Saturday, March 31, 2007

The God Delusion

A couple of days ago, I listened to this interview on npr with my family, while we were driving. It's Richard Dawkins.

Now, I have to say I never gave Dawkins a fair shake, and I still haven't. Don't get me wrong, I buy the whole Selfish Gene thing, and the meme thing is interesting, too. But I have never listened seriously to Dawkins's views on God and religion.

Why should I? He is a scientist by profession and an athiest by confession. He is not an expert in religion, and he doesn't even practice it, so why should he have anything worth saying about it? His only qualification to speak about religion is that he's a really smart guy. And yet, he persists in talking about religion. He is so persistent, it makes me wonder if maybe he does have something to say.

Still, Dawkins tends to use really inflammatory language when talking about religion (e.g. The God Delusion), so that prejudices me against hearing him out.

Well, with all that preamble out of the way, let me tell you about the interview. He was much less inflammatory that I had expected. He even expressed respect for certain aspects of religion, such as the desire to do right or the desire to connect to one's people and heritage. OK, Dawkins, I'm listening. Well, the really interesting thing about Dawkins is that he really considers science to be his religion. He says that he does feel a sense of awe at the laws of physics and the infinite variation of biology, but he refuses to call those laws God or say that they were created by a God. He has no need of that hypothesis (to paraphrase).

That's because Dawkins has an implicit narrative (I believe) that says that the only things worth believing in are those that have explanatory force. God, as a hypothesis, is worthless to Dawkins because the existence of God does not explain anything in the realm of scientific fact.

Dawkins acknowledges this, and says that many people who believe in God also acknowledge that God is a feeble hypothesis. I happen to agree. So why do such people, who understand that theory of evolution by natural selection, believe in God? According to Dawkins, because they are afraid not to. They just can't bear to think there is nothing out there, they can't bear to think they are alone. This, for Dawkins, is not a good reason to believe in something.

I agree with much of the above. Yet, somehow, Dawkins emerges from this chain of reasoning as an athiest, and I emerge from it an agnostic. Where did we diverge? I think there is a difference in our implicit narratives.

Dawkins has an implicit value of humanism in there. He might say, "Why believe in mystical stuff when we have real scientific knowledge right here that is so much more wonderful, scientific knowledge that was discovered by people?" I think somewhere deep down, Dawkins is very attracted to the human empowerment that scientific progress represents. Scientific discovery is for him the pinnacle of human flourishing. And that belief attracts him to science. I imagine Dawkins has an implicit narrative somewhere back there with two panels: in one, people crouch in the dark in fear of the unknown God of their own imaginings; in the other, people walk confidently in the bright light of science.

I approach this whole thing with a somewhat different implicit narrative (which I am trying now to make explicit, I suppose). In my deep down value system, humility is good. Something in me is attracted to humility and repulsed by arrogance. I can't support that, it's just something that is in me. And to this value system, the idea of making science into a religion seems supremely arrogant. Science is just a knowledge system of recent, human invention...how can that substitute for a God? In the same vein, I recognize that religious dogmas and dialectics are also just knowledge systems of recent, human invention, and that they are not God either. But the idea of ever saying, "That's it, that's the Truth, that's all there is," just doesn't make sense to me.

So what is God? Maybe for me God is just a reminder that there is an infinite number of things I don't know.

Friday, March 30, 2007

The G. C.


March 29 was a day at Grand Canyon. The rangers and signs refer to it thus, without article: many canyons are grand, this one only happens to have that particular modifier for a name. It makes sense in a way to give the canyon no name other than “Grand.” It is a self-consciously inadequate title, reflecting the dumbness that strikes many people, including me, when they see it.



This is not a picture of Grand Canyon. This is a picture of the worst faucet ever. This faucet is located in a rt 66 motel. The knobs are a great demonstration of the principles of torque and friction. With soapy hands, there is absolutely no way to turn those things.

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

The Whole Fam Damly



So, March 26 was an enromously long day. I started in Los Angeles and drove to Pasadena with my brother. We had breakfast with EJ and SJ and played with their wonderful labradoodle Quigley. I’m going to try to upload some pictures of Quigley. He is as fun to touch as his name is to say, he has a very sweet nature, and he is well-trained. Props to the Js for having great taste in most everything, including dogs.

From Pasadena we set out for Las Vegas. On the way we saw land sailors. They are wheeled carts with big sails and they just shoot across the desert at terrific speed.

Things in the desert appear in the panorama even when they are very far away. A mountain range appears on the horizon 30 minutes or more before it is reached, and the utter emptiness of the intervening space makes for a lack of references for scale. One drives at 85 mph or more, but seemingly without moving, since the mountains don’t get perceptibly closer. Therefore, Las Vegas appeared hours before we reached it. Partly the delay was due to the desert-distance contraction illusion, but mostly it was due to the traffic time-dilation effect.

Vegas held two main attractions for us: the Bodies exhibit and the Cirque du Soleil Mystere show.

BODIES

These were way more dead people in 90 minutes than I had seen in my entire life up until that point. It reminded me of those old paintings of a philosopher holding a skull. The Cliffs notes explanation is always, “Man contemplates his own mortality.” But viewing and handling (indeed, interrogating—to take a page from Bruno Latour) the remains of the dead is one rather specific way to contemplate one’s mortality, and a powerful one, at least for me. Especially considering that I’m not going to medical school and will not get the opportunity afforded by a course in gross anatomy to interrogate the remains of the dead, I’m glad I went.

A few disconnected impressions:

The heart is smaller than I expected.

A lot of our insides look like plants, branching and so forth.

The brain is smaller than I expected.

The uterus is way, way, way, smaller than I expected.

The pyloric sphincter is really substantial.

The embryo develops really quickly.


MYSTERE

I have seen Cirque du Soleil three times in my life, and I think only during this show did I understand the importance of the clowns. Cirque du Soleil has the world’s best acrobats, and they will be flipping around impressing everyone, while some clown gawks on, inexpertly bouncing a ball or something. Why the clown? Why draw the audience’s eyes off the performance onto something merely odd?

I think it has to do with the need for scale and perspective. After 30 minutes or so of watching the most astounding, eye-popping of stunts, the audience can’t help but cease to be quite so impressed every time someone jumps from one flying trapeze to another. In the absence of clowns, the implicit narrative becomes somewhat Roman: Bigger, higher, more extreme! But that is not the only possible narrative. The clowns call our attention to the other possible narratives. They validate the other feelings the performance evokes in us—wonder, fear, concern for the safety of the performers, haughtiness (e.g. “I could do that”), even boredom, and thereby give the experience more richness. For example, to give voice to our concern for the safety of the performers, Mystere employs two clowns acting as children—one an enormous, ugly, baby; the other a distracted and winsome little girl. Both children innocently (or not so innocently) walk into dangerous situations, play with things they should not, and evoke the parental concern of the audience. Having gasped and laughed at the clowns’ antics, we feel freer to let ourselves experience concern for the acrobats—these human performers with superhuman powers. The trope of parenthood is a brilliant one: our children’s exploits and accomplishments give us naches (because our children are exceeding us), but we also look on their bravery as foolhardy daring (since we also are painfully aware of how fragile our children are, and perhaps a little jealous that they can do what we cannot). How much more richly we experience the performance when we can experience some of these emotions toward the performers.

Anyway, there are other important ways in which the phenomenon of implicit narrative affects our public and private life, which I hope to explore in later posts. For now, BRING IN THE CLOWNS!

March 27 we left Las Vegas and drove to Hoover Dam. Hoover Dam provoked mixed feelings for me. Visually, the Dam and Lake Mead are an ugly scar on the Earth. It is sad the way we’ve choked off the Colorado river. Nevertheless, the flood protection and electricity the dam provides are very valuable. Projects like these allow people to make the desert commercially and agriculturally useful. Hoover Dam makes the desert bloom. And it is also a testament to human ingenuity and cooperation.

However, it makes the desert bloom in a wasteful way. Hoover Dam enables the ubiquitous fountains of Las Vegas, the golf courses of Arizona, the endless tract homes and rotary sprinklers of Southern California. The money spent on maintaining the dam could be spent much more effectively if people conserved water. Differential flush toilets are much cheaper than dams and do just as much to make the desert bloom. There is more potential for solar power generation on the roofs of Las Vegas than there is for hydroelectric generation in the Colorado river, but instead of putting up solar panels, they top those ugly houses with dark, heat-trapping roofs and then cool them houses with electric air conditioners powered by the dam.

And it is a little sick how much human blood went into that dam. 96 official deaths during construction, but that number is low because it doesn’t even count workers mortally injured on the job who died at the hospital off site, not to mention those who met early deaths from chronic illnesses they contracted on the job site. A project of that size (read Big Dig) would never finish ahead of schedule and under budget today, but I am happy that we value workers’ safety more now than they did in the 30s.

The Israelis have made the desert bloom in a less spectacular, but more impressive way. Their ethic emphasizes conservation over production, understanding the land over dominating it. And, significantly, the Zionists intended to improve themselves as they improved the land. They set up new kinds of communities, tried social experiments in the desert (and still do). The Americans simply infected the desert with the same counterproductive, socially isolating forms of development they originated elsewhere and let the ‘burbs spread over the sands without a thought.

Saturday, March 24, 2007

A Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins...

My adventure has begun. I'm blogging from Los Angeles, in the midst of (gasp) a college party. I'm staying with my brother. This morning I had an admission interview at a prominent Southern California business school. It went well, but I felt tense and uncomfortable in the suit. I'm still not used to standing tall, collecting business cards, gladhanding, and shmuzing. Reminds me a little of those first few weeks of teaching, when I was just weeks out of college and would look at myself in the mirror at 6 in the morning, tie around my freshly-shaven neck. The thought in my head would be, "There's Mr. F____." It was an identity I was not yet comfortable with. It took most of a year to comfortably integrate my teaching persona into my overall personality, to be relaxed in front of a class. I guess it will be the same with wearing a suit and a smile.

Thursday, March 22, 2007

"Shelo sam helkenu kahem..."


Today I learned that Israel has its own plug, unique among the nations of the earth. I can only assume this was the realization of Herzl's vision that the Judenstat would invent a new system of electricity, ever so slightly different from, and superior to, that of the European nations, inspired by the design communicated by God to Moses on Sinai: "And thou shalt make thee a plug basically like the European plug, and with pretty much the same voltage. With prongs slanted outward shalt thou fashion it, like the face of an alien. Take care that ye not fashion it with prongs slanted inward, like that of the Australians, whom I shall deliver into your hand, as I swore to your fathers."

It's Official!

From the irony desk...

Olympic Airlines's frequent flyer program is called Icarus.

I know this because I went through a fiasco today trying to book my flight to Israel. After spending several hours carefully and diligently comparing prices on hundreds of airlines, via hundreds of online retailers, fiddling with the dates, etc, I settled on the perfect flight, at a nice price. It was at just the right time, and only a little over budget. It was on Olympic. I thought I was almost done.

Well, halfway into the booking process, Orbitz tells me that this itinerary only offers paper tickets. Paper tickets. What the hell is a paper ticket for an airplane anyway? Isn't that a redundancy or the exact opposite of an oxymoron or something? You need ID to board the plane, and the ticket has your name on it and is not transferable, and the airline has a record of the ticket. Well, whatever, Greece is not in the 21st century yet, I figured, I can play along.

Well, it turned out it would be an extra $35 to overnight the tickets to myself via UPS, and they would require a signature, possibly my signature. That was a problem, since I'm going to LA on Friday and if UPS for some reason didn't manage to actually "overnight" it, I couldn't get it. I involved Mom at this point, and we took turns flipping out and making each other crazy. We investigated having the house-sitter sign for it, then mail it to me in LA, but that seemed to involve a troubling number of connections. We investigated having it sent to a UPS "customer service" center in LA, but after talking to several UPS representatives learned that the customer service center does not accept calls from customers and does not hold packages for customers to come pick up, unless they have a HOLD sticker on them, and sometimes not even then. We investigated having UPS deliver the tickets to my cousin in LA, but I could just see some UPS guy at the end of his shift deciding to forego the signature part and just leaving the envelope in front of my cousin's door to get stolen.

We called Orbitz to ascertain whether they could send it some other way, whether they could put a hold sticker on it, whether they could authorize someone else to sign for it, whether I could pick it up at LAX, etc. The Indians on the other end were polite and patient, speaking too softly and often incomprehensibly. They were all eager to help, but were careful not to make any guarantees, and all three Indian customer service representatives told us different information.

In the end, I coughed up an extra $200 to book on British Airways, which offers electronic tickets. Then, just as I was about to hit SUBMIT, a message popped up telling me the price had stam been reduced by $80. So in the end it hardly matters, except that I'll have a one hour layover in London instead of a 17 hour layover in Athens.

The point is...I AM REALLY GOING TO ISRAEL NOW!

Mom invented a new word today. We were talking about whether I needed a bigger memory card for my digital camera. I explained that some digital pictures take up 2 Mb, while other s take up a mere half Mb. She asked if there was a way on my camera to adjust the megabyteness of the pictures I was taking. She could be George W. Bush's speech writer.

Now I'm just hoping this labor strike will be averted before I go to Israel. Also that any impending strikes by Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran will be averted.

Monday, March 19, 2007

Happy...um...Birthday

My family has some unfortunate birthdays. Mine is the anniversary of the Madrid bombings. My mother's is today, the anniversary of the start of the Iraq war. To celebrate, she bought me presents: 2 pairs of quick-dry underwear and an extra-large pack towel, for Israel. I do wonder sometimes whether it is really worth spending all this money for quick-dry stuff for Israel (isn't everything quick-dry in Israel?), but an even slightly wet garment can get real gnarly after a couple days wadded up in the bottom of a backpack, so I guess it is. I did get her a present: a running top (quick dry, as a matter of fact).

Nikudot mystery of the week is Isaiah 40: 7:

יָבֵ֤שׁ חָצִיר֙ נָ֣בֵֽל צִ֔יץ כִּ֛י ר֥וּחַ יְהוָ֖ה נָ֣שְׁבָה בּ֑וֹ אָכֵ֥ן חָצִ֖יר הָעָֽם׃

Why בּ֑וֹ with בּ and not ב ? Previous syllable is apparently open and previous word has a conjunctive taam. Input welcomed.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Happy St. Patrick's Day

Today I bought a journal to write about my adventures in Israel when I'm "unplugged." Woo-Hoo!

Friday, March 16, 2007

Chaos

A student in the class I was covering as a sub got sick today. He threw up in the trashcan. He was drunk, it seems. My heart goes out to this kid for whom school is so painful he needs to be intoxicated to get through it.

There were other sources of chaos at school today. There was a fight and several teachers were absent. At the end of the day, a secretary shook her head and said, "Well this has just been a crazy day. What's going to happen next? We just stand back and laugh at this point."

In the Bronx, where I used to teach full time, one fight, one drug incident and 10% of the faculty absent constituted a well-neigh normal day. We were always surrendering to the universe, throwing up our hands, shaking our heads at the absurdity of it all, and wondering what in the world was next.

Chaos, you see, is non-linear. 10 absent teachers causes a spillover of chaos and triggers other sources of chaos. It's a cascade. In the Bronx, we had lots of little sources of chaos, but what we perceived was not a little chaos coming from here and a little coming from there, but rather the ever- and omnipresent phantom of chaos haunting every corner of the school.

The street kid's credo--you can only count on yourself--became each of ours. Because you really couldn't count on anything or anyone, ultimately. You assembled a group of like-minded coworkers around you for protection and did your best. But come across a cache of curriculum supplies and hell yes I'm going to take it, and horde it. We've all got to grab to get ours. That was how it was, because of the pervasiveness of chaos.

I suffered a rejection today. I expected it, but it came earlier than expected. Hmmm, well, looking on the bright side........It's a good thing I'm not perfect, cause I'd be damn unapproachable!

Thursday, March 15, 2007

The Future is Now

Well, it was one of those days.

Slept in, because I didn't get called to go to work. I continued a project I started several days ago, but which keeps getting interrupted. It involved recording my voice using the computer and then burning a CD of it. Well, the mic levels were way too low, inexplicably, and I spent a lot of time fiddling with that, not getting much recorded, and making a lot of time-consuming-to-fix mistakes when I did. Also, I was checking my email every 2 minutes for a piece of news I've been waiting all week for, a piece of news that could be good or bad, but which had to come soon. Never really got a good rhythm going.

The day sort of slipped away. An old friend from elementary school--BG--showed up and we "caught up" for an hour or so. Strange how our lives have taken such different directions, or maybe our lives--if you believe in predestination or early childhood determinacy--were already pointing in different directions and just ran on a nearby parallel for a brief and incidental period. Anyway, good guy. Very gental person who joined the military at just the wrong time and got caught up in the war. He was lucky, since he came back in one piece physically, and in not too many more pieces psychologically than he had when he joined. It may even have been a positive thing for him, when viewed in retrospect. But he just doesn't belong with a gun in his hands in the middle of Afghanistan.

Tried to run some errands, with a 50% success rate, including exiting the freeway too early and getting stuck in a mini traffic jam trying to get back on. At staples I kept dropping my credit cards trying to check out.

Got to yoga a couple minutes late and I just never got into my yoga consciousness. I was the only man and the only person below 40 in the class. I hate that. Also the instuctor had all the mats pointing into the center of a circle, instead of all facing one wall. Yeah, it was earthmother time. Everything involved cocking the hips or grabbing your big toe with your hand or kissing your knee or doing the splits or arching your back. I couldn't do hardly any of it. I'm better at the positions that require strength, rather than flexibility. The teacher was really nice though. She kind of went out of her way to try to make me as comfortable as possible, but to both of our dismay and my embarrassment that at one point meant stacking two yoga blocks vertically the long way, since that was as close as I could get my hand to the floor in triangle position.

Right now I'm listening to some music of the genre of techno known as "ambient" apparently. It sounds like the music for one of those wonderful old Nintendo games, like maybe Metroid or Masterblaster or something where you travel through space doing stuff. Composer is ISRAELI!

And then...I got that news I have been expecting for so long. And it was in the positive. And that felt so good. I've been dealing with rejection and information vacuum for many months now, and it feels just great to know I'm going somewhere. Something in the future is now definite. I have something to look forward to, to bank on, and to prepare for. And somebody wants me.

Well, let me talk for a moment about selflessness. An old Polish woman was honored the other day for saving Jewish children during the Holocaust. She saved thousands of children and she was tortured by the Nazis to give up their names. She did not give up their names. Sounds like a real lamed-vavnik. Anyway, when asked by the reporter about why she was willing to do this, she said it was what anyone would have done. I think the reporter noted that this particular expression of humility was characteristic of everyday heroes. I am reminded of the guy who jumped on top of a complete stranger having an epileptic seizure and held him down while a subway train ran ove both of them, while his children watched from the platform. He said, "It's what any New Yorker would do."

I think back to the words of Avot. We are to judge others with kaf zechut. In other words, in absence of actual evidence that a person is saintly or meritorious, we are still to view his or her actions in the most favorable light. We are supposed to assume good intentions. These heroes seem to practice an extreme form of kaf zechut. If one believes their account, they believe everyone else is a saint. (Their post-facto, back-looking, subjective testimony, I acknowledge, is suspect.) But check this out, quoting from this good book:

R. Yehoshua Leib Diskin suggests another motivation. A fundamental factor in the avoidance of sin is the embarrassment associated with iniquity. Believing that society on a whole adheres to a higher standard is essential to maintaining this attitude. Thus, it is necessary to assume that the behavior of one's social group is exemplary; this is aim of the obligation of dan l'chaf zechut.

In other words, you assume that others are saints in order so that you will act as a saint because of the "peer pressure" as it were, or just the desire to conform.

Could it really be that these lamad-vavniks act saintly because they honestly believe that everyone would do this thing in this situation, and that their peers would look down on them if they found out they failed to do what was required? Is it not more likely these saints are just being humble? Or perhaps shrewdly trying to suggest universal saintliness to get others to be saintly out of the felt "peer pressure"? Even assuming they did think any average person would have risked a painful and untimely death to save those innocent victims, what would then keep our would-be heroes from taking the next step and concluding, "Well, if I don't, someone else will. I'll just let someone else do it"?
I mean, is that not the obverse of Diskin's prediction? Were these heroes not doing what they did l'havdil because they didn't think anyone else was going to step forward and do it? Perhaps Diskin's prediction is true and these heroes did think that way, but with the small modification of a local abnormality to the saintly uniformity. In other words, "Anyone in my position would save this person, except these people in my immediate vicinity. I just so happen to be surrounded by some exceptionally wicked people unrepresentative of humanity as a whole, at the moment." ("I knew it; I'm surrounded by assholes," as Rick Moranus so pithily put it in Spaceballs.)

Well, I'll just close with some vague statement about how this proves the world of our ideals is more real that the world of present existance, since prophecies are self-fulfilling and perception is reality and attitude is everything, etc.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

A blogger is born every second...

So, I just sat down to a plate of too-salty couscous and peas to tell you that I am going to Israel. That's right,

I AM GOING TO ISRAEL.

In the sense of using the progessive present to describe events in the near future or events pretty much certain to take place, because they have been planned or scheduled, or because the seeds of their occurrance have already been sown. I am not there yet, but I think it's going to happen.

I guess I've been thinking about tense so much because I've been reading Gesenius. (Sidenote--very complete but very poorly organized book. He starts with all the exceptions and slowly proceeds to the rules, finally reaching the basic verb paradigms in the last few pages.) The ability to speak of future events in the progressive present tense I think indicates a certain hubris about the future. As though merely scheduling things makes them so--like in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure: "Remember to stash the keys here when we go back in time--Wyld Stallyns Rule." When really I am not, at this moment, right now, going to Israel. I don't even have a plane ticket. I have a backpack and a camelback, but they still have tags on them, so I could still return them. I have a Let's Go guide. That's about as much real committment as I've put into this thing so far, except that I now tell people: "I'm going to Israel (plan accordingly)." In a way, just saying it feels like a committment to do it.

I'm not sure if Hebrew has these kinds of statements. For a long time the Jewish Agency told me, "We are finding you an internship." But they haven't found one yet. And that's really all they meant: "We have not found one yet, so it could still happen;" not, "The seeds of your internship have been sown, and you should now feel so confident that it will happen that you may speak of the internship as though it is already happening." Hebrew does not have a future tense. Since the idea of speaking with certainty about the future is absurd, the closest Hebrew comes is an imperfect tense--a way to say, "It hasn't happened yet."

But I really do think I'm going to Israel now.