Noah and the Advance of Civilization

Posted on Tuesday 1 April 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I haven’t seen Noah and am not particularly inclined to, but I was struck by an essay by David Plotz in Slate, Noah’s Environmental Views Are a Disaster. In the film’s worldview, according to Plotz, the corruption mankind brings across the earth, by chopping trees and building sooty cities, is the motivation Yahweh has for wiping everything out and starting over.

It’s a strangely anti-human view of humanity, wherein mankind’s inherent desire to tame his surroundings and to build communities is painted as evil. Noah even scoffs at the very idea of labor. Tubal-Cain and his people mine, smelt, and hunt, to build towers and forge weapons. Their machine labor is contrasted unfavorably with the pastoral Noahites, who rely on a magical forest to supply trees for the ark…

In its nostalgic, unsophisticated view of the world and our place in it, Noah collaborates in the fantasy of certain parts of the environmental movement, which believe that Earth would be healed if there were fewer of us, living further apart from each other. Yet Aronofsky has it upside down. Cities are ecologically kinder than other forms of human habitation. They foster communities and human connections, they enable the advancement of science and the creation of great art. Cities reduce population growth, raise living standards, increase life expectancy, and enhance human freedom.

(I gather there’s some criticism by religious conservatives of Noah’s environmental themes, though I suspect it’s for different reasons than Plotz’s.)

Plot’s comments dovetail with an interesting essay in the Review section of the Sunday New York Times by an astrobiologist named Lewis Dartnell, called Civilization’s Starter Kit, which points out how interdependent everyone in advanced societies is on everyone else for even the basic (not to mention advanced) technological skills for producing goods they personally have no knowledge of.

Who has any real understanding of where their last meal came from or how the objects in their pockets were dug out of the earth and transformed into useful materials? What would we do if, in some science-fiction scenario, a global catastrophe collapsed civilization and we were members of a small society of survivors?

He offers some ideas for basic principles someone might need to restart civilization: germ theory, soap, agriculture. (The essay is a teaser for an upcoming book.)

So I wonder how far isolationists such as the Noahites Plotz describes would get, rebuilding civilization, retreating from communities and living on their own? Not very far I suspect. You don’t get iPhones or wide-screen TVs or the internet by sitting out in the woods suspicious of your neighbors. They’re the rewards of a global civilization, the division of labor, the specialization of skills, and the cumulative growth of knowledge beyond the ancient myths, so much of which is denied by so many, so many of whom are proud of it on the internet, which they use so unironically.

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The Greatest Generation

Posted on Saturday 29 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

In contrast to the standard cynicism about life “these days” or the future of America, there are a few with perspective on history (cf. Steven Pinker’s latest book) who take a more informed view. Here’s an unusually optimistic commentary by one of LA Times’ regular columnists. In contrast to the derisive refrain “kids these days…”, Chris Erskine thinks the greatest generation could be this one.

The greatest generation? Here’s three more cheers for millennials

That’s right: The current crop of young people, the millennials (hatched roughly 1982 to 2004), show all the signs of becoming the greatest generation in human history, surpassing the legendary minds of the Renaissance, or the American Revolution or Brokaw’s esteemed and very worthy WWII America.

They are inherently more adaptive, they are idealistic, they are tolerant of differences.

They are aspirational in all the right ways. At our prodding, they worked harder in high school than we ever did in college.

And, of course, they live in the age of the internet, the greatest tool for information and knowledge acquisition in human history, and the greatest tool for breaking down the walls of insular inculcation.

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Georges Delerue

Posted on Wednesday 26 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Every once in a while I pull off a CD for evening’s listening by Georges Delerue, a French composer of film scores who died in 1992. He seemed to be best known for light playful scores for French films, such as the 1980 film A Little Romance, for which he won an Oscar, but my interest in him was for the lovely, delicate, melancholy scores he did for English-language films, including especially The Day of the Dolphin (with George C. Scott), Silkwood (Meryl Streep), Agnes of God, Julia, and especially Black Robe, my favorite. (He also did Platoon, though that score was dominated by Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”.)

Black Robe may be his best, most complex score of those I know, but my heart belongs to The Day of the Dolphin, a movie I first chanced upon on TV one day at home when I was 18, and was struck by the music. I didn’t see the full film until years later, but at some point I managed to tape record the music off the TV, and did a reduction/transcription of the theme onto a piano score, which hand-written sheet music I still have somewhere in my file cabinet. It’s lovely and heartbreaking. (I liked the movie more than many people, it seems, though I admit it has plausibility issues. The desolate finale is striking, especially since no film today would ever end that way.)

Here’s the main theme, starting at about :30s. (You don’t need to watch the video, actually; just listen to the music.)

I actually saw Delerue, at a special screening at the Nuart Theatre in West LA, obviously more than 20 years ago. I don’t remember of which film. I remember that he was very short.

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Eternal Verities, Not

Posted on Tuesday 25 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Fascinating piece about how evangelical attitudes about abortion have changed dramatically since the 1960s, when Biblical passages were cited to deny that fetuses had souls and therefore abortions weren’t so bad.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/03/hobby_lobby_and_contraception_how_conservative_evangelicals_went_from_not.html

What changed? Politics, the article explains, to the point where evangelicals now denounce not only abortion but contraception.

It’s a good example how of how what many people assume has always been true or proper (like, for example, a particular style of marriage), has in fact not.

Ask most (white) evangelicals about the morality of abortion these days, and you’re certain to hear about its absolute immorality in most, if not all, circumstances. But this is a recent innovation in the history of evangelical belief, a product of political forces as well as new theological insight. That’s not to say that it’s illegitimate, only that—like more liberal evangelicals and mainline Protestants—conservatives aren’t immune to the winds of the world around them. Their beliefs, like those of the people around them, change with time and circumstance.

If the Hobby Lobby fight over the contraception mandate is any indication, we’re seeing history repeat itself. There’s a good chance that, in 10 years, conservative evangelicals will hail their opposition to birth control as a “timeless biblical truth,” the traditional view of “traditional” Christians.

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Cosmos and Creationism

Posted on Tuesday 25 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

A writer at Think Progress says that Cosmos is, indirectly, giving a lot of time to creationist ideas, despite the creationist critics demanding equal time (for nonsense vs sense, apparently).

http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/03/25/3418425/creationism-is-getting-a-lot-of-time-on-cosmos/

By discussing standard creationist arguments about the impossible perfectibility of the eyeball, for example, or denying that one species (dogs) can evolve from another (wolves).

Tyson isn’t ignoring creationism. Creationists wish Tyson were ignoring creationism. Tyson is instead standing on creationism’s home turf and playing by their rules. …

If the ways he’s critiquing creationism weren’t so interesting, his focus on just going through their arguments, dismantling them one after the other, would be tedious. But let’s not lose sight of the fact that this is an incredibly thorough discussion of creationism. Creationists are getting the discussion they claim to wish to be having.

What creationists are upset about is that it’s not a discussion that bothers to treat their ideas like they have any scientific merit. After all, any good scientific question should eventually lead to an answer that generates more questions. Creationism short-circuits that process, instead arguing that there’s an end to questions — that, eventually, you can drill down enough to get to God — God did it or God willed it to be. No more questions needed.

That just can’t be a valid scientific approach. And, so far, week after week, that’s been the subtext to Cosmos.

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Religion and Science, Natural or Not

Posted on Tuesday 25 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Connor Wood summarizes the thesis of Robert McCauley’s book Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not.

McCauley believes that maturationally natural systems get at the core difference between science and religion – religion relies on them, while science shuns them. Since our minds find it easier to see the world in terms of persons and goals, religions often construe the world as being goal-oriented and animate. Meanwhile, science challenges our basic, gut-level assumptions by insisting that the world is not filled with personality and agency, that nature is not goal-oriented. Because this mechanistic view of nature goes against our basic cognitive predispositions, it takes effort to achieve it. Science, in other words, is hard. And religion is just what comes naturally.

Wood counters with ideas from Tanya Luhrmann that religion isn’t necessarily so easy and intuitive; “that modern American evangelical Christians work very, very hard to develop their spiritual senses – that prayer is work, in other words.”

McCauley is almost certainly right that the human brain finds it easier to think in terms of personality and agency than in terms of mechanical causation. We’re prone to making predictable cognitive errors – something Francis Bacon already pointed out in the 17th century – and one of them is to see creatures where none exist. But it’s not obvious that this tendency toward cognitive error explains everything about religion, or even most of it. Despite the fact that religiosity is apparently correlated with agential (that is, social) thinking, and that people with social-cognitive deficits, such as those on the autism spectrum, tend to be less religious than average, religion clearly does require significant work. After all, McCauley’s argument isn’t that religion is a social thing and science isn’t (although that would be an interesting book); it’s that religion rides our basic cognitive predispositions, whereas science counters them. If it takes serious effort to learn how to be religious, how to coax the brain into producing spiritual experiences, then McCauley’s argument may need some rethinking of its own.

Wood seems to think that McCauley’s thesis is more or less on target, though perhaps needing a more nuanced take on faith. I have McCauley’s book and will get to it eventually.

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Sam Harris’ Forthcoming Waking Up

Posted on Tuesday 25 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Looking forward to Sam Harris’ next book, especially since I’m skeptical of what it seems to be about.

http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-path-between-pseudo-spirituality-and-pseudo-science

I am often asked what will replace organized religion. The answer, I believe, is nothing and everything. Nothing need replace its ludicrous and divisive doctrines — such as the idea that Jesus will return to earth and hurl unbelievers into a lake of fire, or that death in defense of Islam is the highest good. These are terrifying and debasing fictions. But what about love, compassion, moral goodness, and self-transcendence? Many people still imagine that religion is the true repository of these virtues. To change this, we must begin to think about the full range of human experience in a way that is as free of dogma, cultural prejudice, and wishful thinking as the best science already is. That is the subject of my next book, Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion.

Which is,

In Waking Up, I do my best show that a certain form of spirituality is integral to understanding the nature of our minds. (For those of you who recoil at every use of the term “spirituality,” I recommend that you read a previous post.)

My goal in Waking Up is to help readers see the nature of their own minds in a new light. The book is by turns a seeker’s memoir, an introduction to the brain, a manual of contemplative instruction, and a philosophical unraveling of what most people consider to be the center of their inner lives: the feeling of self we call “I.” It is also my most personal book to date.

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Lucius Shepard, RIP, and Readerly Notice

Posted on Sunday 23 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I did not know Lucius Shepard, beyond seeing him across the room (at the bar) at some con, perhaps the Portland Westercon in 2001, looking back at my schedule. But as a reader of his, I have the following observation. Like many another writer in the sf/f field, he gained huge attention in the first decade or so of his career, and then tended to fade into being taken for granted in terms of major awards nominations, and perhaps best-of-the-year anthology inclusions, even though he continued doing good and great work for his entire life (based on the occasional later works of his that I read). There are numerous precedents for this pattern (I’m thinking of names I could mention but perhaps I won’t), and it’s a pattern that’s understandable in terms of readers more interested in celebrating hot new talent rather than rewarding continued good work from veterans. I’ve read many tributes here on Fb that mention his early two novels and his couple early collections – but really, he did lots more great work after that. And it’s an unfortunate pattern of many writer careers that sustained work often goes unnoticed, and unrecognized. Alas, Shepard did not live long enough for any of the various Grand Master or Life Achievement awards.

–Captured from a Facebook post last Thursday evening. It got some comments from Gardner Dozois and Terry Bisson, plus a private email from a big name in the field who agreed with my point about the focus on newer writers but felt it untoward to say on Facebook.

There’s more to be said along these lines. As a reader, I discovered certain writers who opened up worlds to me early on, in my early teens, and whom I stuck to for years as I read through their works. I discovered other writers, at first by random chance, picking up their books off newsstands or in bookstores, mostly influenced by cover art and also by publisher brand [I was big on Bantam Pathfinder and anything Ballantine, in those late ’60s]. Some of them were turkeys, others opened worlds I had not seen in my earliest passions for Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke. (In particular, late ’60s and early ’70s Silverberg revealed more to me about life than what I’d gotten from those writers.) And once I became aware, originally through P. Schuyler Miller’s columns in Analog, of the various awards, and then through awards news in Locus, which I first discovered as a mimeographed stapled fanzine at A Change of Hobbit bookstore back when it was a one-room shop above a laundry-mat, a few blocks south of UCLA, where I went to college — then I became a proactive reader, seeking out writers I’d not already discovered.

Years and decades pass. My point is that any adventurous reader, I would think, checks out new writers all the time, and at some point, maybe after one book or a couple, decides to abandon this or that writer, no matter how popular or acclaimed, in order to focus one’s time on the writers that continue to reward attention. There is only so much time in anyone’s life.

My notion in my original post about readers always on the search for the next new thing is like that to some extent. I think literary culture does tend to take for granted many reliable, productive writers, who continue to produce good work even though they may never develop passionate fan bases that launch their visiblity into Hollywood notice. It’s up to dedicated readers, and literary reviews ‘zines like (ahem) Locus and The New York Review of SF and others, who have reviewers who do keep up with such writers, to keep them in the attention of readers.

Not sure I’ve wrapped up this line of thought, but that’s all the time I have tonight.

Posted in Book Notes, science fiction | Comments Off on Lucius Shepard, RIP, and Readerly Notice

The Cozy Cosmos vs. Growing Up

Posted on Friday 21 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Some religious folks don’t like Cosmos because they prefer a cozy universe with human beings at the very center: nice article by Adam Lee about Why Small-Minded Religious Fundamentalists Are Threatened by Wonders of Universe.

For the vast majority of our history as a species, we were wanderers, small hunter-gatherer bands. Civilization is a recent innovation, arising within the last few thousand years, and science is more recent still, appearing only in the last few hundred. But in just those few short centuries, we’ve made dramatic strides, from wooden sailing ships to space shuttles, bloodletting to bionic limbs, quill pens to the Internet. We’ve drawn back the curtain on ancient mythologies and glimpsed the true immensity of time and space. Compared to that vastness, we’re unimaginably small and insignificant; yet we possess an intelligence and a power of understanding that, as far as we still know, is unique among all the countless worlds. As Carl Sagan said, “We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

However, not everyone accepts this as a positive development. There have always been those who prefer a small, comprehensible cosmos, with human beings placed firmly at the center. The religious belief systems that posit such a universe were our first, fumbling attempts to explain the origin of the world, and they rarely share power gladly. Those who clash against conventional wisdom, who dare to suggest that the cosmos holds wonders undreamed of in conventional mythology, have always found themselves in grave peril from the gatekeepers of dogma who presume to dictate the thoughts human beings should be permitted to think.

Lee goes on to cite some religiously-motivated folks who actually still defend the execution of Bruno, the persecution of Galileo, and the Spanish Inquisition. The article continues with the all too familiar contemporary litany of science-denial that dismisses climate change, evolution, and vaccination as targets of “regressive, superstitious, authoritarian world views both religious and political”.

I suppose the same kind of worldview uncomfortable with the immensity of the universe would also wonder why the universe should be any older than traditional recorded human history – a few thousand years. I imagine that’s partly why Creationism makes sense for many people. What would be the point of a universe older than modern humans, if the entire purpose of the universe is to host humanity? For that matter, why shouldn’t the universe be a flat immovable tablet under a dome with tracks for the sun and moon to go around and around, as the ancient mythologies supposed? The rejection of science is because the scientific evidence that the universe is much larger and older than those ancient notions leads to the implication that, hey, maybe the universe *isn’t* in existence merely to host one race of beings on one tiny planet in a vast cosmos full of billions of galaxies… And that discomforts many people.

The steadily increasing understanding of humanity’s place in the cosmos is analogous to a child discovering the world as it grows up. As a child your whole world is at first only your parents and your immediate surroundings. Then you become aware of other family members, if you have siblings. Eventually you meet outsiders, kids whom you recognize as somewhat like yourself, adults somewhat like your parents, but somehow strange and different. Your worldview expands. You meet more and more of these strange others, you realize how many there are, even if part of your extended family or community, but how different their lives and concerns are compared to yours. You realize that the entire world doesn’t revolve entirely around you! As your awareness of other places and other people expands, you come to realize that there are many, many other people in the world whom you will never meet, who know nothing about you, who have lives of their own, often with values completely contrary to those of your family and community. That’s part of growing up, maturing: the realization that you are not sitting at the center of the universe, that your family or hometown or home state or country isn’t necessarily the most correct or special place in the whole world (or universe!) just because that’s where you happen to have grown up. In a sense, the creationists and cosmos-deniers who point to some ancient holy book and say end-of-story, haven’t realized this; they cling to a universe in which humanity is at the center of everything. The evidence suggests otherwise. In a cosmic sense, they have not grown up. Or even realized that it’s possible to do so.

[last para revised 22mar14 5pm]

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Sophisticated Theology, Proofs of God, Humanism, Religious Persecution, Morality

Posted on Thursday 20 March 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

I got the book! You know, the one with the best arguments for God

Jerry Coyne lists books to read before criticizing atheism (just as theists keep issuing books about the ‘best’ arguments for god which they insists atheists must read before drawing any conclusions). Coyne, as I’ve mentioned before, actually reads books by those whom he slightly mocks as “sophisticated theologiansTM” and responds in detail in occasional posts on his blog.

In contrast, most religious people never concern themselves with such sophisticated arguments.

An Awful List of ’7 Things That Prove God Is Real’

People impressed by these arguments are very easily impressed.

Here are four great videos by Stephen Fry about Humanism, and how we know what’s true:

https://humanism.org.uk/thatshumanism/

And here’s a nice quote about what religious persecution really means:

America’s Right-Wing Has Gone Gay Crazy

Religious persecution is the maltreatment of an individual or group because of their religious beliefs. The Holocaust is one example. Shia versus Sunni violence in Iraq is another. Despite what Fox News, the Christian Right and the Republican Party will have you believe, religious persecution is not government refusing to grant Christians the ability to persecute others.

And finally for tonight, Jerry Coyne on that survey about whether people need to believe in ‘God’ to be moral.

Must you be religious to be moral?: A worldwide survey, and its lesson

[T]he primary reason for abject child poverty in … Southern states is that more than a third of children have parents who lack secure employment, decent wages and healthcare. But thanks to religion, these poor saps vote for the party that rejects Medicaid expansion, opposes early education expansion, legislates larger cuts to education, and slashes food stamps to make room for oil and agriculture subsidies on top of tax cuts and loopholes for corporations and the wealthy. Essentially, the Republican Party has convinced tens of millions of Southerners that a vote for a public display of the Ten Commandments is more important to a Christians’ needs than a vote against cuts in education spending, food stamp reductions, the elimination of school lunches and the abolition of healthcare programs.

Posted in Atheism, Culture, Religion, Thinking | Comments Off on Sophisticated Theology, Proofs of God, Humanism, Religious Persecution, Morality