On Easy Connections and Being Someplace

(Nairobi, Kenya)

Dear reader, hello! And I am in Kenya now. And already have some mixed feelings about how to communicate with the people I want to keep informed while I’m here.

And this is why!

Something feels wrong having travelled for 27 hours to the opposite side of the world, and then immediately “connecting” to the internet from a Nairobi hotel room. The wrongness is in the easiness I think. It’s too easy for our own good. Why? Because it’s tempting to live and act as if I am not gone. But I am. Hence, another little dichotomy/fracture in the attempt to live wholly. How am I supposed to commit to being here as I type this blog which HAS NO PLACE?

Flannery O’Connor once wrote that “being somewhere is better than being anywhere.”

I want to feel like I’m somewhere as remote as the place I really am – I want to feel like there is a painful distance between me and my wife that will be resolved in 13 days.

I’m not sure I can really communicate this idea over a blog that will be instantaneously available in just a few minutes. A tension of intentions to be sure (wanting to “reach out” and “connect” and be “close” – rife with spacial metaphor, eh!?).

Oh Whole!, resolve our inconsistencies and fix our fractures. Connect us. Bring us close. Advance us from mere metaphor to reality.

Is this medium effective for such a plea? Do You hear and respect this message? For it shall self-destruct in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

KenYEAH!

Turning Back the Wheel of Progress

…if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.
- Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning”

I’ve had my head wrapped in Clive Staples Lewis for the past couple months (as I’ve been teaching this class), and the most notable feature of my study thus far is probably the sort of education he received and delivered. This, by and large, was “Classics” – but it was remarkably thorough in that he studied not just the history and language of Latin or Greek (the definition of “Classics” that I’d learned in school); his course of study applied such a wide range of disciplines to whatever he read. So, of course modern thought was important and fit for study, but the foundation of these modern questions was (and remains to be) found in antiquity. That is, all good and truthful ideas are really just old ideas – found in old books, written by old thinkers, and now (probably at an ever-diminishing rate) only taught by old dinosaurs of teachers (as Lewis might say).

My friend Dan recently recommended Dorothy Sayers’ article “The Lost Tools of Learning” – it’s really her set of suggestions about how to teach young people – from childhood to adolescence. She laments keeping kids in school too long, thus extending that adolescence; she prescribes a Scholastic model, based on Medieval practices (yes, there was a lively educational institution in those “Dark Ages”). You should learn Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric all by 16.

And honestly, the “Scholastic School of Sayers” is something I would have shuddered at as a kid. But now the only shuddering I’m doing is based on the fact that I have read only too little of ancient thought and history. Better late than never, or so they say.

So, how does a 26-year-old catch up? Or a 30 something or older, for that matter? Its tough advice, since the learning curve is so steep – but I think we need to take Lewis’ advice for ourselves and READ OLD BOOKS, and we need to take Sayers’ advice for our children and TURN BACK THE WHEEL.

Aching for the dear reader’s thoughts on this.

Another notch in the single-tasker’s belt

(I realized this morning that many of my own words, on this blog at least, are reactions to the words and thoughts of others. No man is an island.)

From “Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration” was in the NYT today. This was a very interesting article to me, for a few reasons.

1. This is more support for a lifestyle of single-tasking.

2. The problem is clearly defined, and requires little external evidence; everyone feels unproductive in this fast-paced world of progress and production. Everyone. Problem defined: we can’t pay attenti… hmm. I’m hungry. I need to pay some bills too. And get gas. No not that kind of gas, got plenty of that. I need to finish my Lewis lecture, and get immunizations, and… oh, blog.

3. The article comes so close to suggesting what I think is the only solution: clear your life; change your attitude toward things; reevaluate; reset; develop the virtue of contemplation (thinking long and lovingly about X); have a disposition of focus; today’s troubles are enough; the moment’s troubles are enough.

4. But it doesn’t suggest that. It shouts out to “meditation” but other than that, expects that technology (externalities) are able to fix us, without a meaningful change from within. Put in ear plugs; attach “a frikkin’ laserbeam to your head” to neurologically change your brain to pay attention. I wish I was kidding, but this is how twacked we’ve gotten. That’s transhumanism – this device would take us one step closer to merging into an unholy chimera of man and machine. Just wait for the suggestion of an implant.

5. Cool shout outs to William James and Milton, but I’m not sure if the context works to apply their thoughts. (I’ve never read either of those quotes though…)

6. I am (regardless of my blogbashings) supremely guilty of multi-tasking. But when I can sit and focus for a large block of time (the book/article suggests 90 minutes, but I’m thinking more like 2-4 hours) on the top priorities of my professional, vocational life… Oh! The happy state! I feel whole. I feel united.

Theoretical notch or not, this doesn’t change the fact that we are a culture of divided individuals. Say what you will about “connection” or “unity” with others… we need wholeness and unity within ourselves. (And something tells me that the two are more intimately related than I already think.)

Alas! Modernity! Part 2 of 2 (The Poem)

Aye! Modernity! Realize what no machine could do: feel the rebuke, know the shame! How does mythopoeia translate to zeros and ones?

And the Guide sang:

Iron will eat the world’s old beauty up.
Girder and grid and gantry will arise,
Iron forest of engines will arise,
Criss-cross of iron crotchet. For your eyes
No green or growth. Over all, the skies
Scribbled from end to end with boasts and lies.
(When Adam ate the irrevocable apple, Thou
Saw’st beyond death the resurrection of the dead.)

Clamour shall clean put out the voice of wisdom,
The printing-presses with their clapping wings,
Fouling your nourishment. Harpy wings,
Filling your minds all day with foolish things,
Will tame the eagle Thought: till she sings
Parrot-like in her cage to please dark kings.
(When Israel descended into Egypt, Thou
Dist purpose both the bondage and the coming out._

Tis new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought,
And fools crying, Because it has begun
It will continue as it has begun!
The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run
Faster for ever. The old age is done,
We have new lights and see without the sun.
(Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea,
Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book X, Chapter vi; On the denaturalization of the earth, the dethroning of wisdom, and the love of uninhibited progress – with an eye to redeeming purpose beyond the toil

Alas! Modernity! Part 1 of 2 (The Prose)

Oh, blessed and damned Machine Age! Hearken! You’ve heard of your futility before. I merely – pray not vainly – repeat:

‘There must be a good side somewhere to this revolution,’ said Vertue. ‘It is too solid – it looks to lasting – to be a mere evil…”

The Guide laughed. ‘You are falling into their own error,’ he said. ‘The change is not radical, nor will it be permanent. That idea depends on a curious disease which they have all caught – an inability to disbelieve advertisements. To be sure, if the machines did what they promised, the change would be very deep indeed. There next war, for example, would change the state of their country from disease to death. They are afraid of this themselves – though most of them are old enough to know by experience that a gun is no more likely than a toothpaste or a cosmetic to do the things its makers say it will do.

‘It is the same with all their machines. Their labor-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving them have banished leisure from their country. There will be no radical change.

‘And as for permanence – consider how quickly all machines are broken and obliterated. The black solitudes will some day be green again, and of all cities that I have seen these iron cities will break most suddenly.’

C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book X, Chapter vi; On the futile shift from classical to scientific education

Tasty, iddn’t it? Part 2 coming soon.

‘Being dead’ is so last season!

Exactly.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

Dear Reader, dear,
I’m hearing some stuff about the end of the university, or, maybe it’s the beginning… ? Well, I don’t want either. And I’m just starting up again, so give me a break! (If I haven’t told you yet, we decided, and we’re both enrolling in Talbot’s Philosophy of Religion and Ethics MA program.)

I’m talkin’ about stuff like this and this. I’m sure there’s more of it, too. We now live among a culture and people which, in this era, LOVE to pronounce the death and end of things. ‘God is dead!’ ‘Blogging is dead!’ ‘Eating food is dead!’ ‘Sleeping is so last season!’ I think this is reflective of the temptation of immediacy – to pick up and speed along. Maybe there’s even some “chronological snobbery” built into that (this “snobbery” is a term of C.S. Lewis, borrowed from fellow Inkling, Owen Barfield).

But the concerns about humanities departments (philosophy, religion, theology, english, etc.) “dying” don’t worry me. I’m not worried about going back to school. In fact, I’m more sure about this than LOTS of other decisions in my 26-year life. I’ll continue to pursue a patient spiritual, intellectual, social and academic lifestyle; and the foundation for this patience is the inherent value of thinking and contemplating (v. “to think long and lovingly” – thanks Dave Evans for that) about the world and everything, physical and non-, in it.

If there is any worry for anyone at all, the source must be the reigning (and thoroughly unwelcome, I say) pragmatism of all generations. Earlier in my life I would have said that cultural pragmatism (the kind that suggests going to college merely for a job, to make money) is a generational thing. Silly baby-boomers. But I’m starting to think it’s not generational. Worry comes in all shapes and sizes and ages and so does the pragmatism that dons the crown deep below the surface of that worry.

So I’m rebelling. I’m going to actually enjoy grad school, and I’m going to enjoy the debt we shall incur and the job scarcity and low salaries that follow from a life of academics. I’m hoping to learn a little more about the Classic, undying value for the intellectual life of mind, heart and soul, and what that means for the details of my life.

It’s gotta be a media thing – ironically enough, since ‘News is dead!” is not an uncommon hidden meaning in headlines these days. In fact, how’s “News is old!” for the next NYT headline? Double irony!!

So, media giants! you soothsayers of cultural fate! Will anything else be dead tomorrow? Pragmatists! you worrisome lot! Is anything else regrettably last season?

More importantly, and for the rest of us, is anything alive today? is anything eternal today?

Stem Cells: A Month Later, An Update

So, to update. More of my thoughts have been published by the CBC via their weekly e-newsletter. Check out part 1 and part 2 via the CBC.

But there’s more already! The NIH (National Institutes of Health – the organization behind the regulation and funding of U.S. federal scientific research) has published draft guidelines for ongoing stem cell research. This is their response to Obama’s commission back in March. These are only draft guidelines, so we’ve yet to see how the final draft will look, but…

Here they are.

I’m happy. All things considered, there appear to be significantly strong guides and boundaries for exactly what sort of stem cells may be used in therapeutic experiments.

Big Idea #1

Most importantly: Embryos created solely for the purpose of being destroyed in research is still out-of-bounds (this is the work of the “Dickey Wicker” if any of you are familiar with the unfortunate name, but not the actual work of the amendment).

Now, there will be backlash on this. There already is. Stanford researchers, Colorado representatives and Hollywood actors all hate this. This is a major disappointment for them. Simply proof that they are not willing to reach across divides and find ethically defensible means of doing therapeutic research with stem cells (adult, cord blood, induced pluripotent stem cells).

And we can expect the complaining to continue. Jennifer Lahl, national director of the CBC, mentioned to me yesterday at lunch that the pool made available by these guidelines still leaves researchers vying and competing for precious raw material to experiment on. That’s why they want to create them on their own (through human cloning – also known as somatic cell nuclear transfer – SCNT).

All the complaining, in the midst of getting a bunch more government money, just heightens my disgust that they want to take life into their own hands.

Big Idea #2
And that’s the not-surprising bad news. There is now more federal funding available for embryo-destructive research, and more lines of stem cells available to destroy. But! the silver lining: In order for researchers to obtain these embryos they need permission based on informed consent from the parents of the embryo.

I remember, these embryos are the leftovers from fertility treatments like in vitro fertilization (IVF). So, think of the 2nd through 8th octuplets. In a normal (whatever that means) IVF treatment, only one embryo is implanted and brought to pregnancy. The other embryos (created just to “make sure” that the customer gets the goods she’s purchasing) are not ever implanted. They just get frozen, and some are thawed for research. Others die in the thawing process.

(This should highlight some serious problems with IVF. It’s not as easy as, “they help infertile couples have babies” – there are very small members of the human community involved here, and their existence demands our respect.)

But now, the parents (the patrons of the fertility treatment) will have a say as to how their non-implanted embryos – their CHILDREN – will spend the rest of their lives.

The positive side of silver lining: Instead of the doctors and researchers and their wallets and budgets deciding the fate of the child, the choice is in the hands of parents.
The negative side of silver lining: The fate of the child – the choice for their life or death – the vocation of their existence! – is in the hands of the parents!

And so now, this should be worrisome to you, dear reader. We’re hardly even talking about the NIH guidelines anymore, but I’ll end with this. The stem cell debate may have more to do with issues of the family than we previously ever thought. Scientific and moral and political and cultural things may be more connected and interdependent than we thought.

But remember, these are just draft guidelines – we’ll see what’s in the final. Will Marty McFly get his way? (Oprah’s Doc says no.)

New Class: Clive Staples

So we’ve just wrapped up a 14-week class I was teaching on Philosophy & Worldview. Great great fun! Challenging for all, I think, but exactly what we (or, I, at the least) need to stay engaged and enjoying life.

So much so, in fact, that I’ve got another class starting up soon, on the lovely life and work of a man most of us (religious and ir-) look up to his unmatched combination of clarity, wit, smarts, creativity, and kind-heartedly brutal honesty (in some of his most powerful moments).

Feel free to track with the course via this new blog:
CLIVE STAPLES: The Life and Work of C.S. Lewis

Science’s STEMpede: A few more thoughts on human embryonic stem cell research

This week and next, the Center for Bioethics and Culture is running a two-part essay of mine that summarizes some of my recent thoughts on the politics, science and ethics (or lack thereof) of stem cell research in America.

Check out Part 1 here, on Utility vs. Moral Reality… sign up for the newsletter too! It’s a weekly dose of thoughtfulness about the most recent in bioethics.

Part 2 will be a closer look at the crossroads of science and ethics… and some considerations of the “false choice” or false dichotomy that we’re presented. In particular, I’m sadly skeptical that we’ve solved any such dichotomy. I’ll be arguing that while no dichotomy need exist, the language of politics (even when it specifically calls out “false choices”) is unfortunately incapable of uniting these two in a meaningful way, and I wonder if it can ever do anything else but triumph one or the other.

Here are some of the writings that I’ve been forming these thoughts from:

Use, Abuse, Personhood

This Is Happening Friends

The Masters are Finally Free!

And So It Begins (Thoughts on the Executive Order and Memo)

All Too Familiar: That Hideous Strength and the Abolition of Man

I’m really thankful for the CBC’s unceasing dedication to being a thoughtful, unitive force among such divisive issues. Thanks Jennifer!