If the First Things crowd ever decides to do one of those fundraising cruises that have become so popular of late, I know of a river in Egypt that would be an appropriate destination.

Whole thing here.

First of all, I’m honored to have been invited to contribute to the Commonweal blog, and my first post over there takes on Joe Carter’s recent criticisms of “theistic evolution”:

If God is omniscient, then his knowledge of the course of evolution is eternally perfect – and whether the evolutionary process was random or not has no bearing on this at all. Contra Carter, then, the randomness of evolution wouldn’t require God to tinker around with multiple universes any more than the reality of free will means that Gabriel had to be prepared to ask women other than Mary whether they’d bear the Christ child; in each instance, the fact that the universe’s prior state constrained but didn’t fully determine what was going to happen doesn’t mean that God had to have been ignorant about how things would go.

Whole thing here; it may that you have to register in order to comment, in which case I’m happy to discuss the argument over here as well.

Also, I’ve got a new post up at The American Scene, defending mandatory composting programs against the Reasonoids.

(a) Repeal all restrictions requiring humane treatment of non-human animals. The Congress should not get into the specifics of what procedures can be used when. If it must, it should broaden the set of cases in which non-human animals can be harmed or killed to include not only cases in which human health is at stake, but cases in which people get a kick out of it, or in which there’s money to be made through the research.

(b) Require training in animal research techniques for a Ph.D. in the natural sciences.

(c) Require that any research center provide any researcher or corporate donor with appropriate resources to perform research on non-human animals, and that those research costs be fully reimbursable by the federal government. If they have no one on staff who can perform the research, they should get someone. See (b) above.

Because, you know, one way to stop terrorism is by enforcing our laws. We should absolutely do that. But another is to make it clear that terrorism doesn’t work. We should do that too. And the best way I can think of is to change our present situation, in which far too few scientists perform research on non-human animals. We can keep whatever strictures we want on research on human subjects while also ensuring that no one person has to take on him- or herself the risks that militant animal rights activists want to subject them to.

Or am I somehow misunderstanding the logic of hilzoy’s position?

I suppose it was only a matter of time that, as our lives became more and more unified in the world of electrons at the expense of the world of matter, our deaths would, too. (And yes, I realize that I’m writing this for and posting this on a blog.) Not that online funeral and burial companies (“services” I fear would give the wrong impression) are a trend – but I don’t find this to be a reassuring start:

“On Eternal Space, loved ones can choose from different headstones and bucolic landscape backgrounds — the mountain lake is a popular option — to create a customized online grave site. Loved ones can add “tribute gifts” such as roses, candles, stuffed animals and other items, while mourners can access photos and videos in a “Memory Book” and leave remembrances of their own.”

(The text alone doesn’t quite capture the cluttered tackiness of the screenshots – doesn’t fully demonstrate why I find this development quite so irksome.)

It’s not a cause, but symptomatic of the virtual divorce from the physical world: we can choose a virtual paradise for our virtual gravesites, which hold not even virtual bones. The memory is divorced from the real as we continue to allow the spirit to be divorced from the body. Death is, and likely will be, the last vestige of the fact of our physical existence – that if we are born to die we are born to exist in the physical world. Yet we have arrived already at a point where the “funeral experience” can be captured by computer-generated graphics.

Cemeteries and graves are places, and must be places, in the real world. And while I suppose I can’t complain quite so harshly about online memorial/condolence books (though a virtual note will never be a replacement for one that you can hold in your hand, just as the typed will never be a replacement for the barely-legible handwritten), it is, as I said earlier, the image that I find most bothersome: that these online memorials are not memorials but online graveyards, where the weather is always idyllic and no family member need ever worry about driving over to keep the weeds from overgrowing. A cemetery is a physical place; graves are physical things.

But I suppose that I’m going to complain that it helps to blow down the ritual surrounding not only burial but the cemetery itself. The placing of a rock – the physical symbol of one’s physical presence; the washing of hands upon exit: that the essence of the visit contained something unavoidably physical. And that the cemetery is a place not of our everyday lives, though death and grief are natural. A cemetery and a grave are not places I should be able to visit without leaving my desk. Visits can be essential to one’s mourning process, but to allow them to seep into the home puts us at risk not only of devaluing the funeral ritual, but of allowing the cemetery to seep into the home, of transforming the home into the graveside. There are reasons Judaism tries to encourage not visiting a grave too frequently.

So I can’t help but wonder whether, if “virtual memorial sites are gaining popularity with the public as a very practical alternative to being present at the grave site,” we’ve already lost what I was worrying about. But that’s a question for another day. (And, I should admit, the practices I used as examples are those which have never been dominant in a society, except perhaps the last 60 years in a certain oil-barren sliver of Mideast desert.)

But in the end, these things will always be true: Virtual flowers are not actual flowers, and never can be. Clicking and dragging a shovelful of dirt onto the grave of a loved one will never be the equivalent of shoveling dirt onto a grave. The day when pretending – no matter how sincerely – to bury someone is accepted as equal to actually burying them will be a day worth mourning.

***
Looking back on what I’ve written above, I’m worried it may come across as more whining and grumbling than a substantive complaint. My concerns, to restate (just so I feel better about their clarity) are from two different directions: first, the movement towards removing the ritual and non-ritual practices surrounding death, burial, and mourning from the physical world – or at least movement towards saying that they need not necessarily be housed in the physical world. The problem with this, of course, is that life is physical, and takes place in the physical world, and death is a final reminder of this. Second, that the introduction of the gravesite into the home of the mourners is dangerous and potentially unhealthy. Take your pick as to which we should be more concerned about.

It is, I think, really this lack of sensitivity to the broader cultural situation that left my wife, like so many other nursing moms and breastfeeding advocates (“fascists”, Rosin calls them), so upset with Rosin’s much-discussed Atlantic essay. Rosin’s right, I think, to object to the unrealistic or overbearing attitudes that many breastfeeding advocates take to the subject: there’s no excuse for overstating or misrepresenting the science, and mothers who find nursing to be a burden should absolutely not feel guilt-ridden if they slip off to the store for formula or rice cereal. But the idea that the experience of having friends and physicians pressure a woman into breastfeeding and then make her feel tremendously guilty about the thought of stopping or cutting back is anywhere near the cultural norm even among Atlantic readers or the rest of the American overclasses seems quite unrealistic to me. It’s true that we need to find an appropriate middle ground, and that accomplishing that is going to require honesty about the benefits and burdens of whatever decisions mothers, fathers, and children choose to make. And no one should deny that perspectives like Rosin’s can play important roles in helping us to do these things. She’d be able to do that much more effectively, though, if she didn’t minimize the very different sets of challenges faced by mothers and children in circumstances different from her own.

It’s “not the vacuum”, Rosin writes, that’s “keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound”. No doubt this is true in a select handful of cases, but it gets things pretty badly backwards in a large range of others.

(Cross-posted at The American Scene.)

Working to reframe the question of whether Google makes us Stoopid, Peter Suderman (not without his own hesitations, I should add) ends his post over at The Scene:

Why memorize the content of a single book when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we now store it digitally and just remember what we stored — resulting in what David Brooks called “the outsourced brain.” We won’t become books, we’ll become their indexes and reference guides, permanently holding on to rather little deep knowledge, preferring instead to know what’s known, by ourselves and others, and where that knowledge is stored.

While I like being able to rattle off statistics about baseball teams that played before I was born, maybe it is a better thing that I can’t do that for any team since the entry into my life of, well, the internet – more space for other things. I’m not quite as concerned about this in terms of statistics and data as I am with – what did you expect? – the experience of story and literature.

The experience, yes – even after the fact, even while merely remembering the encounter. Literature, story, poetry – whatever you choose to call it/them – are (or ought to be) experientially timeless. To have listened to Homer recited as he must once have been, to give oneself wholly to the music of an orchestra, to sit reading Keats (silently or aloud), to immerse oneself in say, the worlds of Dostoevsky (or even, I’d say, of a Clancy or Crichton – as far as this particular point is concerned, there is no necessary limit to “high” literature) is to experience time in a way removed from that of our day-to-day lives. When we say that we “lose ourselves” in a book, or a piece of music, or a work of art, this, partly, is what we mean – it is what has occurred when, reading, one looks up and suddenly realizes – realizes! – that one is, in fact, sitting on the living room sofa, holding a book in their hands.

But the experience and the meaning cannot be divorced, at least not wholly. We cannot, as Virginia Woolf declared, ever truly and fully know the Greeks because we cannot know what we have to know them through – their poetry, their music, their performance – as they knew them.

There are two ways to encounter a work: directly, in that initial experience of reading or listening or observing; and later, indirectly, through memory and consideration and reflection. To learn from a work – for a work to affect you and for you to be affected by the work – both are necessary. Somehow, it is less the direct than the indirect that I would say is at risk of being lost on account of the Googlized index-memory – though the encounter, too is certainly threatened by the fact that we are now (or so we’re told, and have witnessed) increasingly likely to index rather than remember. It becomes harder to achieve that atemporality of the encounter with art if our attention spans are severed and shortened. Giving oneself over to a work is, in its own way, a skill, and must be practiced and honed to be kept sharp. If I go too long without reading a long piece – especially a work of fiction – it can take me several days to remember how to (this is one of the reasons why I’ve forced myself to carve out time to read something as often as possible that has nothing to do with school, and nothing to do with the world of the internet).

But my concern is more for the indirect, as I said earlier. That is, for the memory, the recollection, the other angle(s) from which one looks at something in order to see what is there. For example: the difference between thinking of Book 22 of the Iliadand knowing that it contains the death of Hektor, and thinking of Book 22 of the Iliadand recalling the death of Hektor. Or, to zoom out, of thinking of the Iliadand knowing only: Akhilles, Hektor, Agamemnon, Helen, Paris, war, fate, glory; or thinking of the Iliad and seeing all of those (and more), but in (something of, at least) the complex web of their relationships and interactions in all its glory.

The knowing – the memory – of a work is not re-experiencing the encounter. The encounter is outside of time; the memory places it within time and so is able to examine it. The index has two dimensions to the memory’s three: when you hold it up and tilt it, you may still be able to notice something new in the way the light hits it, but it becomes far more difficult.

There is good and bad in the way that Google (to use it as shorthand for all that is new) makes us think differently – the access to information that we otherwise might not have been able to remember is certainly good, as is the freedom to spend more time on those things which are of greater importance to ourselves. But the danger is in the loss of depth of consideration: of Buber’s Du; of the delight of Oakeshott’s Poetical Mode; of Heschel’s allusive timelessness.

[EDIT: I really need to be better about remembering to sign my posts over here when I first put them up.  For future reference, if they talk about being in Chicago and being Jewish, it's probably me. -- JLW]

I remember when the “Body Worlds” exhibit was in Chicago a few years ago and ads for it were plastered all over the city – there was one night in particular that I couldn’t get away from them (I think I was waiting on a bus) and I couldn’t bear to look at them – not because I thought it was gross, or dirty, or anything like that, but because, even though these were the bodies of “donors,” I felt it was disrespectful to them to ogle the dead body. I’ve always felt those taboos particularly strongly (and, contra Van Hagens, I don’t see anything wrong with that). Anyway, at risk of repeating what’s already been said, we now have this:

A new exhibition featuring preserved dead bodies having sex opened in Berlin on Thursday with critics saying a maverick German anatomist dubbed “Doctor Death” has gone too far this time.

The couple, part of Gunther von Hagens’s exhibition “The Cycle of Life”, is the “low point in his tastelessness”, Michael Braun, culture expert from the conservative CDU party, told AFP.

Von Hagens said his copulating couples show the sexual act in “bracing clarity”.

The exhibits, of four “consenting donors”, are in a separate room accessible only to over-16s.

But it is, in a sense, the inevitable extreme if there’s an insistence on dividing the body and the soul, the worldly and the spiritual, and declaring the former base and unworthy and the latter alone sacred or noble. If we are prisoners in our bodies, why not conquer and imprison the prison itself, to free ourselves, as one might say the name of an incubus to defeat it?

The religious case against it is easier—to point out the role of creature and Creator, to remind one that such subjugation of the body is, in fact, to forget that, in the words of Rabbi Heschel, man “is the knot in which heaven and earth are interlaced”: that the body and the soul are essential to state of being human.

A more secular case is harder, especially for me; I’ve been raised to think that there are just certain things one doesn’t do: that the taboos are there for a reason; that even if there is nothing behind them, they are good for the order and structure and survival of society? That this “liberation” from the bodily prison, the so-called subjugation of the guards is actually the subjugation of the human body to the fruits of human technology—only reinforcing Wendell Berry’s dichotomy between the organic and the mechanical, and that it is a dangerous symptom of the growing dependence on that which cannot be sustained inevitably? That, in other words, we would liberate ourselves from one prison into another? (Are these even truly “secular” anymore?)

I don’t mean to imply that there isn’t a good non-religious case against what I’d term the body’s desecration; but any argument against it must be founded on the belief that there is something unique in mankind. The moment a human being is literally “just another animal,” anything is permitted.

What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.”

Read the whole thing, as we kids with our blogs are inclined to say.

… the view that the self and consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain, that the real us is found inside our skulls, isn’t just misleading and wrong, it’s ugly. In that view, each of us is trapped in the caverns of his own skull and the world is just a sort of shared figment. Everything is made interior, private, rational and computational. That may not pose a practical danger, but it presents a kind of spiritual danger.

In that view, each of us is an island of intellect, alone. When you think of us as just interior neurological mechanisms, you see us as alienated from the world around us. The world shows up for us as bits of information that we decipher, like linguistic relics of an ancient culture that we have to interpret. Like when Mr. Spock says, “What is this strange kissing custom?” The danger is alienation, plain and simple. We’re strangers in a strange land.

I find this a very sad and ugly picture of our circumstance. Now contrast that view with a sense of ourselves as engaged in the flow, responsive to the things going on around us, part of the world. It’s a very different picture.

I don’t always agree with Alva’s views in their entirety, but this bit in particular is right on the mark. The whole thing is worth reading.

Even if you could use all the organic material that you have–the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues–and get them back on the soil, you couldn’t feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.

At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.

For good measure, here and here are a couple of my earlier posts on organic crop yields and the sustainability of sustainable farming (be sure to read the comments!), and here is Kevin Carson’s take on why the official “Green Revolution” mythology is a load of bunk. Also, here is what I wrote about the subject of crop yields in my TAC piece on “culinary conservatism”:

Proponents of a new way of eating are on shakier ground when they claim that a widespread turn toward small-scale and deindustrialized agriculture would not affect crop yields. McKibben proudly cites a study in which sustainable farming methods were found to lead, on average, to a near doubling of food production per hectare. He does not mention the many cases in which results have been less impressive. A much discussed study published in the journal Science in 2002 found that switching to organic farming reduced yields by 20 percent, though the possibility of lessening our reliance on petroleum may be worth the investment of some extra land. Reincorporating into the human food chain some of the millions of acres where corn and sorghum are now grown for ethanol production would also make a great difference.

But no reasonable person wants to remake the world or do away with modern agricultural technologies all together. The best solutions will come through honest, case-by-case engagement with the subtle demands of specific situations. As the UC Berkeley agroecologist Miguel Altieri puts it, a sound approach to agriculture “does not seek to formulate solutions that will be valid for everyone but encourages people to choose the technologies best suited to the requirements of each particular situation, without imposing them.” (That this could just as well be the summary of the ideal domestic or foreign policy ought to argue in its favor.) Respect for tradition and social and ecological responsibility can work together with technological innovation and capitalist resourcefulness to respect the ridges and valleys of regionalism in an increasingly flattened world.

In any case, a very happy birthday to Dr. Borlaug, and many happy returns indeed. In my home, we will be eating free-range chicken and organic brussels sprouts in his honor.

(Cross-posted at The American Scene.)