HOW LOW WE HAVE FALLEN

Has it really come to this?  One of the two major political parties has now anointed, as its leading candidate for its nomination for the Presidency of the United States, a failed politician obsessed by a troubled teenage boy's sexual fixations on homosexuality, bestiality, and masturbation.  Surely this will be the end of the Republican Party as an even notionally serious national political organization.  The nation's Catholic Bishops, a shameful cabal of child molesters and enablers of child molestation, have found in Rick Santorum the perfect embodiment of their ideal altar boy.  How I long for the good old days, when evangelical Protestants had the good sense to view the Catholic Church as a sinister agent bent upon destroying America's hard-won independence from foreign entanglements.  Perhaps I have lived too long.

AN IDLE THOUGHT

While I was making dinner, Susie put on a CD of Pete Seegar songs.  I was struck once again by the oft-remarked fact that for half a century, the left has had all the good songs.  That cannot be irrelevant.

THE TWO CULTURES

C. P. Snow [1905-1980] was a British physicist and novelist [his best known work of fiction is The Masters, anatomizing an English Senior Common Room], who created a considerable stir in 1959 when he delivered a public lecture on "The Two Cultures," lamenting both the bifurcation of the English educational system into a scientific track and a Humanities track and the over-valuation of the Humanities track, with the consequent abysmal ignorance of anything scientific among those who had chosen to study "Greats," which is to say Latin and Greek and their progeny.  Here is a passage from Snow's lecture that gives the flavor of his critique:

"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: 'Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?'
"I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, 'Can you read?' – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had."
Snow's target was the British secondary and tertiary educational system, which divided boys and girls into one or another of two totally independent tracks when they were still at what we would call high school level.  Thereafter, no one in one of the tracks was called on, at any subsequent stage of the educational process, to become acquainted with any of the materials studied in the other track.  The American educational system is of course markedly different.  In high school, students are required to take courses distributed across the intellectual spectrum, and even at the tertiary level, almost all institutions have some form of "General Education" or "Distribution" requirement that compels students to encounter, however rudimentarily, ideas, texts, and facts outside of the areas of their concentration.
Now, as I have several times observed on this blog, only 30% or so of American adults twenty-five and older have completed a Bachelor's Degree or its equivalent, and only slightly more than 50% have had any post-secondary formal education at all [including those who have taken non-academic courses at Community Colleges.]  Since the technical subjects, referred to in educational jargon as STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics], are chosen by a minority of high school and college students, most citizens even in this country are almost completely ignorant of even the most dramatic and exciting developments in the forefronts of science.
At the end of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth century, the excitement in the STEM world was mostly in Physics, both theoretical and experimental.  As I have related in my biography, when in 1954, as a twenty year old traveling graduate student, I had tea with the then eighty-two year old Bertrand Russell, Russell remarked that if he had it to do all over again, he would have gone into Physics rather than Philosophy.  I never doubted, nor do I think did he, that had he made that choice, he would have won the Nobel Prize for Physics, rather than for Literature.

But just months before I sipped my tea with Russell, James Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin deciphered the structure of DNA, and the balance tilted decisively away from Physics toward Biology.  The second half of the twentieth century [and what we have so far had of the twenty-first] has belonged to the mind-bending discoveries of biochemical genetics, molecular biology, and their kin.  The depth, power, and specificity of our knowledge of what goes on at the atomic level in living organisms has advanced so rapidly that books written on the frontiers of those disciplines are out of date in half a decade.

My own knowledge of Biology, which at one point, in my early teens, was pretty up to date, came to an abrupt end when I was graduated from high school and departed for college.  Thereafter, I had nothing to fall back on but the High School Biology text co-authored by my father, which unfortunately got wrong the one factoid that stuck in my brain.  [The book said that the human cell has twenty-four pairs of chromosomes, but the correct figure is twenty-three.  Early staining techniques, which were rather crude, created the illusion under the microscope of a twenty-fourth pair, and it was only with more sophisticated techniques, which came on line after I stopped studying the subject, that the error was corrected.]

However, all has not been lost, for my big sister, Barbara, fulfilled my father's thwarted dreams by earning, at Harvard, the doctorate in Biology that he never succeeded in acquiring.  And although Barbara chose a career path that took her first into math education and then to the World Bank, she has, in retirement, returned to Biology, and now teaches a never-ending series of extremely sophisticated courses on molecular biology and evolutionary genetics in the Osher Life Long Learning Institute at American University in Washington, D.C.  With great generosity and patience, she has shared with me some of what she has learned, and periodically recommends a book that summarizes some of the exciting and astonishing discoveries of contemporary Biology.

And so, at long last, I come to the real purpose of this post, which is to acquaint you with one of the books by the British scientist Nick Lane, in which, with brilliance, precision, and great clarity, he synthesizes and expounds the cutting-edge work being done by laboratory scientists in the fields of evolutionary genetics and molecular biology.  Lane's books are not easy reading, but they are comprehensible by lay readers like myself.  Let me tell you briefly about one of his books that I have read, a 2009 work entitled Life Ascending:  The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution.

The organizing conceit of the book, as the title suggests, is that evolution has fashioned a number of "inventions."  The ten chapters are entitled "The Origin of Life, DNA, Photosynthesis, The Complex Cell, Sex, Movement, Sight, Hot Blood, Consciousness, and Death."  In each chapter, Lane introduces the reader to the deepest level of precise laboratory science, and the associated theoretical interpretation of the experimental results, often synthesizing results from widely separated fields in a truly original and creative fashion.  [His books are no mere pastiches of reportage!]

To give you some feel for this work, I am going to quote a lengthy passage that stunned me, from a chapter entitled "Movement."   It is going to take me a while to type this into my computer, so I will withhold comment until I get the entire long passage on the page:

"Muscle contraction depends on the properties of two molecules, actin and myosin.  Both are composed of repeating protein units to form long filaments (polymers).  The thick filaments are composed of myosin, already named by the Victorians;  the thin filaments, of actin.  These two filaments, thick and thin, lie in bundles side-by-side, linked by tiny perpendicular cross-bridges (first visualised by Huxley in the 1950s using electron microscopy).  These bridges are not rigid and motionless, but swing, and with each swing they propel the actin filaments along a little, as if the crew of a longboat sweeping their craft through the water.  And indeed there is more than an element of the Viking longboat about it, for the oar strokes are unruly, unwilling to conform to a single command.  Electron microscopy shows that, of the many thousands of cross-bridges, fewer than half ever pull in unison;  the majority are always caught with their oars in disarray.  Yet calculations prove that these tiny shifts, even working in disharmony, are together strong enough to account for the overall force of muscular contraction.

"All these swinging cross-bridges protrude from the thick filament -- they are part of the myosin subunits.  On a molecular scale, myosin is huge, eight times larger than the average protein like haemoglobin.  In overall shape, a myosin unit is sperm-like;  two sperm, in fact, with their heads knocking together and their tails entwined in a frozen embrace.  The tails interleave with the tails of adjacent myosin molecules in a staggered array, together making up the heavy filament like the threads of a rope.  The heads protrude from this rope in succession, and it is these that form the winging cross-bridges that interact with the actin filament.

"Here's how the swinging bridges work.  The swing-bridge first binds to the actin filament, and once attached, then binds ATP.  [adenosine triphosphate.  ed.]  The ATP provides the energy needed to power the whole process.  As soon as ATP binds, the swing-bridge detaches from the thin filament.  The liberated bridge swings through an angle of about 70 degrees (via a flexible 'neck' region) before binding to the actin filament again.  As it does so, the used fragments of ATP are released, and the cross-bridge springs back to its initial conformation, levering the whole thin filament along in its wake.  The cycle -- release, swing, bind, drag -- is equivalent to a rowing stroke, each time moving the thin filament along by a few millionths of a millimetre.  ATP is critical.  Without it, the head can't release from actin, and can't swing;  the result is rigor, as in rigor mortis, when muscles stiffen after death for lack of ATP."

If you have allowed your eye to slide over this passage, waiting for my commentary to recommence, I want you to stop, go back, and read the passage carefully.  The entire point of this blog post is contained in that passage.  Lane is here describing, at the molecular, level, what happens when a muscle contracts.  Each cycle, as he describes it, contracts the muscle another few millionths of a millimeter!  So, in order for a muscle to contract by one inch [let us say, the amount required by a pianist to lift a finger off as key, preparing to strike another key], this process must be repeated roughly ten million times!

I want you to reflect, as I have, on the uncounted thousands of hours of laboratory research by hundreds of scientists that were required in order for Nick Lane to write that three paragraph long passage.  I put it to you:  there is simply nothing in the fantasies of religion or the angry protestations of ideology that can compare with the sheer wonder of this insight into the most elementary human physical process, the contraction of a muscle.

And this is but one passage, in one chapter, from one of the books Lane has written.  I will feel that the effort of writing this post was merited, if even a handful of you actually hunt up one of Lane's books and devote some hours to reading it.

WHERE IS VOLTAIRE WHEN YOU NEED HIM?

The European Enlightenment was a fresh wind that blew the incense from the altar and the Sacristy and curdled the chrism that anointed the kings.  What a relief it must have been finally to put paid to a millennium of superstition masquerading as sanctimony and royal tyranny cloaking itself in the absurdity of divine right.  Oh, I understand why Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, legitimately bitter at the descent of Weimar into the hell of Nazism, penned their bilious tract.  But the delusions and deceptions of false reason do not demean true rational clarity, autonomy, and freedom of the mind, any more than the Cardiff Giant robbed evolution of its undeniable truth.  "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ and to be young was very heaven."

My mind has turned to the Enlightenment as I have watched with dismay, but not surprise, the outcry at the threatened promulgation of a Federal rule that those offering health insurance to their employees, even if they be Catholic universities or hospitals, must include in that coverage birth control.  Never mind that 98% of Catholic women use birth control.  Never mind that a majority of Catholics approve of the proposed regulation.  Put to one side the fact that the Church, which proclaims birth control a mortal sin, has focused its outrage on the absence of a co-pay!  Let us not even think of the fact that those protesting most loudly -- the Catholic bishops -- are desperate to have America forget their two generation long enabling of child abuse by their ordained priests.  As one waggish tweet suggested, "If altar boys could get pregnant, the Catholic Church would be in favor of birth control."

Predictably, leading the drum-beating has been that aging altar boy, Rick Santorum, whose obsession with and simultaneous aversion to sex is well-documented.  What caught my attention was his most recent pronouncement.  Accusing Obama of being anti-religion, he told his audience that this was the work of the French Revolution.  "When you marginalize faith in America, when you remove the pillar of God-given rights then what's left is the French Revolution... What's left in France became the guillotine."

It is difficult to engage in an interesting and serious manner with someone who is both a bigot and an idiot.  That Santorum genuinely longs for a theocracy is obvious.  That he knows nothing about the French Revolution is also obvious.  Herewith some facts:  the guillotine was invented as a kinder, gentler, quicker way to execute people.  It was instantaneous and painless, unlike being broken on the wheel, torn apart by four horses, or even being hanged.  But never mind.  What is more, the guillotine, in the period known as the Terror, was used far more often to execute nascent capitalists seeking to benefit from the shortage of bread than to kill the nobility [Charles Dickens to the contrary notwithstanding.]  Those who wish to delve more deeply into this fascinating topic can consult a fine old monograph by Donald Greer entitled The Incidence of the Terror in the French Revolution.

But I digress.  The subject of this brief post is my nostalgia for the Enlightenment.  I am old enough to recall a time when it seemed that religion had finally loosed its vampire grip on the throat of civilization, when we could confidently look forward the churches in America, like those in France, being used more often for free concerts by aspiring baroque ensembles than for the mind-killing, soul-numbing rituals of fundamentalist religiosity.

Alas, it has not been so.  Religious fanaticism, In American but not on the Continent, has risen from the ashes again to threaten reason, decency, honor, and morality.  Are we at the dawn of a modern French Revolution?  A blessing devoutly to be wished for.

A JAUNDICED VIEW

Students of Philosophy are not required to know very much, aside from the content of a rather select canon of great texts.  Some logic, perhaps, and a bit of Classical Athenian history [to set the stage for the great early quadrivium of Platonic Dialogues:  The Crito, Euthyphro, Apology, and Phaedo.]  But those of us who persevered and read the classic texts of what we called "Modern Philosophy" -- which is to say, the works of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant -- did actually pick up a few bits and tatters of information along the way, one of the most memorable of which was that to people afflicted with jaundice, the world looks yellowish.  This example of the subjectivity of perception was repeated so often in the Philosophy I read as a boy that by the time I encountered it in writings of modern sense-datum epistemologists like H. H. Price, I simply nodded and moved on.

One day, in an adult education class I was teaching, attended by men and women who had actually done something with their lives, I invoked this example and was brought up short by a "student" in the class who was a physician.  "That is not true," he said.  Now, as you can imagine, this is not a statement that a Philosophy Professor hears very often.  "I don't agree" -- one hopes and prays for that, as it can signal the beginning of a lively and useful debate.  But "That is not true"?  What on earth could he mean.

Well, it seems that people who have jaundice do not see the world tinted yellow.  Things do not look yellow to them.  They look yellow to things!  To be more precise, yellow pigment is deposited in the whites of their eyes [among other less obvious places], with the result that their eyes take on a yellow cast.  Four hundred years of great Philosophers had got it wrong, very probably just repeating what a prior thinker had said.  So much for the experimental method.

These odd thoughts have been prompted by the political events of the last twenty-four hours.  Suddenly, after swamping Gingrich with a multi-million dollar negative ad buy, Mitt Romney has been in turn humiliated hy a bigot in a Leave it to Beaver sweater.  Rick Santorum, whose bizarre sexual perversions lead him to think of polygymy and "man on dog" whenever he encounters the phenomenon of same-sex love, has emerged from the back of the pack as the current darling of the anyone-but-Mitt evangelical crowd.  One more day like yesterday, and Mitt is going to look like yesterday's fad.

I view all of this [yes, I am connecting it up] with a jaundiced eye.  I find myself no longer able to take a simple, boyish pleasure in the bizarrerie of the Republican field.  Too much is at stake to allow any of these appalling people to come anywhere close to the Oval Office.

The Republican aspirants are looking more and more like a sickening, cowardly, revulsion-inspiring yellow.  I think I shall retreat into H. H. Price's Hume's Construction of the External World to regain my composure, even of he did think that jaundice makes things look yellow.

SUPERBOWL SUNDAY

Yesterday evening, when dinner was over, I climbed into bed with a little plastic tub of Trader Joe's chocolate covered peanuts to watch the Super Bowl [my illness has had the disconcerting side effect of making me lose weight, so after a lifetime fighting the battle of the waistline, I am now allowing myself previously forbidden indulgences.]  Susie went into the living room and turned on that classic date movie, Sleepless in Seattle, whose lines I know as well as those of its inspiration, An Affair to Remember.

I was rooting for the Patriots, a holdover from a lifetime lived mostly in Massachusetts.  After a series of bonehead plays one would expect from a poorly coached high school team [twelve men on the field?], the Patriots scored a touchdown with eight seconds left in the half, to take a 10-9 lead.  There was just enough time for me to switch to the movie and watch Sam, Jonah, Annie, and Howard the Bear finally connect on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building.  I turned off the TV and went to sleep.

When I got up in the middle of the night, as I do every night, I logged on and discovered that the Giants had beaten the Patriots 21-17.  I immediately put the game out of my mind and went back to sleep.

I have a theory as to why we invest so much emotion in sports teams, or, as in the case of Tiger Woods or the Williams sisters, individual sports stars.  We do it because what happens to them really does not matter.  We live in a perfectly awful world, in which exploitation, oppression, war, torture, and religious fanaticism make the lives of billions of men, women, and children miserable.  As I write these words, I am waiting to see whether Israel will launch a preemptive attack on Iran, doing its level best to drag America into yet another Middle Eastern war.  The share of the Gross National Product going to workers has hit its lowest point since records have been kept.  After two and a half centuries of slavery and a century of Jim Crow, White America has used the prison system and drug laws to drive African-American men into a third kind of second class status.  Everything I have spent my life believing in and fighting for is under assault or already suffering defeat, and there is virtually nothing I can do about that fact.

But sports offers me a chance to invest disproportionate emotion in the outcome of a game, with momentary exultation if my team wins, and no real disappointment if they lose.  So long as Tiger Woods dominated the professional golf world, I was a devoted TV viewer of PGA tournaments [even though, on the two occasions in my life when I actually played a little golf, I hated the game.]  As soon as he crashed and burned, never, apparently, to recover, I simply withdrew my emotions from golf and stopped watching.  When Venus and Serena were dominating Wimbledon and Forest Hills, I sat glued to the set.  When they began to age and decline, I turned off.

Sports fandom is soothing in its utter unimportance.  In these terrible times, we need some way to get through the day.

LAST WRITES

As one might expect, the medical nightmare I have been living through for the past six weeks has prompted in me some funereal thoughts about what meaning, if any, my life has had.  A Miami University law professor referred to me several days ago as a "grand old man," which gave me pause.  I have spent most of my life thinking of myself as a rambunctious young whippersnapper.  I fear that ship has sailed.

The deepest meaning of my life is to be found in my sons, Patrick and Tobias, and Patrick's son and daughter, Samuel [six] and Athena [three and a half].  As my father lay dying in a New York hospital, I said to him, "You have been a better father to me than your father was to you.  No man can be asked to do more.  I will try to be a better father to my sons than you were to me.  I love you."  I hope Patrick and Tobias can say the same to me when my time comes.

My life has been given unity and shape by my love for Susie, and her love for me.  She saved me by agreeing to rejoin me in mid-life.  I hope we will have many more years to enjoy the delights of Paris.

And then there are all those books.  Good lord, what a great fuss I have made over them as each one has dropped from my sleeve onto the page.  Most have already been forgotten, and the rest soon will be, with perhaps one exception.  In 1964, as I was about to begin a full-scale crushingly expensive psychoanalysis [$25 an hour, but then, my salary as a senior Columbia professor was only $11,000 a year], Arthur Danto offered me a $500 advance to write an eighty page essay on Political Philosophy for an ill-conceived Harper & Row publishing venture.  Twelve months later, I wrote the essay between summer school classes at Columbia, and five years later still it finally appeared as a slender volume, with a title stolen from Mark Twain's lovely literary essay, "In Defense of Harriet Shelly."

In Defense of Anarchism has taken on a life of its own, and will, I imagine, outlive me.  It is pleasant to imagine that some graduate student, decades or even generations from now, will become curious about whether the author of that tract ever wrote anything else, and will find his or her way to one of the books of which I am fonder.

But despite all that scribbling, I have never thought of myself as a writer.  Rather, if asked what I "do," I would unhesitatingly say "I am a teacher."  I remember so many of the thousands of young men and women who passed through my classes during my fifty-three year career as a university teacher.  Indeed, I can recall them more clearly than some of the books I have written!  The great radical poet, novelist, philosopher, social critic, educational theorist, and city planner Paul Goodman wrote movingly and insightfully about the erotic component of true teaching, and I believe that he was right.  I have loved my students like surrogate children, even when they have not reciprocated the affection.  I always revealed a good deal about myself in my classes, and was repeatedly puzzled, but not dissuaded, by student evaluations that said "talks too much about his family."

Genesis 3:19 has it about right:  "for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."  It is enough if I live for a brief moment in the memories of my sons and my grandchildren and my students.