Persecution and the Black Church in the US

Ross Douthat, the younger of the resident conservative commentators at the New York Times, has posted an excellent reflection on Persecution and the Black Church in the United States. Bracing, sobering, and hopeful.

UPDATE: And here's the sequel: For the South, Against the Confederacy; a critique of Confederate nostalgia that can only be offered by a conservative. I haven't spent much time in the South, but quite long enough to see the appeal he talks about here, and to see the difficulty of putting it in the right perspective.

Douthat on New Atheists and Noble Lies

The Times' junior resident conservative, Ross Douthat, can be infuriatingly uneven — sometimes clear-eyed, sometimes self-serving, and sometimes both in the space of a single sentence. But at his best he is a blast of very fresh air: forthright, rigorous, and reasonably open to differences on fundamentals. His current blog post reminds me of why I persevere with him.

Exoplanets ahoy!

There is a lovely animation of the exoplanetary systems discovered by Kepler, and an accompanying article on a recent system with two possible “super-Earths”, in the New York Times' science pages today. Links to previous articles are included ...

Praise, patriotism, partisanship, and pop

The NYT this weekend includes a glowing memoir on the Franciscan Sisters of Mary, on the occasion of Sister Mary Jean Ryan's retirement as chief executive of one of of one of America’s largest networks of Catholic hospitals. The discussion includes their clear-eyed planning for the day (soon to arrive) when the order no longer exists. A friend and I were discussing this sort of thing recently: the difference in organisation and sensibility that allows Catholic groups to be distinctively themselves, while allowing for other ways of being faithfully Christian — something that contemporary Evangelical groups struggle with. There is still a lively tradition of openness in the pews, even in these identity-mongering times, but within the leadership?

A fan of the US military writes in criticism of “support our troops” pieties:

The irony is that our soldiers are the last people who are likely to call themselves heroes and are apparently very uncomfortable with this kind of talk. The military understands itself as a group endeavor. As the West Point professor Elizabeth D. Samet recently noted, service members feel uneasy when strangers approach them to — as the well-meaning but oddly impersonal ritual goes — thank them for their service, thereby turning them into paradoxically anonymous celebrities. It was wrong to demonize our service members in Vietnam; to canonize them now is wrong as well. Both distortions make us forget that what they are are human beings...

The change of tone in the coverage and discussion of Anzac Day, noticeable to anyone over a certain age, springs to mind as an Australian analogue, although the causes may be somewhat different.

An American radio host and author compares contemporary political debate to an auto-immune disease.

And my current nostalgia trip: Glycerine, the greatest hit of the band Bush. I have recently returned to an apartment complex where I was staying in late 1995, through 1996, and this song has been on my mind. Like many pop songs, it would not withstand too close an enquiry into the literal meaning of its lyrics, but as the distillation of a particular mood — masculine yearning, chastened by regret — it is superb. And in contrast to the posturing, braggarty tone of the songs in a male voice that followed it, it is unashamedly pretty. A female cover brings that out, although I do miss the surface roughness of the original:

I could have been easier on you,
I couldn't change though I wanted to.

Getting past the giggle factor

$500,000 as seed-funding for interstellar travel — not for a starship, but for a long-term programme “to begin studying what it would take — organizationally, technically, sociologically and ethically”. DARPA and NASA are behind this, but the work itself, and the carriage of the issue (and the financing) is meant to be done by others for the time being, which is to say, for a very long time.

I'm quite impressed by this:

(1) This is the sort of long-distance thinking and investment that public institutions should sponsor, but the sponsorship that's foreseen here is modest and one-off: this money, together with some meetings to organise and incubate discussion among those interested, and amongst contenders for the funds. It seems as though they have got the level of public involvement right.

(2) They understand that one of the issues is to get past `“the giggle factor” associated with the subject'.

(3) The organisation, sociology, and ethics of the task is explicitly part of the agenda of study.

(4) They understand that we do not yet understand what the question is:

Then again, nobody is smart enough now to know what could come of the starship effort, Mr. Neyland pointed out. It would be naïve to think we even know the right questions to ask.

“If you had asked Einstein and Marconi in 1910 to define a worldwide communication system for the common man,” Mr. Neyland asked, “would he have come up with the iPhone?”

Scott on Streep, and the Eighties

The reputation that Ms. Streep earned for her work in those films retains more luster than most of the movies themselves. Sandwiched between the endlessly mythologized Golden Age of ’70s New Hollywood and the now almost equally sentimentalized decade of the American Indies, the ’80s are comparatively bereft of nostalgic movie-fan affection or revisionist critical love. And yet the respectable films of that era may represent the last gasp of a noble middlebrow ideal. They were ambitious, unapologetically commercial projects intended for the entertainment and edification of grown-up audiences, neither self-consciously provocative nor timidly inoffensive. Some of us grew up on movies like “Sophie’s Choice” and “Out of Africa,” and our fondness outlasts the sense that we eventually outgrew them. Nowadays “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “A Cry in the Dark” would be scruffy little Sundance movies. “Out of Africa” would be in French. “Silkwood” would be “The Blind Side.”

Ms. Streep — grave, scrupulously attentive to the nuances of performance, imbuing every gesture with the values of craftsmanship and respect for quality — was not only the star of so many of these ’80s Oscar movies, but also the most recognizable embodiment of their aesthetic...

A.O. Scott's full article, on the occasion of Meryl Streep's 16th Academy Award nomination, is here on the NYT movie site.

Someone old, nothing new, someone French, someone blue; someone radiant, some history, and a good point

Some things I noticed recently:

One gets a much more measured treatment of the ongoing disaster in Haiti from the NYT than one does from the TV news in Sydney: even the ABC. That's not unusual, but it's still disappointing.

A biologist's love-letter to Avatar. The film itself: wow. The praise is all true, and some of the criticism is true too. This old Alien fan certainly enjoyed the fact that Sigourney Weaver was having the time of her life, both as her character, the splendidly named Dr Grace Augustine, and as that character's alter-ego, a cheeky twentyish eleven-foot tall blue chick with a yen for basketball. (Another nice nod to the Alien films, there.) And amidst all of the reactions to the film, it was very instructive to read a discussion with the Osservatore Romano reviewer whose previous remarks have been taken, as they say, out of context.

The remarkable American strongman Joe Rollino has has died at 104

The director Eric Rohmer also died recently: the NYT has both an obituary and an appreciation by A.O. Scott. I have only seen a few of his films but would happily see the rest, just on that basis. If it were 10 or 15 years ago, I'd expect SBS to put on a retrospective. But now?

In other cinema news, there is a good NYT article on the wonderful Laura Linney: longstanding theatre and film actress, a superb talent with a sharp mind and a professional's attitude, always a little under-the-radar and a little under-rated on the street. And wasn't she superb as Abigail Adams?

The NYT has put out an interactive timeline on the Science and Politics of Climate Change, with links to various historical stories, for example from 1956 and from 1979: the latter of these being the rough period that I would have become aware of the issue. I find this interesting because, as a science brat with all sorts of age-innapropriate concerns and sources of knowledge (and values, and prejudices, and ...) it isn't always obvious to me what other people had access to, when, and on what terms. This article appears to have been from a supplementary section of the paper: a good paper, admittedly, but a regular daily nonetheless.

xkcd on the truth lying between two extremes

Death, life, choice, and cost

It sounds paradoxical to link the desire for unlimited medical treatment to the desire for physician-assisted suicide. But the idea that there’s a right to the most expensive health care while you want to be alive isn’t all that different, in a sense, from the idea that there’s a right to swiftly die once life doesn’t seem worth living.

In each case, the goal is perfect autonomy, perfect control, and absolute freedom of choice. And in each case, the alternative approach — one that emphasizes the limits of human agency, and the importance of humility in the face of death’s mysteries — doesn’t mesh with our national DNA.

Ross Douthat on physician-assisted suicide and the American polity.

There have been a string of good articles in the last month on such cases, where deeply-held but ultimately untenable positions come up against life's conditions and boundaries:

Tim Kreider on not pursuing happiness.

Eric Zencey on GDP as an instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Douthat again, on on the conservatism of Judd Apatow movies:

More than most Westerners, Americans believe — deeply, madly, truly — in the sanctity of marriage. But we also have some of the most liberal divorce laws in the developed world, and one of the highest divorce rates. We sentimentalize the family, but boast one of the highest rates of unwed births. We’re more pro-life than Europeans, but we tolerate a much more permissive abortion regime than countries like Germany or France. We wring our hands over stem cell research, but our fertility clinics are among the least regulated in the world.

In other words, we’re conservative right up until the moment that it costs us...

Concerning that permissive abortion regime, there's this over at First Things:

Prior to the legalization of abortion in the United States, it was commonly understood that a man should offer a woman marriage in case of pregnancy, and many did so. But with the legalization of abortion, men started to feel that they were not responsible for the birth of children and consequently not under any obligation to marry. In gaining the option of abortion, many women have lost the option of marriage. Liberal abortion laws have thus considerably increased the number of families headed by a single mother, resulting in what some economists call the “feminization of poverty.”

(From Richard Stith's Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men.) Back at the Times, RD muses on how the issue might have played differently, if Ted Kennedy had shared some of his sister Eunice's qualms about the practice.

On a happier note, a couple of books reflect, forty years on, on what was special about Woodstock. The answers may surprise you.

Sense, and nonsense, about US politics

On women in combat roles in Iraq and Afghanistan: a pleasingly realistic, as opposed to ideological, piece of reporting — perhaps because it's being prepared during wartime. However, it must be said that some other articles in this series have been much less reasonable.

Meanwhile Ross Douthat has some sane remarks on the health-care-reform debate in the US, and on agency in US politics.

Speaking of the legislature: in memoriam Ted Kennedy, Gail Collins and David Brooks discuss being boring, building human capital, and getting things done. And I have to agree: it is encouraging to see that someone could find their place so completely, relatively late in life, after such previous failure. How to be a good Senator was something he understood quite early, although it seems to have taken seniority, failure as a Presidential candidate, and his second marriage, to free him to become truly good at it.

The ABC in Sydney, of course, is still tone-deaf. A year ago I complained that it was speaking stupidly about Senator Kennedy's illness, and reactions to it, and tonight's reporting of the memorials was no better. There was no mention — not one — of something that has been unavoidable in American discussion of the late Senator's life: his excellence as a Senator, as a legislator, as someone whose business it was to write, to negotiate, to compromise, and to act in concert with others. And if even a quarter of what is said about him in this area is true, then Teddy was superb at it. No-one else in this era is even mentioned as a rival in effectiveness and influence in the Senate; he was the Democrat with whom Republicans — Republican legislators, so they say, without a single exception — most wished to work.

That so thoroughly liberal a figure (and someone routinely demonised as such) could be so respected by the other side of politics, is worth noting, and worth discussing. It's a reminder that the partisan gridlock of present discussion is not the whole story, and is in some ways a declension from an earlier, more civil state. But to even notice any of this is to accept that Americans are not only different from us, but different from our understanding of them, and different — sometimes, dare I say it, they can be better — than their understanding of themselves.

If you're my age, and especially if you're Australasian, you can't help but think of America's quasi-royal family via the Shona Laing song (Glad I'm) Not a Kennedy, although what the late Senator was good at was the workaday business of government, rather than the inspiration one associates with his brothers. Nonetheless, among the pieces of soaring JFK rhetoric that graced the 80's song, there's one that will serve for Jack's baby brother, redeemed sinner that he was:

When a man's ways please the Lord, the Scriptures tell us, He maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.
— Proverbs 16:7

Jim Webb, on holding one's nose and getting real

Second, the United States needs to develop clearly articulated standards for its relations with the nondemocratic world. Our distinct policies toward different countries amount to a form of situational ethics that does not translate well into clear-headed diplomacy. We must talk to Myanmar’s leaders. This does not mean that we should abandon our aspirations for a free and open Burmese society, but that our goal will be achieved only through a different course of action...

Third, our government leaders should call on China to end its silence about the situation in Myanmar, and to act responsibly, in keeping with its role as an ascending world power. Americans should not hold their collective breaths that China will give up the huge strategic advantage it has gained as a result of our current policies. But such a gesture from our government would hold far more sway in world opinion than has the repeated but predictable condemnation of Myanmar’s military government...

US Senator Jim Webb, following his return from Burma, in an op-ed entitled “We Can’t Afford to Ignore Myanmar”. I suspect this is right as far as it goes, but our public discourse on democracy and rights has become so strident, and so little thought-through — while in many other respects, business goes on as usual — that's it's become hard to imagine what a more consistent approach would actually look like.

Redheads, bugs, the LHC, and all that

In praise of the spleen
On the pain of being a redhead
Olivia Judson on your microbial fellow-travellers
xkcd on intercepting asteroids heading towards Earth

Newspapers have gone pleasingly quiet on the Large Hadron Collider, since the run plan was announced earlier this month. It beat the pessimistic, “if at all” tone of reporting just three days earlier. Given previous loud public statements about scheduling, one could argue that we only have ourselves to blame — but it's pretty hard to take some of the free commentary, such as this piece of farfetching on the connection between the LHC and an abandoned Mayan temple. Really. “And like Xunantunich, the collider these days is silent, if not abandoned,” we are told. Stephen Weinberg's response as quoted in the article, “I don’t see it in quite those apocalyptic terms,” is a marvel of understatement.

Meanwhile, yet another tendentious proposal for peace between science and religion has been launched. It is not noted for its theological insight. “Most scientists and most religious believers refuse to be drafted into the fight,” the writer says. Speaking as a scientist and a Christian, I also refuse to be drafted into this sort of attempt at peacekeeping. One problem with peacekeeping forces is that they can have their own agendas; and they are prone to being tone-deaf.

Finally, a chef writes on making “organic” and other small farms more robust against disease:

Healthy, natural systems abhor uniformity — just as a healthy society does. We need, then, to look to a system of food and agriculture that values and mimics natural diversity. The five-acre monoculture of tomato plants next door might be local, but it’s really no different from the 200-acre one across the country: both have sacrificed the ecological insurance that comes with biodiversity.

What does the resilient farm of the future look like? I saw it the other day. The farmer was growing 30 or so different crops, with several varieties of the same vegetable. Some were heirloom varieties, many weren’t. He showed me where he had pulled out his late blight-infected tomato plants and replaced them with beans and an extra crop of Brussels sprouts for the fall. He won’t make the same profit as he would have from the tomato harvest, but he wasn’t complaining, either...

Leaving behind childish things (and also some things of value)

A.O. Scott has written some excellent pieces recently, on films for teenagers (reflecting on the place of John Hughes' movies), as opposed to the current practice of treating the audience like kids;

a propos of which, Molly Ringwald has written a brief reflection on John Hughes as Peter Pan. It's plausible and, all things considered, rather sad. (I also note that, while she's no prose stylist, Ringwald can actually write.)

Meanwhile, in the world of non-moving pictures, photojournalism is in trouble, if not actually dying.

Re the small screen, I enjoyed this comment in the New Yorker, on The United States of Tara:

Collette is impressively convincing, even though I’m not entirely sure what I’m being convinced of.

Going off-message

On Sarah Palin and her enemies:

A Sarah Palin who stepped down for the sake of her family and her media-swarmed state deserves sympathy even from the millions of Americans who despise her. A Sarah Palin who resigned in the delusional belief that it would give her a better shot at the presidency in 2012 warrants no such kindness.

Either way, though, her 10 months on the national stage have been a dispiriting period for American democracy.

If Palin were exactly what her critics believe she is — the distillation of every right-wing pathology, from anti-intellectualism to apocalyptic Christianity — then she wouldn’t be a terribly interesting figure. But this caricature has always missed the point of the Alaska governor’s appeal ...

Over the last few months I have been enjoying the columns of Ross Douthat, the New York Times' new resident conservative: to give a recent selection, here he is offering a critical take on the US Supreme Court, and on using the Constitution to regulate abortion; giving a sane synopsis of where things stand for America in Iraq; and asserting that the basis of affirmative action (if any) will have to shift from race to class.

Meanwhile the established conservative at the Times, David Brooks — really, as a friend of mine remarked in a nice distinction, the resident Republican — found it in himself to call for Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation two months ago ... a sign of how unsupportable the Republican party line has become over the last year. (The fact that he went off-message and criticised the McCain-Palin ticket during, rather than after last year's election, was an early indicator that the game was up.) This week, less than ten of the GOP senators found it in themselves to agree.

In other off-topic news, Barbara Ehrenreich points out that people who were already poor have been hit by the downturn, even if they're not making the news;

a UN official talks about what's right with Japan;

a reporter presents a good-news story on orphanages in Tanzania;

and Matt Bai writes on Obama's sense of humour.

Seven green things

The Southern Lights (Aurora Australis), with the earth illuminated by moonglow, in an amateur photograph by one of the astronauts on board the shuttle Discovery in 1991: from an article in the NYT Lens blog on photography by astronauts.

On non-high-tech ways of being environmentally responsible:
By modifying cattle feed
By putting succulents on city rooftops
By recycling obsolete electronics
By implementing bus rapid transit systems (if the conditions are right)

However, on the political front, working one step at a time is apparently not good enough for some activists (perhaps this can serve as an effective definition of the term “activist”)

On standards in scientific journals:
Physical Review Letters draws a line in the sand, and not before time

“We were wrong”

An object lesson in the value and the limitations of intelligence, management disciplines, and analytical skill, Robert S. McNamara, died on Monday in Washington. The New York Times' obituary makes salutary reading, but if one is going to look at only one thing about McNamara, it should be Errol Morris' wonderful documentary The Fog of War.

I have never understood people describing McNamara as unrepentant and cold. To see him in Fog—apparently, if you were in the right meetings, to see him even in 1968—was to see a man haunted by the hubris, miscalculation, folly ... by the sheer wrongness of so much of what America did in Vietnam; of what he did, as Secretary of Defense, first for Kennedy and then for Johnson, in prosecuting the war; even for aspects of his service during WWII, including what he freely describes as war crimes (he was involved in the fire-bombing of Japanese cities).

Apart from the general cultural anger about Vietnam, and against its symbols—the NYT's most reliably angry columnist has predictably chosen to vent on this occasion—I suspect McNamara's reflections attracted such opprobium because they didn't conform to American norms of repentance. There was no religiosity. There was no talk of transformation or renewal. What there was, was a will to understand, and to draw lessons from past failings.

Lord knows, those lessons were painful enough.

There's also an unpleasant piece of generational conflict at work here: a lack of sympathy with the way McNamara's loyalty to his masters stands in conflict with the all-telling, all-denouncing ethic of younger men. Pensioned off from the DoD for losing faith in the war and urging the President to rethink it, McNamara didn't become an anti-war activist. He got on with running the World Bank as best he knew. And when he did turn again to Vietnam, he did it as a civil servant: asking, what did we do wrong; what can we learn from it. There was a dispassion to the analysis, as there should be. It doesn't mean the countless dead didn't keep him awake at night.

At the risk of an obvious statement, McNamara didn't publicly atone for his sins because he couldn't. (Where would one even start?) An unvarnished “we were wrong” should be respected for what it is. Beyond that is between him and God.

UPDATE: Errol Morris has written a fine piece on McNamara in context

Engaging with difficulty

A.O. Scott has been making a plea for maturity and engagement, in the form of a moral protest against a recent film:

Really, “Away We Go” is about the flight from adulthood, from engagement, from responsibility, even as it cleverly disguises itself as a search for all those things. But the dream of being left alone in a world of your own making, far from anything sad or icky or difficult, is a child’s fantasy.

Stirring stuff. Likewise concerning topics on which it is difficult to talk sensibly, or well, consider the following:

an insightful and sane essay on the Wikipedia revolution;

a meditation on work and thought in the trades, versus the office;

and a report on the frontline of a change of medical practice in the States.

Concerning health care, one of the avowed goals of the Obama presidency, it is good to see that there has been at least some attempt to learn from past mistakes:

It has been 16 years, in fact, since another young, freshly inaugurated Democratic president with a Democratic Congress tried to remake the architecture of health care, and the catastrophe that followed is generally cited as the main deterrent to thinking big about anything in the capital. The plan Bill Clinton took to Congress then, running to more than 1,000 pages of impenetrable new regulations, wasn’t what you’d call politically savvy, but the strategy used to sell it was even worse. Having been elected as the latest in a series of outsider presidents after Watergate, ex-Governor Clinton seemed to believe he had been sent by the voters to purify the fetid culture of Washington; he installed a boyhood friend as his chief of staff and stocked his White House with loyal Arkansans and campaign aides ready to overrun a fossilized Congress. His wife, the current secretary of state, developed the health care plan largely without taking House and Senate leaders into her confidence, instead dropping it at the doorstep of the Capitol as a fait accompli. Ever jealous of its prerogative, Congress took a long look, yawned and kicked the whole plan to the gutter, where it soon washed away for good — along with much of Clinton’s ambition for his presidency.

The first senator elected directly to the Oval Office since 1960, Obama has an entirely different theory of how to exercise presidential power, and he has consciously designed his administration to avoid Clinton’s fate. After winning the office with the same kind of outsider appeal as his predecessors, he has quietly but methodically assembled the most Congress-centric administration in modern history ... Obama seems to think that the dysfunction in Washington isn’t only about the heightened enmity between the parties; it’s also about the longstanding mistrust between the two branches of government that stare each other down from twin peaks on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

How people continue to regard Obama as a pushover and a mere talker escapes me.

I have also been enjoying, together with the occasional cringe-moment, the president's Cairo address. A well-taken Middle Eastern appreciation, along the lines of “Yes, but ...”, can be found here. David Brooks also has some characteristically tendentious but insightful comments on the tensions in Obama's approach.

Several bloggers, fellow fans of the Archbishop of Canterbury, have been reminding me of his Cairo speech five years ago, on the different but related topic of respectful dialogue between Christians and Muslims on the nature of God: on what is agreed, as well as on the disagreements, and on being careful to distinguish the two.

Second thoughts

Work trips put one behind on reading, and on blogging. Here are some things I've been looking at in the last six weeks or so, concerning, in some way, re-thinking a received position.

From the New York Times:
Mary Beard, on Roman book trade and culture
Looking back on decisions about prisoner interrogation
When “bad advice” is the best advice
On the off-brand presidency
On a recognition Israel doesn't need
On the decline of Christian communities in the Middle East

Web comics:
xkcd on changing the rules
PhD Comics on research topics guaranteed to be picked up by the news media

Blogs:
Byron Smith on dying with dignity
Scot McKnight on justification and the New Perspective on Paul: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and ... [one needs to be patient to do anything more than skim these]

Food for thought:
From an NYT op-ed opposed to the drone-war being fought in Pakistan, a comment with resonance for anyone opposed to extremist behaviour, including myself (let the reader understand):

Governments typically make several mistakes when attempting to separate violent extremists from populations in which they hide. First, they often overestimate the degree to which a population harboring an armed actor can influence that actor’s behavior. People don’t tolerate extremists in their midst because they like them, but rather because the extremists intimidate them. Breaking the power of extremists means removing their power to intimidate — something that strikes cannot do...

And from the LRB, Jenny Diski, in a (subscription-required) article on schooling, reflecting on teaching as a young idealist in the early 70s, in an inner-city comprehensive:

The lack of oversight, and of targets, must send a chill of horror through any modern manager of a school, and with some reason: it was pretty haphazard, and who was to say that only good teaching would or did come of the laissez-faire system? The line between liberty and libertarianism is very indistinct, and the desire to dismantle bureaucracy and social inequity leaves open the possibility of chaos, and creates endless opportunities for individual self-aggrandisement. But it seems to me that the risks were worth taking, now that we've seen the dismal results of our 20-year-long experiments with centralised targets, management echelons and paper-based accountability.

Happy Birthday, Uncle Charles

Charles Robert Darwin (1809—1882), gentleman amateur, med-school dropout, ground-breaking geologist, youthful traveller, lifelong naturalist; devoted husband, father, and homebody; authority on barnacles and worms; theorist on coral reefs, and both natural selection and sexual selection in evolution—a man both of and before his time—was born 200 years ago today.

Some articles in celebration:

In the London Review of Books, a heartbreaking poem by Ruth Padel, ‘The Sea Will Do Us All Good’ (subscription only, alas)

In the New York Times Science pages:
Darwin, Ahead of His Time, Is Still Influential
Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live
Genes Offer New Clues in Old Debate on Species’ Origins
Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life
Seeing the Risks of Humanity’s Hand in Species Evolution
Darwin the Comedian
and an interactive feature: On Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of Species’

(Last year Olivia Judson ran a small series along similar lines, for the sesquicentenary of the announcement of natural selection: Darwinmania!, An Original Confession, and Let’s Get Rid of Darwinism.)

As the most provocative of those essays argues, Darwin is not evolution, and evolution is not Darwin. (We should also be careful to give Wallace his due.) In the limits of a few words, I tried to be precise about him: Darwin did not give us evolution, but he did give us natural selection and sexual selection—he gave us mechanisms for the process; and he gave us evidence. In any organised enquiry, evidence has to count for something. And in the natural sciences, mechanism counts for a lot.

His legacy is so distorted by the still-ongoing struggle of our culture to assimilate evolution: it's important to note that the concept not only predates Darwin, but also predates its own scientific respectability; and that the objections mostly concern a cluster of ideas in ethics and political economy that have little to do with biology. Yet, as some of the above-listed authors complain, it has all become bundled together in a package called “Darwinism”. (The idea of Evolution, with its permanent capital letter, is not much better.) In modern times at least, this reaction runs smack into many scientists' reverence for Darwin himself, and so the drama becomes knotted and unending. I hate to think what Darwin, a reflective and sensitive man, would have made of it.

It may ultimately be a distraction in understanding biology, but scientists are people too, and the worship of Darwin is as much about character and values as about the content of the science. The Old Man was painstaking, patient, and empirical, placing evidence before theory; intellectually honest but hating to give offence, devoting his life to his work but devoted to a personal life beyond it: he is every scientist's sainted Uncle Charles, the standard we know we can't live up to. Newton and Maxwell are authorities we respect; Galileo and Einstein are prophets, champions, and men of genius; and in my field, at least, Feynman is revered as a clay-footed hero. But Darwin ... Darwin is loved. Loved by many scientists, myself most certainly included.

Happy birthday to you, sir.

A rather random list ...

... of things I've been reading while trying to stop obsessing about the change of government in the US.

The New York Times:
On why Big Pharma is not the only villain in the drugs business
On telling the Holocaust like it wasn’t
On one of our basic needs: Instruction in manners
On single-mothers-by-choice, and the second child
On the joys and pains of being an animal
On rude placenames in the United Kingdom
On the wording of the presidential oath

Stanley Fish:
On Barack Obama's prose style
On academic freedom: Finkin and Post's book, and an extreme case

On less serious subjects: you may have seen the news that Ricardo Montalbán died a few weeks ago; the NYT obituary reproduced my favourite quote about him, from a review of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan:

With his fierce profile, long white hair, manful décolletage and Space Age jewelry, Mr. Montalbán looks like either the world’s oldest rock star or its hippest Indian chief ... Either way, he looks terrific.

And in a bout of unashamed nostalgia, I looked up Willow Tree on YouTube: a 1990 song from the folk/acoustic/world/whatever band Not Drowning, Waving. The video is not much chop, but the song is superb: I don't remember anything quite like it, for capturing a certain kind of adult longing for childhood --- that part of childhood, at least, that you would want to revisit.

So we swing
On the big willow tree
We all glide through the air
On the branches that hang
We all know just where we want to be ...

Getting some perspective: (6) On Barack Obama

Gail Collins, columnist and former editor of the New York Times' editorial page, on Obama and his dealings with Republicans over the stimulus package:

I don’t know how many times we need to go over this, but this is actually a real-life version of what Obama promised during the campaign. Didn’t you jump up and cheer when your guy promised that he’d get Republicans and Democrats to work together?

This is a point Ms Collins was making as long ago as July:

He talked — and talked and talked — about how there were going to be no more red states and blue states, how he was going to bring Americans together, including Republicans and Democrats.

Exactly where did everybody think this gathering was going to take place? Left field?

When an extremely intelligent politician tells you over and over and over that he is tired of the take-no-prisoners politics of the last several decades, that he is going to get things done and build a “new consensus,” he is trying to explain that he is all about compromise. Even if he says it in that great Baracky way.

Her style is quite unlike that of any other newspaper columnist I've read, and she uses it in service of observations that others seem just not to make. And there is a genuine warmth in it towards people she disagrees with, a commodity in short supply in political commentary. As, by the way, is patience among the left-of-centre.

Her appraisal of the election and the day after was also a delight.