Evolution Outside of the Science Classroom

If you’re a college instructor, and the subject of evolution comes up in a class, and you are not a scientist yourself, what should you say about it to your students? Here are some things that might help you think about this issue.

First thought: Keep the big picture in mind. Regardless of discipline, if you’re working with college students, you’re basically hoping to turn them on to four things: (1) critical thinking and dialogue; (2) close reading, seeing, and writing; (3) intellectual and cultural literacy; and (4) discipline specific skills (reading a particular kind of graph in an economics class; teaching MLA formatting of papers in an English class, etc.). The subject of evolution is thus a “teachable moment” in three out of the four areas that you’re likely focusing on in a college classroom. And as the philosopher Daniel Dennett says, the theory of evolution is “a universal acid.” It drives you to question your certainties, and that’s good for your intellectual life.

Second thought: If humans did not just pop into existence inexplicably out of nowhere, they must have a history. How does history connect to the variety of subjects (economics, psychology, political science, history, literature, philosophy) that might be raised in the non-science classroom? By historicizing questions, one can discuss with students how, exactly, one might use critical thinking and evidence to arrive at historical inductions (converging lines of evidence, Occam’s razor, etc.). And by foregrounding history, one can also introduce students to structuralism and poststructuralism. No person, after all, is an island. Each is part of larger dynamic and evolutionary systems. Stephen Greenblatt’s “new historicism” (the insights of which are informed by evolutionary notions of embeddedness in systems, radical contingency, and flux) can also be raised. And, of course, there’s also the sociology of science itself. That too can be discussed. To not think historically is to not be much of a thinker at all, and evolutionary theory is about thinking historically.

Third thought: You can talk about etiological narratives and “just so” stories. One can introduce students to etiological narratives and just so stories and ask how they function:

• Etiological narratives. These are origin stories that appear in ancient texts like the Gilgamesh Epic and the Bible. It’s the way people, before there was science, explained aspects of the world to themselves and their children. Why are there different languages in the world, why are there rainbows in the sky, why do women have pain in childbirth, why must we labor by the sweat of our brow, why do snakes go on their bellies, where did the first woman come from? The above questions all come, obviously, from the first eleven chapters of Genesis, and each gets answered with a story.
• Just so stories. College-level evolutionary discussions can often take on story-telling characteristics quite similar to ancient etiological narratives. Why do humans love honey, avoid spiders, and smile? If evolution is true, there must be some link between these questions and the competition for survival, resources, and/or sex. But what’s the right story to tell? And what about biologist Stephen Gould’s caution about “spandrels” (aspects of life’s evolutionary “architecture” that are accidental artifacts of unrelated selective forces)? For example, it may be that a mutation in East Asians upon their sweat glands, apparently driven by climate adaptation, also thickened their hair follicles (which might increase sexual attractiveness). What story does one then emphasize in retrospect about what really drove the adaptation (survival selection or sexual selection)?

An example of a well known scientist engaging in “just so” evolutionary storytelling is physicist Michio Kaku (b. 1947). In his book Physics of the Future (2011), he coins the term “Cave Man (or Cave Woman) Principle” to account for the persistence of certain forms of high-touch behaviors in our otherwise high-tech age. Here are two instances of Kaku applying his principle (15-16):

• “[T]he caveman always demanded ‘proof of the kill.’ . . . Similarly, we want hard copy whenever we deal with files.”
• “[O]ur ancestors always liked face-to-face encounters. . . . This is the reason cybertourism never got off the ground. It’s one thing to see a picture of the Taj Mahal, but it’s another thing to have the bragging rights of actually seeing it in person.”

By contrast, Jerry Coyne, geneticist at the University of Chicago, writes at the end of his book, Why Evolution is True (Viking 2009), the following: “There is an increasing (and disturbing) tendency of psychologists, biologists, and philosophers to Darwinize every aspect of human behavior, turning its study into a scientific parlor game. But imaginative reconstructions of how things might have evolved are not science; they are stories” (228).

Fourth thought: Experts collide. When experts collide, what do we do? Here’s philosopher Bertrand Russell (Let the People Think 1941) offering a few rules of thumb:

(1)   That when experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain by a non-expert; and (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend judgment.

In other words, if it is wise to believe things and apportion our level of belief (high, medium, low) to good reasons and evidence, then when experts collide it should give us pause; when they agree, we should take their opinion into strong account; and when they say there is no ground for rendering a judgment, we should not run ahead of them. But there are problems (if not logically, emotionally) with Russell’s otherwise sensible formulation. What, for example, about Abraham and Isaac? Shall we never take intellectual or commitment leaps beyond the evidence? Isn’t it quite obvious, for example, that we all start with quite diverse philosophical premises (metaphysical and epistemological) that cannot be scientifically grounded before we engage in scientific practices? Given that we are embedded in the system we are trying to explain, our starting premises, if we are being honest with ourselves, cannot be taken for granted.

Also, what about the issue of Oedipal struggle in the classroom? Young people generally don’t like to defer to older generations or adhere to given systems of thought without really being presented with very good reasons for doing so. They like contrarians, conspiracy theories, counter-assertions, and populism. By laying Russell’s “follow the experts” trip on them, we’re inviting (justified) rebellion. In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky laid out the psychological dynamics of the underground man determined to engage in intellectual perversity precisely because he needs to think for himself, breath fresh emotional air, and assert his own being in the world. As teachers, we would do well to revisit Dostoevsky’s text because claims made in the classroom ought to keep everyone on their toes, including the instructor. We should keep complexity in play and avoid the temptation to offer pat responses to difficult issues. And we should honor ambiguity and Socrates. Jacob should wrestle the angel.

Fifth thought: Memes are interesting. For being an early and vigorous defender of the theory of evolution by natural selection against its critics, 19^th century biologist Julian Huxley became known as “Darwin’s bulldog.” In the late 20^th and early 21^st century, the sinewy and quick-witted Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins, in his equal enthusiasm for the power of evolutionary explanation, has been called “Darwin’s greyhound,” and in his seminal 1976 work on evolution, The Selfish Gene, he argues that what underlies all of life’s activity is the reproductive imperatives of genetic material: a chicken, as it were, is an egg’s way of making another egg; an anthill is a way to make another egg-filled queen ant, and so on.

Dawkins in turn argues that human language, being also a code for carrying information, functions analogously to genes, moving words, phrases, and ideas about like viruses from human mind to human mind, some being more successful at provoking humans to reproduce them than others.

In the last chapter of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins coins a term for the viral and replicating nature of culture and language. Cleverly mashing echoes of the words imitation and memory with genes, he calls those bits or clusters of culture and language that go viral memes. Memes, like genes, are replicators. Among their potential iterations, memes can travel small and independent (“Got milk?”), can mutate (“Got beer?”), and be carried along in some larger memetic cluster (the 23^rd Psalm—“The Lord is my Shepherd . . .”—in the King James Bible).

An obvious example of a meme is the repetition of the phrase “I prefer not to,” by Bartleby, a copyist in a 19th century law office, in Herman Melville’s well known short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener.” In the story, the phrase comes to infect the minds of the copyist’s employer and coworkers, and it has even taken on a life of its own outside the story itself, becoming readily associated with all forms of passive resistance to authority, from Thoreau to Gandhi to Martin Luther King.

Here are three sentences from the last chapter of Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene that might make for conversation starters in the classroom:

• “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” (206).
• “If a meme is to dominate the attention of a human brain, it must do so at the expense of ‘rival’ memes” (211).
• “When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes” (214).

Sixth thought: Face the religion question directly. The quote that appears below can be found at the beginning of biologist Stephen Gould’s book, Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995). It’s hard to contrast the West’s religious era with its secular era more clearly. So much is implied in the way that Gould has put this:

What transition could be more profound than ‘created in God’s image to rule a young world of stable entities made for our delectation,’ to ‘a fortuitous twig, budding but yesterday on an ancient and copious bush of ever changing, interrelated forms.’

What’s implied here? Numerous things (which can be laid out as movements, as in a piece of music). The movement…

• from an externally derived purpose for humans (we are here “to rule a young world”) to one of having no particular purpose whatsoever.
• from nature for us to nature indifferent to us.
• from authority (priestly rule) to expertise (the scientist’s rule).
• from short time to deep time.
• from entity, essence, and soul to flux and no-self.
• from determinate history to history as contingency.
• from center to margin.
• from human primacy to human belatedness.
• from human separation from other life forms to interrelation.
• from dualism to monism.
• from man derived of God’s “stuff” (in God’s image) to man derived of “animal stuff” (our genetic inheritance).
• from dignity to afterthought (or worse, no thought at all).
• from reason to chance.
• from The Tree as something to which we seek return (as in the Garden of Eden) to something we cannot escape (our evolutionary position as a twig on Darwin’s Tree of Life).
• from unchanging truth wins to deconstructive time wins.
• from human hopes win to death wins.
• from spiritual structuralism (the stable hierarchy or chain of being from God and the angels down) to materialist structuralism (we are embedded in a matrix consisting of atoms in flux in a void).

Concluding thought. Critical thinking—the attempt to arrive, as nearly and objectively as possible, at the truth of a matter—is a skill every college student should practice daily. As a habit of mind, it’s a form of real power—the power of critical thinking. As such, the following quote by Derek Bok might be useful for the college instructor to contemplate: “Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, nontechnical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education” (Our Underachieving Colleges, Princeton 2006, p. 8). Another thing important to college is aspect seeing (seeing things from the vantage of different aspects or points of view, as when one gazes at an image that visually alternates between a vase and two faces). The cosmos is rich with ways that one can view it, and evolution is a rich vein for developing both critical thinking and aspect seeing. Learning to think about evolution is part of what it means to become a college educated person in the 21st century. So be brave. Raise the subject of evolution in class. Doubt and think.

__________

Here’s an example of aspect seeing (which, by the way, fascinated the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein). Do you see two faces or a curvy Martian?

And shall we call her Marilyn Martian?

The Bible Verse Reinhold Niebuhr Chose As Most Essential

If but one Bible verse survived after a global cataclysm, what verse would you hope got preserved?

The famous theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was asked this question in 1954 of a magazine editor, and here was his response:

The passage of the Bible which I would choose is Ephesians 4:32, “And be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” I take it that the purpose is to find a passage of Scripture which will contain as much as possible of the whole message of the Bible. I have chosen this particular passage because it combines the high point of the Christian ethic, which is forgiving love, with a reference to the whole basis of the ethic, which is the historical revelation in Christ. We are asked to forgive one another. The charity of forgiveness is, however, not possible as a duty. It is only possible in terms of the knowledge that we are ourselves sinners, and that we have been forgiven. It therefore combines the Christian Gospel with the Christian ethic in succinct form.

The contrast with Nietzsche and our post-Christian era is stark here. Nietzsche would have called Niebuhr’s response an example of slave morality. The very notion that you should be generous with people and cut them breaks surrounding their faults and bad behavior because God in Christ has been generous with you and absorbed your own faults and bad behavior on the cross, sounds nice but makes you a debtor obligated to a master (as those you forgive in turn become debtors to you).

It is, in other words, inherently guilt producing. When you inevitably fail the standard, it sets up a round of personal recriminations, requests for fresh forgiveness from your master (Christ), and renewed attempts to punish yourself by putting up with stupid, lazy, and bad people exactly as Christ puts up with you. 

And who benefits from this guilt? Nietzsche would say the mediocre, life’s losers (which is why they advocate it). It tames those who excel and gives the undeserving things for free.

Freud might also add salt to this wound, arguing that once you accept such a relationship to others and to God, if you fail and then don’t set up this guilt-cycle consciously, you’ll do so unconsciously (harming yourself by “accident” as a form of self-inflicted punishment).

Still, given the alternative, this seems a fair trade to most people, and why there are so many more professing Christians than will-to-power Nietzscheans in the world. Christianity of the sort promoted by Niebuhr is a refuge from the Darwinian storm, a place for people to breathe the air of generosity together. It is not tit-for-tat (a typical Darwinian exchange if two members of the same species are cooperating and not at one another’s throats), but tit-regardless-of-your-tat. It is an invitation to transcend the game altogether (at least for a while).

In this sense, ancient Christianity’s response to ancient Judaism anticipates contemporary Christianity’s response to our own post-Christian, Darwinian, and capitalist world. Just as early Christianity was push back against strict obedience to the Mosaic law (“an eye for an eye,” etc.), so today’s Christianity is push back against the dog-eat-dog treadmills of the 21st century.

Somewhere love has to prevail even where it induces in us guilt, servitude, and obligation to the One who (supposedly) went first.

__________

But this is where Christianity misses something important about human nature. Generosity is not best secured by obligation to Christ, but by prosperity.

In other words, Jews, Darwinian atheists, and capitalists are surely no more or less generous in practice than Christians who have taken a vow of poverty (for example), and this has to do with tit-for-tat arrangements that make for general prosperity. People who do not enforce the law among themselves, do not assert their own will-to-power, and do not engage in trade and lending for money, have set themselves up for cycles of resentment, not generosity. It wasn’t better morally in the Middle Ages when lending money was considered a sin and cathedral building absorbed a great deal of a community’s energy. It’s better now. And it’s not because of Christ, it’s because of prosperity grounded in Darwinian and capitalist selfishness.

Tell me that’s not true.

And this is why Marxism doesn’t work either. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” has a pleasant ring to it. Indeed, it sounds very much like a secular version of Niebuhr’s favored biblical passage. But in practice it’s a nightmare (as is Christianity).

Better is the below verse from the Hebrew Bible. Contra Niebuhr, it’s the passage I would want to see survive a global calamity. The verse is Micah 6:8. It gets the justice and mercy balance right. And it has the quality of an elegant mathematical formula, a reduction of religion to elements that I, as an agnostic, can absorb and endorse. The translation I’m quoting from is the King James:

He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?

My agnostic translation: Do justly, love empathy, doubt.

And in doing justly I think it’s only fair and empathic to say that I don’t like the author’s flagrant male gendering of the addressor (God) and the addressee (man), rendering women invisible. And in keeping with humility before the ontological mystery (the mystery of being), I think it’s fair to ask how the author knows that God is male. Or what God has shown us. Or even that God exists.

On analysis, in other words, the verse breaks down under its own weight. And that’s why I like it. It’s what makes for the verse’s beauty and power. The author’s admonishments invite scrutiny upon themselves with the same gestures that are advocated.

Isn’t that great?

And this is why I think that Zizek’s critique of charitable giving and philanthropy in the below video, though clever, is ultimately mistaken, harkening back, in Marxist form, to the Pauline moral error that Niebuhr endorsed.

A List Of Republican Dog Whistles That No Longer Seem To Work

These don’t get Republicans to 50 percent + 1 in elections as readily as they used to:

• The pro-torture dog whistle,
• the drug war dog whistle,
• the anti-immigration dog whistle,
• the anti-gay dog whistle,
• the fear-of-terrorism dog whistle,
• the anti-Muslim dog whistle,
• the anti-crime dog whistle,
• the black menace dog whistle,
• the anti-feminist dog whistle,
• the anti-abortion dog whistle,
• the anti-Obamacare dog whistle,
• the anti-UN dog whistle,
• the have-prayer-in-schools dog whistle,
• the save-our-automatic weapons (!) dog whistle,
• the war-on-Christmas dog whistle,
• the increase-military-spending dog whistle,
• the anti-China dog whistle,
• the axis-of-evil dog whistle.

Conservatives are suddenly coming across largely as cranks when they deploy these. But the hysteria, fear, and emotional pain that adheres to these issues are still with us. It’s just that they’re not infecting more than half the voting population (as they have in the past).

I wonder why this is. Is it as simple as demographics? Internet exposure? After the presidential election, it feels like the country may have shifted as starkly as when the 1950s turned into the 1960s. The Obama era seems to be representing the permanent consolidation of cultural liberalism in the country–the end of numerous aspects of the culture wars (not within the Republican Party, of course, but nationally).

My guess is that conservatives will become less politicized and more insular going forward. But where will psychological pain find its expression? Who or what will be left for projection, demonizing, and moral panic? Is there really no going back on such things as gay marriage?

Even Fox News is Not Pure Enough

Tea Partiers are starting to engage in boycotts of Fox News. Strange. This is at PoHuff:

“Particularly after the election, Fox keeps turning to the left,” said Stan Hjerlied, 75, of Fort Collins, Colo., and a participant in the boycott. He pointed to an interview Fox News CEO Roger Ailes gave after the election in which he said that the Republican Party and Fox News need to modernize, especially around immigration. “So we are really losing our only conservative network.” [...]

Donnie Farner, 48, works as a chimney sweep in central Pennsylvania and runs a website, Proud Conservative, which sells right-leaning memorabilia like “Liberals Are Friggin Idiots” T-shirts and bumper stickers which read “Ten Out of Ten Terrorists Recommend Voting Democrat.”

He said staying away from Fox News, and in particular its website, is harder than he realized.

“It is honestly because Fox is everywhere. If you are on Twitter, you click on a link, chances are it might go through Mediaite or Drudge, but it ends up at Fox because Fox originated the story.”

He quickly clicks away, instead relying on Glenn Beck’s website The Blaze to stay informed.

The goofballs. And the “One America network” is supposedly coming this summer (yet another challenge to Fox News from its right).

President Obama has driven the Republican Party’s members into a state of confusion. He has their number. The right has fractured. Expect a third party run in 2016.

Bill Maher on the New Pope

A (Dark) Thought for Spring

Sara Davis, writing for The Smart Set website from Drexel University, links contemporary zombie fascination with vanitas still life Dutch paintings (and Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible):

[T]oday’s bogeyman and morality tale is a decaying body, a walking (or running) death’s head that all the cardio and training in the world can’t outrace. Zombies mock us, like the half-eaten fruits of the Dutch golden age and the weary speaker of Ecclesiastes, that though we may define ourselves by what and how we consume, it is all a pretty distraction from how we will be consumed.

In other words, gym culture gives rise to zombie culture in the same way that capitalist global trade (whether 17th century Dutch or ancient Phoenecian) gives rise to the recoiling underground man–the artist or writer who declares the following: “Pleasure is fleeting; time is passing. One day you will die. Momento mori.“

But the sun is still shining (for now). And the kitty cat of spring is purring. She’ll soon be warming our laps. Whatever works.

__________

Above painting image: George Flegel (Dutch circa 1630). Wikipedia Commons.

Jerry Coyne’s Claim: Science And Religion Are Not Compatible

The religious emperor has no clothes? Evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne is being a bit of a bomb thrower here with his claim that science and religion are flat out incompatible. See if you agree with his arguments. Is he clearing fog or generating a bit of it himself?

_________

To my mind, one of Coyne’s strongest arguments comes around the 13 minute mark when he notes that most Americans blatantly admit that they would ignore a scientific conclusion if it contradicted their faith. What could be more incompatible with the scientific attitude than that?

X Marks the Flop: The Real Problem for Cultural Conservatives Going Forward

Whether you’re an anti-gay evangelical activist or a Muslim dreaming of a new caliphate, here’s the really big picture: liberal attitudes are well adapted to urban life and culturally conservative ones are less so. And the world’s demographics are moving toward greater numbers of urban dwellers.

That’s pretty much checkmate. To have a growing “medieval values coalition” in the world, you need lots of people living in small towns and rural areas. But that’s not where things are going.

Think of a state like New York in the United States. Two-thirds of the state’s voters reside in the city of New York proper. Two-thirds. How does a cultural conservative win a democratic election in the state absent winning the urban vote?

Answer: he doesn’t.

And the demographics of New York state are the demographics coming to the entire globe in 2050. Think about that.

The below United Nations data chart ought to be on the wall of every politically interested person, left or right. It focuses the mind. The blue line plots the percentage of urban dwellers in the world. The green line plots the percentage of rural dwellers. The chart begins at 1950 and projects out to 2050.

The large “X” that the intersecting lines generate is what ought to startle because it shows that the urban/rural percentages change places over time. In other words, there was once a roughly 70-30 divide in favor of rural dwellers in the world (in 1950). It will be the exact opposite in 2050 (70-30 in favor of urban dwellers).

The below chart stops at 2050, but the urban trend doesn’t. By century’s end, demographers project a 90-10 urban/rural split in the human population. 90-10. These numbers are great for the production of cultural liberals and left of center mayors in the world (like Los Angeles’s Antonio Villaragosa, Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel, and New York’s Mike Bloomberg). It’s not so great for the production of reactionary-minded traditionalists (at least in substantial numbers).

The joker in the deck of this global urban trend is the international airport. Yes, plague may one day come to the demographic rescue of cultural conservatism. (See the excellent and disturbing movie, Contagion, for a plausible dramatization of how such a scenario could play out.) In an apocalyptic calamity of the global plague variety, culturally conservative ruralists could well inherit the Earth after all.

__________

A Nice Example of How Conspiracy Theories (and Religions) Work

The below video is a perfect deconstruction of conspiracy theories and religious stories (in my view).

Lay before the world an engaging and logically possible narrative, highlighting along the way anything that might lend it plausibility. Then wait for people who want to believe it (for reasons other than the ones you’ve actually given for believing it) to believe it.

Never mind that the logically possible narrative may not be how things actually are or even probably are.

Oh, and hope you net some smart people over time (such as Thomas Aquinas). They’ll think of yet more reasons to buy the preferred narrative. The story can then take on a mutating viral life of its own.

Conspiracy theories and religious stories are shell games for the conscious mind that allow underlying psychological dynamics to play themselves out. They give a person permission to feel emotions he or she would otherwise find hard to justify (such as that you might be happy when you learn of presidents shot, towers collapsing, or rich unbelievers getting their comeuppance).

Don’t you know I’m telling the truth?

The Change-Genders

At National Review Online is the following description of the Violence against Women Act: ”[It] includes provisions regarding homosexual, bisexual, and transgender victims of domestic violence.”

This is true. And here’s Texas Congressman Steve Stockman’s reaction to the transgender part (as also reported at NRO):

This is helping the liberals, this is horrible. Unbelievable. What really bothers — it’s called a women’s act, but then they have men dressed up as women, they count that. Change-gender, or whatever. How is that — how is that a woman?

Um. Is he serious?

Transgender discrimination is real. It’s ugly. It needs to stop.

A T-Shirt I’d Like to See

If I were going to make a t-shirt and sell it, here’s what it would say:

Show Me the Evidence

Just because something is logically possible,

it doesn’t mean it’s actual or even probable.

__________

If people brought this simple rule of thumb to the world, wouldn’t it be nice?

Why Do Grandmas (Post-Menopausal Women) Exist?

Judith Shulevitz at The New Republic homes in on two theories: the “stopping-early hypothesis” and the “grandmother hypothesis”:

In 1957, the evolutionary biologist George Williams proposed what is called the “stopping-early” hypothesis: Middle-age women need baby-free time to usher their youngest children into adulthood. In the 1980s, an American anthropologist named Kristen Hawkes and two colleagues came up with a different explanation. They had gone to northern Tanzania to study the foraging habits of the Hadza, the last known hunter-gatherers in Africa. While there, the scholars were struck by how strong the tribe’s old women were and how, rather than live off the fruits of others’ labor, they worked hard digging up the tribe’s main starch staple, a deeply-buried tuber. “Their acquisition rates were similar to the rates of younger women,” Hawkes told me, “but these old ladies were spending even more time” than their daughters gathering food, leaving camp earlier, coming back later, and bringing back more than they needed. The anthropologists also noticed that many children with grandmothers or great-aunts had faster growth rates than their counterparts.

From these slim clues, Hawkes and her colleagues developed the “grandmother hypothesis,” which holds that women past childbearing age helped not just their children, but their children’s children, and lengthened the human lifespan in the process. Without babies of their own to lug around, grandmothers had both time and a very good reason to be useful. When they eked out food for their daughters’ children, they reduced the chance that those children would die. That gave the grandmothers a better chance of passing on their own predisposition to longevity. [...]

Two decades later, the grandmother hypothesis has gone from oddball conjecture to one of the dominant theories of why we live so long, breed so fast, and are so smart. The extra calories and care supplied by women in their long post-fertile period subsidized the long pre-fertile period that is childhood. And that’s what made us fully human.

I’ll add a few guesses to these hypotheses (which is what we’re basically doing absent hard evidence):

• Group selection. If group selection plays a role in human evolution–and there are evolutionary biologists like David Sloan Wilson who argue that it does, then giving care to grandmas (and not just exploiting their labor) adds dignity and value to the tribe as a whole. It says: Healthy or unhealthy, we don’t leave our wounded and elderly on the battlefield of life to die. We are all ‘in’ with one another. We rise and fall together. This bonding gesture between young and old makes every individual more willing to take risks on behalf of the others in the tribe, and to expect similar gestures in return. This could certainly be an evolved group trait that raises the fitness of the group as a whole.
• Grandmas raise courage. The existence of grandmas may add spine to warriors. Men fight for the women and children back at the home base, not for themselves. This gives men a righteous cause born of love (for mothers, for mates, for children) and probably makes them more effective and less self-absorbed fighters.
• Grandmas inspire love. Grandmas may have brought selective pressure to the evolution of love. We love our mothers and grandmothers. Their bond with us runs deep. And the emotion of love makes for a stronger collective group. When you love somebody so much that you will not let them die or be abandoned no matter what, you demonstrate traits that work in more adaptive contexts as well. (Who wants a mate that dishonors and abandons his or her parents? If you’re in the mating game, you want to have a reputation for loving your parents.)
• Grandmas carry cultural memory and know-how. This one seems almost too obvious to point out.

These guesses broadly fit within the “grandma hypothesis” generally. The extension of the lives of post-menopausal women have all sorts of benefits to group survival (some obvious, others less so). 

If anybody can think of other evolutionary advantages conferred from extending the lives of grandmas (and grandpas as well), I’d be curious to know your thoughts. It’s an important issue going forward, obviously. Social policy in the United States seems to be favoring the idea that the elderly are, on balance, a burden. And we worship youth and fear growing old.

Ye Shall Be As Gods?

Wearable computing in the form of smartwatches may be the next big extension of man (and woman). Here’s The Los Angeles Times on what Apple appears to be up to:

[Smartwatch owners may soon be able to] read emails, Facebook notifications or caller ID by simply glancing down at their wrists.

The smartwatch, connected wirelessly to the iPhone, would tap the power of the voice assistant Siri to control music, dictate messages or get directions. Forget the wallet? Just swipe the watch near a scanner to make a payment. And as you jog home later, the kinetic energy of your movement would keep the battery charged while the iWatch measures your heart rate and the distance covered.

I suppose it will also double as a cock ring for men, applying real time data on blood engorgement while you get it on.

As humans acquire ever more abilities akin to magic, what’s left for God to do for us? Will such technology spell the decline of religion over time? O will it simply ramp up people’s sense of dissatisfaction, emptiness, and fear so that religion becomes more appealing?

I suspect it’s the former. Over the next century, religion is on the water-slide downward. People won’t be happier, but they’ll be less religious. Most people, as they come of age and move from childhood innocence to experience in the 21st century, will realize that there is no one who can provide their lives with sure meaning, and in seeking for some adequate substitute for religious certainty, they are likely to have an experience pretty much like that described by Wallace Stevens in his “Of Modern Poetry” (1942):

The poem of the mind in the act of finding

What will suffice. It has not always had

To find: the scene was set; it repeated what

Was in the script.

Then the theatre was changed

To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

Sounds like the Republican Party is having a similar problem right now. Time to be creative.

A New Republican Language on Gay Marriage?

Here’s hoping:

CPAC Attendee: No Need to Apologize for Slavery

A white southern male at the CPAC conservative convention this afternoon, during a diversity break-out session, defended white pride, segregation, and slavery in dialogue with a black conservative. Stunning. And other CPAC attendees were giving him support. Even more stunning.

__________

Notice that the white guy saw no reason to apologize for slavery. After all, it provided black people with housing and food. The white guy’s name, by the way, is Scott Terry. He’s 30-years-old. Pathetic.

But it gets worse. ThinkProgress interviewed him after his public remarks and reports the following:

When asked by ThinkProgress if he’d accept a society where African-Americans were permanently subservient to whites, he said “I’d be fine with that.” He also claimed that African-Americans “should be allowed to vote in Africa,” and that “all the Tea Parties” were concerned with the same racial problems that he was.

At one point, a woman challenged him on the Republican Party’s roots, to which Terry responded, “I didn’t know the legacy of the Republican Party included women correcting men in public.”

It’s such a relief to see the Republican Party’s neurosis and resentment ping-ponging among themselves and not infecting the rest of the country and the world (which is what would have happened had Barack Obama not won reelection).

The saddest part of this for me is the guy’s age. How can someone born in 1983 talk like a white southerner born in 1923? My guess: he was home schooled and missed the news that all humans on earth share a common African father going back just sixty thousand years ago.

Did you know that?

Books from Underground

Rand Paul Speaks the Truth

I’m no fan of Rand Paul, but his directness in the below Politico article on the GOP’s national troubles impresses me. Here’s Politico:

Republican leaders are questioning the interventionist foreign policy that President George W. Bush and the party’s last two nominees paid obeisance to; party elites are urging a more tolerant or even supportive stance on gay rights and would be just fine if abortion wasn’t discussed at all; [...]

“We have to, as a Republican Party, get bigger, not smaller, and we’re a party that’s becoming more regionalized and I think a smaller, less significant national party,” said Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, deadpanning: “We’re a great red state party.”

The way to compete in blue America, Paul said, is to embrace a more restrained foreign policy and take a federalist approach on values issues.

“If you want to get together a majority in California I think your only chance is to be more of a libertarian Republican,” said Paul, who is considering a presidential bid in 2016 [...]

Rand Paul is right, of course. The old right wing foreign policy and traditional values canards can no longer deliver 50% of the electorate in national elections. But whether yet another white southern male is the vehicle for carrying the libertarian rebranding of the Republican Party to a national audience in 2016 is another question.

Here’s Jon Stewart, using Glenn Beck as his foil, deconstructing the paranoia, intellectual confusion, and panic that surrounds contemporary American conservatism:

Ludwig Wittgenstein for Beginners

First thought. To get a handle on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, one can start with a simple question: what does the scientist (as opposed to the philosopher) do and accomplish?

The answer seems pretty straightforward. The scientist reasons and experiments her way to very definite discoveries. She achieves these discoveries because her matter is, well, matter. Matter, unlike mind or a concept like the good, is subject to such things as observation, controlled manipulation, modeling in space and time, and public verification.

Science is a very powerful method for reducing complex material things to simpler material things and general principles. In science, it makes sense to say that the truth about your body is that it consists of cells and those cells consist of atoms. Scientists know this. They have discovered these things. Likewise, it has been learned that the astonishing diversity of species comes from natural selection. Again, scientists know this. It’s a jaw-dropping discovery.

And for Wittgenstein that’s the problem with the traditional philosopher. Like the scientist, her ambition is discovery, to get at the truth of matters either by reduction (analysis) or generalization (synthesis). But she applies methods (Occam’s razor, etc.) to things for which no material and therefore no objective properties actually exist.

Wittgenstein and language-games. Wittgenstein would have us think of nonscientific languages as games. In learning to play chess, for example, we don’t ask what a king is in some ultimate sense, but where the king goes on the chess board and how it moves in this particular game. We might recognize, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, a “family resemblance” between the chessboard’s king and a medieval king, but we don’t concern ourselves with getting at the essence of “kingness,” the truth of “kingness,” or any definition of “king” that might transcend its immediate contextual usages in the game we’re actually playing. Likewise with a word in a language game: its usage is driven by the game it is being deployed in; it is context specific.

Usage is important here, for Wittgenstein takes words and languages to function as tools for getting very particular things done (woo a lover, describe an idea, declare a couple “husband and wife,” write a poem, get someone out of jail). We should, therefore, be content with the historical contingencies by which our words and languages get used and not force them to do work that they really can’t (such as tell us what the ultimate truth is about time or the relation of mind to matter). Here’s how Wittgenstein puts it at the end of his famously difficult and obscure little book, Tractatus:

The inexpressible indeed exists. This shows itself. It is the mystical. The right method in philosophy would be to say nothing except what can be said using sentences such as those of natural science–which of course has nothing to do with philosophy–and then, to show those wishing to say something metaphysical that they failed to give any meaning to certain signs in their sentences. [...] Of what we cannot speak we must be silent.

What Wittgenstein is suggesting here is that the ultimate truth and nature of free will, knowledge, consciousness, determinism, happiness, justice, and the inward heart cannot be reduced in language to simpler elements or derived from more general principles because languages are not consistently empirical in that way. Languages are logic and rule based games, historically contingent. They can’t step out of their usages in specific contexts and do things they aren’t designed to do. And so the philosopher’s wisest chess move, on being confronted with a metaphysical provocation (“What is truth?” “What is time?” “What is equality in relation to liberty?”) is silence, to not move at all.

In The Blue Book, Wittgenstein is a little gentler. He concedes that the philosopher still has something to do. She has work. But it is not to unify, generalize, simplify, reduce, or explain:

Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything.

What then is the philosopher to do? What is her job? Wittgenstein would replace ambitious philosophical explanation of the world with description.

Description of what? Of how words are actually used as tools in particular sentences and contexts. That should be the philosopher’s work. Wittgenstein once wrote the following in one of his notebooks: “My whole task consists in explaining the nature of sentences” (Quoted in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1967, vol. 8, 330). And the philosopher A. C. Grayling sums up Wittgenstein’s position in his Tractatus this way: “The proper task of philosophy, he says, is to make the nature of our thought and talk clear, for then the traditional problems of philosophy will be recognized as spurious and will accordingly vanish” (Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction, 2001, 18).

Richard Rorty on Wittgenstein. The conclusion that some philosophers (such as Isaiah Berlin and Richard Rorty) have drawn from Wittgenstein is that we should stop trying to hold together in a single theory concepts such as freedom and equality, determinism and responsibility, unity and diversity. There’s simply nothing that’s going to satisfactorily unify such concepts in a coherent manner. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t function individually as useful tools in our “language-games” (perhaps the best-known phrase coined by Wittgenstein).

Here’s how Rorty bottom-lines Wittgenstein in his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989, p. 11-12):

[Traditional philosophers assume vocabularies are] reducible to other vocabularies, or capable of being united with all other vocabularies in one grand unified super vocabulary. If we avoid this assumption, we shall not be inclined to ask questions like “What is the place of consciousness in a world of molecules?” [...] or “What is the relation of language to thought?” We should not try to answer such questions, for doing so leads either to the evident failures of reductionism or to the short-lived successes of expansionism. We should restrict ourselves to questions like “Does our use of these words get in the way of our use of those other words?” This is a question about whether our use of tools is inefficient, not a question about whether our beliefs are contradictory.

And here’s Rorty offering examples (Ibid. p. 12):

[Y]oung German theology students of the eighteenth century–like Hegel and Holderlin–found that the vocabulary in which they worshiped Jesus was getting in the way of the vocabulary in which they worshiped the Greeks. Yet again, the use of Rossetti-like tropes got in the way of the early Yeats’s use of Blakean tropes.

The gradual trial-and-error creation of a new, third, vocabulary–the sort of vocabulary developed by people like Galileo, Hegel, or the later Yeats–is not a discovery about how old vocabularies fit together. [...] Such creations are not the result of successfully fitting together pieces of a puzzle. They are not discoveries of a reality behind appearances, or an undistorted view of the whole picture with which to replace myopic views of its parts. The proper analogy is with the invention of new tools to take the place of old tools. To come up with such a vocabulary is more like discarding the lever and the chock because one has envisaged the pully, or like discarding gesso and tempera because one has now figured out how to size canvas properly.

In other words, when we’re inventing a new vocabulary, and think we’re getting closer to the ultimate truth of some matter, we’re actually just inventing another way to talk. We’re adding to the history of language-games another game. To quote The Spinners, we’re participating in the “games people play.” We’re doing music; we’re doing poetry; we’re not getting closer to the highest reality, which is ineffable. Here’s Rorty again (from Essays on Heidegger and Others 1991, p. 65):

The later Wittgenstein saw all philosophical attempts to grasp type A entities [God, ultimate truth, time, etc.], all attempts to express the ineffability of such entities, as succeeding only in creating one more language-game.

So just stop it. That’s Wittgenstein’s dour advice. Rorty’s advice is different: no need to keep silent, but know that when you’re philosophizing you’re really just doing poetry.

Paul Horwich on Wittgenstein. Aside from concluding that where philosophy apes science it is off track, there are other reasons that Wittgenstein is pessimistic about traditional philosophical ambitions. In an excellent short essay on Wittgenstein in The New York Times, philosopher Paul Horwich offers two of them. Here’s one:

[O]ur concepts exhibit a highly theory-resistant complexity and variability. They evolved, not for the sake of science and its objectives, but rather in order to cater to the interacting contingencies of our nature, our culture, our environment, our communicative needs and our other purposes. As a consequence the commitments defining individual concepts are rarely simple or determinate, and differ dramatically from one concept to another.

And here’s another:

[T]raditional philosophy is necessarily pervaded with oversimplification; analogies are unreasonably inflated; exceptions to simple regularities are wrongly dismissed.

Wittgenstein’s conclusion according to Horwich? The philosopher can (at best) be descriptive and deconstructive, not explanatory and constructive. She can point out where the great systematizing philosophers of the past fail (Hegel, etc.), but not where philosophers of the present and future might succeed. Because they can’t. At least not with regard to metaphysics.

Wittgenstein, in other words, brings philosophers to an aporia (an impasse) with regard to ever reaching any greater or deeper truth than language-game description. And when the philosopher tries to move beyond language-game description into ultimate explanation, she imagines herself a scientist but is actually a poet deep in a language-game herself. And so contemporary philosophers who agree with Wittgenstein, like Paul Horwich, talk like this:

[I]t was always a mistake to extrapolate from the fact that empirical concepts, such as red or magnetic or alive stand for properties with specifiable underlying natures to the presumption that the notion of truth must stand for some such property as well.

Wittgenstein versus Augustine. According to Wittgenstein, truth has no underlying essence or nature (or at least none that can be explicated in words). The way we use the word truth in language is always context specific. One of Wittgenstein’s own examples is Augustine puzzling over the nature of time, which Avrum Stroll summarizes this way (The Columbia History of Western Philosophy 1999, p. 635):

Wittgenstein emphasizes that Augustine’s problems are of his own making. He wishes to impose a model that will simplify and order a seemingly chaotic set of uses of the concept of time. But this is both unnecessary and confusing. As Bishop Berkeley said of philosophers, “We first cast up a dust and then complain we cannot see.”

Attention to the contextual usages of a word like time reveals aspects of its form (its family resemblances to other contexts in which it is used), but never its essence. Like the Zen ox pursued by the meditator, our hunting of time eludes us the deeper we try to penetrate its ultimate meaning. We find ourselves lost in a fog–a fog of our own words (tools) misapplied.

Wittgenstein’s logical atomism and pictorialism in the Tractatus. Avrum Stroll writes that “[Wittgenstein's] Tractatus begins with an affirmation of a species of logical atomism . . .” (Ibid. 631). What Stroll means by this is that Wittgenstein posits a fundamental unit of language that cannot be reduced any further, and so it can only be described, not explained by recourse to some deeper analysis or synthesis. For Wittgenstein, that atomic unit is not a word in language or a thing in the world, but a fact.

A fact, in Wittgenstein’s use of the term, is two things in logical relation (the car is or is not in the garage) and that fact can be logically or visually pictured (we can see in our mind’s eye a car in a garage or an empty garage, but we cannot see a car both in a garage and not in a garage at the same time): ”‘An elementary fact is thinkable’ means: we can form a mental picture of it. [...] It is as impossible to say something that contradicts logic as it is to draw a figure that contradicts the laws of space or to specify the coordinates of a nonexistent point” (Tractatus 3.001, 3.032).

And so our mental world is built up around logically possible facts, and our sentences reflect this. Facts are the atomic units of possible existence. No thing or word is an island, each is part of a chain (two linked things belonging to a coherent sentence). In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein puts it this way: ”In an elementary fact the objects hang in one another like the links of a chain” (2.03), and “God can create anything so long as it does not contradict the laws of logic” (3.031).

And so Wittgenstein’s second sentence in the Tractatus is this: “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” (1.1). Again, this is because no thing in the world or word in a sentence is an island. The irreducible unit of language is the fact, the relation within a particular and logically possible language-game.

Wittgenstein’s toy cars and dolls. What inspired Wittgenstein’s insight that a sentence really only makes “sense” when it reflects a logical relation in space and time? According to his Notebooks, Wittgenstein was reading a newspaper account of a courtroom reenactment of a car accident. The reenactment was done using toy cars and dolls. This proved to be a “eureka moment” for Wittgenstein, for it occurred to him that this is exactly what a coherent sentence does: it maps, pictures, or models objects in a logically possible “state of affairs” which the reader then apprehends and “sees” (turns into a mental picture). Likewise, musical notations mirror real sounds, which are then read off by a musician and translated into music.

From this early insight of Wittgenstein’s, one can see immediately its implication for non-empirical languages: what is a language really mapping and reflecting with precision if it is not a material situation (such as a car wreck in space and time)? Answer: nothing. And so “Of what we cannot speak we must be silent” (Tractatus 7).

But what then of Wittgenstein’s own sentences? Wittgenstein explains cryptically: “My sentences are illuminating in the following way: to understand me you must recognize my sentences–once you have climbed out through them, on them, over them–as senseless. (You must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after you have climbed up on it.) You must climb out through my sentences; then you will see the world correctly” (Ibid. 6.54).

Wittgenstein and the fungal rhizome. If you are determined to go on speaking and writing against the early Wittgenstein’s advice, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s metaphor of the fungal rhizome (as opposed to the rooted tree) bears resemblances to language-games, and may be a good way to approach your speaking and writing. The fungal rhizome exploits contingencies (such as cracks in a sidewalk, moist shadows of inattention) and ramifies in whatever direction suits its purposes. In the introduction to the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, the editors of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (2010, pg. 1148) write the following:

Wheras the traditional model for knowledge is drawn from plants with “roots” [...], Delueze and Guattari draw their metaphor from fungal “rhizomes”–a network of threads that can send up new growths anywhere along their length, not subject to centralized control or structure. The logic (or rather, nonlogic) is exemplified by invasive species such as mushrooms and crabgrass that proliferate without a controlling structure. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, the same antihierarchical perspective is what may have led Walt Whitman to choose Leaves of Grass (1855) as the title for his book of poems.

Of the rhizome itself, Delueze and Guattari write this: “[I]n nature, roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one [as normally imagined]. [...] Even the book as a natural reality is a taproot, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves” (Ibid. 1456). And so Delueze and Guattari admonish the writer in this fashion: “Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant! Don’t sow, grow offshoots! Don’t be one or multiple, be multiplicates!” (1462).

Wittgenstein sounds his barbaric yawp? Once you believe language-games and not the pursuit of truth are what humans are really engaged in, life can become play for you (irony, gesture, creation, interpretation, emphasis, reordering, choosing, poetry, fashioning, silence). In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes this: ”So in the end when one is doing philosophy one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound” (quoted in Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others 65).

This sentiment sounds very much like Walt Whitman’s “I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world!” But Wittgenstein is skeptical of the giddy and triumphant transcendentalist who imagines himself obtaining a holistic grasp on the world from a superior vantage, dominating it with his voice. Instead, Wittgenstein writes immediately after the sentence on his desire “to emit an inarticulate sound” the following (Ibid.):

[S]uch a sound is an expression only if it occurs in a particular language-game, which should now be described.

Described, not explained. What a downer Wittgenstein is in contrast with Whitman’s poetic optimism! But Wittgenstein is probably right. A chess move means nothing apart from its chess game. No gesture is an island. Language cannot achieve escape velocity from history and social meaning. For humans, there is no God’s eye view; no “view from nowhere” (Thomas Nagel’s phrase); no way to bootstrap yourself with a metalanguage or final language over the roofs of the world.

Two objections to Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein prefers “family resemblance” to essentialism in definition, and he might be wrong about this. If he is, a good deal of his critique concerning the impossibility of a metalanguage or final vocabulary arguably breaks down. For example, Wittgenstein insists that a word like “game” can never be adequately defined so that the definition holds across its range of usages. We must be content with “family resemblances” in the way the word gets used, and we shouldn’t imagine that we can arrive at an adequate genus-species definition of the Aristotelian sort that applies in all cases.

More traditional philosophers, such as David Kelley, have attempted to counter Wittgenstein by offering a definition of exactly the sort he holds impossible. Here’s Kelley’s definition of game (containing a genus and species): “[A] game is [genus] a form of recreation constituted by [species] a set of rules that specify an object to be attained and the permissible means of attaining it” (emphasis mine; The Art of Reasoning 1990, p. 50). Wittgenstein’s retort might be that Kelley has strained out the camel to swallow a gnat. Such a definition represents an impoverishment of the word’s rich and varied usage and emphasis in particular contexts.

A second objection to Wittgenstein is an argument from consequences: if he’s right, his advice to go silent on philosophical matters–or to merely describe states of affairs and then “leave the world as it is”–could have reactionary historical consequences going forward. Here’s the philosopher Michael Lynch, writing in The New York Times, expressing clear relief that Wittgenstein didn’t make his appearance on the world’s philosophical stage before John Locke: “Locke’s view that there are human rights, for example, didn’t leave the world as it was, nor was it intended to.” Snap!

If we’re ultimately ironic in our commitments, and really think all of our non-empirical languages fail at the level of rationality and coherence–and this largely brings us to privacy and silence, doesn’t that leave the world to the competition of true believers?

__________

Resources:

Grayling, A. C. Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2001).

Heaton, John and Judy Groves. Introducing Wittgenstein (Totem 1999).

Kelley, David. The Art of Reasoning (Norton 1990).

Kolak, Daniel (tr.). Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (Mayfield 1998).

Leitch, Vincent (Ed.). The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Norton 2010).

Popkin, Richard. The Columbia History of Western Philosophy (Columbia 1999).

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge 1989).

–Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge 1991).

Assert Yourself

The below video is a nice introduction to existentialism. And so is this brief passage written by historian Carlin Barton in her great book, Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (University of California Press 2001, 31-32):

On the morning of June 6, 1989, a riveting series of photographs appeared on the front page of the Union News in Springfield, Massachusetts; it showed a young Chinese man in a white shirt casually blocking with his body the advance of a line of tanks into Tiananmen Square. [...]

This was the Roman descrimen, the “moment of truth,” the equivocal and ardent moment when, before the eyes of others, you gambled what you were. This was the agon, the contest, when the truth was not so much revealed as created, realized, willed in the most intense and visceral way, the truth of one’s being, the truth of being.

When, before the eyes of the enemy Etruscans and their king and commander Porsena, Livy’s would-be assassin Marcius was threatened with torture by fire, the unarmed youth confounded the enemy by thrusting his right hand into the flames of the altar and standing, unflinching, while it burned. He said to the king, “See how cheaply men hold their bodies when they set their sights on glory” (2.12.13). With those words and that gesture he responded to the threat of torture. [...]

As the art historian Bettina Bergmann points out, the Romans had a taste for moments of high tension, frozen instants of “explosive emotions,” “excruciating suspended animation,” “moments of decision”: Medea contemplating her children with  a dagger on her lap; the sacrificial bull poised to receive the blow of the ax; the wounded gladiator anticipating the death blow; Phaedra clasping her letter to Hippolytus; Helen resisting the blandishments of Paris. Because of their desire to find and express the “truth” of their being in action, the Romans were eager to interpret any and every confrontation as an ordeal, an opportunity for the exercise of will.

How do you stake your being? Selfishly, sacrificially? Violently, nonviolently? Competitively, cooperatively?

Or are you in bad faith most of the time, pretending you have no choices to make or that you’re an utterly determined thing, like a stone (what Jean Paul Sartre called a being-in-itself as opposed to what each of us actually is, a being-for-itself, a being with choices)?

Sartre once illustrated bad faith this way (I’m paraphrasing): during a dinner date, a man (call him Frank) slips his hand under the table and rests it upon a woman’s knee (call her Indie for indecisive). Indie pretends that Frank’s hand is not there. The muscles in her thigh go limp. She keeps on talking as if nothing has happened. She acts as if Frank’s hand has no more significance than a napkin. Indie does this because she realizes that any decisive response she makes (either toward or away from Frank’s gesture, or to discuss it with him directly) entails a choice of her being, and she does not want to make that choice. So she fakes it. She stalls for time. She is in bad faith.

How about you? When are you going to stop cheating and faking your way through life, face difficult truths, and explicitly choose your way of being in the world, staking yourself–taking chances?

I’m speaking now to all cowards, myself included.

Will you always be Oedipus, unable to face the truth of your being, your eyes in your hands?

This is the work of life.

God is Immanent Through the Internet?

That’s Jim Gilliam’s thesis. The ghost of love has infected the global machine. A rather robust form of religious humanism, I’d say. To whom much is given, etc.