Poetry and Physics

Here is a nice poem by W.H. Auden. You can hear him read it here. 

After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics

If all a top physicist knows

About the Truth be true,

Then, for all the so-and-so's,

Futility and grime,

Our common world contains,

We have a better time

Than the Greater Nebulae do,

Or the atoms in our brains.

Marriage is rarely bliss

But, surely it would be worse

As particles to pelt

At thousands of miles per sec

About a universe

Wherein a lover's kiss

Would either not be felt

Or break the loved one's neck.

Though the face at which I stare

While shaving it be cruel

For, year after year, it repels

An ageing suitor, it has,

Thank God, sufficient mass

To be altogether there,

Not an indeterminate gruel

Which is partly somewhere else.

Our eyes prefer to suppose

That a habitable place

Has a geocentric view,

That architects enclose

A quiet Euclidian space:

Exploded myths - but who

Could feel at home astraddle

An ever expanding saddle?

This passion of our kind

For the process of finding out

Is a fact one can hardly doubt,

But I would rejoice in it more

If I knew more clearly what

We wanted the knowledge for,

Felt certain still that the mind

Is free to know or not.

It has chosen once, it seems,

And whether our concern

For magnitude's extremes

Really become a creature

Who comes in a median size,

Or politicizing Nature

Be altogether wise,

Is something we shall learn. 

Sick again...

Last night we picked out, bought, and carried home our Christmas tree from the sale down the street. Unfortunately, this is how I felt during the decoration party afterwards:



(I interpret that to be the look of illness, not constipation, but it's arguable, I admit.)

This makes about the fourth or fifth consecutive trip back home to MS after which I have become ill, usually a head cold. It's hard to call it a coincidence at this point. I suppose it could just be the stress of the long drive (~15hrs in holiday traffic), particularly with the back and forth between families in MS.

As my Italian friend says "Traveling is not for you. You should think of becoming a tree."

I agree.

So Happy...

Well, it's not going to please many people back home, but I'm pretty pleased with the election results. I was a little nervous going in that it would be a lot closer than it was. Obama even (unofficially) picked up NC by a margin of about 11,000 votes! North Carolina and Missouri were two of the most contested states when it came down to the election. Carolina going blue by 11k as I said (70% voter turnout in Durham Co.!!!), and MO going red by about 5k. It's a novel feeling to vote for a democrat and be on the majority side in a state (albeit a slim majority).

To brag for a moment, I also predicted the exact percentage (to the nearest point) of the popular vote that Obama would get back in MS: 42%. Not bad.

We'll see how the next four years go, but for now, I'm happy.

Oh, and for all of you who were on the edge of your seat, Danielle Adams was elected with 46% of the popular vote (about 10% edge on the closest challenger) for Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor.

The Splendors of Autumn

This weekend we returned to the Great Smoky Mountains for our yearly pilgrimage. That is where we got engaged. It is also probably my favorite place on Earth. The timing of our visit was dictated by the presence of H's family at a conference in western Carolina this week. It just happens that this is PEAK season for autumn colors in the mountains. Surprisingly, this is the first time we have seen the mountains at peak. I must say, it surpasses expectation. I should clarify that the tops of the mountains were in full color while the valleys were only starting to develop autumnal hues. The resulting effect is that the higher one hiked, the more beautiful the setting. There were trails that were literally covered by bright red and yellow leaves. One had the feeling at higher elevations that the hike was a set from an Yimou Zhang film (think "Hero").

On the first day of our trip into the mountains we drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway for the first time (it never seems to go where we are headed when we are in the mountains). On the right I've given you a sample of the colorful views available from the roadside. We made our way ever so slowly (because of the views) to Bryson City, our adopted home in the mountains, where we had reserved a campsite. The forecast for the next day was not promising, 50% chance of rain, cool and breezy. That's the forecast for the valley which means that on the mountain it's probably going to be wet, cold, and windy. I told H that I expected to walk in the mountains all day unless there was a thunderstorm. As this was a frontal system, I did not expect rain to lead us astray. H grimaced and agreed to humor me within reason.

After a cozy night in the tent, we got started on Day 2 (our only day of hiking) by engaging in a lively debate in the car (as we drove through fog and drizzle on our way into the park) as to just which trail to do. We eventually decided to take advantage of the "foul" weather and do one of the more popular trails in the park. The logic was, from my end, that many of the fair weather hikers would not bother with the mountains today (probably in Gatlinburg eating cotton candy at Ripley's Believe or Not museum) and we'd have the hike mostly to ourselves. So, we decided to do the Alum Cave Trail. It is a VERY popular trail in the park because it has great views, a natural limestone arch, and all the paradigmatic Smokies experiences lumped into one 4.8 mi roundtrip hike. The trailhead is also right on the main road through the park.

Now, the argument against doing Alum Cave was precisely that one of the attractions is a set of stunning views. Visibility was severely limited on this particular day (see photo of cloud that would be view, left), so views would not be the deciding factor. Still, I wanted to see the park in a variety of weather conditions, and I expected that the lack of expansive vistas might focus our attention on some other beauties on the trail. I was not disappointed.

We hiked through mist and rain for most of the way up to Alum Cave. You might think that's unpleasant (H would probably say so), but the results were fantastic. The trail was often shrouded in mist, giving it a "hobbit-like" feel according to H (see picture of rhododendron canopied trail, right). Have a look also at what the bluffs just before Alum Cave look like in the cloudiness (left). Once we reached Alum Cave, which is actually just an overhang, we stopped for a while to eat some M&M's and rest while enjoying the misted seclusion. We debated whether to continue up to Mt. LeConte, another 2.5 miles up the trail, as I thought that the views might clear up later in the day, and also that while we had hiked halfway up anyway... H was having none of it. So, we decided to do another hike somewhere else later in the day, and down we went.

On the way down I decided to annoy Hannah by being obsessed with spotting salamanders in the stream. It wasn't explicitly to annoy her, but it did the job. I think the annoyance was mitigated partially by the fact that she was much better at spotting salamanders than I was. This minor joy gave way to affected boredom as she could not be bothered to point out yet another salamander to my feable eyes. Still, we managed to spend twice as long descending the mountain as we had in ascending as I insisted that we stop at nearly every accessible pool in the stream to look for salamanders. Why salamanders? Well, it turns out that the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is home to a startling diversity (and abundance) of the little critters. In fact, if you measure by total biomass, and salamanders are not large creatures, they outweigh the total biomass of birds and mammals combined in the park! They are also reclusive, often brilliantly colored, and some even secrete poisonous slime for protection. These are all things that endear wild creatures to little boys.

Thus my enthusiasm.

We found one salamander on the trail (H spotted it). I caught the little guy and held it up for H to photograph, but the camera was not up to the task of focusing on his small wriggling body. So, I put him down and waited for him to calm down, and then got a nice photo (about thirty digitally expendable out-of-focus photos later). That was the yellow one (pictured). In all we saw a dozen or so on the trip down. It's a great exercise I think in learning how to look at the stream. Once you know that there is an abundance of something, you start to see that abundance because you train yourself to seek it out. We walked all the way up the mountain having only seen one salamander, and that one only because it was running across the trail right in front of H. On the way down several groups passed us while we were scrutinizing some tiny pool in the stream, and no one asked us what we might have found. I guess they thought we were just fascinated by a mountain stream, which is okay, but the fact that it might be teaming with fascinating, visible critters may not have occurred to them because they could not immediately SEE what we might be looking at. The fact is that it's hard to spot a salamander while moving if you don't already know very well where and how to look: A salamander is no bear (not to say that people don't walk right by those obliviously as well).

I think that in general we have lost a great deal of our appreciation for learning to see the world around us. We, culturally, do not seem to realize that there is just too much around us for us to process all of it at any one moment, and thus that "seeing" is a learned skill, or art, unto itself. The fact is that when you take someone out of their element there will be things around them that they literally do not see because they have not learned to pay attention in that way. Generally we have lost the discipline and skill of paying attention, of seeing, the world around us in the ways that presume that the world around is explicitly that of salamanders, thunderstorms, and autumn colors rather than the world of cars, thermostats, electronics, and money. I would go so far as to say that the dullness that we have developed is not just a dullness to the "natural world" but a dullness to the sense of sight when it comes to interpreting even our new "built" environment. Science, I think, is or should be predominantly about developing precisely this skill, about learning to see things in ever greater detail. "Understanding" is just a way of seeing, of deciding what is important and what is not in a picture. Understanding physical mechanics is just seeing which forces are at work. Understanding ecology is seeing who are the agents in what "economy" in an ecosystem. These are all just pictures that we paint of the world, and all good science continually calls those pictures into question. It is an exercise in seeing. I will leave it at that for now.

I love the mountains.

Sci-Epic

In case you thought that science was no-nonsense, hard-nosed knowledge production, take a look at this opening paragaph:

It is an epic story: the struggle of thousands of men and women over the course of a century for very high stakes. For some, the work required actual physical courage, a risk to life and limb in icy wastes or on the high seas. The rest needed more subtle forms of courage. They gambled decades of arduous effort on the chance of a useful discovery, and staked their reputations on what they claimed to have found. Even as they stretched their minds to the limit on intellectual problems that often proved insoluble, their attention was diverted into grueling administrative struggles to win minimal support for the great work. A few took the battle into the public arena, often getting more blame than praise; most labored to the end of their lives in obscurity. In the end they did win their goal, which was simply knowledge.

This is the first paragraph (I can't make this up) of a history of the science of climate change entitled The Discovery of Global Warming (Harvard University Press), written by the Director of the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) who holds Ph.D.'s in physics and history, and was a lecturer at CalTech for a few years before pursuing history of science topics.

Maybe it's not pure mythology, but if it's not it still a bit too adventurous to be talking about what is probably the biggest epistemological issue of modern science: climate prediction. The issue is that it's not easy even to write down the argument for global warming in a few equations, or to show a few graphs. Certainly we can show a graph that seems to show that the climate is warming, but that does not tell us how this change is being effected (i.e., are humans involved, and how). And it doesn't just boil down to a physical argument. It boils down to a whole host of cumulative evidence no single piece of which is the nail in the coffin. So the question is, when do we know what's going on with the climate? What do we point to as the criteria of that knowledge, even within science?

Obedience?

Here's an interesting article:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/personal/08/20/lw.siblings.pay.you.care.parents/index.html

You will have noticed that I have a propensity to rant about the mechanical metaphor underlying science as well as the unreasonably profit-based economy. This article gives a very clear example of how profit/compensation can begin to infect life. I have heard professors and teachers complain about it, and this article is just another example: Americans always want tangible compensation.

I suppose I could make a conventional economic argument and suggest that the article should have calculated the debt that the average child accrues (by virtue of parental support) before he/she becomes financially independent. Add a reasonable market-based interest rate and it seems that you have a measure of what obligation you have to your parents. I suppose you'll have to also value the opportunity cost of having a child for each parent and factor that in (that's a lot of hours taken away from wage earning). Who knows what the actual number would be, though I'm sure it's a lot. And I guess you could even make arguments about who is a good parent based on the "investment" into the child, and who is a good child by who "pays down the debt."

But really, is it not becoming obvious just how impoverished family life must be to talk about things in these terms?

The argument that I would rather make is not economic at all. Call me an idealist, but putting a monetary value on these things seems reprehensible. It's true that we all have to balance the care we give to family members with all the other demands of life, but that balance should not be primarily an economic one. The temptation is one of finding an easily applied measure so that decision-making is clear-cut endeavor. But as with every other simple measure, it is a poor one to depend on. Constantly seeking an easier way to make difficult decisions does not necessarily parallel the desire to make better decisions.

Perhaps one's ability to make good decisions in these difficult situations without simplistic reduction (i.e., without saying "it really all boils down to how much you spent on me") is a better measure of how well that person was raised. But then we have to answer the question of how a parent's successes or failures should affect the care he/she receives in later life (or whether they should receive any at all) from their children. These are the sorts of questions that teach us about our society. The sad fact is that perhaps if parents make mistakes (or certain mistakes), then their children will not have gained the understanding that for them to revisit that failure on their parents in later life is itself a mistake. While it may be a parent's lot to suffer at the hands of a child, it is not his/her desert.

The same goes for others. Measuring people by economics is doomed to be an ethical failure. By that standard homeless people are worthless, and Donald Trump is a tremendous person.

Getting back to the CNN article. As we often do, we see the issue backwards. The problem is not that more people cannot be compensated for taking care of their aging families, or even that jealousy crops up in families over asymmetric inheritances, but that people feel that money is an acceptable currency in these situations at all.

The Environmental Tango (an elaborate metaphor)

It should be clear from the last post that I had a great time in FL. Now I'll relate the other side of the coin, the side that will inevitably make some roll their eyes or throw up their hands in disgust. It's the philosophical side.

What disturbs me about environmental restoration, or environmentally oriented engineering generally, is twofold: 1.) it presumes that the environment is some thing out there that we can fix (as opposed, say, to participating in... think of how silly it would be to ask engineers to go fix a boring dance party. The issue in the latter case is not that there is a thing to fix, but that folks are participating poorly.), and 2.) it presumes that if we are damaging the environment that there needs to be a profession devoted to fixing it.

In many ways these two problems are just ways of stating the same issue. If the environment is not a thing but is rather all that goes on with and around us (without being to separate the "with" and the "around" - it is, after all, our environment, our surroundings, that context within which we act by definition), then it is something that we participate in, or with. Perhaps a better image than seeing the environment as an elaborate machine is to see it as a partner in whose embrace we dance to the step of the seasons. Or maybe we should see the environment as the music itself to which we dance, eliminate the physical partner that we manipulate, and rather see that our actions are the dance that is attuned to the environment. It is easy to follow the metaphor to an understanding of what an unfaithful approach to the environment would be, that is, as if we danced to a different rhythm or a different style, we waltzed to a tango. The metaphor breaks down, perhaps, in that my looking like an idiot with no rhythm does not ever directly impact the music. It does, however, affect the dance if we remember that the dance is not what I'm doing or what the music is doing, but what the two accomplish in concert. Environmental degradation is not the dancer affecting the music, but the dancer failing to dance to the music. So, I've come to the point, questioning the environment as something inherently other than man. We cannot consistently (that is, faithfully) delineate an environment separate from the man, I want to say, and this to say that in our metaphor the "environment" is not the music but the dance itself. This is a tango environment, or a waltz environment, and we know by listening to the music and watching the dancers. If the two (dancer and music) are not coherent then we arrive, rightfully, at confusion (and this is where I think we stand today).

What, in this case, would a professional devoted to restoration do? He/she might teach the dancer to dance to the music, for example. Ah, but in our metaphor that is the professional teaching the citizen something rather than fixing the environmental thing. So that can't be it. We said that the environment is precisely the dance, the concerted movement of music and dancer. To fix the environment we need to teach the dancer to participate faithfully with the given music. He could change the music, I suppose, to fit the dancer, but in such a case he still has not taught the dancer to recognize what dance goes with which music, and thus have no guarantee that this will repair the integrity of the overall performance in the least. The trouble for the engineer is that there is no physical thing to operate on. We need rather to be taught to move in concert with a rhythm around us.

I like stretching metaphors, so I'll keep going. In this little dance party, what is it that restoration engineers currently go about doing in mistaking the environment for a thing? Perhaps they change the music for a few bars where they see an opportunity to make the dancers movements coincide with a section of music. It's hard to say. What is key to keep in mind is that what they are manipulating may not be the heart of the problem. They look for a thing to fix without ever asking whether the problem is a thing in the first place. Certainly, it is logical to think first of manipulating things. We are surrounded by rivers and streams and hills and valleys, trees, soils, rocks, and animals. Things, all of them. The issue is in taking too literally the idea that the environment is some thing apart from our participation. Herein is the power of the Christian distinction between creature and creator, I think, as distinct from distinguishing man and nature.

So, environmental restoration engineers certainly go about working on the environment in our colloquial sense, but it is not clear that they are addressing any problem of real interest because they have not taught us how to dance any better. In fact, much of the action of the environmental engineer is performed in the same awkward shuffle as the rest of us who are causing the problem in the first place. The environmental engineer is no Fred Astaire in the metaphor, nor does he seem to aim at being so. It seems, on my metaphor, that there is no fixing without showing, that we need examples more than we need mechanics.

And I hope that the metaphor makes it clear that the image of an engineer seeking to mechanically repair the dance is a rather clumsy one. The mechanic who shows up wrench in hand ready to "fix" the dance has little integrity. The notion of a profession devoted to direct manipulation of the problem is rather absurd since the only way to fix the environment is to get folks dancing the tango properly when there is tango music playing. As I said, we need examples, instructors who can teach by doing and showing, rather than mechanics who can apply corrections with a wrench.

Now, a metaphor is not really an argument. So what is my argument? Why aren't restoration projects doing a wonderful thing by turning brownfield sites into functioning ecosystems? I think they are doing something wonderfully effective. The trouble, it seems to me, is that they haven't really restored the brownfield to a functioning ecosystem. They have perhaps restored the site to what it was before man invaded it (optimistically, but this is the aim), but they have not created a situation in which man is involved with the site without further degradation, much less to environmental appreciation. They have, in a sense, recharged the environmental batteries for a little while, but have not taught us how to generate power. The approach it too often seems is either to manipulate the environment so that it may exist in steady state with the practices of local people (e.g., turn it into a golf course), or to formulate a list of thou shalt not's that will preserve some minimal level of ecosystem integrity (e.g., minimum ecological discharge in a river). Neither of these confront the dancer with the idea that he might just look like an idiot on the dance floor, and that maybe it is time to consider investing in lessons.

As I have said in other posts, I do not question whether science and engineering are effective. I want to challenge their faithfulness.

Wild(ish) America

I've just returned from a nice paid vacation in Florida for a week. What's the secret to being paid to go eat seafood on the Gulf Coast? Apparently you just have to be willing to get dirty.

A friend of mine from college is now an engineer with a firm in California. Every once in a while he gives me a call to do some sub-contracting on their projects. It's mostly just his goodwill towards others, and that I think he's trying to recruit me for his company. The recruiting is not unwelcome, but let's face it, CA is a pretty big demerit on their score card. Anyway, this time my friend JS was going to be on my side of the continent for a job and could use a little help with a field study, so I hopped onboard if for no other reason than to pay for my wife's imminent "work" trip to London to present a paper at a conference.

The work was pretty easy. JS mostly had to download data from two instruments at 7 sites or so along a river in the panhandle of FL. There were also two new sites that he had to install instruments. The latter were the jobs that he needed help with since it included carrying a stack of 10 foot sections of 2" pvc pipe and a few steel T-posts (think barbed-wire fence posts) along with drill, saw, computer, hose-clamps, crimps, a variety of other odds and ends, and of course duct tape.

The sites were on a stretch of unregulated river in FL with a wide, undeveloped floodplain. Honestly, it reminded me a lot of the Delta National Forest in MS. The floodplain roughly 8 miles wide and was forested predominantly with tupelo, cypress, swamp oak, and ironwood.
The understory was pretty open (i.e., you could walk it easily without needing, say, a machete), with lots of vines, poison ivy, and ground palm. Oh, and don't forget the spiders! They were awesome. I haven't seen spiders like that since Brazil. They built orb-like webs that would span 6 or 8 ft between trees, and the spiders themselves had bodies that were about 2-3 in long (at least one sex did... I'm not sure if this larger version (the others were only about an inch long) is the male or female. I'm guessing female.). Legs and all you're looking at something that has a footprint about the size of a man's palm or slightly larger. And the woods were littered with these guys! To move through the forest we generally did a sort of maze-like negotiation of dozens of giant spider webs between trees.

I know what you're thinking: Florida in late July around a bunch of sloughs in a river, must be really hot and humid. Humid, yes; hot, not really. The temperature was only in the low 90's or high 80's the whole time we were there, probably because there were thunderstorms pretty much the whole trip. A typical day consisted of a hot morning that would cool off when a breezy scattered thunderstorm came through and drenched us. The shower would be followed by stiflingly still air and direct sun that heated everything back up to a steam bath. This would happen two, three, or four times an afternoon. I have to say, it's tricky operating a laptop (for downloading the data) in a thunderstorm. Meanwhile, Bob-the-boat-driver regaled us with stories of fishing boats being hit by lightning.

Most of the study sites were between a quarter of a mile and a mile off the main river back along sloughs. The idea is to determine the river stage at which these sloughs become hydraulically connected. Thus, a typical stop on the river consisted of a hike across the floodplain or along the channel of the slough (depending on how much water was in the slough) to the field site to download the data. And of course, Florida is reptile country. Strangely, we didn't see that many reptiles. I looked and looked. I mean, I was there on a paid eco-vacation as far as I was concerned, so I wanted to see wildlife. JS on the other hand would rather not see a snake unless it was to avoid stepping on it. The one snake we did see in the woods was a pretty nice sized one at about 30" or so moving calmly about 2 or 3 ft to the right of our path. I saw the snake after JS had passed the spot in front of me obliviously. JS was visibly tense after the encounter. This is when I found out he really doesn't like snakes. Of course, he's better about snakes than Bob is about spiders. Apparently, when JS doesn't have any other help on the data collection trips, Bob has to accompany JS on these hikes (for safety's sake). But Bob has the rather poor combination of poor eyesight and well-developed arachnophobia. Or, at least, this is what JS chuckled about on one of our walks, relating that when Bob inevitably runs into one of the webs he screams hysterically.

And we really only saw one alligator as well, and that one from the boat in the main river channel. Again, a bit of a disappointment. When my dad and I used to go water skiing on the Pearl River in MS we'd see an alligator or two in the shallow sloughs pretty much every time, and maybe the odd gator swimming across the channel. At night on the Pearl you can shine a flashlight on the glassy water and get a good idea of just how many gators are really around all the time from the reflecting eyes that stare back at you. And you hear so much about the density of gators in Florida that I half expected to cross deep pools in the sloughs by walking on the backs of a crowd of gators. But it's not like that at all. There are gators there, no doubt, but I don't get the impression that they are in any greater numbers than on just about any other river in the southeast with comparable degree of wilderness.

Now, that said, JS did tell me about a time when a whole team from his company was down to do the initial installation of all the sites. When the group went to cross a pool in one of the sloughs one of the guys actually stepped on the tail of gator that was just sitting on the bottom. It's hard to say who was more startled, the fella or the gator, but both reacted by violently thrashing about in the muddy water as they tried to get away from each other. The incident got everyone's heart rate up, but no damage was done to either participant.

I suppose the biggest adventure that JS and I had was on our way to the site furthest from the main river. The Moccasin Slough site was about a mile inland along a winding slough. When the river is low, as it was, it's much easier to walk across the floodplain than to try to follow the intermittently shallow and deep channel of the slough. So, Bob put us out on a steep bank of a bend in the main channel and we climbed up to the floodplain and set off. We had with us an up-scale GPS that works even under thick forest canopies (the details of how aren't really important here). JS had marked the site with a waypoint on a previous visit, so we set out with the GPS watching the screen and trying to connect the dots. Incidentally, I had intended to pack my compass precisely for this job, but had forgotten.

The floodplain along the river is, as I mentioned, about 4 miles wide on either side of the river channel. In fact, it is aptly named a "plain" as it is as flat as one can imagine. Once you leave behind the main channel, the forest looks the same in every direction. I don't mean that in the way that all forests look the same in every direction. I mean that having wandered through forests in the hills of MS, this place was eerie in its lack of direction. Thankfully, the GPS worked well under the canopy and we had no trouble following the waypoint to the site. About halfway in we heard a massive grunt off to our right. Then about 60 yards ahead we saw a herd of feral pigs running across our path. Closest to us were a bunch of piglets, at least half a dozen.

Now, snakes and alligators don't make me nervous, but wild hogs put me on edge especially when there are little ones running about. I suppose I've heard too many stories from the Delta about boars chasing hunters and treeing them. The story is that a boar is tenacious and will sit there and wait for you to come down. It might all be wives' tales, but who wants to find out when a 300 pound boar is roaming around the woods around you perhaps feeling that his favorite little piglet daughter is being threatened by a bald ape? So, JS and I kept still for a few minutes to let the pigs get some distance on us. Then we continued on, keeping up a conversation betwixt us mostly to apprise the pigs of our location as we moved on. We made it to the site without further incident, performed our duties and packed up to make the return trip across the forest. We set out in the direction whence we came with JS in the lead with the GPS unit. After about a hundred yards JS started curving the left (sometimes it's hard for the GPS to pick up immediately which direction you're moving, so adjustments to the path are common). Then he adjusted further to the left. And again. And again. Pretty soon I felled compelled to say, "Hey, man, I think we've just about done a 180 in here."

I was adamant that we were about 30 deg short of retracing our steps back to the slough, but JS (having been staring at the GPS screen) seemed sure he was taking us in the right direction because the GPS said so. After a couple of starts and stops, and ensuing discussion, JS had the good judgment to turn on the "track" feature of the GPS which shows your path on the screen. This is how we discovered that the GPS direction arrow doesn't work well under the canopy. It was clear when we plotted our track that we had been headed the wrong direction, but even we we got going in the right direction the GPS arrow pointed us off at right angles to the newly re-acquired route. We made it back to the boat in short order. But this is precisely why I'll have a compass next time.

All the while on these little jaunts through the woods, we were soaked with sweat, rain, and covered with spider webs and mosquito bites. At one point my shirt was so wet and dirty from shoveling an instrument out of four feet of sediment (buried by the slough), that I just took it off and washed it in a pool along the slough. We usually ate lunch in small town restaurants near the river, and I usually ate while still soaking wet. The air conditioning in these places actually made it such that I was far more comfortable being outside in the heat and humidity than in the icebox they called a restaurant. On the third day, the rubber soles of both of my boots came off in the same day! I was reduced to walking on the foam bottoms for the rest of the day (with feet constantly soaked). At lunch that day I was, as you can imagine, particularly wet, and tried my best not to make that squishy wet shoe noise as I walked through the restaurant. I must have looked like Swamp Thing.

So, wild pigs, a snake, an alligator. Add to that spiders, bald eagles, ospreys, kites, innumerable water birds, kingfishers, falcons, raccoons and deer. When we weren't in the woods we were generally eating fresh bay scallops or blackened grouper at a local restaurants where the beverage of choice was sweet tea (they don't serve "unsweet" tea), and the side item of choice was cheese grits. What a nice vacation.

The funniest risk associated with this trip: apparently every year 20 or 30 people are injured when Gulf Sturgeon jump out of the water and hit their boats. According to our boat driver, sturgeon can grow to 6 or 8ft in length and way around two hundred pounds.

Broke

I'm broken.

I don't mean in the sense that my spirit is broken. I mean it in the sense of malfunction, like when the car breaks down. I'm broken, I don't work, I'm screwed-up somehow.

For a full week now I have been trying to work on my research. I work for a few minutes. Then I find myself sitting in front of my computer blankly. I stare off into space and my mind wanders. Psychological pressure builds, and builds. I get a headache. I'm tense.

I haven't gotten anything, and I mean anything, done in a week. A WEEK. It's demoralizing. My supervisor wants progress to accelerate, and I feel as though I'm pushing through thickening molasses. There's no good reason for the retarded progress, no tremendous intellectual hurdle. I just have no focus. I get upset; I should be able to push through on pure disciplined attention. This should be nothing. I'm wasting time; why can't I just do what has to be done. When the supervisor returns from his vacation I'll be forced to tell him that I've accomplished nothing. Having to say that will tear my insides to shreds regardless of his reaction. Disappointment, frustration, whatever. He has nothing on the degree of my self-critique, and increasingly self-contempt.

It is not that I'm incapable of concentrating. Quite often I can concentrate intensely for hours, or even days, on a topic. It's the sort of all-consuming concentration that I recognize might well become dangerous in its own right. So, no, it's not that I can't concentrate. It's that I can't always control when and on what I concentrate. I think it's this concentration that has given me the label of being a little "intense" for some people's taste.

I am prone to extremes (case in point).

As I hang on through the drought, the psychological pressure builds: there is a schedule associated with the Ph.D., there are hoops to jump through at particular times. Regardless of whether I think the hoops and the schedule really mean anything (clearly they don't mean too much, since I took 5 years to get a bachelor's degree, and abandoned one Ph.D. already), my ability to jump through those hoops at will is somehow important to me. So, when the malaise gets to this point where I doubt my ability to perform on (my own) command, it sends shivers of doubt and anxiety through me. The aggressive/competitive side of me (which is well developed) wants desperately to show the melancholy side of me just who has the reins in this relationship. I want to wrangle my intellectual angst with brute psychological force.

At times I've been able to make the slog through to the other side by the very simple attack of taking tiny steps of forward progress, stay focused on focusing on work, no matter how slow the progress, just do something and things will slowly re-align.

The strategy just doesn't seem to be working at the moment.

That's why I say that I'm broken. It's an appropriate phrase. Let me spell out why it's appropriate... Everything in this post as been about overcoming all for an almost mechanical efficiency. Somewhere in my experience I seem to have started evaluating myself in analogy with a piece of software, a computer program, or a machine. The analogy says that I'm broken: with the appropriate inputs, I'm not producing the expected output. It depends the day you ask me as to whether I think it's true.

But really, what other model does society hand you? I'm a part of a nation, an economy, a research institution, and a family. In Aristotelian language each of these carries with it certain responsibilities, a certain role. There are virtues associated with fulfilling those roles, and prudence is the virtue of balancing them. But in our society it seems to be less about relationships and responsibilities, and more about production and performance. In the modern mindset we are agents within dynamic systems. "Agents" have interactions rather than relationships. I find it telling that sociologists model societies using mathematical models derived for modeling the molecules in gases. Molecules don't have relationships, commitments, and responsibilities, they have laws to obey. Our systems are constructed, or at least made intelligible, by the hypothetical existence of underlying laws. The economy is subjected to government control by virtue of conceptualizing it as a dynamical system (and manipulating it accordingly), which implicitly reduces persons to agents - agents obeying laws. So when I fail to obey the laws of productivity, of efficiency, of profit maximization, I am disobeying the laws that make our society intelligible. I am molecule violating electromagnetism, which is to say that I am unintelligible, a puzzle, and probably just a data point that is determined to be an error and thrown out of the pool for analysis. If enough of us deviate together, then maybe the sociologists would update the models to include us as a minority contributing statistically to the dynamics of the whole (a different species of agent obeying slightly different laws).

I am not saying that statistical relationships don't exist between social "observables". I am just saying that describing society and economic engagements as a machine has consequences for the cogs in that machine. If we find economic existence intelligible (that is, we can wrap our heads around it somehow) by thinking of it as a machine, then that metaphor shapes how we see our role in that machine. Wouldn't a carburetor find itself in an odd situation if it failed to perform its proper function without any apparent mechanical malfunction? It's clearly nonsense, any malfunction would just be (by definition) a mechanical malfunction! So, what is the implication? The only malfunction in a component of the economic system (say, someone who cannot keep a job) must be a mechanical problem with the component itself. And sense components are themselves just little machines, we can potentially fix that problem. This is the realm of medicine. Any psychological problem is actually a neuro-physiological (read: mechanical) problem.

You see where all of this goes. If I am failing to fit social expectations, it is because I am broken. And the anxiety it sets up is that I need to get fixed so that I don't fail the system any longer. And what if medicine is not advanced enough to fix me? Or if the cost is greater than my potential economic output?

That's the long way around to explaining my playful expression that I am broken. For me it is both an expression of personal dissatisfaction and a satirical jab. It makes me wonder what a list of modern virtues would look like, and whether/how these would derive from the practices of mechanistic explanation, and how this may or may not deviate from the ancient virtues.

A Tough Act to Follow

I offer an excerpt of a letter written by the founding brother of the Missionaries of Charity, Brothers (the male wing of Mother Teresa's order) about his experiences in rich and poor countries:

"Sometimes people wonder why we go to more prosperous places like Los Angeles, Tokyo, Hong Kong, when there is such desperate poverty in India and on such a large scale. I believe that there is much more terrible poverty than that found in India. Hong Kong illustrates this for me. When i was in Calcutta recently during the floods which devastated so much it struck me one day that the people of Calcutta are somehow much more humanly rich than people in Hong Kong. It is a strange paradox that may be saying something to us. It is true of much of the more affluent world. In Hong Kong we have a small home for severely mentally disabled men. We get public funds - and much interference. The men in the home are severely retarded. They have been in various institutions where they did not respond much to training or treatment. They lived with their families in the impossibly small rooms of Hong Kong housing conditions. Since joining us, all have responded well - and the big thing, it seems to me, is that they are happy. But that is not enough, we are told. They must be doing something, they must be programmed. There can be few places as rushed in the world as production-centred [sic] Hong Kong. The stress and pressures here are great. It seems we are not allowed to be satisfied that these disabled men are happy. They have to be got into the rush, into the rat-race that is driving everybody else mad. There are basic questions involved in this about where the dignity and value of a man lies, whether it is in his being or in his performance. And so India, with its greater material poverty, has a quality of life that is often lost when the gods are materialistic and must be got down in a report. It is a question of the human and spiritual enjoyment of life. I feel, in places like Hong Kong, we are meant to be a little witness to this as 'Animal Farm' bears down on all sides."[my emphasis]
-from Mother Teresa: A complete authorized biography, by Kathryn Spink


We would do well to keep this in mind when we decide we're going to "help" people. It is a great challenge to help people become themselves rather than to attempt to make them look more like ourselves.

Cosmic humor

I ask, is God's humor distinct from his justice? I'm guessing not and here's why:

Yesterday I purchased a biography of Mother Teresa because I think she's about the closest thing to the faith of the Patristics and their practice that we've seen in recent times. I read the first 70 pgs yesterday evening. Toward the end of that reading session I found the following passage:

"If an increasing number of occupants of the home for the dying began to recover it was not because Nirmal Hriday [the home] could provide efficient medical care which hospitals could not. There were those trained doctors and nurses who came to work there on a voluntary basis who were horrified at the failure to observe the kind of fundamental rules of hygiene which would protect the Sisters from infection and the 'patients' from contaminating each other. The Missionaries of Charity were not to wear gloves to touch the maggot-ridden bodies of the dying, any more than they were to hold the lepers at arm's length because they were tending the body of Christ. One anecdote which Mother Teresa loved to tell and retell was of a young novice who was sent for the first time to work in Nirmal Hriday, who returned at the end of the day with shining eyes, protesting her joy that she had been touching Christ throughout the day."

This passage falls on the next to last page that I read last night. Then, not twelve hours later, who walks into morning prayer but L, perhaps the most notoriously smelly homeless drunk in our city. We've known L for a while. He shows up for prayer, asks what day it is and if we can buy him a beer, and then disappears for a few weeks. He has in various prior appearances passed out on the church steps, yelled irately at one or other of us, and chugged a glass of raw eggs for breakfast. I once saw him wandering drunk in city traffic three times in one day in substantially different locations of the city. One story circulating among those on the street is that the cops don't hassle L anymore because once when he was picked up in a police cruiser one of the officers proceeded to vomit in his car because of the smell. Maybe it's true, if not in fact at least in spirit. He generally looks as if he has been unconscious in a ditch for a few days. His mood swings from disoriented and inquiring to outright belligerence. Another story has it that he has been banned from all of the local convenience stores because of his propensity to lose his temper and throw things.

Anyway, L walks into our little church and has a seat in one of the rear pews. I find it endearing that he positioned himself so: merciful and endearing. Even from that position his scent quickly diffused around the small sanctuary. After prayer C and I spoke with him over breakfast and I offered to go buy him some new clothes (to replace some utterly soiled garments) if he would come back to evening prayer to pick them up. He agreed, so we collected his sizes from him and proceeded to shop at the thrift store after lunch.

L showed up promptly for evening prayer, while I was speaking to another of our local friends (he told me some of the stories about L). L took his position on the pew, adamant that we have service before he would change clothes. After prayer I walked him around to the parish hall (he had forgotten how to get there since breakfast... it's less than 50 feet and the buildings are attached), and got out the new socks, underwear, shirts, pants, etc. He needed help getting his shoes off. No problem. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a good head for figures, at least as clothing sizes go, so the pants were several sizes too small in the waist. He insisted on trying on all three pair, despite their all being the same size. A particularly comical moment (which failed to strike him) was when he came out of the bathroom asking for help in buttoning the pants, for which the button and button-hole were respectively closer to his hips than to his navel. No chance, buddy. After some convincing he put back on his "ratty ol' britches" and proceeded to dress himself. He couldn't get the new socks on, so I helped. His feet had sores on them, at least patches I assumed were sores because they were an opaque black and looked abraded. The smell was, hmm, memorable. His ankles were swollen, almost too much for me to get the socks over them, and his legs were covered in scars. He said he had a rod in his left shin from some long ago accident. No details.

I asked if we could get him a motel room so he could get a shower and clean up. Maybe we could get a nurse to come have a look at the more troubling wounds. But he wouldn't have it. "No, thank you, sir," he kept saying. C helped him button up the new shirt that we got for him. Unfortunately, he kept his undershirt, a medium-weight long sleeve knit shirt that he had worn for I think probably at least a year underneath his sweater (yes, he's been wearing a sweater in the South all summer... he said it was "kinda warm").

Tomorrow we'll go get him some pants that fit. And I'll try again to convince him to let us take him to clean up some. If only there were a shower at the church.

The point here is not that L stinks, but that L is precisely the guy I need to be alongside while reading Teresa's biography. So, I say that God is humorous because I almost laughed when L walked in this morning precisely because of my choice of reading material the night before. There will be no easy tests today, no charming, well-kept homeless to chat with. And it only seems obvious that the humor of the situation is also its justice.

Work keeps me away

Again, it's been a while. I'm starting to feel the crunch of getting a Ph.D. in the next year and work is ramping up. If I could just finish what feels like an almost incessant amount of preparation for the paper that is currently in the works, maybe I'd have some momentum going.

To update you on life here: Jax graduated from puppy class two weeks ago. For the final session we just played games in a semi-competitive atmosphere. Jax took second place in the agility category. If he hadn't been quite so spastic we might have taken first. As it is we got second even though we had to try the L-shaped tunnel about 6 times because he couldn't, as it were, "see the light at the end". So, we just played peek-a-boo with him running in and out of the tunnel. Besides that he has phenomenal speed, and he's plenty smart. We made a short video of him doing obedience exercises the other day. We'll try to post that soon. He now knows: sit, down, stay, wait, shake, roll over and up (which is to get him to step up onto a platform). I've been experimenting with teaching him to discriminate his toys on command. So far it seems that grammatically he's hooked on verbs. Nouns haven't quite clicked. That is, he always seems to equate a command with DOING something. I can tell him to find his squeaky toy, but if I'm holding two toys, he is almost as likely to go for the wrong one. I have theories about how to overcome this. More soon.

Oh, and I've noticed that I'm oddly polite to the dog. When he does something wrong he gets a stern "No, sir!" Don't ask why. I dunno.

Been a while

I've been absent from the blogosphere for a while now. Meanwhile, I've had a lot on my plate. My supervisor finally woke up and realized that I'm a lazy bastard when it comes to my Ph.D. and asked ever so gently that I increase productivity. It's only fair. So, I've been very busy with work this week, trying to regain some of the ambition that I had at the beginning of the summer. There is still hope. I should be impressed that the boss was so distracted from my stagnation for so long. It helped that one of my fellow students in the group just got a paper accepted in the journal Science (which is a career maker for young scientists), and because we also got word that my own humble attempts at science had been selected as a highlight in the month's geophysical publications. Should my work make it into any popular news setting, I'll post a link here. Don't hold your breath.

In addition, H and I went a few hours west to meet up with my sister as she spends a summer as a remora to the Equestrian show circuit's shark. She's a helper for photographers who specialize in equestrian events. They happened through our state, so we went out for a short visit. Ironically enough, the grounds for the event have recently been subjected to some stream restoration work conducted by a local engineering firm. Folks were hostile about the result, which significantly reduced the functional area of the site as far as horse showing is concerned. At a glance I suggested that it looked like a Rosgen-ite project (I have done a little work in stream restoration). A little later we actually spotted an engineer doing some monitoring, so I ambled up to speak with her. Turns out that the project was designed using Dave Rosgen's methodology, which is a somewhat simplistic approach to stream restoration, but it packages easily and that's what sells. In that sense "stream restoration" is a lot like "organic": it's becoming more of a marketing label than a philosophy. Everyone wants to restore the environment and eat healthily, but effort is where we get bogged down. So, as long as we can throw money at a product that has the right label (i.e., stream restoration, or organic), then surely we are still engaging in the virtue of those activities. Unfortunately, something is lost and it has something to do with buy-low sell-high.

Anyway, it's back to the world of mathematical models for me. I have to figure out a few things so that I can return to writing this paper. I spent 3 hours yesterday (or maybe more) just deciding what (and then coding) the most efficient and defensible method of binning the data would be so that the estimate of the probablity density would be methodologically sound. It's a really basic operation, but so much depends on the resulting estimate that I was, and am, a little anxious about having it just right.

License to Evangelize

Been looking for just the right way to share your faith?

Maybe you're not the bumper sticker type.

Maybe you're a compassionate "lead dog" and want to put something meaningful in the line of sight of all those "dogs" on the highway for whom the view never changes... Give them a little piece of eternity to contemplate.

Well, South Carolina's DMV has you in mind (while copying a Florida design that failed to make it to production). Nothing says "I'm not vain" like a Christian vanity plate.

If you ask me, this is just itching for some creatively ironic vanity plates, like say:

"Chch&St?"

or

"Cnstntn?"

or

"in what?"

These are of course only the snide versions. No doubt piety can and will be taken to new heights if the plates go into production.

Keeping up with reading

So, what have you been reading? I've been trying to keep a lively reading schedule. Last week I read Wendell Berry's Life is a Miracle which is broadly sympathetic to my own view of science. I'm also half-way through Ernst Mayer's One Long Argument, a primer on the development of Darwinian theory. I'm about to finish up Augustine and the Catechumenate, a study on the education of those seeking baptism in the fourth century church. In those days it took roughly three years of instruction in the life and liturgy of the church before one petitioned for baptism. How easy we have it these days. Biblically speaking, in addition to the readings from the lectionary read at prayer, last week I read Esther and Ezra once each and then Romans about four times (I find Paul troublesome).

I just picked up a copy of Hendry's Theology of Nature which I sampled earlier today (the chapter on "Science of Nature") and look forward to consuming and digesting it in its entirety very soon. In addition I got a collection of William Blake's poetry and Harold Bloom's introduction to Blake's poetics entitled Blake's Apocalypse - both just to satisfy curiosity. And when there's time I'm looking for an excuse to delve into Michael Polanyi's Gifford Lectures (published as Personal Knowledge).

Besides that I don't really have much time. I'm trying to work on my Ph.D. (which means also reading scientific literature, at present that on the mathematical theory of intermittent dynamics in nonlinear systems), keep up with my wife, and train the dog (whose behavior has become demonstrably worse... I think we have to re-establish our disciplined routine). In the yard: our tomato plants are starting to produce. Our two-year-old vine (that's right, we kept it alive all winter in the attic) has between 7 and 9 tomatoes at various stages of development. The vine that our Italian friends gave us seems to have one or two very small fruits, and the other four tomatoes still need time to mature. The squash plant has 3 or 4 more squashes developing, and the pepper plants are starting to make their upward thrust. A new sport we're developing in the yard is training Jax to stalk rabbits, for which he seems to have some intuitive grasp.

That's all for now.

Science of Blame

Previously I said:

"Science really has no resources for talking about what should be and yet we see quasi-religious fervor in the debate over the reality, source, and necessary responses to global warming even within the scientific community."

It strikes that it is worth commenting on the debate around the sources of global warming. When we ask "How is this happening," what is it that we want to know? We are, one assumes, asking what the efficient cause of global warming is. The answer: increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. So we ask what the efficient causes of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations might be. Part of the answer: fossil fuel emissions. The chain of causes continues: vehicles, power plants, American industry, growing economy, etc.

The point, in short, is that the science of global warming can only tell us the efficient causes in a mechanistic chain of events. And in fact relatively quickly we reach an echelon at which science is on shaky ground for talking about efficient causes. For example, what chain of causality made man such a magnificent fossil fuel burner? And don't think that relating the story from the history books amounts to establishing causation!

That is, given that technology is what it is, science can tell us which are the offending technical agents. It cannot tell us, for example, who is to blame or when we went wrong. It cannot even tell us that global warming is a bad thing! Such questions require sound judgment. But surely a scientist, so well trained in logic and so well apprised of the facts, should be able to exercise sound judgment in the matter. Why? Thinking deductively, or at best thinking clearly, does not amount to prudence.

As I see it, we have equipped scientists to answer such questions only in technological terms. The offending agent in global warming is a piece of technology (or set of technologies), according to science, and the solution is then (straightforwardly) to design alternative technologies that are not climatically offensive.

Brilliant!

This seems to be precisely where we've arrived, culturally. The energy debates are debates about how to transition the economy to a fuel that will neither severely hamper the U.S. economy nor promise significant climatic alteration (which again, creates economic uncertainty). We applaud ourselves because we are behaving honorably, deploying the greatest epistemological apparatus (i.e., modern science) in the history of mankind onto the knotty problem of saving the planet. Bravo! Bravo!

The unacknowledged assumption is that moral questions are technological questions. The "blame" for global warming goes to those silly fossil fuel technologies (and perhaps to anyone who willfully subverts the transition to alternative fuel). Scientifically we simply can't sort out another recipient of blame, and culturally we are ill equipped. Other examples of the moral-technological link are not hard to find, I think, perhaps the most conspicuous being obesity drugs. Consider it an exercise to find examples of where we have produced solutions to questions of morality through technological contrivance.

This is to say that culturally we may be losing the ability to criticize ourselves on any plain that does not admit of description via efficient causes or technological manipulation. Science cannot tell us not to live the way we do; it can only offer us a choice of technologies for doing so. And we seem to be happy with that.

To sum up this post, our approach to global warming has not been to ask if our way of life needs revision, but whether our technologies need revision. It's a conservative question, one that hopes to preserve the status quo, and projects a confidence that the path that led us to technologies that offend the climate is not inherently a bad path, just one with a hiccup.

That is tremendous optimism.

Jax-I

How's the dog? Well, after a two week hiatus from puppy class we have developed enough bad habits to take us forward for a while. Jax exceeded even his normal exuberance this past Tuesday night, reducing H to utter frustration. The other owners apparently persist in tranquilizing their dogs with heavy sedatives before class.

The one activity in which Jax's dynamo showed itself to be both entertaining and within the requirements of the class was during the recall practice. The arena is about a 30ft square in the main room of the building and is bounded by a low gating system to deter the dogs from exits, etc. For the recall exercise one of the handlers would hold the dog at one corner of the arena while the owner would go to the diagonal corner. The handler would then release the dog at approximately the same time that the owner recalls the dog, "Jax, come!" After watching a few dogs trot over to their owners, or maybe wander over while sniffing along the way, it was nice to see Jax excel by doing his best impression of a Saturn rocket on its way into orbit. You could see the fear on H's face as, in the split second that it took Jax to reach escape velocity, she tried to decide whether Jax would be able to stop himself before he ran her over.

In her uncertainty she failed to secure the treat bag.

So when the Jax-I rocket did arrive, H held out her hands in self-defense and the contact sent treats rolling about the floor. This was the perfect opportunity for Jax to demonstrate that the Jax-I comes complete with an anterior Hoover attachment. Once the treats were consumed, Jax and H left the arena as a pair, though H was the redder of the two.

In the next iteration of the same exercise a second handler sat in the arena off to the side of the diagonal linking owner and dog and provided some mild distraction with a tennis ball. I was concerned how Jax would do with such a distraction in play. Never fear. The reason rockets don't have wings is that you don't turn rockets, at least not quickly. Jax noticed the tennis ball as he passed at about Mach 9. He then created something of a mess of H as he touched her, made a half orbit, and then went back for the ball. When he realized that he'd been duped (that deceitful lady didn't really want to play ball at all) he headed back for H.

Jax slept on the way home, as usual.

Evolution and Reason

Sorry, I know I promised something ordinary. Humor me.

For those who want to be too committed to evolutionary explanation: The Darwinian materialist has to explain his own explanation in Darwinian terms. He has to give a Darwinian account of why the neural activity of Homo sapiens necessarily produces a true thought (i.e., Darwinism). If he cannot give a reason why evolution should produce such true thoughts (or give an evolutionary account of truth), then it seems that he has no way to claim that he is not engaging in a Darwinian delusion.

The implication is that physicists are dependent on biologists to give an account of why physics should be true at all (in the sense that it is more than a very effective delusion). And that is an ironic reversal.

Some thought must be put into just how such a committed Darwinian materialist may get out of this predicament without resorting to circularity (e.g., "Darwinism is true because it is the result of Darwinian selection").

Does this mean that I don't "believe in" evolution. Well, no. It means that I don't believe in scientific materialism. That's no news to anyone who has read much of this blog. I think Dawkins is deluded, but not because he's a scientist.

It's because he's an ass.

And if you've read Judges, you'll know that it's the jawbone of the ass that will slay the Philistines.

Originality or lack

Some of you might realize that my criticisms of science are not strictly speaking "original." I have been influenced by Wendell Berry (mostly his novels and poetry [from which you may recognize "practice resurrection"], though I have also read The Unsettling of America). Berry has long been an opponent of uncritical technological consumption, as well as of scientific materialism more generally. He has also gone to the Bible for close readings to re-evaluate how we understand our situatedness within creation (see "The Gift of Good Land" or "Christianity and the Survival of Creation"). In short I think he is the foremost (both temporally and qualitatively) proponent in America of a genuinely Christian engagement with creation.

So, I'm not raising any new issues.

If anything, I approach the issue slightly differently. Berry's style, and indeed much of the strength of his critique, relies I think on a sort of embodied common sense. The gauntlet that he throws down before the modern view is that it doesn't make sense practically. My proposed approach is more circumspect as it relies methodologically on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre. There are essentially two prongs to my attack. One is to examine the early stages of modern science, say around Newton and the Royal Society, and challenge the inevitability of scientific materialism historically. I think it is a contingency that science is the way it is. It is not that science has privileged access to "how the world is" and that such access has dictated materialism. (I've just written myself out of conversation with Dan Dennett.) This approach is to follow MacIntyre's historical approach to rival rational traditions. In this case we have rather than two rival traditions being synthesized (as for Augustinianism and Aristotelianism into the Thomist synthesis), instead a divergence of traditions. So, I want to understand rationally how this occurs if even just in the particular case of the scientific revolution.

The second prong in the attack is to challenge the Humean Is/Ought distinction that seems implicit to modern science. I think that science's supposed ethical/moral neutrality is a rational mistake finding its roots in the Enligthenment. The result is the sort of ad hoc scientific value judgments that are being leveled in the modern climate debate. Science really has no resources for talking about what should be and yet we see quasi-religious fervor in the debate over the reality, source, and necessary responses to global warming even within the scientific community. Furthermore, the inevitable result of such conceptual poverty is that responses to the perceived danger are characterized almost exclusively by the need for further research to decide what our options are for out-engineering the disaster.

So, I want to talk about science's inheritance as the favored child of the Enlightenment and how this has eroded its conceptual resources for ethical debate. To make the criticism that science divorces knowledge from action (epistemology from ethics) is, I think, to level a criticism that is consistent with Wittgenstein's remarks (which is not to say that it is what Wittgenstein "meant" or "said" through his remarks).

The entire critique is MacIntyrean. While I think that Berry's critique is more meaningful on the whole, I am sensitive to MacIntyre's notion of criticizing rival schemes on their own terms.
Since science doesn't contain any ethical "terms" I think that there is an opening in the environmental debate to show how science can pose a problem that it cannot deal with on its own terms.

A normal post about the dog, etc. is forthcoming for those who hate all this other nonsense.

On track with Wendell

Wendell Berry says, "My work has been motivated by a desire to make myself responsibly at home in this world and in my native and chosen place."

I reckon that's a good place to start for most anyone. My own inclination is to modify the motivation to "make myself faithfully at home in this world and in my native and chosen place."

The change is probably more a matter of taste than content.

Oh, wow...

This is precisely what I am not about:
http://www.re-discovery.org/gravity_1.html

Scary. Think Tank or Fruit Basket?

In support of my views

By chance I found this letter to the editor of the Times Literary Supplement by one Andrew Janiak (Duke University) in response to some rather dismissive comments by Steve Weinberg (imminent physicist and careless historian of science):

Sir, – Steven Weinberg's review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion contains some inaccurate remarks about the history of Weinberg's discipline, mathematical physics. If the contemporary debate between religious thinkers and defenders of "scientific" conceptions of the world is to be constructive, we must recognize the historical specificity of the current positions. The fault lines of the raging debate about intelligent design, and related matters, may seem permanent, but the relation between science and religion was decidedly different during the era of modern physics's emergence. For instance, although contemporary physicists like Weinberg may now understand Sir Isaac Newton as having promoted a secular conception of natural phenomena and of their ultimate origin, this characterization reflects a decidedly anachronistic picture of Newton's own conception of his work.
Weinberg contends that Newton's theory of gravity in Principia mathematica challenged religion because it provided a natural explanation of various phenomena, such as the planetary orbits. But this was certainly not Newton's own understanding of his theory; indeed, in the first edition of the Principia, published in 1687, Newton argued that the solar system could only have been given its current configuration by the intervention of a wise and intelligent being. Weinberg misrepresents Newton again when he contends that the "argument from design" was refuted by Newton's explanations of the world. In fact, Newton himself endorsed a version of the design argument, and in the very text in which he presents his explanations of natural phenomena. In the famous "General Scholium", added to the second edition of the Principia in 1713, Newton writes that "the diversity of created things" could only have arisen "from the ideas and the will of a necessarily existing being". More generally, Newton made it clear that discussing God by analysing the phenomena of nature is a proper part of his natural philosophy. The task now confronting us, then, is to understand precisely why science and religion are understood as conflicting with one another, given their intertwining in the past. [my italics]

ANDREW JANIAK
Department of Philosophy, Duke University,
Durham, North Carolina 27708.

I'm happy to see the same mention of the gravitation controversy as well as the "intertwining" of science and theology in the past. Of course, we don't have the same views, but I think Janiak is highlighting the same intellectual ambiguity out of which modern science has sprung. It is perhaps just my reading of Janiak that sees a sympathy with the notion that things did not have to turn out the way the did.

I should also mention that my comments on Newtonian gravitation are drawn from the book "Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism" by Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs (with a name like that, surely she also wrote a cookbook? I hope that's not belittling). It's a great little book on Newton and his first followers. See pages 50-51 and 59 for the most direct route to the topics in question.

Clarifying the degree...

After reading my own post from yesterday, it occurred to me that while I essentially said what I meant, I may have unwittingly undermined the degree to which I am challenging science. There is one reading of that post which focuses on the example of retarded innovation as the key to what I am on about, as if perhaps I am just bemoaning my own inability to keep pace with technology or perhaps that I have a bit of the Luddite or Ruskinite romanticism in me.

While I challenge those characterizations of what I said (as I continue to stand by the challenge to innovation as a good in and of itself), here I only want to make it clear that such was not the extent of what I am on about. While the process of experiential learning that is the foundation of our notions of the "scientific method" are unlikely to change, the characterization of those experiences are likely to be greatly altered in a theological setting. I can only offer one example from the history of science off the top of my head. The early debates over what exactly Newton was expounding in his theory of gravitation are instructive, I think, to see where historically the church failed to recognize the seriousness of the task at hand. Where Newton himself (devoutly and scholarly religious albeit non-trinitarian) recognized the threat of heresy, via materialism, in the precise interpretation of the gravitational force, the church failed to grasp the danger. I would be careful here with diction since it is not my view that the church is at such a point on the defensive. Rather, it was the failure to appropriate such learning into the church's initiation into truth, or rather it was the church's small-minded rejection of the notion that such things might teach us further about how to be faithful, that led to the defensive. The failure was, I think, the result of the church's desire to remain powerful by remaining within the framework that it had already mastered (sociopolitically), over and above its humility in remaining faithful.

In fact, the issue at hand was whether gravity was to be understood as a passive property of all matter (which is more or less the view we have inherited to this day) or whether it was to be understood as a dynamic act of God. Many will see the latter as a sort of deus ex machina because that's simply not the sort of hypothesis scientists make, nevermind that Newton favored this view and indeed feared the waywardness the former would engender. Newton foresaw scientific materialism and consciously rejected it. Well, you say, Newton was after all just the proto-modern scientist. He laid the foundation but was quite all there. We've since advanced beyond his superstition. Perhaps. Or maybe there is simply a rival description and rationality for what happens "physically". It seems to me that it is not greater leap to credit God with action at a distance than it is to impute a universal property to all matter that somehow links it with other matter (I am, of course, ignoring modern understandings, and misunderstandings, of gravitational force because philosophically they are the heirs of this early materialism. It is precisely the pursuit of a particular type of question, that of how this latter materialist understanding "works" in nature that we have our modern theory). But surely now, you say, I am engaging in quackery.

Maybe, but I am not in the least convinced. Where Newton saw no rational departure in contemplating the explanation of gravity as property versus action (and settling on the latter), I think we must be careful to consider that the materialism inherent in the rationale of modern science is not intrinsic to the subject matter, but is perhaps rather a property of the kinds of questions and answers that apprentices to science are taught to ask and offer.

This is all just to make the clarification that my critique of science is not fundamentally just about the ethical practice of science or the ethical use of its results. Instead I am fundamentally calling into question the material presumption of scientific enquiry. The notion that scientific practice has an ethical dimension is a wrongheaded way to approach it. A fundamental objection exists in my approach which is that science does not by virtue of method have access to knowledge. Rather, science (as we know it) is devoted to effectiveness. This devotion leads to a dualism between knowledge and ethics, what is and what ought.

An alternative I think is to reject the notion of knowledge being a collection of cognitive "facts", and rather that science's aim must be to refine our participation in creation. As such, scientific knowledge cannot be something attained by the individual because it must presuppose participation in some community life. Newton recognized that care must be taken in conceptualizing each advance in experiential knowledge lest it be misunderstood and lead us astray. The advance that Newton was thinking of was the generality of his gravitational formula. Remember, though, that it was a simple formula that yielded overwhelmingly correct predictions that then led to this debate over the understanding if its term: gravity.

So then, I think we have to admit the possibility that we may have misunderstood the data before our eyes. It is not just a question of pursuing the ethics of science but about pursuing a faithful understanding of why creation behaves as it does.

As a delightful piece of creative writing about creation, consider this quote from Chesterton:

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they
are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated
and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up
person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people
are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is
strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says
every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening,
"Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that
makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately,
but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the
eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old,
and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may
not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE."
-GK Chesterton

Back, finally...

I have finally returned to the blogosphere after a long hiatus. The past couple of weeks have been both fun and frustrating. After a series of dentist visits, a trip to see the family (and meet new family), and $1200 in car repairs (meted out over, count them, three different instances), we have now returned to the relative calm of normal life, albeit with a puppy who refuses to sleep through the night. In fact, the pup impresses me because he can actually bark through the entire night without having any water in his crate. That has to be a notable feat. H can still sleep soundly through his noise, but his barking affects me physiologically (think of how fingernails on a chalkboard often affects people) and thus reduces my sleeping hours to a seemingly endless period of cringing tension. Cottonballs in the ears don't seem to help, so we're going for all out ear plugs so that I can get some sleep while also not giving in to the dog's demands for midnight attention. The humans in this household will prevail. Mark my words.

A slow initiation into the truth

Meanwhile the vocation debate rages, no doubt to the chagrin of those family members keeping up with things from the shadows. My options seem to be academic engineering, consulting engineering, and (almost non sequitur) theology. H is frustrated that all those folks from whom I ask for advice are themselves already vocationally biased toward the latter choice. I'm not getting a fair external appraisal, she worries. That's an honest grievance, I admit. On the other hand, consider first that it is not particularly easy to find people who have experience in both camps and then that the bias from the two camps is not exactly symmetric. That is, the bias toward dismissiveness is much stronger from the science/engineering camp toward theology than vice versa. The overwhelming social presumption is that theology dismisses science at its own peril while science dismisses theology almost by virtue of its own (science's) integrity. People who worry about where the twain shall meet are at best an oddity, perhaps epistemologically schizophrenic, or at worst just engaging in quackery.

I am against quackery, imminently concerned with the unity of my psyche, and admittedly desirous of being viewed as no more of an oddity than I am at present.

That said, I think there is good reason for theologians to start taking science to task. Granted, this won't make a lick of sense to anyone who is not Christian. Not a lick. At least not unless they have significant empathic potential and a willingness to put on the Christian shoe for a while. You simply cannot boil Christianity down to a scientific position because clearly in doing so you have already presumed that Christianity does not fundamentally challenge the "scientific" position as such. That is, the act of translation precludes the ability of the Christian to fundamentally challenge science. When Christians accept those terms at the outset they have effectively committed rational suicide in the debate.

This leaves us paralyzed, does it not? The Christian cannot speak to the scientist nor vice versa (and this violates what we know from experience). Well, as usual it is more complicated than just this. But, in a way, that is the gist of it, or at least that's where much of the contemporary debate is stalled.

But let me start from another vantage. Implicitly we seem to think that Christianity is about the supernatural or the spiritual while science is about the natural or physical. So, the Christian needs the scientist in order to say true things about, well, things; while the scientist needs the Christian in order to be able to say true things about ethics. I am not sure that such categories should be accepted by the Christian (in fact I feel much more strongly about it than just that). From a theological standpoint "science", if we mean the systematic investigation of causes and effects via our experience, is naturally a rigorous approach to investigating creation. The fundamental distinction from a Christian standpoint is that between creature and creator rather than natural/supernatural. And insofar as theology has a category for creature, then it seems that theology should be engaged in the investigation of creatures within the scope of all other Christian inquiry. And, in fact, this is largely how Science (in the way we mean the word today) found its genesis. Unfortunately, I do not think that the church was as adept theologically at discerning heresy (as distinct from proclaiming heresy for base ends like retention of political influence, say) early in the investigation of creation (i.e., around Galileo, Newton, etc.) as it was, say, in the Christological controversies. The result, I think, is the rise of scientific materialism and (fast forward) the present friction between Science and the church.

This is to say that there is no formal reason why Science (as we know it) is the only way to describe the world we call physical. Does this mean that there is another scientific method out there somewhere that could be the Christian one? Well, that seems a bit silly. It's probably silly to claim that there is a single "scientific method" at all (despite high school textbook claims), but far sillier to think that the basic methods of experiential learning would be drastically altered. While we would in all probability learn about creation in much the same experiential way, one fundamental difference is that theologically such activity could never be abstracted from the rest of the theological project. Or, to be less lofty, it could never be abstracted from the pursuit of the Christian life. How might this be different? A devastating difference might be that the means to scientific advancement cannot be overlooked in light of the result. The utilitarian notion that the sacrifice of an individual's family life for the sake of scientific advance that would save millions of lives might just be irrational within a theological framework. A theology of creation would not, I think, have as its end mechanical effectiveness or utilitarian salvation (which is fundamentally about ratios). Virtue would almost certainly trump technological advance. The ability to care for a dying person through loving service would almost certainly trump the drive for a cure (Christianity is, after all, about a revolution against the power of death). By "the ability to care" I mean the community raising and training virtuous people into the capacity of doing so. Loving service takes work.

In short, a Christian-based "science", that is, a robust theological enquiry into creation, would be subordinated to liturgical time and practice, indeed to the development of the understanding of virtues in light of such new knowledge, and as such would almost certainly proceed at a comparative snail's pace when compared to that innovative capacity with which we are now accustomed. Innovation for its own sake is not rational theologically. A scientist who does not pray cannot speak faithfully (and thus truthfully) even if he speaks effectively.

One might ask whether the world wouldn't be worse off if I had my way with science. Fewer vaccines, slower travel, fewer mechanical conveniences. Wouldn't that suck? The only answer from the Christian, I think, is to ask which option is more faithful. The Christian's goal, after all, is faithfulness and not effectiveness or comfort. It is the Christian predicament that faithfulness is to God and that all truth cannot be truth abstracted from the worship of God. So the question of curing more people through a mode of life that is less faithful is just to ask the Christian to engage in knowing deceit, to bear witness against Jesus Christ of cross. Indeed, it is the predicament of the Christian that "knowledge" is never independent of worship, that knowledge must be true to be known and no truth comes but by faithfulness to the Son who is truth. There is simply no way for the Christian to hold that a bunch of "facts" are in any way "true".

That striving for faithfulness, it seems to me, extends to learning about the creation.

I'll end with this summary paragraph:

Knowledge, for the Christian, is about participation. Learning about the creation, as for all Christian learning, is ultimately about becoming more faithful and not about becoming more powerful. Learning is the slow initiation into a life that bears witness to truth. Studying creation is in this way no different than studying scripture, each is the process by which we are initiated into the truth that will transform all life. This, I think, is a starting point for science understood theologically. Such a notion is fundamentally ascetic. But just read Romans 5 again:

"Through him we have also obtained access into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us."