"Looking to science for deliverance from the tragicomedy of history is part of what it means to be modern."
-- John Gray (The New Republic, April 20, 2012)
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science. Show all posts
Thursday, May 03, 2012
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
A Universal Corrosive
"I can think of lots of reasons why The Closing of the American Mind deserves as many readers as it earned in the eighties; Bloom’s sly wit and the torrential energy of his prose are worth the price of admission, in my opinion. But this one carries a special urgency. As well as anyone then or now, he understood that the intellectual fashion of materialism—of explaining all life, human or animal, mental or otherwise, by means of physical processes alone—had led inescapably to a doctrinaire relativism that would prove to be a universal corrosive."
Andrew Ferguson, The Weekly Standard, Apr 9, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 29
Andrew Ferguson, The Weekly Standard, Apr 9, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 29
Sunday, April 01, 2012
The Fall of Rome and the Rise of Islam
A friend shared a link to Tom Holland's recent article in the Guardian, about the Fall of Rome and the rise of Islam.
I thought it very good: Holland is a fine writer. In true Blogger fashion I have some half-digested thoughts to share.
I always understood that among Sci-Fi fans, "the Mule" in the Foundation Trilogy has long been understood as an unflattering portrait of L. Ron Hubbard, whose inauguration of a science fiction religion had roughly the same effect on North American SF fans that Muhammad's revelation had on the post-classical world.
It seems astounding that Holland manages to all but ignore the fact that the Roman Empire was mostly replaced by Christian societies, not Islamic. Those Greek Egyptians who received that invoice for sheep that he mentions, were not exactly members of some pagan cult: Egypt had been Christian for 300 years by that time.
Then he also neglects to mention what may be the most interesting thing about Asimov and Herbert, which is that their books have scant or no Christian content. People had been writing novels about the Fall of Rome for hundreds of years -- you could fill a whole library with such books, though they are all unread today. I used to own one that I picked out of a dollar bin in Texas: a big fat elegant blue-backed thing from the 1890s with gold-edged pages and a pompous kind of title like "Sunlight and Shadow" or some such, execrably written by a dull and no-doubt fat 19th century Evangelical minister, and all about the spiritual awakening of some Roman aristocrat's beautiful daughter with milk-white skin and sexy lips, as she becomes attracted to the persecuted sect in the catacombs, falls under the sway of its compelling bearded bishop, and learns to recognize her True Lord in Christ. "Quo Vadis" is another such book, far more famous. Now why would Tom Holland make no mention of this?
He doesn't say much about Star Wars either, perhaps because its narrative of political rebellion, which could certainly be classical or proto-Christian, doesn't fit the pattern. How true, that what people don't say can reveal as much as what they do. "In other regions ... there are even more haunting silences." Indeed.
Holland's connection of late Roman catastrophe to Tolkien's Middle Earth history, by way of Arthurian romance, is ingenious, perhaps not ironclad but insightful. Tolkien's book does achieve much of its effect by its background reference to sprawling, ancient ruined places, to regions once beautiful and cultivated but now waste, grown up with tangled forest and now the haunt of murderous creatures. Schooled on such works, we want our ruins vast and gloomy. The real ruins scattered about the Holy Land almost always disappoint, in part because they are so small and beaten down, and washed in sun.
What myths will we tell ourselves, who live in a world where nothing can be conceded as true unless it is subject to measurement?
I thought it very good: Holland is a fine writer. In true Blogger fashion I have some half-digested thoughts to share.
I always understood that among Sci-Fi fans, "the Mule" in the Foundation Trilogy has long been understood as an unflattering portrait of L. Ron Hubbard, whose inauguration of a science fiction religion had roughly the same effect on North American SF fans that Muhammad's revelation had on the post-classical world.
It seems astounding that Holland manages to all but ignore the fact that the Roman Empire was mostly replaced by Christian societies, not Islamic. Those Greek Egyptians who received that invoice for sheep that he mentions, were not exactly members of some pagan cult: Egypt had been Christian for 300 years by that time.
Then he also neglects to mention what may be the most interesting thing about Asimov and Herbert, which is that their books have scant or no Christian content. People had been writing novels about the Fall of Rome for hundreds of years -- you could fill a whole library with such books, though they are all unread today. I used to own one that I picked out of a dollar bin in Texas: a big fat elegant blue-backed thing from the 1890s with gold-edged pages and a pompous kind of title like "Sunlight and Shadow" or some such, execrably written by a dull and no-doubt fat 19th century Evangelical minister, and all about the spiritual awakening of some Roman aristocrat's beautiful daughter with milk-white skin and sexy lips, as she becomes attracted to the persecuted sect in the catacombs, falls under the sway of its compelling bearded bishop, and learns to recognize her True Lord in Christ. "Quo Vadis" is another such book, far more famous. Now why would Tom Holland make no mention of this?
He doesn't say much about Star Wars either, perhaps because its narrative of political rebellion, which could certainly be classical or proto-Christian, doesn't fit the pattern. How true, that what people don't say can reveal as much as what they do. "In other regions ... there are even more haunting silences." Indeed.
Holland's connection of late Roman catastrophe to Tolkien's Middle Earth history, by way of Arthurian romance, is ingenious, perhaps not ironclad but insightful. Tolkien's book does achieve much of its effect by its background reference to sprawling, ancient ruined places, to regions once beautiful and cultivated but now waste, grown up with tangled forest and now the haunt of murderous creatures. Schooled on such works, we want our ruins vast and gloomy. The real ruins scattered about the Holy Land almost always disappoint, in part because they are so small and beaten down, and washed in sun.
What myths will we tell ourselves, who live in a world where nothing can be conceded as true unless it is subject to measurement?
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Too Complex to Study
"Physics [...] restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists ... and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties."
Noam Chomsky, New Scientist, 19 March 2012
Noam Chomsky, New Scientist, 19 March 2012
Fallacies of Neuroscience
"This is pseudoscience of the first order, and owes what scant plausibility it possesses to the fact that it simply repeats the matter that it fails to explain. It perfectly illustrates the prevailing academic disorder, which is the loss of questions."
Roger Scruton, Spectator.co.uk., 17 March 2012
Roger Scruton, Spectator.co.uk., 17 March 2012
Originality in the arts and sciences
"When a well-known scientist, John Wheeler, writes that 'matter tells space-time how to curve, and curved space-time tells matter how to move', we may or may not be impressed, but it is hard to reorient one's worldview accordingly, to abandon the sense that there is an absolute "now" in every corner of the universe and that empty space is just a void ready to be filled, and cannot be bent, and is a distinct entity from time. The Einsteinian revolution may have redefined the absolute basics of matter, energy, space and time, but the limits of our mental equipment keep us in our evolutionary homelands, in the savannah of commonsense."
Ian McEwan, guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 March 2012
Ian McEwan, guardian.co.uk, Friday 23 March 2012
Saturday, July 02, 2011
Divide in Order to Distinguish
"It is a dull and obtuse mind, that must divide in order to distinguish; but it is a still worse, that distinguishes in order to divide. In the former, we may contemplate the source of superstition and idolatry; in the latter, of schism, heresy, and a seditious and sectarian spirit."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection aphorism XXVI
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Reflection aphorism XXVI
