I had another dream, I had another life
My third guest post at Times & Seasons is titled ““That They Might Have Joy”: Conquering Shame Through At-one-ment.” I use Steve McQueen’s 2011 film Shame as a springboard for discussion about shame, vulnerability, and human connection. The post can at times be a little graphic given the subject of the film (sex addiction), but it offers the chance to explore shame, the addictive behaviors that often emerge from it, and its possible role in the Fall.
Check it out.
Over at Worlds Without End, I’ve reviewed BYU biologist Steven Peck’s forthcoming book Evolving Faith: Wanderings of a Mormon Biologist: the latest in the “Living Faith” series from the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. The book offers both technical works in science and philosophy (largely surrounding evolution and ecology) and personal essays. I conclude,
Beyond merely being a book that speaks positively of evolution that was published through “the Lord’s University” (which may come in handy when discussing it with Mormons skeptical of the theory), it also is an example of what Latter-day Saints should be doing: thinking deeply about science, philosophy, and theology. Peck’s essays could potentially rekindle a sense of connection between Latter-day Saint readers and Creation, binding them to all living beings. The book is a reminder of the strangeness of embodiment and consciousness, an invitation to reflect on the millions of years written into our genetic code, and a call to environmental ethics and proper stewardship. Peck has provided a benchmark in LDS dialogue between science and religion. Not only will this book be helpful for lay readers, but it can serve as a model for future academics seeking to tackle similar subjects. I hope to see insights by Peck and others begin to trickle into class discussions and maybe, just maybe, replace the anti-scientific views found in so much Church curriculum. We will be a better church for it.
Check it out and be sure to pre-order Peck’s book.
I used to teach a (poorly attended) finance class the second hour of church while I was what is called a Ward Employment Specialist. One of my main focuses was not just mere budgeting tips, but the underlying emotions of finance. Most finance experts recognize that the reasons people spend too much and save too little is because of the emotional states we are in when we (don’t) spend or (don’t) budget. I was reminded of this while I was reading a recent article in The Wall Street Journal on procrastination:
Putting off a work or school assignment in order to play videogames or water the plants might seem like nothing more serious than poor time-management.
But researchers say chronic procrastination is an emotional strategy for dealing with stress, and it can lead to significant issues in relationships, jobs, finances and health.
…Many chronic procrastinators believe they can’t get started on a task because they want to do it perfectly. Yet studies show chronic procrastination isn’t actually linked to perfectionism, but rather to impulsiveness, which is a tendency to act immediately on urges…Highly impulsive people…shut down when they feel anxiety. Impulsive people are believed to have a harder time dealing with strong emotion and want to do something else to get rid of the bad feeling…
Focusing on time management alone will help procrastinators, but only so much, the scientists say. The emotional regulation component must be addressed as well.
If you struggle with procrastination like I do, you might find the article helpful. Give it a read.
You have probably seen this video already because everyone is sharing it, but I had to share it too. I have always wanted to do exactly this: go out to some giant field and set up a scale model of the Solar System and just wander around and try to drink in the sheer scale of it all. Little did I know that, starting with an earth the size of a marble, you’re going to need 7 miles of empty space to do the setup to scale, and that’s without including Plutos’ orbit. (It only goes out as far as Uranus.)
I’d really love to see this done as a permanent installation somewhere. I want to spend an entire day walking around, watching the planets move, imagining the delicate art of sending tiny craft across immense gulfs of emptiness to deliver rovers (or astronauts!) to alien worlds.
(If you’re receiving this blog post via email, you’ll have to visit the site to watch the YouTube clip. Sorry, they don’t embed in the emails for some reason.)
So this is rad:
Acting on a tip from spelunkers two years ago, scientists in South Africa discovered what the cavers had only dimly glimpsed through a crack in a limestone wall deep in the Rising Star Cave: lots and lots of old bones.
The remains covered the earthen floor beyond the narrow opening. This was, the scientists concluded, a large, dark chamber for the dead of a previously unidentified species of the early human lineage — Homo naledi.
The new hominin species was announced…by an international team of more than 60 scientists led by Lee R. Berger, an American paleoanthropologist who is a professor of human evolution studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. The species name, H. naledi, refers to the cave where the bones lay undisturbed for so long; “naledi” means “star” in the local Sesotho language.
Exciting stuff.
This piece is cross-posted at Junior Ganymede.
For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my firstborn in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility.[ref]2 Nephi 2:11[/ref]
As I was compiling my notes from my read-through of Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate
Donald Symons has argued that we have genetic conflicts to thank for the fact that we have feelings toward other people at all. Consciousness is a manifestation of the neural computations necessary to figure out how to get the rare and unpredictable things we need. We feel hunger, savor food, and have a pallet for countless fascinating tastes because food was hard to get during most of our evolutionary history. We don’t normally feel longing, delight, or fascination regarding oxygen, even though it is crucial for survival, because it was never hard to obtain. We just breathe.
The same may be true of conflicts over kin, mates, and friends. I mentioned that if a couple were guaranteed to be faithful, to favor each other over there kin, and to die at the same time, their genetic interest would be identical, wrapped up in their common children. One can even imagine a species in which every couple was marooned on an island for life and their offspring dispersed at maturity, never to return. Since the genetic interests of the two mates are identical, one might at first think that evolution would endow them with a blissful perfection of sexual, romantic, and companionate love.
But Symons argues, nothing of the sort would happen. The relationship between the mates would evolve to be like the relationship among the cells of a single body, whose genetic interests are also identical. Heart cells and lung cells don’t have to fall in love to get along in perfect harmony. Likewise, the couples in the species would have sex only for the purpose of procreation (why waste energy?), and sex would bring no more pleasure than the rest of reproductive physiology such as the release of hormones or the formation of the gametes:
There would be no falling in love, because there would be no alternative mates to choose among, and falling in love would be a huge waste. You would literally love your mate as yourself, but that’s the point: you don’t really love yourself, except metaphorically; you are yourself. The two of you would be as far as evolution is concerned, one flesh, and your relationship would be governed by mindless physiology… You might feel pain if you observed your mate cut herself, but all the feelings we have about our mates that make relationship so wonderful when it is working well (and so painful when it is not) would never evolve. Even if a species had them when they took up this way of life, they would be selected out as surely as the eyes of a cave-dwelling fish are selected out, because they would be all cost and no benefit.
The same is true for emotions towards family and friends: the richness and intensity of the feelings in our minds are proof of the preciousness and fragility of those bonds in life. In short, without the possibility of suffering, what we would have is not harmonious bliss, but rather, no consciousness at all.
The idea that our capacity to experience love is tied to the imperfections in our relationships, to their fragility and capacity to fail, is profound.
There’s a thought-provoking article in the recent issue of Nautilus on futurism’s blindspot: culture. The author argues that our “innovation-obsessed present” conditions us
to overstate the impact of technology not only in the future, but also the present. We tend to imagine we are living in a world that could scarcely have been imagined a few decades ago. It is not uncommon to read assertions like: “Someone would have been unable at the beginning of the 20th century to even dream of what transportation would look like a half a century later.” And yet zeppelins were flying in 1900; a year before, in New York City, the first pedestrian had already been killed by an automobile. Was the notion of air travel, or the thought that the car was going to change life on the street, really so beyond envisioning—or is it merely the chauvinism of the present, peering with faint condescension at our hopelessly primitive predecessors?
…We expect more change than actually happens in the future because we imagine our lives have changed more than they actually have.
I think this point about technology is debatable. However, the main thesis is that “Ideas, not technology, have driven the biggest historical changes. When technology changes people, it is often not in the ways one might expect:
…Why is cultural change so hard to predict? For one, we have long tended to forget that itdoes change. Status quo bias reigns. “Until recently, culture explained why things stayed the same, not why they changed,” notes the sociologist Kieran Healy. “Understood as a monolithic block of passively internalized norms transmitted by socialization and canonized by tradition, culture was normally seen as inhibiting individuals.”
In other words, “when it comes to culture we tend to believe not that the future will be very different than the present day, but that it will be roughly the same. Try to imagine yourself at some future date. Where do you imagine you will be living? What will you be wearing? What music will you love?”
Predicting the behaviors and ideas of the future are far more difficult than predicting the technology.
If you haven’t heard of The Martian
Epic, am I right?[ref]You know I’m right.[/ref]
An article from MoviePilot.com goes even farther, however, and argues that “The Martian Heralds A New Era Of Realistic SciFi.” Here are some thoughts about this story, about sci-fi, and about humanity.
First, the book was great, but even as I was reading it I was pretty sure it would make an even better movie. It is really well-suited for visuals and would retain all of its punch even when shortened and simplified for screen. So, yay.
Second, I do hope that it heralds the dawn of some more realistic sci-fi. Don’t get me wrong: alien invasion stories are fun and FTL and artificial gravity[ref]The two most essential non-existent technologies used in most sci-fi.[/ref] are fine and dandy as plot devices go, but at a certain point I feel that scientific pseudobabble[ref]Looking at you, Star Trek[/ref] can kind of lead to all-around laziness. I mean, universal translators? They don’t even make sense conceptually. Sure, it may have been necessary for Star Trek, but it’s all the imitators who take the same liberties that drive me nuts. It’s not hard to see a trend from Star Trek to the absolute nadir of big-budget science fiction film (and the worst movie I have personally seen in my life): Wing Commander.
Finally, I also hope that realistic and popular sci-fi might lead to some renewed interest in space exploration. Because as it stands today, humanity kind of sucks on this front. No human being has been beyond low earth orbit in my lifetime. That’s really, really frustrating and should be a species-wide source of shame and humiliation. It’s not even close, by the way. That last time we (meaning: anybody) sent an astronaut outside of low earth orbit was Apollo 17. That’s 1972, people. Nineteen seventy-two. We’rec coming up on a half century since venturing outside of our atmosphere.[ref]OK, rovers are pretty cool. But not the same thing.[/ref]
You really need to see a picture to understand just how pathetic this is, so here you go:
That tiny smidgen of blue hugging the surface of the earth? That’s LEO. The green stuff is medium earth orbit. The red is high earth orbit. The moon–which, remember, we’ve been too once or twice–is way, way out beyond that. That’s how far we were able to go 50 years ago. And that’s how far we haven’t gone in my lifetime. And we call ourselves explorers? Adventurers? It’s a disgrace.
Oh, and while I’m venting, I may as well not hold back on this either. From the MoviePilot post:
There’s something simply satisfying about a survivor tale, and the idea of being marooned has intrigued writers for centuries. The Martian takes this concept and runs with it, propelling the age old tale to a new era by placing it in an interstellar setting. And with NASA scientists advising the screenplay, could The Martian help put the realism back into sci fi? [emphasis added]
The word “interstellar” has a meaning. It means “between stars.” Does Mars orbit a different star? No, it does not. So The Martian is interplanetary, not interstellar. In any other article I would have just rolled my eyes, but come on! The thesis of this article was realistic sci-fi and the very next sentence talks about “NASA scientists advising the screenplay,” but you could even get the word “interstellar” right?
OK, I’m going to go see if there are any kids on my lawn I can shake my cane at.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has an engrossing outline of a fairly new study on what are known as microaggressions. The study examines our transition into a moral culture of victimhood. The 18th and 19th centuries saw a shift from cultures of honor to cultures of dignity. Honor-based cultures tend to lack strong legal authority and institutions, thus socializing individuals to rely on their own bravery and capabilities to avenge insults and consequently earn honorable reputations. Dignity-based cultures see the worth of individuals as inherent rather than bestowed by public opinion. This moral paradigm is reinforced by the reliance on third parties (i.e., police or courts) for egregious offenses, though frivolous use of authority is often condemned and a general “thick-skinned” approach to insult is the standard. This emerging culture of victimhood combines the sensitivity to insult of honor-based cultures with the reliance on third parties from dignity-based cultures. Sympathy is preferred to honor and victimization is emphasized rather than inner strength and worth. The status of the “virtuous victim” has risen to the point of creating competition for the coveted title of most oppressed. This leads to the reporting (and fabrication) of slight offenses toward marginalized groups (i.e., microaggressions). Yet, this publicizing of microaggressions often takes place in already highly egalitarian, diverse, and affluent pockets of society with strong administrative bodies (such as university campuses). As progress is made toward increased equality and diversity, the standard for offense paradoxically drops. In other words, the richest, most equal, most diverse societies in the world will make the loudest denunciations for the smallest possible offense (whether actual or not).
It’s an absolutely fascinating read and an incredible insight into our current culture.
“Crap” may be a bit strong, but The New York Times nonetheless has an important–if not disturbing–article on a new analysis called the Reproducibility Project, which attempts to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals. The conclusions were recently published in Science. Tillburg University’s Jelte Wicherts said, “I think we knew or suspected that the literature had problems, but to see it so clearly, on such a large scale — it’s unprecedented.”
The project began in 2011, when a University of Virginia psychologist decided to find out whether suspect science was a widespread problem. He and his team recruited more than 250 researchers, identified the 100 studies published in 2008, and rigorously redid the experiments in close collaboration with the original authors.
…Dr. John Ioannidis, a director of Stanford University’s Meta-Research Innovation Center, who once estimated that about half of published results across medicine were inflated or wrong, noted the proportion in psychology was even larger than he had thought. He said the problem could be even worse in other fields, including cell biology, economics, neuroscience, clinical medicine, and animal research.
The report appears at a time when the number of retractions of published papers is rising sharply in a wide variety of disciplines. Scientists have pointed to a hypercompetitive culture across science that favors novel, sexy results and provides little incentive for researchers to replicate the findings of others, or for journals to publish studies that fail to find a splashy result.
This is a much-needed study.
