Last year, decided I was going to read Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, as part of my ongoing efforts to understand the people I find myself constantly disagreeing with. Well, that didn’t go so well.
But, down to the last few hours of 2014, started that bad boy – am a couple pages into the introduction! Woo Hoo!
This time, for sure! 2015: get in shape (after a fashion) and read some more Hegel! Keep it simple.
“Must be the wrong hat!”
What is a natural resource? Turns out, this is a little trickier than one (me, for example) might suppose. I was foolish enough for years (hey, I was born and raised in California, cut me some slack) to think natural resources were just *there*, just things people found – and used up. Therefore, all the Malthusian and Ehrlichian doom-saying made sense to me, at least on some level: we were going to use everything up! Then we’d starve! My push back was along the lines of asserting that we were using things up much slower than feared, and using them more efficiently so that we needed less of any given resource over time.
But that, while not entirely wrong, misses the point: things become resources when human ingenuity is applied to the stuff in the natural world. Rocks became a resource once people picked them up and started mashing seeds and clobbering tapirs with them; wood became a resource when people started making spears and building fires; petroleum became a resource (and saved the sperm whale) once somebody figured out you could cook kerosene out of it and light your lamp.
And it’s not a one-time thing – raw materials can become resources many times in different ways. Iron might have first accidentally become a resource as part of a stone tool; then, in itself, as cast iron; then rare and hard to get steel as people figured out how to control the carbon content; then as mass produced steel once Bessemer and friends worked out the blast furnace concept, then as an ingredient in specialty steel alloys. But iron was always there, the raw ingredient for both plowshares and Winchesters, right under the feet of men hunting with stone tools.
Thus, the constant in resources is and always has been human ingenuity. Resources people fought and died over in one age are ignored in the next, while the Pennsylvanian farmers who cursed the seeping oil in their fields in one generation might be oil barons in a decade or two. 
I bring this up because of some news from the material science front: graphene is cool. While we carbon-based life forms have been surrounded by and living with carbon non-stop for eons, only in 2003 was somebody able to create the single-layer chicken wire lattice structure that is graphene.
Now it turns out that graphene might be useful in improving battery and solar cell efficiency and in separating hydrogen out of the atmosphere. Assuming this pans out – a big assumption at this point – all of the sudden, it seems we may have created new resources out of, at least on the hydrogen front, thin air.
The best case full-ride experience here would be that graphene provides much better solar energy collection, much better energy storage, and makes fuel cell technology not only feasible but ubiquitous. In fact, if the whole hydrogen gathering thing pans out, the solar cells and batteries will end up as footnotes. My sci fi imagination sees sails of graphene wedded to a thin power generation layer popping up everywhere, generating as much power as any home or business needs just so long as there’s water vapor in the atmosphere – and there should be, since the burning of hydrogen creates water.
Clean abundant energy on demand anywhere you need it. While it seems optimistic, we live in a land where anyone can buy steel in any number of forms for tiny amounts of money – imagine how this would look to the Zulu master metal workers of 2,000 years ago, who spent hours and hours of back-breaking labor and burned a small forest in order to get a couple pounds of steel. So there’s precedent.
Now, if graphene could be used to desalinate seawater, just about every cause for war (reasonable, material causes, at least) would cease. Then again, even using current desalination technology, if you have enough energy, it would work.
Happy New Year!
A few years ago, attended a seminar on the “Memorial Address”, a speech delivered by Martin Heidegger in 1955, on the 175th anniversary of the birth of composer Conradin Kreutzer. Apart from reports from the organizer of the seminar that gasps had been emitted from other faculty at St. Mary’s at the mere idea that anyone would read a Nazi sympathizer,* about the only thing I remember from this seminar is the introduction by the translator. In it, he mentioned by way of explanation that, in Germany in the 1950s, people still invited philosophers to speak at public occasions, as representatives of best thinking at the time. So Heidegger, whose works very few philosophers and fewer civilians even pretend to understand (I don’t), was still respected enough in the land of Kant and Hegel that mere incomprehensibility was not considered a fatal shortcoming.
Anyway, the translator thought it important enough to mention that philosophers were once considered public figures, as if it might otherwise seem jarring to a modern reader to read something from a philosopher written and delivered as a speech to a audience at a anniversary celebration. Moderns, it seems, expect their philosophers to be safely quarantined in lecture halls and classrooms, away from honest citizens.
This low opinion of academic philosophers can be seen in the movie Funny Face, produced in America a few years later in 1957. In this comedy, the hopelessly nerdy and hopelessly beautiful book store clerk Jo Stockton, played by Audrey Hepburn, is smitten by the philosophy of “empathicalism” propounded by one Emile Flostre, a Parisian philosopher. (I imagine they made Flostre French because it was a little too soon in 1957 to use a German philosopher. Besides, German philosophers are not funny, at least not in a light enough way to use in a musical comedy.)
The plot, such as it is, brings Jo and Dick Avery (Fred Astaire) to Paris. Dick’s job is to warn Jo off Flostre, who he is certain is a fraud and lecher. Even though his motives are more and more suspect as he falls in love with Jo, Dick is proven correct in spades – Flostre thinks of Jo as only another conquest to be made, and shows no ’empathy’ with her desire for, I suppose, TRVTH.
The point is, that in an America where the dominant philosophical school at the time were (still are!) various flavors of Marxist, Hegelian and Analytic Philosophy, the producers of this movie were safe in having the protagonist announce that Flostre was a fraud well before he ever makes an appearance, and regardless of the noble-sounding but laughable things Jo says about him and his teachings. American movie-goers were safely assumed to largely share or at least be sympathetic to this point of view.
Heidegger might have been the last philosopher as public figure to grace the intellectual landscape of the West. Given the nature of the philosophy now taught at the University, it’s hard to see this as any great loss.
Two related posts:
Cardinal O’Brien’s TAC Commencement Address
The Catholic Nature of True Study
*I want to say I’m sure that Margaret Sanger and John Dewey, for example, get a similar reaction at St. Mary’s because of their political views and affiliations, but somehow I doubt it.
Issue #3 of the Sci Phi Journal is out! You can get it at Amazon now, and eventually at Castalia House (link is to the general vicinity of where you’d find it.)
While of course you should buy this issue right now because in it continues the high standards and entertainment value of the previous issues, there is yet one additional reason you should buy it right now:
Yes, right there on the cover, in among the real writers, it’s – ME. There’s an essay on the philosophy of the Matrix Trilogy right there in the magazine, written by me, of all people! So, buy this magazine now!
What are you waiting for? $3.99 – what a deal. More entertainment for the buck than anything George Lucas has done in 30 years. For example.
One last thing, in which I demonstrate what an arrested adolescent I am*: I got a major thrill out of calling PayPal, where I needed to explain to the inordinately cheery young lady on the phone what I needed help with: “I’m a writer, and my publisher wants to pay me through PayPal.” Those words *my* lips! Huzzah!
* not to mention how poorly I understand stuff like PayPal
For this evening we begin the 12 day celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior! Beginning with vigil Mass of Christmas Day, the 12 Days of Christmas proceed through the Midnight Mass (this year, we’ll be going to St. Margaret Mary’s in Oakland for the Extraordinary Form high Mass), and the feasts of Sts. Stephen, John the Evangelist, Thomas Becket, Sylvester, and Basil the Great, and the Holy Innocents, Mary Mother of God, and the Holy Family, culminating on Epiphany, when in our household we exchanges gifts. Hosanna in the highest!
This year, the family (well, my wife, the two teenagers still at home and I – the 10 year old made 3) made all 9 Masses of Simbang Gabi, the traditional Filipino Advent novena leading up to Christmas. Mass is held at 5:30 a.m., and followed by a traditional Filipino breakfast. It was great! Our Filipino brothers and sisters are always so warm and welcoming.
We have a full slate of visiting and visitors over the next few days. Two sets of friends who lost young adult sons this year are coming over to decorate the tree with us tonight; Christmas dinner is with Grandma as usual, Saturday morning and afternoon is with old friends of my kids, then evening dinner with old friends of mine. Sunday is with my sister in Sunnyvale.
May God bless each of you and your families with the peace and joy of Infant Jesus!
(That’s real small s science prevailing over whatever the dude in the lab coat is saying today.)
Pediatricians Revising Anti-Bed Sharing Stance: Dire Warnings “Backfired.”
Before digging into this lovely article and the links it provides, we’ll recap the situation:
Back when we had our first baby, we read, among other things, some books by Dr. William Sears on ‘attachment parenting’, which includes encouragement to do the whole ‘family bed’ thing. This lead me to read up on the claims that ‘co-sleeping’ was going to kill our baby. A couple things stood out:
So, #1 son was a fussy baby, to put it mildly. I had built a custom rocking cradle for him (It came out nice!) and so we put him in it. Yea, like that was going to work. Within the week, he was sleeping with us – much better, less stressful, more sleep. And so, based on my own educated layman’s ability to judge the validity of ‘studies’, we just smiled and nodded at the whole ‘make the baby sleep by herself!’ mantra chanted at us over the decades.
So it is with some grim satisfaction that I today read that the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Centers for Disease Control have backtracked: somebody finally noticed that this whole war on basic, natural parenting was based on a total of *4* studies of dubious value, and that, by shaming moms into not sleeping with their babies, they caused a number of – are you sitting down? – unintended consequences:
Specifically, when parents don’t bring babies to bed, they tend to sit up with them and feed them on a sofa or in a chair which carries with it a very high risk of injury or death as babies get stuck in sofa cushions or dropped on the floor by sleepy parents. She also notes that discouraging bed-sharing has also had the inadvertent effect of making extended nursing more difficult which carries with it an increased risk of SIDS and other health problems.
As to the studies themselves:
the AAP’s statement from which it comes is based on just four papers. Two of the studies are misrepresented, and actually show little or no risk of sharing a bed when parents do not smoke, and two of the studies do not collect data on maternal alcohol use, a known and powerful risk factor.
Pretty much what I’ve been saying FOR THE LAST COUPLE DECADES.
Only one more refinement to be added. One of the crazier warnings is that mom or dad may roll over on the baby and crush and smother her! Now, I can only speak from personal experience, but I never came close to rolling over on a baby in the years we spent with a baby sleeping with us. It’s almost like natural selection has imprinted on us an awareness that the survival of our genome depends on the survival of our children – or something. In any event, somehow, even in deep sleep, I knew there was a baby in the bed and to be careful. It was an entire non-issue.
I’ve got to wonder about all the medical and other child-rearing advice we get that tends towards the destruction of the family at its roots: the natural bonds between parents and children. What all this anti-family-bed and, for example, strap them in like astronauts in the car advice does is make parents get used to ignoring the discomfort of their children: instead of physical contact and comfort, the parents learn to ignore the kid’s crying, and the kid learns that the comfort and contact are highly conditional. Where the emotional bonds should be unquestioned, we sow doubt. I just hope the tradeoffs actually make sense, or at least were acknowledged at some point: yes, perhaps a few babies a year might die as a result of mom holding them in the car, but that may be the better path than the temptation towards indifference that not holding them encourages. I don’t know that this is true, but I’d like to see it and similar issues at least discussed.
On the drive back from visiting my sister in Sunnyvale, we played 20 questions. This can be a little different:
We get answers like: “Conceptually? No.”
Or, to the question “Is it worth more than $10,000?” we get, “In nominal terms, perhaps not, but certainly when adjusted for inflation.”
After establishing that the answer was mineral, man-made, mobile, larger than a car, and was not made after 1950, the 10-year old asks: “Is it a cell phone?” He explained that, before 1950, cell phones were bigger than cars and cost way more than $10,000.
Hard to argue with that.
With two questions left, my wife pulls “Is it a steam locomotive?” out of thin air. I have no idea how she guessed it – they weren’t that close. Mind reader.
She is a bit psychic:
Mom: Animal, vegetable or mineral?
Daughter: vegetable.
M: Did we eat it tonight?
D: Yes.
M: Is it heirloom carrots?
D: Yes.
But mostly, simple questions like: is it used for work? or: is it bigger than a loaf of bread? tend to generate philosophic discussions that, on the surface, seem unwarranted. And it’s not even me who starts them, I swear!
I’m just old enough to remember when we students at St. Mary’s of the Assumption School in Whittier, California, would start our day at Mass. Each class had an assigned area – 16 in all, as there were double classes of about 50 kids each for each of the 8 grades. Our parents would drop us off at church, and we’d find our class, and join them. Nuns in habits would make sure we genuflected before the Blessed Sacrament, knelt, stood and sat at the appropriate times, and generally behaved ourselves. No talking, no slouching, and kneeling meant kneeling, not that weird z-shaped butt-on-the-pew thing.
I’m a weirdo – I liked it. I liked Mass, I liked the rituals, I liked the songs. I also learned – physically – what reverence meant, and how to show it.
Sadly, this all came crashing down about the time I hit 3th grade. But for a couple glorious years, I got to go to Mass a lot as a kid.
One error I think almost all of us make all the time, at least us older guys and gals who have some idea what reverence is, is to think of reverence as something reserved for Church. On the contrary, here’s a definition from Fr. John Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary via CatholicCulture.org
The virtue that inclines a person to show honor and respect for persons who possess some dignity. There are four forms of reverence, corresponding to four forms of dignity: 1. familial reverence toward one’s parents or those who take the place of parents; 2. civil reverence toward persons holding civil authority; 3. ecclesiastical reverence toward the Pope, bishops, priests, and others in the service of the Church; 4. religious reverence toward any person, place, or object related to God. (Etym. Latin reverentia, awe, respect.)
This is a good definition, but I don’t think it goes quite far enough. For example, there must be an element of reverence in a family not just on the part of children toward parents, but between a husband and wife, and on the part of parents towards their children (and, by extension, all children) and even between siblings. On my best days, I do feel an awe and respect toward my wife. That she (and God Himself!) has somehow recklessly entrusted her life and salvation to *me* in even a tiny degree is awesome; that this woman bore my children deserves way more than respect. And I wept when the nurse handed me my first born – awe and respect hardly describe it, but are essential components of what I experienced and continue to experience as a father.
But what we feel is not the important part – that’s what the good sisters were trying to beat into our thick little skulls at Mass (figuratively speaking – the Dominicans were not violent in my experience). We needed not only to learn to be reverent, but to develop and own a language of reverence. The nuns were determined to teach us. In church, that language consists of gestures, postures and silence – and that’s exactly what was being enforced. The concept may be abstract, but the language in which it is expressed is concrete.
We’re suffering under a double whammy these days. First, few if any Catholics under the age of 50 even know what it would mean to be reverent, even in church. Nope – we talk, wander around, plop ourselves in the pews like we’re at a beach party. At best, there’s a sort of awkwardness, a feeling that maybe I should be doing something.* But even worse, and much more insidiously, we never learn to have reverence for each other. By failing to learn a language of reverence at the source – the awe inspired by the Living God – we have no words for the reverence that beautifies and enriches our lives. Without reverence for each other, much of the family life that is, after all, the image of the Divine Life, becomes desiccated, drab and at risk of death.
The reverence we should practice at Mass is another aspect of the gift of the Eucharist. It is something that is part of our mission that the dismissal send us on: Go! You are sent! Having a language of reverence gives us a way, a form, in which to speak the language of love to our brothers and sisters. Without a language of reverence in word, gesture and posture, life not only becomes crass and dull, it is gradually bled dry of love itself.
So, be reverent at Mass. Don’t make a show of it – kids can always tell – but, from the heart: genuflect, stand, kneel and sit as if you are in the presence of the Lord and Maker of the Universe – because you are. Our bishops here and in San Francisco are trying hard to make this happen, but, boy, is it an uphill battle. The chronological solution may be the only way. But we can do our part.
* One hilarious one – I have a dark sense of humor: at daily Mass, two of the about 25 of us bring up the bread and wine at the offertory. It’s often amazingly awkward: the simple, direct, reverent thing to do is to walk up to the altar as a team, hand the priest the offering, then together, bow once to the altar and priest, and then return to your pews. Simple enough? But because of decades of bad catechesis and worse examples, people are baffled: they wander up more or less together, and wander off semi-randomly after having unloaded the gift they personally were carrying, with no bow or other gesture to punctuate and complete the action. They are afraid, it seems, to perform the obvious reverences, either because they just don’t know how or, sadly, because some Fr. Hippy-dippy has told them that all that kneeling and bowing harshes his mellow and they should just be *natural* or something. So they perform liturgical gestures like a herd of cats…
1. Got about 3 1/2″ of rain over the last 2 days. North of here, and at higher elevations, 6 or 8″ wasn’t unusual. Around here, that’s a LOT of rain. Most areas have already received 50% or more of season normal rainfall, and we’re way less than half way through the rainy season out here – January and February are when we tend to get most of our rainfall.
Now, before you laugh at us weakling Californians and our panic at getting slightly moistened, just recall how non-Californians react to earthquakes. Anything less than a 4.0 isn’t even enough to get a native out of bed, yet the non-natives have heart attacks if the light fixtures sway a little. .So, back off!
Death Valley got 2″ of rain. The valley sits in the rain shadow of 4 different mountain ranges to the west, the last being the southern end of the Sierra – a pretty impressive barrier. Years go by sometimes with only a trace of rain getting through. When it does rain, however, amazing wildflowers bloom everywhere – the floor, the hills, all over the place. We’re thinking of taking the trip down – it should be awesome this spring.
The level of Lake Shasta, a gigantic reservoir up near the Oregon border rose 23′ in less than a month, and is still rising. Only about 100′ to go to full. Similar story at the other reservoirs. In other words, a half dozen more decent rainstorms, which would be pretty normal, and we can go back to panicking about something else besides drought.
2. Some distant day, I hope my kids can look back and say: “Then the old man lost over a hundred pounds, and lived another 30 years!”
3.”The Future is Renewable”. Um – what? This from the same rigorous thinkers who are out to “save the planet.”
Quick refresher, from a natural science point of view: The sun goes red giant in about a billion years, evaporating everything on earth, maybe even the planet itself. Everything goes poof, curtain comes down, and, in the highly implausible event that we’re still around, we (meaning our descendants who would be much farther removed from us than we are from trilobites) all die.
Well before that, we almost certainly become extinct. Mammals, while highly adaptive as a group, are made up of many short-lived species. A mammal species that last more than a couple million years is unusual. The longest lasting species of Homo was Homo erectus, which lasted a bit over a million years. By that standard, we’ve got maybe a few hundred thousand more years to go. So, I wouldn’t sweat that whole main sequence star stuff.
Finally, and more to the point: civilizations don’t tend to last more than a few hundred years, tops. What this means is, if you pick a point in time and space where there’s a civilization worthy of the name, then go back or forward a couple hundred years, you almost certainly wouldn’t recognize the place. So any particular civilization is like the weather: if you don’t like it, just wait and it will change. Usually to something more akin to the French Revolution or the Mongol conquests than to the American Revolution, but change it will.
So, all those Greens who think we’re doomed are correct – just not the way they think we are. If natural history also repeats itself, the worst case is that we do some damage to the environment, then die out – and, a million years later, it will be hard to tell we were ever here, and all sorts of new and interesting life forms will infest the planet, doing old and boring things like disemboweling their prey alive and casually driving other species to extinction on their way to their own extinction. Ah, the good old days, before we people messed things up!.
I suppose “It would be better if we used renewable energy instead of fossil fuels” wouldn’t fit as well on a T-shirt, and might do even more damage to Latin American national monuments if deployed in a similar manner.
4. Got all these great ideas for posts. When I’ve got time, my brain tends to be full of other business. Next week for sure!
Yard Sale of the Mind 