Science and mysticism in the U.S.A.

Great stuff on the Bob Edwards show this morning:

Americans built the bomb, walked on the moon, decoded the human genome, and created the internet. Yet only half of American adults know the earth orbits the sun once per year. What happened to scientific literacy in America and who is to blame for its decline? Journalist Chris Mooney and scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum (check their blog, the Intersection) examine these questions in their book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. Then, writer Mitch Horowitz, editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin Press, is a well-known scholar and expert on the occult. His new book Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation explains how the esoteric movement spread throughout America and what its impact is on our nation today.

Much of this superstitious, supernatural, pre-scientific folderol can actually be traced to a couple of teenage sisters and some quick-buck schemers in the 19th century, Horowitz reports.

Time for a re-valuation of values here, no?

John Updike, U & me

Another fallen hero...

I once published a brief comment about John Updike's aversion to materialist metaphysics. He had written, in his reluctant memoir Self-consciousness:

"When we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept—the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation."

I wrote:

Updike may appear to yearn for the supernatural, but in fact his books are full of appreciation for the natural, simple satisfactions of everyday life. He would love nothing more, it seems, than to "be a self forever."

That's still how I read him. I wish he could be a self forever, here amongst the selves we're sure of, for my own selfish reasons as one of his most admiring readers; and because he was the theist whose charm and intelligence and humanity most tempered my inclination to dismiss theism as nothing but the residue of pre-scientific superstition.

It is very sad to think of his no longer being here. What a vast space of "emotion and conscience, memory and intention and sensation" for us all to try and fill. Who will temper me now?

Addendum: Garrison Keillor has penned a very nice tribute to Mr. Updike, eliciting from me a brief further comment...

Very nice tribute to a very great man whose greatness was out of all proportion to his humilty and generosity of spirit. I've posted my own humble tribute to him at http://delightsprings.blogspot.com/ and though I never met him, I think (based on something he told Terri Gross about his distress in contemplating the intrusions of biographers, even friendly ones) he would say that as an admiring reader I did, sort of, know the best of him.