Gore Shares Peace Prize for Climate Change Work – New York Times
Over at Slate, former Gore staffer Mickey Kaus gives him his due, and Christopher Hitchens begs him to run.
Wired just reprints AP coverage.
Morning Edition goes for blanket coverage.
Category Archives: media
Hillary’s laugh: better that W’s
The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg takes on the nonsense about Hillary Clinton’s laugh, and makes a remarkably sensible point that even the Daily Show has missed:
Hillary’s laugh is unusually uninhibited for a politician—especially, perhaps, for a female politician. It is indeed a belly laugh, if not a “big belly” laugh, and it compares favorably with the incumbent Presidential laugh, a series of rapid “heh-hehs,” at once threatening and insipid, accompanied by an exaggerated, arrhythmic bouncing of head and shoulders in opposite directions. [emphasis added]
About time
Thomas Friedman comes out against 9-11 craziness in what is certainly the first clearly articulated mainstream call for America to get over it already that I’ve read. All I can say is, it’s about time.
Mother Teresa’s doubts
So it turns out that Mother Teresa, the paradigm of Christian charity, had doubts about her faith. What do we conclude from this? Well, based on media coverage I’ve seen, we’re to understand that Mother Teresa was some kind of hypocrite. Because, Lord knows, you just can’t have doubts and call yourself a Christian.
Doesn’t anyone read the Bible these days? Doubt is an integral part of the Christian experience, so much so that we see it in the life of the ultimate Christian exemplar, Jesus. Gethsemane and the cries from the cross aren’t just empty scenes in a kabuki Passion play; they’re real, human responses to the cruelty of the world. If Mother Teresa struggled with belief and continued her good work anyway, then she’s in good company.
CPT on the BBC
Something like a year after the tragic conclusion of a hostage crisis involving four of its volunteers in Iraq, Christian Peacemaker Teams gets some coverage over at the BBC. The Beeb has a photo essay about CPT’s team in Hebron, one of the worst flashpoints in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and also the team I happen to have visited during my undergraduate cross-cultural semester in the region. CPT’s stated mission is to bring a nonviolent presence to the worst conflicts in the world — to actually “get in the way” of warring parties — and the team I met were good folks. It’s good to seem their message reach a wider audience.
Robo-Adam and Eve-Machine
The Underground Press at Eastern Kentucky University has a photo-tour of a new Creation Science Museum that’s opening in their neighborhood. As previously reported by the New York Times, the museum is $27 million worth of flashy animatronics, special-effects heavy video displays, and pseudoscience all aimed at “proving” that the Earth and all its inhabitants were created ex nihilo in six days’ time about six thousand years ago. The Underground Press’s side-by-side comparisons of the museum’s accounts of “human reason” (science) versus “God’s Word” (Christian fundamentalism) is highly informative.
Now, I’m not going to tell anyone that they don’t have the right to believe what they want to, and even teach it to their children – but I do think it’s wrong to wrap yourself so deeply in your worldview that you can’t even hear the alternatives. As with most of anti-evolution propaganda, this museum isn’t going to convert anyone. It’s a sermon aimed at the choir, the intellectual equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and singing “I am the very model of a modern Major General” at the top of your lungs when you’re losing an argument. It’s sad.
Essay: Biology and morality
My new favorite podcast is Radio Lab, from New York Public Radio. It’s sort of Nova plus This American Life, with a heavy dose of the Douglas Adams sensibilities that I’ve come to associate with co-host Robert Krulwich. And it’s awesome.
What’s on my mind right now is the episode of 28 April 2006, “Morality”. It delves into emerging studies of the biology of human morals – what parts of the brain are involved in moral decision-making, and how evolutionary history shaped them. A key point is that there are two kinds of moral thinking, rules-based decision-making (“Thou shalt not kill”) and calculating (“the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”). And these two kinds of moral thinking take place in different parts of the brain. When they come into conflict, maybe because you’re thinking about killing someone in order to save several other people, a third area of the brain kicks in to decide between the two. This third area is (apparently) entirely unique to humans – not even chimpanzees have it.
But chimpanzees (and other apes) do have the rules-based moral thinking area. It helps them get along with other chimps. Which means that rules-based morality is evolutionarily primitive. If they could write, chimps could probably come up with most of the Ten Commandments! Where does that leave Christian morality? Is it all just pre-programmed behavior wrapped up in unnecessary mysticism?
No. As it happens, I’ve just finished reading Michael Ruse’s excellent book Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? (Cambridge University Press, 2001), which addresses exactly this question. And, as Ruse points out, Christ’s teachings call us to live beyond the Ten Commandments – those moral principles that seem to crop up in every human belief system.
If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet those who greet you, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as you heavenly Father is perfect.
—Matthew 5:46-8 (NIV)
In other words, Christians are to exceed the dictates of morality that everyone already follows. We’re to transcend our biology, using that part of our brain that sets us above the rest of the animal kingdom.
Encyclopaedia Biologica?
From news @ nature.com: work has begun on what is to be a comprehensive Encyclopedia of Life. Estimated “final” contents: multimedia presentations on 2 million species. Estimated time to completion: 10 years. The web portal is online now.
The sample pages are intriguing, particularly the weird slider on the sidebar that runs from “novice” to “expert” – apparently it filters the information presented depending on how deep the user wants to go. It looks as though it will be possible to browse through the tree of life, which is essential.
Hard to say how valuable this will actually be – certainly it looks like a good source for elementary science term papers, but will it actually be useful for basic research? What I would want (and what is maybe there but not visible in the sample interface) is easy connections to the primary literature (Google Scholar?) and public gene or protein sequence data.
So much depends on …?
Bill Moyers Journal continues to impress. This week Moyers talks to Jonathan Miller about his (Miller’s) new documentary “A Brief History of Disbelief.” It’s a wonderfully frank conversation about faith (or the lack thereof), probably in no small part because of Moyers’s resume includes ordination as a Baptist minister. One thing in particular that struck me is Miller’s description of the events people often associate with spirituality – birth, death, sunsets – as “vulgar”:
I have moments of – I suppose you might call them transcendent feelings; feelings which rise above what is immediately in front of me. But on the other hand, they’re almost entirely the result of what is immediately in front of me. Not birth; not death, though those are extremely important, and do give rise to very strong feelings. But often, just simply seeing that things are arranged in the way that they are. That there are ripples in the sand once the tide has gone out.
To which Moyers responds by referencing William Carlos Williams:
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
Which exchange is beautiful in ways I can’t really articulate.
And so the question I’m left with is, why is it that Christianity (and the big religions in general) seem to have such a strong association with platitudes on the lines of “sunsets make me feel spiritual” – is it because the mainstream absorbs cliches? Is it because platitudes are part of the luggage we get from our parents, (frequently) along with our religious faith?
“We’re not a fragile country. Trust us to have that conversation.”
So, I was pretty excited when I learned Bill Moyers was coming back to PBS with a new interview program, Bill Moyers Journal. And I was even more excited when I learned that it would be podcast, so I can listen to it even though my TV gets nothing but snow and the input from my DVD player. But the icing on the cake? The first interviewee is Jon Stewart.
I love Public Broadcasting.