Waking Up Conscious

The joy of waking up conscious is a wonderful thing. Kinda gets your day off to a good start. These August days drag on. Waking up conscious each day makes life better. Better than waking up conscious and it's Christmas already and you wonder what happened the last 4 months. It's a John Denver kind of day. Cakes on the griddle. Sunshine on my shoulders. Life ain't nothing but a funny, funny riddle. Thank God I 'm a country boy.

Contra Pinker

The Power Of Science And The Danger Of Scientism

by Adam Frank

August 13, 201311:32 AM Enlarge image


No matter what face you put on it, science is a powerful tool. Here, engineer Marcus Hold works on a nearly completed RoboThespian. Marvels of modern science, these fully interactive and multilingual humanoid robots are increasingly being sold to academic research groups.                                                No matter what face you put on it, science is a powerful tool. Here, engineer Marcus Hold works on a nearly completed RoboThespian. Marvels of modern science, these fully interactive and multilingual humanoid robots are increasingly being sold to academic research groups.

Matt Cardy/Getty Images Can you be a strident defender of science and still be suspicious of the way it is appropriated within culture? Can you be passionate about the practice and promise of science, yet still remain troubled by the way other beliefs and assumptions are heralded in its name? If such a thing is possible, you may be pro-science but anti-scientism. And, if that is the case, then Steven Pinker may have just pissed you off. But, as we'll see, it might be hard to tell.

Scientism is getting a lot of play these days. It's a difficult word to pin down because it takes on a wide range of meanings depending on who is throwing it around. According to Merriam-Webster online, scientism is:

an exaggerated trust in the efficacy of the methods of natural science applied to all areas of investigation (as in philosophy, the social sciences, and the humanities).

Thus, scientism is the "science can explain everything," (or, at least, "science explains everything important"), kind of position some folks take in arguments about religion, philosophy, the value of the humanities, etc.

Steven Pinker has now waded into the scientism debate with a New Republic essay entitled "Science Is Not Your Enemy: An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors, and tenure-less historians." For Pinker there really is no such thing as scientism, which, he claims, is "more of a boo-word than a label for any coherent doctrine."

The problem with Pinker's essay is that his main purpose is to convince friends in the humanities (history, literature, etc.) that adoption of methods from the science side of the campus poses no threat to their disciplines. On the contrary, data mining of historical records, he would claim, may shed new light on the mechanisms of history. And Pinker is clear about the importance of the humanities when he states:

No thinking person should be indifferent to our society's disinvestment from the humanities, which are indispensable to a civilized democracy.

If this were all there was to the scientism debates then I, for one, wouldn't see much need to weigh-in. Pinker says a lot that is eminently reasonable in the essay. But there is a much deeper question about science and culture and Pinker seems to step right over this bumpy ground without even noticing.

Pinker speaks about a sense of recrimination against science for its place in human life. He cites his own experience of such attitudes as a professor at Harvard:

When Harvard reformed its general education requirement in 2006 to 2007, the preliminary task force report introduced the teaching of science without any mention of its place in human knowledge: "Science and technology directly affect our students in many ways, both positive and negative: they have led to life-saving medicines, the internet, more efficient energy storage, and digital entertainment; they also have shepherded nuclear weapons, biological warfare agents, electronic eavesdropping, and damage to the environment." This strange equivocation between the utilitarian and the nefarious was not applied to other disciplines. (Just imagine motivating the study of classical music by noting that it both generates economic activity and inspired the Nazis.) And there was no acknowledgment that we might have good reasons to prefer science and know-how over ignorance and superstition.

What Pinker fails to see in this passage is that it is precisely the enormous power and the enormous success of science that put it in a unique position for misuse by those who claim to speak in its name.

Over the last four centuries the practice we call science has utterly reshaped human civilization in ways that have no precedent. Science, on its own, is simply a practice, it's a method for asking questions finding answers. It's a way to approach the world. The ability to harness that practice to create powerful change (via wealth creation or military power) has always carried its own dangers.

The efficacy of science generates a powerful attraction for advocates of (often unspoken) philosophical assumptions. These are people who seek to cloak their beliefs in the legitimacy of the scientific enterprise. This is where scientism raises its ugly head.

Pinker is right to argue, as he does, that science can't be blamed for the stupidities of social Darwinism, eugenics or the communist insistence that it had found a science of history. But his easy dismissal of scientism as a "boo-word" misses the point that science gets used within culture for more than just legitimate purposes. In fact it's the very efficacy of its tools that allows cultural misappropriations of science to go unnoticed.

Part of this misappropriation comes from thinking that, since science is so good at providing explanations, explanations are all that matter. It's an approach that levels human experience in ways that are both dangerous and sad. In discussions of human spirituality and science, for example, it leads to cartoon arguments between Richard Dawkins and fundamentalists about who started the universe. Missing are the varieties of reasons people feel "spiritual" longing that have nothing to do with asking how the moon got there.

The power and promise of science is not compromised by understanding that we live in a world saturated by its fruits and poisons. Pinker is quite right that scientism is not a coherent doctrine. But that doesn't mean the term is empty.

Scientism is an unfortunate consequence of the success science has had explaining the natural world. It would, in fact, be useful to clarify how scientism manifests itself. That would help us understand the damage it does to the real project that lies ahead of us: building a place for the full spectrum of human belief in a culture fully shaped by science.

Flight

I watched the movie Flight, with Denzel Washington.  It is a very good movie.  Washington was wonderful.  I do not remember who else was nominated for Best Actor Oscar, but I would have given it to him over Day-Lewis as Lincoln.  Flight is an entertaining drama.

The New Brenda Wineapple Book

By DAVID S. REYNOLDS

Published: August 9, 2013

So many histories of the Civil War era have been published that one would think writing another would be pretty much a matter of choosing a major political event — the Compromise of 1850, say, with its controversial Fugitive Slave Act — and then pressing cruise control. We drive on a familiar freeway that takes us through a deepening valley: the growing gulf between the North and the South during the 1850s. We view familiar scenery like the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Then, suddenly, we encounter a multicar pileup: the Civil War.
ECSTATIC NATION



Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877



By Brenda Wineapple



722 pp. Harper. $35.

.It is indeed tempting to piece together a narrative where everything falls neatly into place or, even if it doesn’t, to imagine a sane resolution to the debate between antislavery and pro-slavery ideologues. A generation of historians known as the revisionists used their supposedly rational perspective to argue that the Civil War was “unnecessary,” caused by issues that could have been solved through reasoned discussion and political compromise. That view, which was vigorously challenged in the later decades of the 20th century, has made something of a comeback in recent years among those who contend that there must have been ways in which a war that killed approximately 750,000 Americans could have been averted. If we had only gone left, not right, on that freeway, we could have avoided the smashup.



In “Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877,” her splendid new history of the Civil War period, Brenda Wineapple takes us on a different ride. Think the Monaco Grand Prix: zigzagging, sometimes precipitous, with hairpin turns that slow you to a crawl followed by straightaways where you reach 200. Lincoln is there, of course, along with all the other major players, but the usual dichotomies are replaced by a kaleidoscope of outsize personalities, conflicting visions and unforeseen events.



In other words, Wineapple gives us history as it feels in real time: full of plans that backfire, schemes foiled by chance, outliers who suddenly change everything and happy endings that turn out to be not too happy after all. And, somehow, the whole untidy situation pushes us toward social progress. “Ecstatic Nation” is not a book with an overt agenda. Its message is delivered through its vivid portrayal of the human side of an era, following the roiling tides of emotions — erratic, shifting and ultimately overpowering.



Lincoln once confessed that he didn’t control events; they controlled him. But if he wasn’t in control, who was? Everyone, Wineapple demonstrates. Everyone in that tumultuous time.



Wineapple’s title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem about “A single Continent” where “One — is the Population— / Numerous enough — / This ecstatic Nation / Seek — it is Yourself.” The image reminds us of the importance of the individual in history. The nation is a motley assortment of individuals, and the individual is a mini-nation of selves. As Walt Whitman, the quintessential poet of American democracy, proclaimed in 1855, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”



All too often, Civil War histories are dominated by accounts of military strategy, party positions, social currents, economic trends and so on. While not ignoring such themes — indeed, her book is a reliable repository of factual information about the Civil War — Wineapple brings alive the vibrant, imperfect people behind the issues: not just the leaders in Washington and on the battlefield but the quixotic adventurers who tried to take over Cuba and Nicaragua, the pro-slavery hotheads, the fervent abolitionists, the poets, the showmen, the shysters and the spirit-­rappers who conversed with the dead. Ecstatic indeed.



With so many individuals bouncing off one another and gravitating to opposite sides of the slavery issue, small wonder that a blood bath resulted. Wineapple finds that, despite all sorts of political deals put on the table, polarized passions became an unstoppable force. By 1860, she writes, “a certain sense of inevitability” had overtaken the nation. “War seemed a foregone conclusion” because there was no “incentive to budge, to question one’s own righteousness, to create the grounds on which a compromise might occur.”



There were many bold efforts to challenge slavery. The Liberty Party in the 1840s tried politics, to no avail. Another method was to reject the government altogether. That was the choice of the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who publicly burned the Constitution, which he considered a pro-slavery document, and urged the North to secede from the South. Another strategy was Christian persuasion, the avenue taken by Harriet Beecher Stowe in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which showed the human side of enslaved people. Yet another was individual military action, taken by John Brown, who willingly gave his life in his holy war against slavery.



But all of these efforts, no matter how very different they were, led to slavery becoming ever more deeply entrenched in the reactionary South. One of the strengths of Wineapple’s book is it shows how moderates were inexorably sucked into the vortexes of the sectional passions that led to the war. She tells, for example, of Alexander Stephens, a temperate Georgia representative who in 1859 abandoned politics because he found himself, in his words, caught between two trains, each with a drunken engineer, headed on a collision course. Soon, however, Stephens was right back on the Southern train after being selected as the vice president of the Confederacy, which he extolled as a model society based on the “great physical, philosophical and moral truth” of the inferiority of blacks.



Efforts to ward off war, Wineapple makes clear, were as fruitless in the North as in the South. Lincoln rejected the incendiary tactics of abolitionists and carefully adhered to the principles of the nation’s founders. In 1858 he declared that war was not the solution to slavery, which he said might take as long as a century to disappear. But to his pro-slavery opponents Lincoln was just another devilish radical.



Wineapple relates the war and its aftermath with economy and power. The four-year conflict ended slavery but could not bring a lasting resolution to the race problem. Early in Reconstruction, blacks briefly gained political ascendancy in the South with the help of Northern pressure, but then complacency set in. By 1876, Reconstruction had collapsed, and Jim Crow was beginning to be put in place. In the North, many erstwhile abolitionists abandoned their former radicalism; the few who retained it, like Wendell Phillips, Lydia Maria Child and Frederick Douglass, became lonely prophets of a civil rights movement that would take nearly a century to rouse the nation’s conscience.



Wineapple makes good use of her gift — visible also in her other fine books on Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson — of communicating vast amounts of information in lively, cogent prose. She makes familiar historical figures seem fresh and unfamiliar ones seem vitally important. The result is a masterly, deeply moving record of a crucial period in American history.





David S. Reynolds is a distinguished professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. His books include “John Brown, Abolitionist” and “Mightier Than the Sword: ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ and the Battle for America.”

Fiddler on the Roof

If I could play the fiddle I'd place a chair on my roof and be the Pelham Fiddler on the Roof. I am Protestant, not Jewish like Topol, and this is not Russia 1905, and I would not call myself a peasant, only a day laborer, but this could very well be pre-revolutionary America. I'd play and people would stop on the streets and wonder who this clown was, and one of my neighbors would proudly say, "He's the Fiddler on the Roof you fool!" I'd play "Amazing Grace" and "When the Saints Go Marching In" and people would sing and believe again and everyone would come together. If only I could play the fiddle.

Friday Night at Panera Bread

Being the nice guy that I am, I picked up supper from Panera Bread for me and the missus. It is Friday night, isn't it??? I just about lost continence when the cashier said the total was $30.01. Say what? We're talking about two sandwiches, a cup of soup, and 4 cookies. I had no idea I was running up such a steep bill. There goes the rest othe weekend. Canned soup and crackers tomorrow. Popcorn? Fasting? Is there a word from the Lord? I'm all ears.

Panel Trucks

I am naturally suspicious of panel trucks because I can easily imagine all kinds of unnatural things going on in those kind of trucks. I am especially suspicious of unmarked panel trucks. If they are marked I assume it's a cover for something nefarious. You don't see as many panel trucks as you used to. I see a panel truck & I think painters. Ha! I think electricians. Ha! Good cover. Sus...picious looking vendors of various sorts. I think people who WORK for a living. Ha! But I wonder if there's meth lab in the back of that panel truck. I wonder if someone is doing surveillance (like on ME!). You tend to see panel trucks in front of convenience stores. What are they doing in front of convenience stores??? Don't leave your car unlocked around a panel truck. It may be the last time you see what's on your car seats.