauty and naivety? I like this classic quote from On the Road :

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”

Is that what faith is? Is it Niebuhr’s “animal impulse and confidence in the meaningfulness of human existence”?

Do you have faith?

On Monday Major Adrian Agassi, one of the military court judges who holds jurisdiction over the West Bank, bluntly told the Guardian that God gave the land of Israel to the Jews, and that’s basically that:  

In an unusually frank interview, which offers insights into the melding of religion, politics and law that underpins land seizures in the occupied territories, Agassi has laid out his belief that Israel has a biblical claim to territory beyond its borders and that he, even as an immigrant, has a right to live on it when those born there do not. “When we [Israelis] say that this is a political conflict, then we lose the battle,” he told the Guardian, adding that it should be remembered that the ancient land of Israel is “given to us by the Bible, not by some United Nations”.

God gave it, I believe it, that settles it? It’s not hard to predict the outcome of such talk, should it prevail in Israeli politics.

Faith Baldwin:

Autumn burned brightly, a running flame

through the mountains,

a torch flung to the trees.

Look busy.

If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, is faith the last refuge of a failed thesis?

Or might faith be that place where you reach the end of all that you can figure and do, and, in outrage at the apparently absurd universe, you nevertheless choose hope?

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones makes a prediction:

I’ll stick with 2025 for now.  There may be small local papers around for longer than that, but no big city dailies.  New York will be the last to go, but in fifteen years newspapers will be a thing of the past even there.

Happy Halloween!

Wow!