"Welcome to the big leagues"

Maybe the world of athletic competition isn't ready for cosmopolitanism, after all.

"odd and pixeled"

I logged on to a live chat with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik yesterday afternoon, discussing his piece in the new issue "What Did Jesus Do?" It's a smart review of the spate of new books on Jesus, including Bart Ehrman's Jesus, Interrupted. (Ehrman will be our department's first Lyceum Lecture guest early next year, stay tuned.)

Reminded me of the "biotech & ethics" Friday chats we did a couple years back: rapid-fire, a bit choppy, but fun and challenging and quickly over.

Here was my little exchange. (The excisions marked by [...] indicate moments when all those other unseen chatters rushed in to interrupt with their own agendas. You obviously couldn't do this in the flesh, it would be too much like a presidential press conference.)

3:35

[Comment From Osopher] 

Thanks for clarifying the end of the essay. But it still bothers me that you evoke a "mystery" surrounding this man, rightly credited by Jefferson with moments of moral sublimity but also documented by Bart Ehrman and others as having been almost uniformly misunderstood. So my question: what do you see as the unsolved mystery about Jesus of Nazareth?

3:36

Adam Gopnik: By "unsolved mystery" I meant only that there are aspects of the Jesus myth that are just never going to be susceptible to rational judgment, and that faith, as everyone says, remains a leap -- foolish or necessary -- but a leap past reason. [...]

3:38

[Comment From Osopher] 

So the mystery might be more about us: why do so many find reason so uncongenial?

3:39

Adam Gopnik: Because our lives are bounded by the certainty of death, I suppose, and what reason can give us seems, to some -- to so many -- unsatisfying. I'm with Darwin on this one -- enough in life to give anyone meaning, if we make it hard enough -- but I understand the opposite feeling. Much the best account of this, I think-- this double feeling --is in William James's "Varieties Of Religious Experience" [...]

3:42

[Comment From Osopher] 

Totally agree about Darwin and James. Thanks for the chat and for the review, I've got to go and pick up the kids now.

3:43

Adam Gopnik: Pleasure sharing views; even in this odd and pixeled forum.

And I do totally agree: many of us don't feel a need for Jesus to furnish our lives with meaning, though we admire his message-- which was not exclusively his, of course-- of hope and charity and love and forgiveness etc.  But like William James and Adam Gopnik I must also acknowledge the "double feeling" of so many others for whom sweet reason seems not to be enough.

It is indeed a pleasure sharing views. But I don't think I'll be joining your "mafia family" (an avatar-driven online game, I presume? ), Adam. Thanks for the invite, but I already feel a little guilty for the time I stole to join you online yesterday. But only a little.

another vital question

A few students have taken me up on my final essay suggestion: explore alternative responses to the Vital Question (as posed by William James): "What is this world going to be? What is life eventually to make of itself?"

It's a question about human nature, the possibility of progress, of our capacity for cooperation and kindness and compassion, and of many particular facets that James could not have imagined.

I'll be interested to see where people choose to take the question. One possibility is the biotech angle:

"Where will synthetic biology lead us?" asks Michael Specter (author of Denialism). Some think life's about to start making of itself a creator of brand-new forms of life-- not in the Wittgensteinian sense, but for real. What might await our form of life, at the other end of that rabbit-hole?

"If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us." O brave new world, that has such reasonable-sounding "biological engineers" as Drew Endy in it...

Thing is, this isn't really even "long-term" thinking,

the future is now.

Bill McKibben, for one, says "Enough!"

free-range kids?

Will we ever learn?

Jon Haidt scorns the old, long-rejected behaviorist dogma that "Unconditional love-- holding, nuzzling, and cuddling children for no reason... was the surest way to make [them] lazy, spoiled, and weak... John Watson wrote of his dream that one day babies would be raised in baby farms, away from the corrupting influences of parents. But until that day arrived, parents were urged to use behaviorist techniques to rear strong children: Don't pick them up when they cry, don't cuddle or coddle them, just dole out benefits and punishments for each good and bad action." (Happiness Hypothesis ch.6)

Might as well throw them to the wolves.

Recently, more humane voices had squelched the behaviorist din (and rescued infant organisms from the den): "children need love as well as milk," and touch, and secure, reliable, attached, nurturing parents who demonstrate no-strings affection.

But the hydra has been rearing its head again. One of its faces belongs to the ubiquitous Dr. Phil (no relation), who "tells us in his book Family First that what children need or enjoy should be offered contingently, turned into rewards to be doled out or withheld so they 'behave according to your wishes.' And 'one of the most powerful currencies for a child is the parents’ acceptance and approval.'"

And TV's Supernanny (or is it -ninny?) says, “The best rewards are attention, praise and love,” and these should be held back “when the child behaves badly until she says she is sorry,” at which point the love is turned back on.

I'm with Haidt on this one, and with Alfie Kohn when he writes that he'd be "glad to see less demand for skillful therapists if that meant more people were growing into adulthood having already felt unconditionally accepted." (Hap Hyp ch7)

Unconditional love doesn't mean total comfort and ease. The character-building benefits of (some) adversity in a child's life are evident and attractive, just as the squishy softness of privilege's children is repellent. I heard actor Wallace Shawn on Bob Edwards last Thursday, reading his autobiographical essay on the subject. Ick! (There's just something about the lives of New Yorker children... recalling Mr. Gill of Starbucks' fame).

But this new "free range" movement, letting small children walk (or ride the subway!) to school unaccompanied by a trusted adult? No. This is not Gilligan's Island, and we're supposed to be raising humans here. But yes, give them permission to eat a cookie without calling. That seems safe enough.