"I think we could be in the rather frustrating position of having indirect evidence of life... but not being absolutely certain and not having any prospect of becoming absolutely certain in the foreseeable future." - Barrie Jones
My sister's eldest child was about four, I think. I was babysitting for the evening, and had already tucked his little brother in bed for the night. Curled up on the sofa with the four-year-old, I slowly turned the pages of a children's book about the universe, as he studied the pictures intently. He wanted to know all about the planets. Why were some bigger than others? Why were they different colors? Why didn't they have air we could breathe? But it was when I told him that those bright stars in our sky were really other suns, very, very far away, and that some of them had planets of their own, that the discussion got tough.
"Could we walk to that star?" he asked, pointing at a corner of the illustration.
"No, it's too far away."
"Could we see all those other planets?"
"No, there are too many. It would take a HUGE amount of time." ("Huge" was his favorite word then. Anything too large to describe or fully comprehend was considered huge.)
"Even in my whole life?"
"Even in your whole life."
He didn't like that answer, and his little face darkened. It wasn't fair. He wanted to see all those places, learn about them. (Of course, so did I.) I tried mollifying him by invoking his parents' strong religious doctrines.
"Isn't it wonderful, that God is so great, he can create a universe big enough that we could never explore it all?"
He didn't buy it. I couldn't blame him: neither did I.
Ironic, but not surprising -- that's how I'd sum up recent events relating to the the President's Council on Bioethics. The rate of religious doctrine's intrusion into the realm of scientific truths has steadily worsened since Bush's questionable election in 2000, and doesn't appear likely to improve during the remainder of his term.
I generally spend my lunchhour perusing my favorite news sites, foreign and domestic; straight news, quirky news, science and technology news, they're all fascinating. It's not unusual for one news story to lead me through a dozen different sites as my curiosity is kicked into gear. Foraging off the beaten trail is a lot more interesting than eating pablum. So, when I start from different sites, on different continents, and via completely different stories and routes, wind up at sources with a common theme, I generally figure that the Universe is trying to make a point.
The two sources I came across today are titled:
They're not redundant, but complementary, touching on some core themes from different angles.
The first article describes a concept called 'the wisdom of repugnance':
"In other words, the feeling you get in your bones that something is wrong is a reliable guide to what really is wrong. The Council on Bioethics [has] declared that happiness exists to let us recognize what is good in life, while real anger and sadness reveal to us what is evil and unjust. "Emotional flourishing of human beings in this world requires that feelings jibe with the truth of things, both as effect and as cause," they write. By extension, repugnance is a good guide for making decisions about bioethics. If cloning gives you the creeps, it?s wrong.But what exactly produces those creeps? In recent years neuroscientists and psychologists have made huge strides in understanding both emotions and moral judgments. They've scanned people's brains as they decide whether things are right or wrong; they've looked at the brain's neurochemistry, and they've gotten insights from the brains of animals and the fossils of ancient hominids as well. And their conclusions seriously undermine the philosophy of the council.
[...] one of the leaders in this new field of "neuro-morality," [is] a philospher-neuroscientist named Joshua Greene at Princeton University. Greene argues that feeling that something is right or wrong isn't the same as recognizing that two and two make four, or that the sky is blue. It feels the same only because our brains respond to certain situations with emotional reactions that happen so fast we aren't aware of them. We are wired to get angry at deception and cruelty; even the thought of harming another person can trigger intense emotional reactions. These "moral intuitions" are ancient evolutionary adaptations, which exist in simpler versions in our primate relatives.
When our ancestors stood upright and got big brains, Greene argues, these moral intuitions became more elaborate. They probably helped hominids survive, by preventing violence and deception from destroying small bands of hunter-gatherers who depended on each other to find food and raise children. But evolution is not a reliable guide for figuring out how to lead our lives today. Just because moral intuitions may be the product of natural selection doesn't mean they are right or wrong, any more than feathers or tails are right or wrong."
The latter article has a broader scope, but is nonetheless a biting indictment of the current administration's pathetic performance in the science and bioethics arenas. In particular, it contains a pointed quote from John Kerry, who in addition to being the opposing candidate in the current presidential race, is a member of the US Senate's Science Policy Committe:
"there have always been the few with a distaste for progress and a fundamental distrust of the American people to have the morality and strength to handle the consequences. Unfortunately, today some of that deep distrust of new discoveries and of the American people has found a home in George Bush's White House. George Bush has proved a ready ally for those who seek to impose their private moral vision on the American people. Over and over again, this President has put partisan politics above scientific and medical advancement. Whether it is global warming or stem cell research, President Bush has appeased his party's right wing by ignoring scientific fact and slowing medical progress..."
I'm sure the President is a legitimate man of faith. I only wish he were also someone who valued truth above doctrine. We need, and require, a moral compass for the country, a leadership that governs by ethics rather than politics. What we're getting instead is an executive who thinks that ethics and religion are the same thing. And there is no surer path to Hell than that fallacy.
Why is it, that liberals have no problem laughing at themselves, while conservatives take offense at the silliest jibes?
Last week, I assisted Curious George in writing a letter to my youngest nephew, who was having a challenging time coping with some of life's recent twists. To give the letter a little cheerful accent, I went looking for illustrations of the literary monkey online.
To my delight, and much subsequent hilarity, I came across these items:
Fred and I printed them out, and took them down to share with his (liberal) mom -- who was immediately consumed with laughter. Then we passed them down the table to his (conservative) sister -- who looked at them, put them down, and said she didn't see anything funny about them.
She did, however, mention that she had seen this picture, which she found highly amusing:
Personally, I think it's damn funny, too. My only question is, how on earth can you consider the Kerry/Gomer to be hilarious, but not the the Bush/Monkey?
I've noticed this trend before - I'll send a funny poke at a conservative, to a conservative family member, and in response I almost always get a serious article expounding the merits of their favorite conservative and the deficiencies of the opposing liberal.
Lighten up, people. If you can't laugh at yourself once in a while, your perspective is seriously out of whack.
Three cheers for Oregon's Benton County, for taking such a logical action in the melee over gay marriage. Finally, FINALLY, someplace that is willing to take a meaningful stand on the issue.
I continue to wonder, why a government constitutionally separated from religion has any interest whatsoever in defining the concept of "marriage".
The formal life commitment of two individuals to one another has two major aspects: religious and socio-economic. In the United States, we have historically used a single term to describe both, "marriage", but it would be more accurate to refer to them as "marriage" (religious) and "civil union" (socio-economic). Why? Because the state really has no defensible interest in requiring the registration of religious status or affiliations.
What goes on inside a church, synagogue, mosque, or other place of worship, is absolutely none of the state's business. A prime example of this is the continued exclusion of women from the Catholic priesthood -- something which blatantly violates the concept of Equal Opportunity, but which, as a religious practice, is solely the pervue of the Catholic church. Similarly, marriage in the context of faith is defined by religious texts and tenets, and ONLY in this context can references to passages from the Bible and spiritual sanctity have any bearing, or in fact, meaning.
Meanwhile, the state, via municipal and county marriage licensing processes, controls the socio-economic aspects of the married condition: the management of property, the assessment of taxes, the custody of progeny, and the general protections of law. In this context, it does not make an iota of difference what has transpired in history, in the Bible, or in Congress. (Not that I would equate any two of those venues with one another.) Clinging to historical precedent on this issue is no better than expounding the benefits of slavery, or decrying the victories of suffragettes. What matters here is only, ONLY, the non-religious aspect of the married state, in this particular day, age, and location. And the plain unvarnished truth is that there is absolutely no objective difference between a gay couple and hetero couple in this context.
A government operates via forms, whether they be paper or electronic. A form doesn't care about the sex (or sexual orientation) of the person completing it. Oh, there may be a space for their sex to be indicated, but that's just a tally -- the form itself really Just Doesn't Care. Bits is bits, data is data, and the computer will take whatever information is fed into it, without judgement or discrimination. There is no rational argument that can be made for denying a gay couple the rights of marriage in this context. No new processes need be developed. No new tax tables need be compiled.
There is immeasurable hand-wringing over the "weakening" of marriage by legalizing the institution for gays, but there has yet to be given any concrete example of how this accusation can be quantified. Does it lessen a hetero couple's legal rights? Nope. Does it change their taxes, property, or custody arrangements? Nope. Does it violate their faith? In many cases, sure. But that's their problem. Not society's, not the government's, and sure as heck not gay couples'.
Three cheers for Benton County, for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.
It's Spring. Well, technically, anyway. Fred's mom has tulips starting to poke up in her garden, and the local college kids have just come back from Spring Break. Soon, life will start to reassert itself, sending a green blush across the brown lawn outside my office window, and renewing the flowerbeds that serve our resident moose, deer, and groundhogs as salad bars. I'll be able to leave my bedroom windows open all night, and wake up to fresh air and chirping finches.
And, yet...
People that I care about are in pain, or dying. My favorite uncle is battling multiple cancers. My new niece is facing months of surgeries and difficult medical procedures. My best friend's eldest son is fighting for time against a brain tumor which has become inoperable. And an old family friend is in hospital, struggling to breath through a trach tube as an infection assaults his respiratory system.
Is it deliberate cruelty, that Life sends such awful tests to us in a time that should be ripe with new growth and fresh starts? Some days, it seems unspeakably horrific that the season is almost gloating at human suffering.
I have been reading a tumor diary posted by the BBC. It hits very close to home, given the similarities to my friend's son. But the latest entry there seems in some strange way reassuring, as though in the midst of the pain there is coming a Spring for the soul. And I wonder, how well I would make such a journey. I have been amongst the mourners many, too many, times. But how would I mourn myself, were I were in Ivan's stead?
Came across an account of an odd hobby this afternoon. I have to wonder, what drives a person to undertake such an odd endeavor?
I suppose in many ways it's no different from people who create huge spheres of collected string or rubber bands, although I've always found such activities to be somewhat mystifying. And even they could be said (if one stretches a bit) to be of some general value, given that their composition allows their creators to perpetually reorganize their kitchen drawers, tame stacks of old National Geographics, and control the proliferating wires that seem to pervade everyday life these days. Their ponytails will stay tightly tied, their packages will be neatly bound, and their children will have endless hours of fun playing cat's cradle and shooting rubber bands at the neighbor's cat.
But paint? What can one do with a big ball of paint? If being labeled a record-breaking oddity is the goal, then perhaps this qualifies, but the appeal escapes me. 18,000 coats of paint...my arthritic hands ache at the thought alone. Do you suppose it's all the same color? Was it purchased specifically for the task, or was this merely a way to dispose of excess pigment without dumping it into a landfill? Whose baseball was sacrificed to the cause, and why on earth did someone ever think to paint it in the first place?
People get crazier by the day. Next, they'll probably be obsessing about how many red M&Ms are produced in a year, or cataloguing all the occurrences of the word "frell" in Farscape.
Um. Never mind...
Where do we draw the line, between traditions that have outlived their usefulness, and traditions that define who we are, distinct from other people, places, and cultures?
Yesterday was Town Meeting Day in New Hampshire, the traditional day when communities across the state hold their annual gathering of citizens, to discuss and vote upon proposed budgets and municipal activities for the coming year.
In my home town (the town where I grew up, rather than the one I live in now), the last vestiges of this form of government have finally been eliminated.
I was present at the Meeting in 1988, when the town voted to try running matters via a Town Council (elected) and a Town Administrator (hired by said Council). I voted against the change then, and I'm just as firmly opposed to it today. The argument in favor of the change, was that the town had grown too large to effectively manage its duties with only a single day per year to conduct the year's business. And, in many respects, that argument is not without validity. But leaving communal goverment behind in favor of representative government nonetheless weakens a community at its most basic level.
When you govern by Town Meeting, there is no separation between the concepts of "Town" and "citizens". They are one and the same, and governmental activities are woven into the fabric of normal, everyday community life. To choose instead a representative form of government, is to separate the one from the other. Instead of the Town being a "we", it becomes an "it". What kind of impact does this have on individual investment in the community? When you are no longer part of the core structure of a town, maintaining a high level of social discourse among an informed electorate is made monumentally more difficult.
Our Town Moderator for many, many years, Joe Michaels, was the epitome of the classic New England Town Moderator - with good humor and a wry intelligence, he kept Meeting rolling right along, giving fair opportunity for folks to speak for and against each measure, while holding us to a focused progress through the agenda. On the evening the final Town Meeting vote was passed, he commented, that only time would tell if the change would prove to be a golden goose...or a rotten egg.
No points for guessing which outcome I think was achieved...