"Age of Wonder"

Happy Earth Day!


One of the things I really like about my daily 50-minute commute to school (and it's at least that long back again!) is, most days, the opportunity to hear a terrific Bob Edwards interview on XM satellite radio. Day before last, for instance, Richard Holmes spoke of The Age of Wonder. Sounds like Dawkins was right in Unweaving the Rainbow, to insist there's no need to fear science as a source of disenchantment with the world's natural poetry.


Holmes concludes:  "We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective. Above all, perhaps, we need the three things that a scientific culture can sustain: the sense of individual wonder, the power of hope, and the vivid but questing belief in a future for the globe." 


One of the surprise stars of this story is Charles Darwin's grandpa Erasmus, who was already defending a sophisticated multiverse cosmology in the 18th century. And he was not a bad poet.

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?

This Jackie believed

He was great on the field, but his "This I Believe" essay (recorded in 1952, re-broadcast this morning on XM's Bob Edwards Show) is even more impressive to me. Jackie, it turns out, was a pragmatic meliorist. Could any contemporary athlete write and deliver with conviction anything remotely so articulate and thoughtful?

"...I believe in the human race. I believe in the warm heart. I believe in man’s integrity. I believe in the goodness of a free society. And I believe that the society can remain good only as long as we are willing to fight for it—and to fight against whatever imperfections may exist.

My fight was against the barriers that kept Negroes out of baseball. This was the area where I found imperfection, and where I was best able to fight. And I fought because I knew it was not doomed to be a losing fight. It couldn’t be a losing fight—not when it took place in a free society..."

The 5th Inning

Heard Ethelbert Miller talking to Bob Edwards about his memoir The 5th Inning , the title a metaphor for approaching the end of life. A baseball game is considered "complete" and can go in the books after five innings. If a decade of living roughly corresponds to an inning, then, those of us in our 50s can only hope for a 7th inning stretch, a dramatic and satisfying 9th, and (hope against hope) extra innings ( "That's what one hopes for when the game seems to be ending.") I miss Ernie Banks ("let's play two!)... but take heart from Norman Corwin.

Miller's cool website pays homage to the generations before him.

The book features this epigraph, from an 8th century Chinese poet: "The months and the years, a running river. Then there's the day you wake up old."

Then there's the day you wake up younger than the day before. It can happen.