Sunday, November 27, 2022

The Huxleys on evolution, religion, experience, humanism, cosmic philosophy

...For T.H. Huxley, evolution meant not the end of religion but, rather, religion's reconstruction—"a new ethical formula, a new set of beliefs, a new pattern of rules by which humanity might live," in Ronald Clark's words. His heirs Julian and Aldous took up this pursuit, seeking traditions that were both compatible with science and resonant with humanity's religious impulses. Predictably, though, the brothers ended up with different creeds.

Julian developed what he called "evolutionary humanism," a mashup of his favorite progressivist themes. It featured in many of his lectures and books, although he discussed it in greatest detail in "Religion Without Revelation" (1927). Central to the ideology was humanity's purpose: we are the children of a cosmic process that produces ever-greater intelligence and complexity. There could be no more important common aim than to take control of that process—to overcome our individual and tribal identities and achieve the more advanced mode of collective existence he called transhumanism. Evolutionary humanism, given its focus on the betterment of the species, became welded to eugenics. This might explain why, as eugenics lost legitimacy, evolutionary humanism became all but forgotten.

Where Julian focussed on unity and transhumanism, Aldous turned to experience. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he wrote to Julian about his conviction that the higher states of consciousness described by mystics were achievable. The fascination persisted, and, by the nineteen-thirties, Aldous believed that society's aim should be to nurture the pursuit of enlightened consciousness. By the time he published "The Doors of Perception" (1954), which connected his experience on the drug mescaline to the universal urge for self-transcendence, he had been writing and lecturing on mystical experiences for decades. Through this commitment, Aldous helped pioneer a form of secular mysticism that suffuses modern attitudes, showing up in things like New Age yoga and psychedelic-assisted therapy. An inheritor of evolution, the half-blind stork wrested sublime experience from the caverns of institutionalized religion.

The history of the Huxleys reveals a paradox in how we think about evolution. On the one hand, it exemplifies our impulse to find answers in cosmology. As organized religion declined, people sought guidance and justification in the scientific narratives taking its place. From race science to eugenics, progress to spirituality, the Huxleys combed our deep past for modern implications, feeding an ever-present yearning.

On the other hand, the Huxleys expose how diverse and historically contingent those implications can be. Evolution is a messy, nuanced, protean picture of our origins. It offers many stories, yet those which we choose to tell have their own momentum. It can serve as a banner of our common humanity or as a narrative of our staggering differences. It can be wielded to fight racism or weaponized to support oppression. It can inspire new forms of piety or be called on to destroy dogma. The social meanings of evolution, like so much else, are part of a grander inheritance.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/28/how-the-huxleys-electrified-evolution

Thursday, November 24, 2022

“grateful for every good thing”

Today is Thanksgiving Day. Although the Thanksgiving festivities celebrated by the Pilgrims and a tribe of Wampanoag Indians happened in 1621, it wasn't until 1789 that the newly sworn-in President George Washington declared, in his first presidential proclamation, a day of national "thanksgiving and prayer" for that November.

The holiday fell out of custom, though, and by the mid 1800s only a handful of states officially celebrated Thanksgiving, on a date of their choice. It was the editor of a women's magazine, Sarah Josepha Hale, a widow and the author of the poem "Mary Had a Little Lamb," who campaigned for a return of the holiday. For 36 years, she wrote articles about the Plymouth colonists in her magazine, trying to revive interest in the subject, and editorials suggesting a national holiday. Hale wrote to four presidents about her idea — Taylor, Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan — before her fifth letter got notice. In 1863, exactly 74 years after Washington had made his proclamation, President Lincoln issued his own, asking that citizens "in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise." He requested prayers especially for those widowed and orphaned by the ongoing Civil War, as well as gratitude for "fruitful fields," enlarging borders of settlements, abundant mines, and a burgeoning population.

It was Ralph Waldo Emerson who suggested, "Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude."

In the book On Gratitude, published in 2010, a number of writers take up Emerson's charge, listing some of the specific things that helped them in their writing career — things for which they are grateful. In the book, Kurt Vonnegut said: "I've said it before: I write in the voice of a child. That makes me readable in high school. Simple sentences have always served me well. And I don't use semicolons. It's hard to read anyway, especially for high school kids. Also, I avoid irony. I don't like people saying one thing and meaning the other. Simplicity and sincerity, two things I am grateful for."

John Updike said: "I'm not a movie star or a rock star. I maybe get two or three letters a week out of the blue, for some reason, and as I'm an old guy now, most of the letters are kindly. They do keep you going. This is an unsponsored job. I don't get paid without readers. So I appreciate that enduring fan base. It does keep me going. And for someone to take the time to say they like me. That's a blessing."

Joyce Carol Oates said: "I was only about eight years old when I first read Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, and when we're very, very young almost anything that comes into our lives that's special or unique or profound can have the effect of changing us … I virtually memorized most of Alice … That blend of the surreal and the nightmare of the quotidian have always stayed with me. My sense of reality has been conditioned by that book, certainly, and I am grateful for it."

Jonathan Safran Foer said: "I'm grateful for anything that reminds me of what's possible in this life. Books can do that. Films can do that. Music can do that. School can do that. It's so easy to allow one day to simply follow into the next, but every once in a while we encounter something that shows us that anything is possible, that dramatic change is possible, that something new can be made, that laughter can be shared."


https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-november-24-2022/

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Earthset from Orion

NASA Spacecraft Finishes Its Close Encounter With the Moon

…Before the flyby, a camera on Orion provided sharp video of the moon growing ever larger as the spacecraft approached, capturing an earthset — the small blue marble of Earth slipping behind the big gray disk of the moon in the foreground…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/science/nasa-artemis-orion-moon-pictures.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

How Reading — Not Scanning, Not Scrolling — Opens Your Mind

Every day, we consume a mind-boggling amount of information. We scan online news articles, sift through text messages and emails, scroll through our social-media feeds — and that's usually before we even get out of bed in the morning. In 2009, a team of researchers found that the average American consumed about 34 gigabytes of information a day. Undoubtedly, that number would be even higher today.

But what are we actually getting from this huge influx of information? How is it affecting our memories, our attention spans, our ability to think? What might this mean for today's children, and future generations? And what does it take to read — and think — deeply in a world so flooded with constant input?

Ezra Klein Show

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/22/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-maryanne-wolf.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Monday, November 21, 2022

Thinking is pedestrian

"There is time enough for a stream of consciousness that flows at the pace of walking. All the parts of your life, all the time scales, smoosh together. This pace is a mode of being: the walking pace, pedestrian and prosy. Thinking is pedestrian. Aristotle’s Peripatetics: they talked things over while walking around the Lyceum, and their walking helped them to think. They felt that. I like the sweaty huff and puff of the uphill slogs, and the meticulous stepping of downhill, and every other part of walking. Of course I also like the rest stops, and setting camp, making dinner, wandering around, watching the sunset, lying down at night; I even like insomnia if it happens to strike me. I like it all. But what you do most of the day up there is walk. And I like that most of all."

"The High Sierra: A Love Story" by Kim Stanley Robinson: https://a.co/03iIPKF

Wednesday, November 9, 2022

“a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam”

It's the birthday of Carl Sagan, born in Brooklyn, New York (1934), who created the TV show "Cosmos", which is still the most popular science program ever produced for television. He was a young astronomer advising NASA on a mission to send remote-controlled spacecrafts to Venus, when he learned that the spacecrafts would carry no cameras, because the other scientists considered cameras to be excess weight. Sagan couldn't believe they would give up the chance to see an alien planet up close. He lost the argument that time, but it's largely thanks to him that cameras were used on the Viking, Voyager, and Galileo missions, giving us the first real photographs of planets like Jupiter and Saturn and their moons.

Sagan also persuaded NASA engineers to turn the Voyager I spacecraft around on Valentine's Day in 1990, so that it could take a picture of Earth from the very edge of our solar system, about 4 billion miles away. In the photograph, Earth appears as a tiny bluish speck. Sagan later wrote of the photograph, "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives… [on] a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

He actually never used the phrase "billions and billions of stars," which is often attributed to him, but Billions and Billions is the title of his last collection of essays, which came out in 1997, the year after he died.

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/twa-the-writers-almanac-for-november-9-2022/

Igbok?

https://www.instagram.com/p/CktVlqQsfhu/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY=

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