I've called this story a “myth”, not in the vulgar sense that “it didn't really happen”, but in the more technical sense that it's part of the way we think: a story we tell to explain the way the world is, to position ourselves politically and socially, to understand what kinds of action are possible or desirable, and why. The modern myth is a defiantly unfair reading of Genesis 3, which is part of the point of it: it's an alternative vision of the world.This from my 2001-02 review of the film Pleasantville, which has been living in an obscure part of the web for years; it's now been uploaded to my new blog of the same name, Bruce's Reviews. More to come over the next little while.
And this is where Pleasantville comes in. The visitors from the 90s bring colour to the world around them, Jennifer by introducing the locals to the life of the body, David (after initial resistance) by opening up the life of the mind ... but they themselves remain stubbornly monochrome. Jennifer is puzzled ...
Wednesday, 3 June 2009
Colour my world
Sunday, 31 May 2009
Come down, O Love Divine
Come down, O Love Divine,
Seek thou this soul of mine,
And visit it with thine own ardour glowing.
O Comforter, draw near,
Within my heart appear,
And kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.
As Luke tells the story, the Spirit of God fell on Jesus' disciples on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, and they went out praising God in many languages, drawing a large, curious, and somewhat sceptical crowd. Peter announced that this was nothing other than the promised renewal of the nation: that Jesus, handed over to the Romans for execution but vindicated by God --- raised from death --- had now been “exalted to the right hand of God” and had commissioned them to be his witnesses. He called on those in the crowd to repent, and to be baptized into Jesus' name for the forgiveness of their sins. Three thousand people were initiated in this way; that day is traditionally understood as the beginning of the church, and has been celebrated ever since.
Lest this all be thought somewhat in-house, Peter's other great task (again, as Luke has it) was to reach beyond the Jewish community and --- in the face of his own customs and purity concerns --- to open the Christian fellowship to people from other nations. The struggle to understand what true unity of differing people meant, and exactly what God's agenda was in the matter, was a huge one for that generation, and the bulk of the occasional letters that comprise the New Testament (together with the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation) engage with the issue in some degree. The particular expression is bound up with concerns of that time and place, and the people involved, but in more abstract terms the questions are perennial: how are background, identity, and behaviour related; what are our obligations; what do we make of human difference?
The basic Christian answer is that one should be baptised into the name of Jesus Christ: but what then follows? The knotted complexity of parts of the New Testament shows that the answers may not be simple, let alone obvious. A classic example from another age is the abolition movement at the end of the eighteenth century: the realisation that slavery had to be renounced --- already implicitly understood in the first century --- tore up lives and institutions and economies over decades. We say we “change our minds” but the process of changing one's mind is messy, and by no means merely mental. Our society makes “Amazing Grace” a song of sentiment, but it was the sentiment of a man converted slowly --- slowly, in fits and starts --- from traffic in human lives.
The favourite Pentecost hymn in my tradition is Come down, O Love Divine by Bianco da Siena (d:1434), as translated by Richard F. Littledale in the 1860s, and most famously set to Ralph Vaughn Williams' tune Down Ampney. The hymn is of a more mystical bent, its perspective that of the inner life before God, compared to what one might call the community focus of the New Testament writers. Of course, the two are related, as the “Amazing Grace” example also shows. But the relationship is not simple.
(It's easy to find cheesy versions of the tune and the hymn on the web, and hard to find good ones. An embellished but dignified rendition is free as an MP3 from Selah Publishing.)
O let it freely burn,
'Til earthly passions turn
To dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
And let thy glorious light
Shine ever on my sight,
And clothe me round, the while my path illuming.
Let holy charity
Mine outward vesture be,
And lowliness become mine inner clothing.
True lowliness of heart
Which takes the humbler part
And o'er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.
And so the yearning strong
With which the soul will long
Shall far outpass the power of human telling;
For none can guess its grace,
'Til he become the place
Wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling.
Seek thou this soul of mine,
And visit it with thine own ardour glowing.
O Comforter, draw near,
Within my heart appear,
And kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.
As Luke tells the story, the Spirit of God fell on Jesus' disciples on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, and they went out praising God in many languages, drawing a large, curious, and somewhat sceptical crowd. Peter announced that this was nothing other than the promised renewal of the nation: that Jesus, handed over to the Romans for execution but vindicated by God --- raised from death --- had now been “exalted to the right hand of God” and had commissioned them to be his witnesses. He called on those in the crowd to repent, and to be baptized into Jesus' name for the forgiveness of their sins. Three thousand people were initiated in this way; that day is traditionally understood as the beginning of the church, and has been celebrated ever since.
Lest this all be thought somewhat in-house, Peter's other great task (again, as Luke has it) was to reach beyond the Jewish community and --- in the face of his own customs and purity concerns --- to open the Christian fellowship to people from other nations. The struggle to understand what true unity of differing people meant, and exactly what God's agenda was in the matter, was a huge one for that generation, and the bulk of the occasional letters that comprise the New Testament (together with the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation) engage with the issue in some degree. The particular expression is bound up with concerns of that time and place, and the people involved, but in more abstract terms the questions are perennial: how are background, identity, and behaviour related; what are our obligations; what do we make of human difference?
The basic Christian answer is that one should be baptised into the name of Jesus Christ: but what then follows? The knotted complexity of parts of the New Testament shows that the answers may not be simple, let alone obvious. A classic example from another age is the abolition movement at the end of the eighteenth century: the realisation that slavery had to be renounced --- already implicitly understood in the first century --- tore up lives and institutions and economies over decades. We say we “change our minds” but the process of changing one's mind is messy, and by no means merely mental. Our society makes “Amazing Grace” a song of sentiment, but it was the sentiment of a man converted slowly --- slowly, in fits and starts --- from traffic in human lives.
The favourite Pentecost hymn in my tradition is Come down, O Love Divine by Bianco da Siena (d:1434), as translated by Richard F. Littledale in the 1860s, and most famously set to Ralph Vaughn Williams' tune Down Ampney. The hymn is of a more mystical bent, its perspective that of the inner life before God, compared to what one might call the community focus of the New Testament writers. Of course, the two are related, as the “Amazing Grace” example also shows. But the relationship is not simple.
(It's easy to find cheesy versions of the tune and the hymn on the web, and hard to find good ones. An embellished but dignified rendition is free as an MP3 from Selah Publishing.)
O let it freely burn,
'Til earthly passions turn
To dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
And let thy glorious light
Shine ever on my sight,
And clothe me round, the while my path illuming.
Let holy charity
Mine outward vesture be,
And lowliness become mine inner clothing.
True lowliness of heart
Which takes the humbler part
And o'er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.
And so the yearning strong
With which the soul will long
Shall far outpass the power of human telling;
For none can guess its grace,
'Til he become the place
Wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling.
Wednesday, 13 May 2009
Beyond consent
Through gritted teeth, and firmly holding my nose, I would like to express some limited sympathy for Matthew Johns, who has been hung out to dry by Channel Nine (and just about everyone) after a years-old group-sex scandal was so thoroughly aired on national television this week.
His pathetic, but I suspect sincere, clinging to the mantra “but she consented”, is the point here. Well yes, maybe she did. If one thinks about the situation, this doesn't really cut it, but our society has spent a few decades pretending that consent (perhaps glossed to mean “informed consent”) provides a sufficient handle on the morality of sexual encounters. (Even some of Johns' critics, as quoted on the TV, are still trying to cut their disgust to fit the Procrustean bed of “consent”.) That pretence has helped blight this decade for the unfortunate girl in the story (one prays, not her whole life); but it has also betrayed Johns and people like him, by making it easier for them to lose moral perspective, and by indulging their boorishness.
Earlier generations of thought approached this problem via honour, an approach rich in double standards, and modern commentators have been quick and strident in their criticism. Accepting all of that criticism, one has to say that older approaches are realistic at one point --- the plain fact that “consent”, meaning what-the-woman-wants-or-says-at-the-time, is not necessarily the main question, and by no means the only question --- on which our society has been systematically stupid. Without mercy, we have pilloried our ancestors for the deficiencies in their thinking ... and yet people in future societies looking back on ours, or people in different societies looking across at us, will probably ask how we could be so blind. The cheap answer will be that we handed over our thinking in this matter to people without daughters, and to people who furthermore did not care about the moral lives of their sons. Doubtless there's more to it than that, but will anyone have enough patience with us to give a more merciful answer?
His pathetic, but I suspect sincere, clinging to the mantra “but she consented”, is the point here. Well yes, maybe she did. If one thinks about the situation, this doesn't really cut it, but our society has spent a few decades pretending that consent (perhaps glossed to mean “informed consent”) provides a sufficient handle on the morality of sexual encounters. (Even some of Johns' critics, as quoted on the TV, are still trying to cut their disgust to fit the Procrustean bed of “consent”.) That pretence has helped blight this decade for the unfortunate girl in the story (one prays, not her whole life); but it has also betrayed Johns and people like him, by making it easier for them to lose moral perspective, and by indulging their boorishness.
Earlier generations of thought approached this problem via honour, an approach rich in double standards, and modern commentators have been quick and strident in their criticism. Accepting all of that criticism, one has to say that older approaches are realistic at one point --- the plain fact that “consent”, meaning what-the-woman-wants-or-says-at-the-time, is not necessarily the main question, and by no means the only question --- on which our society has been systematically stupid. Without mercy, we have pilloried our ancestors for the deficiencies in their thinking ... and yet people in future societies looking back on ours, or people in different societies looking across at us, will probably ask how we could be so blind. The cheap answer will be that we handed over our thinking in this matter to people without daughters, and to people who furthermore did not care about the moral lives of their sons. Doubtless there's more to it than that, but will anyone have enough patience with us to give a more merciful answer?
Sunday, 10 May 2009
Genes, hobbits, plutonium, telescopes, a moon, and an obituary
A view of the planet Neptune, and its giant moon Triton, from a distance of 3.75 billion kilometres, taken by the New Horizons spacecraft, en route to the dwarf planet Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. Image details can be found on this page at the NH website.This image is featured in honour of Venetia Burney Phair, a retired economics and maths teacher, who died recently at the age of 90; and who, as a girl of 11, gave Pluto its name. One of the instruments on New Horizons --- designed, built, and operated by students --- was earlier named in Mrs Phair's honour.
In other space science news, the shuttle Atlantis is due to launch on Monday for the final mission to repair and service the Hubble Telescope. Because of the extra danger in missions to the Hubble, the shuttle Endeavour will be on standby as a rescue vessel, in case anything goes wrong. Some years ago, when NASA tried to rule out such missions because of the danger to the crew, it wasn't just the scientific community that objected: some of the astronauts did too ...
Other articles:
On the genetic analysis of common diseases
On “hobbits”: the black swans of palaeontology ... and their flat feet
On why the Americans are going to make more plutonium 238 (hint: not for bombs), how they will use it more efficiently when they have it, and why Stirling engines are the bees' knees
Sunday, 26 April 2009
On Eve Tushnet and The Gathering Storm
The unclassifiable Eve Tushnet has a couple of posts on the notorious Gathering Storm advertisement on her blog.[1] I'd heard about the ad being objectionable --- and indeed, it is --- so I was surprised to learn that Ms Tushnet actually does some work for NOM, the organisation that produced it. On the one hand I couldn't see how that could work out; on the other, I was fascinated, given my own situation.[2]
Here she is speaking, from a position opposed to gay marriage, about criticisms of that position:
Because belonging to a lobby group or a movement is not the same as belonging to a church. I've elsewhere posted in admiration of Ms Tushnet's Catholicism and the resources it gives her, and the home it provides her; and for another example, the USCCB's Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children, also cited by Tushnet, is a good advertisement for the Catholic Church: one could disagree with the position, and still respect the practical advice; one could disagree with the advice, and still admire the humanity and maturity of its conception. I understand how one could disapprove of the church in other ways, but value the tradition that makes this sort of thing possible: I understand that because it's pretty much my own position. A propos of this, a friend pointed out that a church is not meant to be admired from a safe distance ... which is a good point, so let me put it this way: I can see how, being a Catholic, one might choose to stay one; I can see how, having become a Catholic, one might judge it to have been a good choice, any drawbacks apart.
But a lobby group or a movement is not like that. Achieving an effect, pushing a point of view or policy, effecting a particular change in society, is the point of the endeavour. That's what a lobby is about: there is no other “there” there. So when a lobby comes up with a cheesy, fearmongering advertisement, it is reasonable to view it as essentially discrediting, in a way that it's not when a person does something wrong, or a country does something objectionable, or a church says something silly. If a lobby is in the business of saying silly things, or saying things in an objectionable way, isn't it Just Bad?
Which brings me back to my own local concerns. One of my criticisms of the evangelical church, at least in this town, is related: I think it's confused about whether it's a movement or a church --- even worse, whether it's an insurgent movement or The Church, simpliciter. This has all sorts of implications for how one views membership, duty, loyalty, and the ethical position of both individuals and officials: I take a rather different view, for example, of a minister on the one hand, and a cadre of a movement on the other; if they are the same person, there is potentially a serious problem. But that is really a matter for its own post, on another occasion.
[1] I can't seem to link to individual posts there. The ones I mean are from April 2009: scroll down to Wednesday, April 15, and look for "POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE" and “'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'".
[2] Short version: I am a conservative Christian, in the Anglican tradition (and happy to be so), I live in Sydney, and while it would be misleading to call me an evangelical I'm probably more like that than anything else; and I was taught and trained by evangelicals, and I have friends in that ministry. And yet I find the public stance of the Sydney Diocese, in particular its official media presence, absolutely unbearable.
Here she is speaking, from a position opposed to gay marriage, about criticisms of that position:
The best counterargument is the same as the best counterargument on all gay-marriage topics: “This isn’t just about gay marriage but about a whole panoply of prior changes, most of which have obvious good qualities as well, so you’re not seeking status quo so much as rollback.” ...Her other comments ad loc are incisive, quite wide-ranging, and well-taken; and some of the links are fascinating. At the end of the day, though, I'm still confused about how she can reconcile herself to a group running an ad that she herself describes as fearmongering, and as “really, really cheesy”.
I see the force of that argument, and of course I acknowledge that there’s no way we would be having this conversation without the prior cultural changes which led to e.g. laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation. For that matter, every single day I take advantage of the cultural changes which have made it possible for me to be an out lesbian while facing very limited explicit hostility.
But I still disagree that gay marriage is only a trivial turn of the ratchet (do ratchets turn?? I’m really not the home-improvement kind of dykey!), a mere formality, or something you can only worry about if you also reject all of the prior cultural moves which brought us here. I think prudence can allow you to draw a line, and frankly, gay marriage is a really obvious place for that line. Gay marriage is a big deal for the same reasons given by its supporters!--it is a real change in the culture, a deeply significant change, and a change with far-reaching public implications. I don’t think you can write paeans to marriage as a public and cultural status, then turn around and say that gay marriage will have very limited public effects. Marriage isn’t designed to have limited public effects.
Because belonging to a lobby group or a movement is not the same as belonging to a church. I've elsewhere posted in admiration of Ms Tushnet's Catholicism and the resources it gives her, and the home it provides her; and for another example, the USCCB's Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children, also cited by Tushnet, is a good advertisement for the Catholic Church: one could disagree with the position, and still respect the practical advice; one could disagree with the advice, and still admire the humanity and maturity of its conception. I understand how one could disapprove of the church in other ways, but value the tradition that makes this sort of thing possible: I understand that because it's pretty much my own position. A propos of this, a friend pointed out that a church is not meant to be admired from a safe distance ... which is a good point, so let me put it this way: I can see how, being a Catholic, one might choose to stay one; I can see how, having become a Catholic, one might judge it to have been a good choice, any drawbacks apart.
But a lobby group or a movement is not like that. Achieving an effect, pushing a point of view or policy, effecting a particular change in society, is the point of the endeavour. That's what a lobby is about: there is no other “there” there. So when a lobby comes up with a cheesy, fearmongering advertisement, it is reasonable to view it as essentially discrediting, in a way that it's not when a person does something wrong, or a country does something objectionable, or a church says something silly. If a lobby is in the business of saying silly things, or saying things in an objectionable way, isn't it Just Bad?
Which brings me back to my own local concerns. One of my criticisms of the evangelical church, at least in this town, is related: I think it's confused about whether it's a movement or a church --- even worse, whether it's an insurgent movement or The Church, simpliciter. This has all sorts of implications for how one views membership, duty, loyalty, and the ethical position of both individuals and officials: I take a rather different view, for example, of a minister on the one hand, and a cadre of a movement on the other; if they are the same person, there is potentially a serious problem. But that is really a matter for its own post, on another occasion.
[1] I can't seem to link to individual posts there. The ones I mean are from April 2009: scroll down to Wednesday, April 15, and look for "POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE" and “'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'".
[2] Short version: I am a conservative Christian, in the Anglican tradition (and happy to be so), I live in Sydney, and while it would be misleading to call me an evangelical I'm probably more like that than anything else; and I was taught and trained by evangelicals, and I have friends in that ministry. And yet I find the public stance of the Sydney Diocese, in particular its official media presence, absolutely unbearable.
Saturday, 25 April 2009
A guilty pleasure
Returning home late last night, I stumbled over a favourite film from my early teens: Firefox, the one where Clint Eastwood steals the Soviet Union's eponymous superplane.
Let's get some important points out of the way first: (1) The film is a shameless, twice-baked piece of Cold War cheese. (2) The idea that in the early Eighties, the Soviets might have been able to surprise the West with a revolutionary-on-all-fronts wonder-weapon, was pretty silly at the time --- although I remember it being taken seriously in the media --- and in retrospect, it's even sillier than the idea that messed-up middle-aged pilot Mitchell Gant might just walk in and fly the plane out of Russia.
Having taken due note of all that, the film is great. The effects are superb, and have not only stood the test of time, but are a pleasant reminder of the days when special effects were just that: occasional, rather than structural. And one can see some of Eastwood's characteristic concerns, both as a star and, in what was a relatively early outing, as a director. (It helps if, as I did, one also reads the book, and can see the changes of content and emphasis.) The ruthlessness of the Western spymasters is downplayed a little, but Gant's ruthlessness is downplayed a lot: in the film he has a code, a respect for others caught up in the events, and a confused-and-weary disdain for his masters and the inhumanity of the conflict.
And the film itself has great sympathy for the professionals among the Soviet officers. Respect for Voskov, the pilot, comes as no surprise, but one finds oneself barracking for the police inspector; for Dmitri Priabin (Oliver Cotton), the 2IC of the KGB team on Gant's trail; and most of all for General Vladimirov (Klaus Löwitsch), head of the effort to recapture the plane. He himself has respect for his adversaries, a hatred of overconfidence and hasty conclusions, and no malice ... and he is very, very good at what he does. The case is oversold by making the First Secretary a buffoon, and such an obvious hindrance to the Soviets' task, but there's great dignity in Löwitsch's performance, and a vision of professionalism-among-the-enemy in the tradition of the great war films.
It's a guilty pleasure of a movie, but a real one.
Let's get some important points out of the way first: (1) The film is a shameless, twice-baked piece of Cold War cheese. (2) The idea that in the early Eighties, the Soviets might have been able to surprise the West with a revolutionary-on-all-fronts wonder-weapon, was pretty silly at the time --- although I remember it being taken seriously in the media --- and in retrospect, it's even sillier than the idea that messed-up middle-aged pilot Mitchell Gant might just walk in and fly the plane out of Russia.
Having taken due note of all that, the film is great. The effects are superb, and have not only stood the test of time, but are a pleasant reminder of the days when special effects were just that: occasional, rather than structural. And one can see some of Eastwood's characteristic concerns, both as a star and, in what was a relatively early outing, as a director. (It helps if, as I did, one also reads the book, and can see the changes of content and emphasis.) The ruthlessness of the Western spymasters is downplayed a little, but Gant's ruthlessness is downplayed a lot: in the film he has a code, a respect for others caught up in the events, and a confused-and-weary disdain for his masters and the inhumanity of the conflict.
And the film itself has great sympathy for the professionals among the Soviet officers. Respect for Voskov, the pilot, comes as no surprise, but one finds oneself barracking for the police inspector; for Dmitri Priabin (Oliver Cotton), the 2IC of the KGB team on Gant's trail; and most of all for General Vladimirov (Klaus Löwitsch), head of the effort to recapture the plane. He himself has respect for his adversaries, a hatred of overconfidence and hasty conclusions, and no malice ... and he is very, very good at what he does. The case is oversold by making the First Secretary a buffoon, and such an obvious hindrance to the Soviets' task, but there's great dignity in Löwitsch's performance, and a vision of professionalism-among-the-enemy in the tradition of the great war films.
It's a guilty pleasure of a movie, but a real one.
Friday, 17 April 2009
Two years on
This blog is now two years old, and (I hope) active again after a quiet month.
Well-trafficked posts from the last year, in contrast to the laundry list from the first year, have been completely dominated by the ethics of Joss Whedon:
Mal's speech, or, On not making a better world (1) (2008/09/08)
Simon's speech (2008/05/30)
Top five fantasy battle-cries (2008/09/19)
Updike on neutrinos (2009/01/29)
It was a pleasure to bring a few new readers to Updike's neutrino poem.
Well-trafficked posts from the last year, in contrast to the laundry list from the first year, have been completely dominated by the ethics of Joss Whedon:
Mal's speech, or, On not making a better world (1) (2008/09/08)
Simon's speech (2008/05/30)
Top five fantasy battle-cries (2008/09/19)
Updike on neutrinos (2009/01/29)
It was a pleasure to bring a few new readers to Updike's neutrino poem.
Thursday, 16 April 2009
Spring readings
Good advice that I'm still struggling with:
On practical ways to end email bankruptcy, and then stay solvent
Interesting articles in the New York Times:
In defense of secrecy
Why imaging should not replace dissection in medical training
On abandoned boats in the US
On the return of wine-on-tap
On earthquake prediction,
and Why young buildings failed in old towns
Why anarchy on land means piracy at sea
The superbug of the moment
Last voyage for the keeper of the Hubble
On blogs:
recently I've been reading Byron Smith on The cost of dying;
discussing church as A good place to doubt, with Michael Jensen;
Christian obedience, work, and rhetoric, with Chris and friends;
and Le Guin, and The Jane Austen Book Club, with Natalie
On freedom of speech and religious freedom:
The US Supreme Court tells people to get real
In the category of news that's too melodramatic for fiction:
Judges plead guilty in scheme to jail youths for profit
On practical ways to end email bankruptcy, and then stay solvent
Interesting articles in the New York Times:
In defense of secrecy
Why imaging should not replace dissection in medical training
On abandoned boats in the US
On the return of wine-on-tap
On earthquake prediction,
and Why young buildings failed in old towns
Why anarchy on land means piracy at sea
The superbug of the moment
Last voyage for the keeper of the Hubble
On blogs:
recently I've been reading Byron Smith on The cost of dying;
discussing church as A good place to doubt, with Michael Jensen;
Christian obedience, work, and rhetoric, with Chris and friends;
and Le Guin, and The Jane Austen Book Club, with Natalie
On freedom of speech and religious freedom:
The US Supreme Court tells people to get real
In the category of news that's too melodramatic for fiction:
Judges plead guilty in scheme to jail youths for profit
(3) spring and sakura
Number 3 of “Ten things I love about Japan”.
Spring is a big deal in Japan, and sakura (the cherry blossom) is a very big deal. Trees have been in flower the last couple of weeks, depending on location, and I've been wishing I was sitting on a blue tarpaulin somewhere with friends, looking at a sea of white flowers.
Because that's what everyone does. Going out to look at flowers has an effeminate feel, to much current Western taste, but there's no such sense in Japan, and well might there not be: the blossoming of the cherry trees strikes any given place like a wave, with a few hints that it's about to arrive, an overwhelming surge for a week as all of the trees bloom together and the world is carpeted in white, a couple of weeks of aftermath --- and then it's gone, moving north through the islands.
That short season of hanami (looking-at-flowers) parties is the peak and the pivot of the year, with the best weather, and everyone out and involved. Picnics are held everywhere, and in cities you can see office girls out early, laying claim to a choice spot laid out with blankets or blue tarp, ready for the whole office to decamp for lunch in the open. This is a country that doesn't do things by halves, and hanami is at least one thing that it's pure pleasure to be a part of.
For more info: Cherry Blossoms (Sakura) at japan-guide.com
Spring is a big deal in Japan, and sakura (the cherry blossom) is a very big deal. Trees have been in flower the last couple of weeks, depending on location, and I've been wishing I was sitting on a blue tarpaulin somewhere with friends, looking at a sea of white flowers.
Because that's what everyone does. Going out to look at flowers has an effeminate feel, to much current Western taste, but there's no such sense in Japan, and well might there not be: the blossoming of the cherry trees strikes any given place like a wave, with a few hints that it's about to arrive, an overwhelming surge for a week as all of the trees bloom together and the world is carpeted in white, a couple of weeks of aftermath --- and then it's gone, moving north through the islands.
That short season of hanami (looking-at-flowers) parties is the peak and the pivot of the year, with the best weather, and everyone out and involved. Picnics are held everywhere, and in cities you can see office girls out early, laying claim to a choice spot laid out with blankets or blue tarp, ready for the whole office to decamp for lunch in the open. This is a country that doesn't do things by halves, and hanami is at least one thing that it's pure pleasure to be a part of.
For more info: Cherry Blossoms (Sakura) at japan-guide.com
Thursday, 19 March 2009
Research for America
There's an interesting guest-post on Olivia Judson's blog, proposing a formal mechanism for recruiting fixed-term workers for scientific research,
A different mechanism, of the kind proposed, would seem to meet a need.
[following the model of] Teach for America, which harnesses the energy of college graduates who are willing to give a little time before moving to the next stage of their careers... Research for America could serve a similar purpose of giving smart young people a chance to see if research is the right career for them, without committing five or more years to getting a postgraduate degree.The writers have specifically biomedical research in mind, and (obviously) are thinking about the American situation. That said, they have at least addressed what seems to be a general problem with research at the moment: it needs a lot of workers, far more than can go on to full-fledged research careers of their own, so the academic system of apprenticeship-by-research-degree-and-postdoctoral-work strains to accomodate them. As a result we either create expectations that cannot be met, or damage the apprenticeship system for those that still truly need it, or both ...
A different mechanism, of the kind proposed, would seem to meet a need.
Monday, 16 March 2009
Einstein on intuition in physics
Using as few hypothetical laws as possible, science attempts to explain relations between observable facts, arriving at them in a deductive manner, that is, in a purely logical way. Physics is customarily referred to as an empirical science and it is believed that its fundamental laws are deduced from experiments, so as to indicate how it differs from speculative philosophy. However, in truth the relationship between fundamental laws and facts from experience is not that simple. Indeed, there is no scientific method to deduce inductively these fundamental laws from experimental data. The formulation of a fundamental law is, rather, an act of intuition which can be achieved only by one who watches empirically with the necessary attention and has sufficient empirical understanding of the field in question. The sole criteria for the truth of a fundamental law is only that we can be sure that the relations between observable events can be logically deduced from it. It follows then that a fundamental law can be refuted in a definite manner, but can never be definitely shown to be correct, as one must always bear in mind the possibility of discovering a new phenomenon that contradicts the logical conclusions arising from a fundamental law.Albert Einstein, Unpublished Opening Lecture for the Course on the Theory of Relativity in Argentina, 1925
Experience is, therefore, the judge, but not the generator of fundamental laws. The transition from the facts of experience to a fundamental law often requires an act of free creativity from our imagination, as well as an act of creation of concepts and relations; it would not be possible to replace this act with a necessary and conclusive method...
(The full lecture is in Science in Context, Vol. 21, issue 3, pp. 451-459 (2008); posted today on the preprint server as arXiv:0903.2401v1 [physics.hist-ph] . © The Hebrew University, Jerusalem.)
Sunday, 15 March 2009
“This was not just about greed”: Rowan Williams on trust, risk, and the material order
The Archbishop of Canterbury in a lecture on Ethics, Economics and Global Justice, takes a polite swipe at too-easy criticisms of contemporary capital, and ventures one or two criticisms of his own. Here he is on time and trust:
The loss of a sense of appropriate time is a major cultural development, which necessarily changes how we think about trust and relationship. Trust is learned gradually, rather than being automatically deliverable according to a set of static conditions laid down. It involves a degree of human judgement, which in turn involves a level of awareness of one's own human character and that of others – a degree of literacy about the signals of trustworthiness; a shared culture of understanding what is said and done in a human society. And this learning entails unavoidable insecurity... And the further away I get from these areas of learning by trial and error, the further away I get from the inevitable risks of living in a material and limited world, the more easily can I persuade myself that I am after all in control.On risk and capitalism:
Although people have spoken of greed as the source of our current problems, I suspect that it goes deeper...
Ethical behaviour is behaviour that respects what is at risk in the life of another and works on behalf of the other's need. To be an ethical agent is thus to be aware of human frailty, material and mental; and so, by extension, it is to be aware of your own frailty. And for a specifically Christian ethic, the duty of care for the neighbour as for oneself is bound up with the injunction to forgive as one hopes to be forgiven; basic to this whole perspective is the recognition both that I may fail or be wounded and that I may be guilty of error and damage to another.and on embodiment:
It's a bit of a paradox, then, to realise that aspects of capitalism are in their origin very profoundly ethical in the sense I've just outlined. The venture capitalism of the early modern period expressed something of the sense of risk by limiting liability and sharing profit ...
One of the things most fatal to the sustaining of an ethical perspective on any area of human life, not just economics, is the fantasy that we are not really part of a material order – that we are essentially will or craving, for which the body is a useful organ for fulfilling the purposes of the all-powerful will, rather than being the organ of our connection with the rest of the world. It's been said often enough but it bears repeating, that in some ways – so far from being a materialist culture, we are a culture that is resentful about material reality, hungry for anything and everything that distances us from the constraints of being a physical animal subject to temporal processes, to uncontrollable changes and to sheer accident.
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