Food for Thought

The other day I mentioned Pascal Boyer’s book Religion Explained. So far I have read about 80 pages and it is fantastic. Here is a passage from page 28, dealing with religion and morality:

Having concepts of gods and spirits does not really make moral rules more compelling but it sometimes makes them more intelligible. So we do not have gods because that makes society function. We have gods in part because we have the mental equipment that makes society possible but we cannot always understand how society functions.

This is something I myself have hammered on with various people for a while now. Religious ideas are an interface to the perhaps unintelligible or at least difficult to understand cognitive apparatus that makes human social life possible. In other words, human society cannot function without some basic rules. For example, don’t kill each other, respect the wisdom of your parents or elders, don’t commit incest, and so on. Of course, all of these rules make sense when you run the arithmetic or the logic or the genetic profiles, but the rules themselves have been around a lot longer than the requisite arithmetic, logic, and genetic profiling technology. Why? Because we came to an intuitive understanding before we came to an explicit, logical understanding. That intuitive understanding was then embedded in a cultural system and enshrined to become religious. Makes sense to me.

I don’t have the time or inclination to sit down and write pages and pages about this right now, but this ties in with a lot of the discussions between Christians and atheists. For instance, there was, once upon a time, a British fellow by the name of Lewis who imagined this thing called “mere Christianity.” That is, Lewis believed that since there seem to be universal tendencies in human morality, and those tendencies are encoded in the Christian religion, the Christian religion must be true. (Yes, I am simplifying for the sake of brevity.) Never mind that the exact same argument could be made for any religion that includes those same moral propositions. Boyer is saying (and I am agreeing) that morality and religion are causally connected, but precisely the opposite of how many people see them. Religious beliefs are the result of basic human morality, and not the other way around.

People have a hard time with this kind of talk, I know, because of that word “morality” and all the baggage it comes with. A lot of folks tend to think that morality by definition is caused by religious belief. But the idea here is that morality is functional and that this function has almost always been understood intuitively and expressed via religious language. In other words, it is not that some people are “good,” but that behaving in such a way that is beneficial to human society was long ago labeled “good” (as opposed to “evil”), and we are almost irrevocably stuck with this post hoc definition of social functioning.

At any rate, I am nearly certain that various people who read this blog are going to find much fault with what I have said here, and since I am rather in a hurry and anxious to get out of here and visit my local farmer’s market, I suspect that I have done a poor job of error and logic checking. For that I apologize. If anything, take Boyer’s passage at face value, because I think it is something worth thinking about.

The Splashin’ of the Christ

(Note: Since The Passion of the Christ is out on DVD tomorrow, I thought I would post a review I wrote back in March. Have fun.)

Standing in line for The Passion of the Christ, I couldn’t help but notice, well, the line. It was long, comparable to lines for The Lord of the Rings or a Star Wars episode. Regrettably, however, none of these fans were in costume, and the atmosphere was considerably less festive than what one might find at those other movies. We were, after all, about to see the Lord Jesus Christ get nailed to a board, and that is serious business. If one believes the Christians, this was the pivotal event in human history and the only act of brutal violence that’s fit for worshipful meditation. Come one, come all, and see your savior slaughtered! Seek ye first the best seats in the house, and suffer the little children to come unto an R-rated movie.

But this was a big suburban megaplex, not at a Sunday night screening in church. Maybe those other people were there for edification, but I was there to see a violent, supernatural thriller. Despite the alleged piety of the movie, this was still a secular venue with popcorn and everything. So I set my expectations where I would for any movie. Even though I knew the story beforehand, I decided The Passion of the Christ would still have to offer interesting characters, a compelling plot, good cinematography, and high production values. In other words, I would pretend I knew nothing, and let the movie stand or fall on its own terms.

(What follows is my know-nothing take.)

Unfortunately, the characters have about as much dimension as the screen. Considering only what the movie offers about Jesus, here’s a quick rundown: Jesus was a megalomaniac carpenter, taunted by visions of some hooded, androgynous weirdo and its deformed child, loved by his mother, hated by his priests, and considered harmless by his local Roman governors. His followers, unfortunately, were big wimps who ditched him when trouble came. For some reason, the Romans beat him to a bloody pulp and crucified him. Then, he came back to life and the movie ended, apparently a setup for the sequel.

Motivations are a bit murky. It isn’t clear why Jesus thinks he’s God, as he never really does anything God-like; I couldn’t figure out who the hooded, androgynous weirdo was, or why it was cradling a deformed child in one scene; motherly love needs no explanation; and even though the priests claim to be upset by Jesus’ blasphemy–one of them even tears his clothes open in a bizarre display of anger–it seems a little extreme to demand a guy be crucified just because he thinks he’s God. The puzzlement of the bald Roman guy, apparently some cat named Pontius Pilate, is about the only thing I could understand. Tell me again why Jesus ought to be killed?

Then there were some cryptic supporting characters. For instance, Pilate’s wife. I couldn’t tell if she was in the movie because just she was a major hottie, or because she was the only person to speak up and say that this Jesus guy should not be crucified.

Or what about the beautiful Monica Bellucci (of Matrix fame), who was assigned the task of sobbing and commiserating with with Jesus’ mother? Who was she, and what was she doing there? Was Jesus’ mother a lesbian? During one of the flashback sequences, we see this woman battered and bruised, kissing Jesus’ feet. It’s a nice slow-motion scene, with some stirring music, but it doesn’t explain much.

There is also a skinny, bearded guy that hangs around with the sobbing women, but he never says much, and it’s not clear who he is, what he’s doing, or why he needs to be in the picture. Once or twice it’s implied that he is Jesus’ brother, but no one ever comes out and says it, and it isn’t clear that he is an actual brother, or just a fraternal buddy.

Now, the plot. It runs something like this: Jesus, a megalomaniac-slash-carpenter, gets picked up by the police one night. His friends ditch him, and the police drag him off to the priests, who drag him off to the governor, Pilate, who finds no fault with Jesus and sends them to a guy named Herod, whose political role is unclear. He seems to be a raging homosexual, and his court is reminiscent of Jabba the Hutt’s. Herod will have nothing to do with Jesus and the increasingly angry priests, so the whole lot of them traipse back over to Pilate, who, despite his power, seems to be terrified of this mob, and will do anything to shut them up. So he has a couple thugs beat Jesus to a bloody pulp, which, in this case, is not a figure of speech. (Where most movies would compress time with a quick montage and a cut to the finish, this one relishes every lash of the cat-o-nine-tails, giving the audience nearly half an hour of splish-splashy scourging.) But the priests really want to see Jesus dead, so they insist on crucifixion. Still Pilate resists, and brings out a crazy, creepy looking murderer. He gives the priests a choice–let Jesus go free, or let the crazy killer go free. The priests, inexplicably unconcerned about the safety of their community, choose to let the murderer go free and have the mentally ill carpenter crucified. So the Romans load up Jesus with a big, wooden cross (while the other two guys scheduled for crucifixion that day are given only small, straight pieces of wood that span their arms), and force him to carry it down the street and up a hill to where they will nail him to it. The Romans, however, being apparently clueless, don’t seem to realize that a guy who has been beaten to a bloody pulp will probably not be able to do this. So they end up having to find a strong, healthy guy in the crowd, who gets forced to help Jesus with his burden. Eventually, everybody makes it to the top of the hill, where the three guys are nailed up. Jesus lingers for a while, until there’s a big earthquake that cracks in half the temple where the priests hang out, and then he dies. A few minutes later, he’s back from the dead, and striding away, all set for the sequel.

Again, there are problems. Why does Jesus think he’s God? Why is he arrested? Why does he submit to authorities, when he appears to know beforehand what will happen to him? Why do the priests want him dead? Why do the Romans have to be so brutal? Why is there an earthquake? Why does Jesus come back from the dead, only for the movie to end right away? The whole thing seems trumped up. Even though he’s apparently the protagonist, Jesus doesn’t struggle against his obstacles. Once he is overcome by the obstacles, even into death, his only escape is through a deus ex machina, a major narrative no-no. Whoever wrote this thing should have gone to a few scriptwriting seminars, or done a few more rewrites.

There are good things about this movie, though. The cinematography and the production values are fantastic. The sets look real, the lighting is expressive, and the composition of shots is clean and well-balanced. During the crucifixion scene, there is an amazing shot looking down Jesus’ arm, from his fingertips to his face, as a nail is driven into his hand. It didn’t look digitally enhanced, and as far as I could tell, a real nail was being driven into a real hand. (There was trickery involved, of course, but the method wasn’t obvious.)

Nevertheless, good camerawork, good lighting, superb special effects, and eerily morose actors could not save this picture from incomprehensibility. Not sure why anything was happening, I was bored for long stretches. “Why has the plot stopped for half an hour to linger on a brutal scourging?” I wondered. “Would it be too much trouble to use this time for a little helpful exposition?” And, “With all this gratuitous violence, why no nudity, raunchy sex or comedy relief?” It’s just the violent story of a pathetic anti-hero, completely lacking in charisma or initiative, who apparently cannot be killed, but whose tormentors nevertheless, and for reasons unknown, make a valiant attempt to do so.

(Thus ends my know-nothing take.)

As you may have gathered from this quasi-facetious rundown, the main problem with this allegedly religious movie is that it completely lacks religious content. A protagonist who thinks he’s talking to God is not so uncommon, nor is senseless violence, or characters who seem to be driven by something besides the plot or their own internal motivations. These are all characteristics of badly-written B-movies, and they do not lift The Passion of the Christ to the level of success it has enjoyed. Although has been marketed as a religious movie, it is really just a piece of video iconography. In other words, The Passion of the Christ is visceral cinematic art depicting a vignette that may have aesthetic appeal on its own, but whose narrative power is sorely limited and whose intended meaning can only be grasped by people who not only already know the back story, but who believe extraordinary things about it. An atheist may think icons are well-painted, or pretty pictures, but only a Christian can see in them that magical quality of religious meaning. The same is true of this movie.

So I had to wonder about all those people in line, who filed into the theater as they would for any other movie, bought popcorn and sodas, and plopped down to watch the Lord Jesus Christ get nailed to a board. Did they apprehend the piety of Mel’s masterpiece? What ineluctable religious stupor gripped them as they watched a man be mutilated by maniacs? Despite my experience at having been a Christian, I am wholly unprepared to answer this question. If, as Christians claim, it was the death and resurrection of Jesus that saved our sins, what good is the torture, the passion of the Christ? From a purely pragmatic theological perspective, if there is such a thing, all that really matters is that God became human so other humans could kill him, and he could prove his dominion over death. The scourging, the cross-bearing, and the crucifixion all seem to be little more than infelicitous details incidental to the time and space in which God chose to appear. That these violent bits have become the sole point of focus for certain Christians says more about those Christians than about the God they claim to worship. That The Passion of the Christ is unswerving in its pious devotion to every wound of Jesus says more about Mel Gibson than it does about Jesus.

What messages can be drawn this film? First, the Jews were bloodthirsty idiots who would rather see a murderer set free than face the theological implications of a challenger to priestly hegemony. Second, the Romans were bloodthirsty idiots who enjoyed hacking and slashing other human beings into little tiny pieces. In short, The Passion of the Christ is about bloodthirsty idiots, and the Christians love it.

Flying Chinese No Match for American Sense of Humor

Just returned from seeing Hero. Fantastic movie. (That will be the extent of my review.)

But what is the matter with American audiences? (Or, more specifically, what was the matter with this particular Fresno audience?) These are people who can watch movie car accidents where big pickup trucks go flying through the air without batting an eyelash. People who can see Tobey Maguire put on a red suit, turn into a cartoon, and start swinging around the city without thinking anything is amiss. People who go to movies where some guy goes inside a computer and makes bullets stop in midair. People who think nothing of John Woo movies where everything is highly flammable and explosive and all the main characters can absorb several clips full of bullets and still deliver dialogue. But give them a beautiful, artistic, expressionistic scene of a couple Chinese guys having a gorgeously choreographed sword fight on the surface of a scenic lake and suddenly they break into laughter.

Can someone explain this to me? After Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon I heard people complain that the flying warriors were unrealistic. But since when has the American cinema been a place of puritanical verisimilitude? Remember when Elliot and his friends rode their bikes into the sky? Or what about the time when Nazis opened the Ark of the Covenant only to be melted where they stood? How about any of these latest spate of films based on comic books? I don’t recall anyone laughing when Eric Bana turned into the grumpy green giant. (Maybe you were at a different screening, though.) But make a few Chinese people fly around and discuss philosophy while engaging in swordplay and suddenly everyone is snickering.

Somebody tell me why people are so inconsistent. Please.

Explaining Religion

So I bought another book. Some people are addicted to alcohol or gambling or video games. Apparently I am addicted to books, because I buy them about five times faster than I can read them. (Hence the enormous backlog of reading and the tall stacks of books on my desk, my table, my floor, my night stand, etc.) But this one I’m gonna read. (Yeah, I say that every time.)

Today I hunted/gathered, then dragged back to my cave a nifty little book called Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought by anthropologist Pascal Boyer. So far I have read twenty pages and already Boyer is challenging most of my previously held views about religion. For instance, he claims that “the urge to explain the universe is not the origin of religion.” Instead, religion is the rather baroque byproduct of our tendency to explain individual events without being aware of the methods we use to explain them. So says Boyer, and I am inclined to follow his reasoning. But twenty pages out of 330 is not enough to make a final judgment.

In case you are wondering, my previously held view of religion was what Boyer calls the “intellectualist” school of anthropology, which originated with 19th century scholars such as Edward Burnett Tylor and Fames Frazer. Boyer sums up the intellectualist view: “A central assumption of intellectualism is this: if a phenomenon is common in human experience and people do not have the conceptual means to understand it, then they will try and find some speculative explanation.”

However, Boyer argues that we are faced by phenomena that are difficult to understand all the time. For instance, we believe that our thoughts make our bodies move, even though “thoughts” are immaterial, ineffable, intangible, and pretty much nonexistent by any reasonable definition. This is pretty weird, but people don’t really care, and religious ideas have not developed around this phenomenon.

(Personally, I don’t think “thoughts” are what make us go. Instead, I think thoughts are a byproduct of responses formulated by the brain according to stimuli and then projected on something like Daniel Dennett’s “Cartesian theater.” Hence, figuring out how something immaterial moves something material isn’t something I feel I need to do.)

Meanwhile, any time you start talking about cognitive science or naturalistic theories of religion, you’ll get philosophers and theologians jumping all over you and telling you that what you’re saying is ridiculous. Mostly, I think, because if it wasn’t ridiculous, those people are losing a little job security. (Don’t try to accuse a theologian of making contradictory statements–like challenging every tenet of the Christian faith but still insisting that he or she is a Christian–in order to maintain job security, though. A friend of mine tried that once. Sort of like sticking your hand in the tiger cage.)

Anyway, back to reading.

Love, Crazy Little Thing Called

Love is a sickness full of woes,

All remedies refusing;

A plant that with most cutting grows,

Most barren with best using.

            Why so?

More we enjoy it, more it dies;

If not enjoyed, sighing cries

            Heigh Ho!

Love is a torment of the mind,

A tempest everlasting;

And Jove hath made it of a kind

Not well, nor full, nor fasting.

            Why so?

More we enjoy it, more it dies;

If not enjoyed, sighing cries

            Heigh Ho!

Samuel Daniel

Ligeti, Kubrick, Overstock.com, and Me

Thanks to Overstock.com, I am now the proud owner of all five CDs in the Ligeti Project. This composer, György Ligeti, has done some pretty interesting stuff. You have probably heard his work if you have seen Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Kubrick used Ligeti’s music without permission, by the way, and the two were in court for six years sorting out their problem. Ligeti won.) Ligeti did not compose the famous opening music, which is the first section of Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, but he composed the eerie music for the scenes involving the Monolith. Many people were introduced to Ligeti via this film, including me, although I did not realize it until a professor played Atmosphères in one of my classes. (Why he did that I am not sure, because it was a class on piano literature, and Atmosphères is not only not for piano, but would be impossible to transcribe for piano.)

I have been collecting these discs for a couple years now, and needed only Volume III, which the nice people at Overstock.com provided for a reasonably low price, including shipping. Better yet, though, was what awaited me inside the packaging. Somebody with a black Sharpie had hastily drawn a picture of the famous black Monolith from Kubrick’s aforementioned film, including a talk-bubble inexplicably rising from the mute black box to say, “Ligeti rocks!” That was cool, I must admit. So if you happen to work at Overstock.com and you are the Sharpie/Monolith fiend, thanks for the human connection. Despite the fact that your actions have absolutely no bearing on the economic benefits of shopping at Overstock.com, I will likely shop there again, simply because you have put a human face on this particular transaction. So much for thinking rationally. Stupid humans. Ah, well, Kubrick would be proud.

To High School Students

So this girl walks into the classroom today, takes one look at me, and says, “Oh Lord, not you.” Probably how a lot of people feel when they run into me. But I don’t mind. Students have other ways to make my blood boil. For instance, when two students are sitting next to each other talking and laughing, I say “Be quiet and get to work.” The most correct response is to say nothing and just do what I asked. If you absolutely must speak, a simple “Okay,” followed by doing what I asked, will suffice. However, most students, rather than responding correctly, prefer to say, “I am!” This is not only a lie, a disrespectful comment, and plain belligerence, but also the one thing that will make my blood boil in the classroom.

I doubt there are any high school students who read this blog, but if there are, and you are reading this, take note: Never, ever say you “are” doing something when you are only about to do it. That means if you are not working and your teacher tells you to get to work, do not say “I am!” Say “Okay” or “I will” or just do it without saying anything. If you are standing up and your teacher tells you to sit down, do not say “I am!” Just sit down. Never, ever use the present tense to express haste.

That is all.

Just a Bunch of Stuff Crammed into One Entry

Today I worked in elementary special education, which is always enlightening and mind-numbing at the same time, if you can imagine that. Perhaps harder to imagine is somebody like me (who blogs about drinking Guinness to keep from thinking too much while worrying about whether humans are hardwired to worry about things and pondering what to say in the latest theological discussion) sitting at a table with kids whose cognitive abilities are sorely lacking and teaching them how to use contractions correctly. Yes, as Walt Whitman wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

But now I am finished at work. So I came to the cafe to drink coffee and get back on my intellectual ball, read some local news in the papers lying around the tables here, keep up with some blog comments, read my friends’ blogs, post a little myself, and then dive into a new book I received in the mail today. Actually, it is an old book, which I purchased used via Amazon zShops. I like to buy books that way, because they are usually cheaper, and I can get things that are out of print.

Anyway, this book is The Colonial Wars, 1689-1762 by Howard H. Peckham, originally published in 1964, according to the copyright info in the book. It looked like a decent survey of an often forgotten chapter in American history. Those were the days when colonial subjects from France, Britain, and Spain, as well as several tribes of natives, squared off against each other over resources, shifting diplomatic alliances, land grabs, and whatever else they could think of to fight over. Despite being forgotten, it was a pretty important time in our history, because it helped to shape the colonials’ attitudes toward the imperial government of Britain. Then in 1763, when Britain had finally prevailed in all these wars and noticed that their colonies had become pretty darned profitable, they decided to nail down their administration and get a better cut of all these resources the colonists were milking. Suddenly the long-standing policy of administration by “salutary neglect” (i.e., basically just letting the colonies do whatever they want, within a few guidelines designed to make sure the mother country keeps a profit–the monarchy was more interested in the border disputes and establishing their supremacy on the new continent than with administering their existing colonies) fell by the wayside and the Americans began to feel the heavy thumb of their transatlantic governors. This did a lot to stir up resentment, which led to our famous Revolution.

However, despite that brief sketch of the era, my knowledge is still pretty spotty, which annoys me to no end. I simply must understand better. So I am going to read.

Let’s Get Stupid!

At last, the American people have found an insubstantial issue to polarize this election and keep themselves from thinking about the hard questions! While we beat our chests and grunt at each other over a few isolated incidents in the military service of one man thirty-five years ago, we can ignore the problems of American power in an increasingly resentful world and forget about the threat of terrorism.

What is character, anyway? John Kerry is neither as noble as his supporters claim, nor as duplicitous as his opponents accuse. He is just one human being with a life of shifts, changes, and reverses like the rest of us. The same can be said of George W. Bush. Few people are so consistent across several decades of their lives to warrant meaningful predictability in a complicated world. Circumstances change, and people often change with them. But while we are content to forget our own personal histories changes and developments, we examine those of our presidential candidates as if they were a concise map to future policy decisions. Could we be more naive?

Hubris, the Carbon Cycle, and Monty Python

Woke up this morning and ate an orange over the sink. Actually, I woke up, walked across the room, tapped the snooze button and went back to bed. Then I did that one more time a few minutes later. Then I got up and ate the orange over the sink, fully 28 minutes after I had planned on getting up. Most of those 28 minutes were spent listening to the electronic screech of my alarm, which, if I get myself in the right state of mind (i.e., “lying here feels nice and I do not want to walk across the room to press that button again”), can actually sound kind of soothing. But if I hear an alarm in the middle of the day, it drives me nuts. The orange was good, though.

While I ate the orange, I thought of hubris, which is an old Greek word for pride. Usually people use it like this: “Our scientific and technological hubris will be our undoing.” In other words, we put too much faith in our own abilities to engineer solutions to our problems, and in fact most of our problems are the result of previously engineered solutions. This is really just another way of expressing Proverbs 3:5: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.” Personally, I find that sentiment naive at best and ridiculously absurd at worst. I will come back to that.

Hubris and the orange got me to thinking about the carbon cycle. This is the biogeochemical cycle by which carbon migrates from the atmosphere to the biosphere to the lithosphere (or geosphere) to the hydrosphere (not in that order), and all the spheres that make our lives possible. It is enormously complex and I am not a scientist, so I will not explicate further. (Follow this link if you want to know more.)

Without the carbon cycle we could not have things like fossil fuels or global warming. Fossil fuels are big, carbon-based molecules extracted from deposits of formerly living things underground. We pull them out, mostly in the form of crude oil, refine them, use them to make our vehicles move and to generate electricity, among other things, and then spew exhaust laden with carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it hangs around absorbing heat. (Again, see here for more information.) Plants like some carbon dioxide, which they use in photosynthesis, but if we cut down all our trees (“deforestation”), then they are unable to keep up with these elevated levels of carbon in our atmosphere. Hence, global warming, simplified version. So people get worried about things like SUVs and deforestation.

By this time, however, I was finished eating the orange and it was time to get to work. I rode my bicycle, not because I wanted to cut down on greenhouse gases, or that I am particularly worried about the carbon cycle, but because I am concerned about a similar cycle in my own body: the fat cycle. You know, where too much food comes in but not enough exercise uses it up, so fat accumulates, sort of the way greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. Cycles. So I cycled to work.

(Now you are reading and wondering if this is in fact an accurate account of my morning thus far. Did I really get up, eat an orange, and start thinking about hubris and the carbon cycle? Yes. That should indicate to you how big a nerd I am.)

Here I am finally at work, having accomplished the necessary routine tasks required to open the bookstore and waiting for customers. Having this wonderful, DSL-connected iMac as my point-of-purchase workstation makes blogging almost irresistible. So I have decided to figure out what my brain has been trying to do with all this hubris and carbon cycle and snippets-of-Old-Testament-wisdom-literature stuff. This has turned out to be me difficult than I expected.

Scientific or technological hubris is slippery, and perhaps even mythological, I think. The idea is that when we undertake projects whose consequences we cannot foresee, we are engaging in hubris. Attempting foresight ought to drive us into greater conservatism and slow down the progress of science and technology, which to many people seem to be careening at breakneck speed across hitherto unmapped territory. But the problem with this view is that scientific and technological innovation, regardless of their social or environmental costs, have nearly always been financial gold mines. People who advance science and technology tend to get rich, and getting rich is one of our fundamental desires as humans, it seems. This economic incentive is what makes science and technology develop ever more quickly. Everybody wants to overturn the last technological or scientific advance with yet another one. Having to choose between foresight or riches, we have consistently chosen riches. Is this hubris? I wonder.

You may be thinking, “Well, duh, theomorph! We are clearly fools to choose riches over foresight.” But I am wondering whether we have that choice. Who has foresight? Even in a slow-moving economy with little innovation, who has foresight? No one can predict the future. For instance, think about that carbon cycle. This thing never became apparent to us until we started disturbing it. But now that we are aware of the carbon cycle, scientists dispute what it is actually doing. Some of them say that carbon is accumulating in the atmosphere. Others say that the oceans are absorbing more carbon than they used to. Still others claim that forested land has actually increased, and that northern forests are absorbing more carbon than they used to. No one can tell for sure. Average temperatures are on the rise (global warming), but scientists have had a hard time saying exactly why, and an even harder time predicting what is going to happen in the future. Here we are, with the best science and technology we have ever had, actually trying to have some foresight, and still failing. So I wonder whether we can choose anything but riches anyway. I suppose we could choose complacency and poverty, but why would we do that?

There is much more to think about, but I am not prepared to do that right now. Other things need to be done. However, I will say that I am glad our alleged hubris has rewarded us with things like clean water supplies, healthy food, effective medicine and longer life spans, lower infant mortality rates, and Macintosh computers. That is what we get for leaning on our own understanding. Which reminds me of a wonderful scene from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, when the Jews try to get themselves riled up over Roman rule in Judea. Recall that without Roman rule in Judea during the first and second centuries C.E., the birth of Christianity would not have made a lot of sense. People wanted a messiah because living under the Romans was just too much for them. Except life in the Roman empire was pretty darned good. (In this sense, the Jews had a lot in common with the Celts at the other end of the empire, who went through a similar stage of lunacy a few hundred years later.) Here is the scene, with which I shall close:

Man: What exactly are the demands?

Francis: We’re giving Pilate two days to dismantle the entire apparatus of the Roman imperialist state, and if he doesn’t agree immediately, we execute her.

Reg: They’ve bled us white, the bastards. They’ve taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers’ fathers.

Stan: And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers!

Reg: Yeah.

Stan: And from our fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers!

Reg: All right Stan, don’t belabour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?!

Man: The aqueduct?

Reg: What?

Man: The aqueduct.

Reg: Oh yeah, yeah, that they’ve given us, yeah, that’s true, yeah.

Man: And the sanitation.

Stan: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like.

Reg: Yeah, all right, I grant you, the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things the Romans have done.

Mathias: And the roads!

Reg: Well, yeah, obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don’t they! But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct and the roads…

Man: Irrigation.

Man: Medicine.

Man: Education!

Reg: Yeah, yeah, all right, fair enough.

Man: And the wine.

All: Yeah, yeah, the wine!

Francis: Yeah! yeah, that’s something we’d really miss, Reg, if the Romans left.

Man: Public baths.

Stan: And it’s safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.

Francis: Yeah, they certainly like to keep order. I suppose they’re the only ones who could in a place like this!

Reg: Yeah, all right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us!?

Man: Brought peace.

Reg: Oh, peace. Shut up!