Random Reading

From an interview with James Lovelock:

Humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting on our lives over the coming decades. This is the stark conclusion of James Lovelock, the globally respected environmental thinker and independent scientist who developed the Gaia theory.

It follows a tumultuous few months in which public opinion on efforts to tackle climate change has been undermined by events such as the climate scientists' emails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit.

"I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change," said Lovelock in his first in-depth interview
since the theft of the UEA emails last November. "The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful."

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is "modern democracy", he added. "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

Lovelock, 90, believes the world's best hope is to invest in adaptation measures, such as building sea defences around the cities that are most vulnerable to sea-level rises. He thinks only a catastrophic event would now persuade humanity to take the threat of climate change seriously enough....

much more here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock

But, say we could get humanity to take this seriously, and say cutting emissions is a necessary component of the solution, but not sufficient. Should we then Hack the Planet?


New topic:
From an article called Renouncing Humanity:

The attractivness of communism was rooted primarily in the response to World War I. The revolutionary slogans exhorting people to rise against governments that had unleashed a war as senseless as it was bloody; the slogans proclaiming a coalition of the world of labour against military regimes, bourgeoisie and landowners; the slogans declaring “war on war” and calling for “all land to the peasants” were certainly attractive. Their attractiveness was intensified by a rhetoric promising to open the door to a better world for the poor and the dispossessed, for the downtrodden and humiliated. The chaos and injustice of the capitalist market was to be replaced by a planned economy and a just division of the goods produced.

It was in the name of these slogans that idealist communists were willing to justify terror (as long as it was red), lies (to ensure that the revolutionaries did not lose hope), wickedness (provided it was aimed at the counter-revolutionaries). One might say that communism appealed to what is best in human beings in order to extract what is worst in all of us.

...Perhaps the greatest illusion that we, people of the democratic opposition, had laboured under was our conviction that we lived in societies comprising honest and noble people who had simply been silenced. We believed we were the voice of those who had been silenced and that is why our rebellion was fundamentally a moral one. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn told us “not to live the lie”. Leszek Kołakowski asked us to "live with dignity”. John Paul II exhorted us: “Don’t be afraid!” and he promised that “truth would set us free”. Václav Havel believed in the “power of the powerless”.

For us, dissidents, this ethical motivation strengthened our morale but it also turned us into elitists. Being a dissident required being in open conflict with the dictatorship and everything it entailed: oppression, loss of opportunities, exclusion and often imprisonment. Yet our conviction that our voice was the voice of the enslaved nation was only part of the truth. In defending the historical truth and religious and civil liberties we articulated the collective consciousness. Yet our call for active resistence and for breaking the barriers of fear and apathy remained unheard. The ethical perfectionism of a Sakharov, a Havel or a Kuroń simply could not be shared by everyone, certainly not by the majority. The majority stayed silent and we assumed this was out of fear.

... And another thing: democracy equals pluralism: it implies that we agree to disagree; that we are all different, with varying interests and outlooks. But what we keep hearing and dreaming of is the need for national unity, as if it were not obvious that such unity – necessary in time of war – is impossible in normal times.

That is why we are told that these are not normal times, that there is an enemy out there to get us... In this moment of danger – we keep hearing – parliamentary democracy amounts to idle talk and manipulation; ... And that is why – we are told – we need a strong government, which can deploy special measures to establish national unity and eliminate corruption

Outrageous conclusions are based on reasonable assumptions. The prospect of a world dominated by oligarchs who have corrupted the state is obviously horrendous. However, the prospect of a world dominated by a state apparatus that has eliminated democratic institutions and the rule of law and destroyed the market is equally horrific. Until recently we lived in a world that was a mix of Brezhnev and Mussolini; nowadays we are faced with the sinister spectre of a world that is a mix of Putin with Berlusconi, of secret services with big money gained by corrupt means.

In the 1920s and 1930s democracy failed to protect the rule of law and the result was fascism and communism. The question that bothers me today is: can we muster enough courage and imagination in order effectively to protect the republic and the open society that we failed to protect from fascism?

Sadly, whether its politics, economics or the environment, people are sheep.

And, because of a few insights in the following, we're not likely to get the kind of leadership --- scientifically, philosophically, politically --- we need to make things better.

On Nietzsche, in The Soul of the Scientist of Man,

“Let us confess,” says Nietzsche, “how utterly our modern world lacks the whole type of a Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and whatever other names these royal and magnificent hermits of the spirit had; and how it is with considerable justification that, confronted with such representatives of philosophy as are today, thanks to fashion, as much at the top of the heap as they are in reality on the bottom ... a solid man of science is permitted to feel that he is of a better type and descent.”

If a person possessing a mind on par with Heraclitus and Plato ever happened to come along, Nietzsche feared that he might find contemporary philosophy so unattractive and the study of scientific minutiae so time-consuming that he would never realize his philosophic potential. “The height and width of the tower of science has grown to be enormous,” he writes, “and with this comes the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a ‛specialist’ — so he never attains his proper level, the height for a comprehensive look.”

On the basis of his own scholarly experience, Nietzsche concludes that great philosophic minds risk losing the capacity to say something meaningful about the world when they devote their lives to obscure matters that are of little interest to the rest of humanity. By encouraging students to spend decades of their lives in narrow fields of study, scientific scholars impair the human capacity for comprehensive thinking and deprive the world of the kinds of people who are most likely to be able to make meaningful sense of it.

Simon Johnson is taking the economic problems in Greece seriously.

A.C. Grayling reviews book called Conceiving God

Speaking of which, I'm looking forward to reading Pullman's new book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ

Christ is indeed that saddest figure in the Gospels, the conscientious, quiet-living brother of the Prodigal Son, who is forgotten and thrust aside in the excitement when the bedraggled young man comes back to a festive welcome from his doting father. In Pullman's apocrypha, this Gospel parable becomes the reality of family life for Joseph and Mary. Christ takes to following Jesus secretly, listening to his words, writing them down and tidying them up when their message is troubling or a challenge to common sense: yet he cannot bring himself wholly to supersede the message he hears, and traces remain of the wildness of the original. Christ's record of Jesus's teaching becomes a strange mixture with a new agenda: as the angel-stranger says to Christ, Jesus 'is the history, and you are the truth'. It is Christ who invents the Church, an invention that is far from Jesus's intentions (his ultimate goal is not nearly so clear). Humiliated by his own failure to love a repulsive beggar unconditionally, Christ decides that the only way that the world's ills can be healed is for his brother to suffer publicly for the people. Whether Christ is capable of seeing that a crucifixion will be the outcome of his betrayal is irrelevant to the treachery. I will not spoil the ending, but suffice it to say that the story is intended to point to Christianity as it exists today, in all its beauty, poetry, and artistic creativity, as well as the side of Christian history that is disfigured by intolerance, arrogance, stupidity and cruelty.

Oh well, civilizations come and civilizations go, such as that in Angkor.

But at least the universe is safe. Or is it? Who knows?!
Our universe at home within a larger universe? So suggests wormhole research