The Melting Pot

Somewhere along the line a once meaningful metaphor for America has gone the way of all melting pots, it seems, replaced by what? Smorgasbord? We don’t call it that, as yet, but what else does multiculturalism mean when translated into the language of food? The melting pot, of course, was never a very perfect image. It didn’t melt black slaves into whites, not even after slavery ended. Resistant ingredients produced our China Towns—as well as helping build our railroads. The Irish seemed also, at first, resistant to cooking. There were those signs. Don’t try to jump into the melting pot, feller. Not wanted here. But it helped to speak English and to be white. The first signs that we were transiting—thus that the melting pot had holes—was the use of hyphenated-American expressions. Race was there all along, euphemized into “ethnicity.”

What led to the above, however, wasn’t thinking about the melting pot but what was under it: the fire. While wealth was expanding, the pot still melted, even as it leaked and, at its bottom, kept accumulating residues that just would not, absolutely Would. Not. melt. What seemed in the past, indeed quite effectively still when I came to this land (1951), to cause the integration of immigrants was a combination of cultural and physical similarity and ample wealth. Those were the causes rather than the lofty ideas enshrined in the Declaration or the Constitution. Now the fire is sputtering—and hence the pot is cooling. The contents are drying up. And cracks are forming on the surface. I look at politics over the last two decades or so—and at ethnic demographics—and wonder... Is the white population beginning to feel hemmed in by growing ethnic minorities on all sides? Is that what all the passion is about? President Obama only won 43 percent of the white vote in 2008, for instance (link). Isn’t there enough fire for everybody? Should we therefore make the pot smaller—so that all the fat can rise to the top?

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The sign shown may be purchased from the Irish Brigade Store for $19.95 (link).

Sobered Up

The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastens to his place where he arose.
     [Ecclesiastes 1:5]

For most people in our circle, yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act caused elation combined with a certain chagrin—chagrin present because most of us don’t really like the confusing stitch-work of that act, a mosaic of compromises. Nevertheless, the idea of a national health care plan, reaching all citizens, appears highly desirable and just. I for one expected the Court to kill it. Hence yesterday turned into a kind of dizzy, half-staggering dance of celebration. Today sobriety returns.

I woke up this morning with an observation that has kept recurring ever since I had my first courses in American history in high school. It is that the history of democracies is in a sense incoherent. Now this, but then the reversal of this. Now that, which is a reversal of that other, but not quite a reversal. But be sure that that which we now celebrate will not long survive the choppy sentiments of a chaotically agitated public. And so on and on. Successions of people, briefly glimpsed, obscured, returning, exiled, executed, triumphant, over-come, etc., etc.

Examples are Athens, Republican Rome, Britain, and the United States. In times of democracy, too much change. The periods in the history of democracies that take on a certain structure are invariably military disasters of some kind. Hence I have a very good grasp of our Civil War, but the befores and afters are blurry for me—until we reach the World Wars. And after that, much of the same.

Now as Ecclesiastes observes, recurring change is as much a characteristic of the macrocosm as of the life of societies—with the sun hastening in darkness to return to its beginnings again. The real longing is for the higher law, beyond society and nature, but in this realm, let’s face it, the best we can hope for is occasional approximations the roots of which, even before they spread their leaves, are already under attack by gnawing creatures.  

Butterfly Update

Herewith our second Black Swallowtail butterfly of the 2012 season. We’ve learned how to tell the boys from the girls, and this is a lady. We now realize that we've yet to see a male. Their wings, seen from the back, are a bright pattern of yellow and black. Ours are mostly black from that perspective—except for the tell-tale markings, not least “eyes” at the tail.

The first image shows the lady just some minutes after she emerged from her chrysalis. She spent about three hours drying her wings and testing her ability to fly. She had affixed her pupa to the screen as well and hence, presumably, felt comfortable in this odd posture. In the second I show her with her wings spread, still in our sun room.

Here, finally, I show her literally seconds before her first solo flight into nature actually began—from a kind of little basket Brigitte had used to collect her from the window sill to bring her out of doors. As all the butterflies we've nurtured so this, the Second Lady of the Spring, also headed straight north.

Now for something different. We discovered, yesterday morning, three new larvae of this species on two different dill plants. They are at their earliest stage and hence virtually impossible to see. At this stage their coloration is brown, with a white spot in the center. Very rapidly they turn black—except for that spot, of course. To illustrate the tiny size of the creature, I will show in succession the dill plant (an arrow marks the area where one larva lurks), the portion of the plant where I saw it, and last, the enlargement of the area itself.

We’ve learned today that Monarchs are as partial to milkweed as Black Swallowtails are to dill. Expanding our view, we’re about to acquire some milkweed. Both of my cameras were on strike when the First Lady of Spring arrived. Our neighbor caught some images, and those may yet be shown.

Crude Simplification

Being myself a master of that genre—it’s a way of venting mental gas—I bow my head when I see someone who out-does me. In his column today in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman attributes this gem to one Daniel Brumberg at Georgetown University. Friedman paraphrases Brumberg thus: “the Arab awakenings happened because the Arab peoples stopped fearing their leaders—but they stalled because the Arab peoples have not stopped fearing each other.”

The white man’s burden sometimes weighs so heavily on learned shoulders that groans like that issue forth—and are then gratefully echoed by pundits looking for the sound-byte. It’s all about fear, don’t you know—and if you didn’t, now you do. Too bad Brumberg-Friedman don’t hasten to globalize this wisdom and assign it to the very birth of democracy wherever. The tyrant’s grown feebler, so let us arm against the neighbor.

I prefer the even simpler simplification of “original sin.” It is also a heavy load but has a few holes in it through which the light occasionally penetrates.

Progressive, Regressive Notes

The temperature has been so cool of late we might as well be living in an air-conditioned house—even as that project is now only about 65 percent complete. Caustic jokes come out of my mouth. “You watch, Brigitte,” I say. “As soon as the system is up and running, news will come that scientists now foresee that Global Cooling has begun.”

The workmen turned on the outdoor compressor while I was out in the yard writing on a clipboard. I didn’t notice. They came to fetch me to admire. It is quite unobtrusive. I used to be quite knowledgeable on this subject years ago, but technology keeps marching on. New techniques.

The two butterfly pupae have yielded butterflies. The sedate and conventional of the two turned out to be adventurous and stormed the screen door beating it to get out. The extroverted adventurous one, by contrast (and this happened yesterday), spent hours quietly, sedately drying its wings before Brigitte finally coaxed it outdoors. Pictures will be shown.

The world’s breathlessly waiting for the Supremes to rule on health care. Soon it’ll be another circus out there. My perhaps premature take on this is on LaMarotte.

We saw a quite wonderful film last night, Arranged. The film is unique in that it takes a contrarian stance toward modernity, placed in New York, no less. Quite unpredictable if you are steeped in our times and wary. Delightful.

Reading Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. In an odd way its thematics are similar to Arranged. Have not read any novel in the daytime for years, but now my morning work-space is denied me. Yes, there it goes. The doorbell just rang. The workmen have arrived.

My notes are done just in time.

The Dove in the Garden

           
The lovely shrub is our hydrangea; it is unusually showy this year. Our particular shrub is Hydrangea macrophylla. The variety is “Taube,” from the German for pigeon or dove. Hydrangea is a Latinized Greek word constructed by Linnaeus meaning “water cup,” referring to its cup-shaped seed pods. Macrophylla translates as “big-leaved.” This plant originates in southeast Japan.

One interesting fact about this type of hydrangea is that the color of its petals depends on whether or not the soil is caustic or acidic and therefore either holds or releases the aluminum in the soil. Our soil is obviously caustic—because the leaves are pink. But Brigitte has another, younger version, taken from the original shrub shown but planted in different soil—and sure enough, its petals are blue! Other names? There are several: Bigleaf Hydrangea, Lacecap Hydrangea, Penny Mac, and Hortensia. There are yet others, but those (e.g., Mophead) do not apply to our cultivar.

The usual aviso: Click images to enlarge; Esc returns to the post.

Egyptian Time Perspective

At 4:31 p.m. Egyptian time, which was 10:31 a.m. here in Detroit, an hour-and-a-half late, the final results of the presidential election there were made known to the public. The Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, won the office with 51 percent of the vote; his opponent, the ex-general Ahmed Shafiq, garnered 48 percent. So it is over? Well, in a way. The country’s military oligarchy seems still to hold the thicker strings that guide this Egyptian puppet in its motions. They engineered the parliament’s demise just before the run-off vote was held, perhaps thus hoping to shoo in their candidate.

Interests me, this whole business—if for arcane reasons. Using the Muslim calendar, we are now in 1433. But the Islamic calendar is based on 12 lunar months; these yield 354 or 355 days per year. Using 354.5 as an average, 1433 produces 1390 years of 365.25 days—suggesting that the calendar began in 622 AD. Yep. That also happens to be the official starting year of the calendar, the year of Mohammed’s flight (hegira) from Mecca to Medina. Hegira (or hejira) is also used to mark the Muslim year, combined with the Latin anno; this year, therefore (until November 14), is 1433 AH.

Now supposing we imagine that civilizations are more or less organic phenomena—rather than mechanical—thus that they develop and age “naturally.” In that case the Islamic one is in its fourteenth century—a time which, in ours, felt not even a whiff of democracy yet; the authentic, spontaneous thing would have to wait another 400 years or so. Which is another way of saying that the tenor of events in Egypt, with the authoritarian hand of the military still holding the reins (to change metaphors), seems to be about right. The democratic form is not, in this view at least, “natural” to the Muslim culture at this time. It is imposed by its overwhelming presence round about that country—to its North and, across the ocean, to its West.

Is that the reason why this announcement was late in coming—even if only by an hour-and-a-half? Were the Egyptians sort of hoping that, if they delayed, time would catch them up to an alien modernity? If so, they didn’t wait long enough.

Savonarola’s Ghost

When one’s time horizons are restored—even if only temporarily (the workmen are gone, but they’ll be back)—then the ordinary daily trials resume. But better ordinary woes than strangers underfoot. The first of these is waking up to find myself (disgusting!) still here. The longer I sleep the longer I stay captured by what I think of as the physical—unless the papers trigger one of my routines. Then, with adrenaline flowing, I tend to go off on crusades.

That, of course, still leaves me in the world; not quite the physical, but certainly half-submerged. I’d rather be in some ideal setting where order reigns and everything, looked at closely, retains its sanity. So why bother looking out? Why look at the great social-collective? What draws me, I think, is its seemingly greater scope—something lacking (but also only seemingly) in my concrete drive, my scraggly grass, and the familiar glories of our plants and flowers. The mind’s tempted by the too-rich information that lets one (once more seemingly) encompass the whole globe. But what mirrors back from that is disorderly enough to signal just how bad things are—even if, reason tells me, the “bad” out there is no worse in proportion to mundane daily life than it is right here in my own backyard.

Behind this lies a reflexive identification with community—including my ancestors who tried to pass their values on to me. It grieves me how little they actually managed to pass on. But at least they tried. Occurs to me that there is an archetype in here, in me, called Savonarola, close kin to an actual person by that name. And from it rises—before my mind’s completely awake—a harangue to the wicked. If Brigitte is awake, she gets to hear it. If I’m really captured, it goes out silent as a blog-post. But sometimes I manage to wake up enough to remember to look within. Then, finally, I feel energized and cheerfully go to make that second cup of the morning quite relaxed.

Defending Town and Wildlife

I saw the image of a fishfly on the front page of the Wall Street Journal this morning. The story is headlined “Something Smells Fishy In These Tony Michigan Towns.” Then I see that the story is from Grosse Pointe, MI. So we are “tony,” are we? The author got that wrong. Next I encounter this little snippet: “The worst part: The flies have little to do with fish. The name refers to the smell all those rotting bugs give off.” Wrong again. Finally our author found a policeman in my part of the Pointes, Grosse Pointe Farms. According to that official, this year’s is supposed to be the worst “invasion” in more than 30 years. Not in our opinion here.

“Tony” is supposed to be “high-toned,” thus “uppity.” In the 1920s, I am told it was the name of a reddish-brown fashion color. Yes. The Grosse Pointes are well off to wealthy. And the color is right because most of the homes are brick. But if you live here and know the population—from its highest to its modest levels—it would occur to no one to describe this place as “tony.” Want to be negative? Call the Grosse Pointes bourgeois—with the kind of intonation a French person would use. Want to be neutral? Upscale, staid will do. Want to be positive: Reserved, traditional describes us. We also have lots and lots and lots of trees. They cover us. Green, green. Major budget battles here turn on how many and which kinds of trees to plant. Tony? Baloney.

The fishfly is an aquatic insect meaning that it spends one year out of each year under water living in submerged mud burrows. Had to add that word, submerged, just to emphasize the point. Through most of its life this creature is a nymph. It turns into a winged insect just before its time has come to reproduce—and die. Sex is enjoyed high in the air. Then the fertilized females deposit their eggs on the water. Finally, male and female, they fly inland to die. The fishy smell? Well, hadn’t noticed it. Indeed, just to see, I collected some and held them to my nose. No sign of it. They are called fishfly because they live under water.

Now for that “worst invasion” in 30 years. The policeman may have been referring to the WSJ’s invasion of the Pointes, not to the fishflies. 2010 was much worse; last year the fishflies were both late and rather thin in population. This year was just about right. The Journal’s writer did get one thing right. Elsewhere these creatures are called mayflies. Around here they tend to peak around about June 16.

Conditioned Solstice

We’re celebrating this year’s summer solstice—it’s a day ahead of the usual date because we’re in a leap year while it lasts—by having air conditioning installed into this 1929 house. The work began in Spring and will end in Summer, the two points no more than two weeks apart. This rather extensive span is necessitated by the age of this house and its heating system: radiators. There are no furnace vents to be easily co-opted to carry cold air in summer. Hence rather major work’s involved. Needless to say, the resulting activity has demolished my routines, and will continue to do so for a while yet. After that will come relief. With all this going on, the  summer solstice caught me by surprise, so that this is written a day after. Whatever, as they say. I spent summer solstice digging up and then replanting two huge plants to make room for the compressor that lives outside. Sweaty work at 94° F. So quiet is that unit, the company informs me, that you can have a civilized conversation standing right by it, resting your coffee cups on this decorative top. Can hardly wait for it to come on… 

The Path to the Water Hole

Sharia is one of those words that, coupled with “law,” is similar to rice paddy, which translates to “rice rice”; hence Sharia law is “law law.” Unless you insist on understanding the word “sharia” still to mean what it once did, long ago, namely “the path to the water hole,” a now obsolete Arab way of saying “way of life.” When you live in the desert, the supremely important thing to know is the way to the life-sustaining liquid. Certainly since Mohammed’s time, the word has come to mean “law,” “legislation,” “ordinance” or “command.” The word is traced to Koran 45:18. Herewith three different translations:

Then We have made you follow a course in the affair… [M.H. Shakir translation]

Then We put thee on the (right) Way of Religion…. [Abdullah Yusuf Ali translation. The translator adds in a footnote: “Shariah is best translated the ‘right Way of Religion,’ which is wider than the mere formal rites and legal provisions, which mostly came in the Medinah period, long after this Makkan verse had been revealed.” ]

And now We have set you on the right path…. [N. J. Dawood translation]

What seems clear to me is that when the verse was written, the meaning of “path” or “way” was still alive—but that today the meaning of the word is “law,” indeed most commonly rendered as legislation. And more: related words already used in Mohammed’s time were shara’ra meaning “He ordrained,” shara’u meaning “they decreed,” and shir’atun meaning  spiritual law, all used in the Koran with those meanings.

There are those who do—and those who don’t—start sweating and agitating when language is abused. It’s a reflex in me; I plug up my ears, in a symbolic gesture, when I hear Sharia law spoken out loud.

Another Bicentennial

We’re on the eve of another bicentennial, that of the War of 1812. On June 18 of that year President Monroe signed a declaration of war against England that Congress had passed on June 1, 1812. Such events enable us to get a feel of time’s relentless flow. One way is by looking back at the personal level, which I did the other day by recalling Theodosia Burr Alston (link). The war of 1812 suggests just how rapidly time passes on the collective scale. Little Napoleon? That hand stuck into his vest? Ancient history? No. Just the other day. It is very difficult today to imagine France actually invading Russia, but that happened in 1812. Britain then was already embroiled in the Napoleonic wars, and it was England’s greatly expanded activity at sea that also caused the conflict between England and the United States. Britain restricted U.S. trade activities and seized American sailors to serve aboard British ships, known as impressment. America was pressing to the west, and Britain supported American Indian tribes—hoping, indeed, to establish an extensive Indian buffer state between the states and Canada. The big losers in this war? They were the Indian tribes.

The United States excelled at sea—so much so that the USS Constitution, better known as Old Ironsides, has become the enduring symbol of this war. She is paraded every fourth of July, to this day, in Boston harbor. The image I am showing, courtesy of NAVY.mil (link), shows such a parade. A curious fact about Old Ironsides: her sides were made entirely of wood, the only iron being nails. But she was well-commanded, larger than all British frigates, and enemy shot bounced off her sides…

Back when the national bicentennial took place in 1976, we celebrated it on a (lucky for us) quite elevated point of a freeway pointing at Washington, DC. Cars, cars, cars everywhere. You couldn’t move an inch—yet the mood was calm and festive. We were up there for many hours until the sun set and then, in due time, the fireworks began. It is shocking to realize that thirty-six years have passed since then...

Learned and eloquent historians on C-Span—rarely seen except on such occasions—reinforced my view that life two hundred years ago was, in general feel, much as it is today. The nation was politically split; the Federalists all voted against the conflict as a block. The other party then was the Democratic-Republican; some of their members also opposed the war. The war’s financing was by piling on national debt. Thousands of newspapers informed the public. Broadsides—posters—served the role of twits and Facebook entries. The physical side of life was much much harder. And to think that the United States was having a small war on the side: it was not the big Behemoth yet leading the charge against little Napoleon.

Caterpillars Have Personalities

Update 2 in butterfly raising 2012. In an earlier post we reported on three Black Swallowtail caterpillars that Spring brought to our tentatively named Rancho Mariposa. One became bird food. When we noticed its loss, we brought the other two inside. Very soon they began what is known in the business as the wandering phase. At this stage the caterpillars become very active. In part their incessant climbing, stretching, and exploration is intended to push what remaining wastes are in them out. In part they are trying to find the perfect perch to rest and form their hard pupae. One of our two survivors behaved with fitting decorum. It crawled about using the dill plants and multiple convenient sticks the Rancho provided for it. The other one?

Well, the other one was insistently adventurous. It managed to reach the rim of the pot several times—and twice it dropped down to the table below. Each time Brigitte returned it to the pot again. Then we were out of the house for a while. On returning, Extrovert had entirely disappeared. A great search ensued, but we couldn’t find it. A day later we discovered it hanging from the screen of a sunroom window. It had managed to overcome endless obstacles and to travel a long distances, ever heading, evidently, for more light. It was so firmly attached to the screen, we couldn’t remove it. And then, two days later, both Introvert and Extrovert turned into pupae over-night. Caterpillars must have personalities.

Clicking on the images enlarges them, Esc returns to the post. In the first image the fine tendrils these creatures use to suspend themselves from the branch that holds them are sharply visible.

Unavoidable Conflict

The conflict between church and state is, you might say, built in. Religion organizes people; it forms communities. The leader or leaders of such communities then come to represent a power. By its very existence, this power rivals that of the secular ruler. The constitutional separation of church and state is a reasonable but awkward stratagem. It works for a while. Here and there. This separation has biblical rootings: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”: quoted in three of the four gospels. Problems surface when Caesar demands what belongs to God—or the Church encroaches on what belongs to Caesar. In a very complex modern world even drawing the line between the two is extraordinarily difficult.

This issue is at the core of today’s runoff elections in Egypt. To one side is a relatively weak representative of Caesar, but evidently backed by a military oligarchy strong enough so that it could simply squash a parliament dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. On the other is the Muslim Brotherhood itself which might, just might, if it waxes strong eventually, impose religious law.

The problem is compounded by the fact that humans are social creatures and that a vast gulf opens between religion as a social phenomenon and religion as an inner experience. My own view of collectives is, to put it mildly, reserved—and no matter what their nominal coloration. They tend to be somewhat less than human. Internal guidance may conflict with the demands of both collectives. As a minimum, let there be separation—be that separation enshrined in constitutional language or not. It won’t always be so. Millions of years to go yet, and a snapshot from the U.S.A. is barely even a moment on such scales. There is no conflict for the individual if Jesus’ words are understood. Caesar is all collectives; we give them what is theirs. The rest is conscience.

A Census of the Sisterhood

It pleased me to read the news yesterday concerning findings of the Human Microbiome Project, an organization of the National Institutes of Health. HMP has now taken a census of micro-organisms that share our bodies. We are host to some 100 trillion bacteria, ten for every one of our cells; it isn’t that we “host” them, exactly, although we do. Without them we would have major problems digesting our food. Long ago I had a poetic reaction to studying biology and imagined that each living being is a “chemical civilization.” Even back then (the 1970s) students came to value the crucial role played by our Symbiont Sisters; the scientific work to estimate their total number and subdivisions into “ethnicities” had not yet been done. Now it has. Ten thousand species live in us; all told they have 22,000 different genes—over against our own 8,000; they represent about 1 to 3 percent of our body mass—thus a person weighing 150 pounds will have 3 pounds of helpful guests—using a 2 percent figure. Biome, incidentally, comes from “living" and “mass.”

These civilizations are similar to our own—but only to mean what fractal mathematics calls “self-similarity.” That concept means that some arbitrarily selected whole will be approximately similar to a part of itself—while also being part of a greater whole also self-similar to itself.

Back in the 1970s it was mitochondria in cells that brought home, for me, the notion of a community of living beings, cooperating to form greater wholes. Mitochondria produce the cells’ energy; they are power plants in what looked to me then like cities—if greatly enlarged. Mitochondria have their own DNA; presumably they were, at one time, immigrants to cells, valued for their superior technology.

The more we think about bodies—which we imagine to be exclusively our own—and the more they look like vast aggregations of other living beings—who in turn carry within them what seem to be alien symbionts—and so on until (as in my case), I imagined invisibly tiny “little people” who use enzymes as their tractors, forklifts, helicopters, hoists—the more curious the picture becomes and the more strange we seem to ourselves. Are we these structures, by whatever name we call them: bodies, machines, communities, or chemical civilizations? I’m convinced that we are not. We can live our lives and never even think about such matters. But at some point understanding such mysteries matters. HMP, mindful of the public’s narrow interest in utility, points to advances in medical knowledge as the justification for this research. But for me, this too, like everything else, points at something beyond.

A Mental Nervous System

A fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal today tells the story of a “hospital” in Bagram, Afghanistan, where combat robots are fixed. There is Medicare for robots, sure enough, and no entertaining controversy about co-pays or budget deficits in that connection. Soldiers in the theater become very attached to their robots. They name them, give them ranks and promotions, and when the bots are injured they want the same robot back again—not a replacement.

There is a lesson here. We animate extensions of our bodies by extending a mental nervous system to them; their ills and injuries cause us literal if only mild inner pain. How many people, hitting a really harsh pothole, haven’t cried “Ouch” at the bump. My computer has a seizure, a stroke? Flat-lines in a power outage? All else stops until it’s healed.

Having chuckled with Brigitte about this story, I went to tell Clare about it. Clare is our Honda CRV. I think she smiled at me. But she’s still just a baby delivered to us at Jeffrey Honda—or should I say our auto-clinic?

Translating Honor

Honor is a word now in temporary decline. The word belongs to the cultural periods of history not to civilization. It suggests the appropriate fusion of body and of soul, thus bravery and courage, proper to the body under stress, and a transcendental stance, proper to the soul, which, in practice, is willing to sacrifice itself for the community. In its highest expression it suggests intelligence; in its low forms in manifests as duels, honor killings, vendettas and other pointless mayhem. Honesty derives from honor; its current form, telling the truth, is actually a later development dating to around 1400 (Online Etymology Dictionary); the older sense, of honorable, is preserved in the phrase of “making an honest woman of her.” Honor and truth-telling are intimately linked in German: Ehre, ehrlich—and in Hungarian, to leave the Latin or Germanic languages: Becsület, becsületes. The same is true in Greek: Timē, timioz.

The decline of a word very much at home in ages of kings, dukes, and nobles—and the bloated and contradictory meanings it developed by abuse—is understandable. But surely the qualities that it once represented, at best, have not disappeared and are still valued. I got to thinking. How would we translate honor into modern. My nominee is “integrity.” Applied to a person, it has precisely the same meaning that honor once had. It is rooted in the Latin for wholeness, completeness—which in a human means the same fusion of powers honor represents. Integrity is a kind of humble form of honor fitting for a democratic time. Which is appropriate. Proverbs (15:33) tells us: “The fear of the Lord is the instruction of wisdom; and before honor is humility.”

Culture and Civilization

The distinct meanings of these two words emerge fairly well when we speak of ourselves as a “multicultural society.” The unspoken meaning in that phrases is that we are now a “civilization.” In a designation like Greek or Roman culture, the two are hopelessly blended. Something like Greek culture existed in a more or less pure form, but when Athens and Sparta staged their early version of a, for them, world war, they had developed into civilizations. I imbibed this way of treating the two words when, anciently, I read Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. For Spengler Kultur was the early, growing phase of a great collective, Zivilisation the later stage.

The root of culture is cultivation, thus agriculture, tilling, the Latin cultus—but that word also includes extensions of meanings like care and labor to include worship and reverence. Thus at the base of culture—religion.  At the base of civilization—the city. The root of the word is the Latin civis, meaning a townsman, later citizen, and from that came civitas, the city, replacing the original for that word, urbs; we still, of course, have urban areas and the behavior that goes with it (we hope), urbanity—when we are not civil.

In the life of the great big collectives, we move from very small settlements and larger aggregations of these held together by a common mode of worship—to vast urban conglomerations in which the transcendental view has thinned out to become a lifestyle. By the time we reach multiculturalism, culture is seen by the organs of civilization as an irrational residue to be tolerated as a civility.

Calculating the Compensation

Is there a difference between bombing a city at high altitude and destroying a single building by an air strike? No. Both are acts of collectives, but they are ordered and then carried out by conscious individuals—which fuzzes up the moral picture slightly. And any righteous feelings should be curbed. The necessary labor and material is paid for by all of us, hence we are all, like it or not, cells of the collective monster.

I happened to see General John Allen make his apology to a turbaned village elder on TV this past Saturday for just a destruction of a single-house; there were women and children inside, of course, a loss of eighteen people in the wrong place. Among the words I heard General Allen say were: “We will do the right thing by the families. We will do the right thing for the community.”

We pioneered this method—the compensation of families for the death of members—back in 2011 under an act of Congress. The average payment to a family was $2,083,000. Interestingly, the compensation was scaled to the income level of the person killed. The bottom here was $250,000 for a person earning up to $20,000 a year. Will the Afghanistani families who lost members in that airstrike get millions, hundreds of thousands, or less? Well, per capita income in Afghanistan last year was $585 a year. Can Big Man Capital even see such minute income? No. And that’s the problem with peripheral damage. Can’t see anything when you are acting in total darkness.

Arctic Algal Bloom

Late-night Brigitte left a link that early-riser yours-truly read this morning. That story—and all the others referenced here—are from the Los Angeles Times. They got me thinking about actions and their consequences.

Last Friday the Times brought a story (link) about NASA’s discovery of a massive algae bloom in the Arctic; this was a big surprise for the scientists involved—and what it means is still being debated. Two years ago, for instance, a Canadian team had reported something contrary: the world’s phytoplankton has been disappearing at the rate of 1 percent a year over the last 100 years (link).

Does NASA’s discovery mean that things are suddenly turning around? Or does it mean that melting Arctic ice has caused phytoplankton to wake up and multiply? Or does it mean that increasing carbon dioxide is good for algae? They certainly feed on it.

The rule for scientists and journalists is to report what they find—without fear. Peer review will sort things out, sooner or later. Last Thursday, thus the day before the algal bloom, the Times brought quite another kind of story (link). It concerned the nearness of the “tipping point”: we have too many people, and our actions threaten irreversible planetary consequences.

This got me thinking. The scientists’ gloom in the tipping-point story may certainly be justified, but stories about approaching Armageddon almost always have the same structure. They project change in one part of the environment while holding all other trends steady. Thus it is presumed that burning massive quantities of fuels, paving the arable surface of the planet, mowing down the rain forests, and genetically distorting crops will continue unabated—yet that population will keep on climbing from 7 to 9.3 billion by 2050. Or, conversely, that global warming will increase—but the amount of water vaporized will remain the same and the sky will remain as bright and blue as ever. The story about algae blooms, however, in altogether unanticipated places, suggests a wilder and more interesting future.

Irreversible consequences? I mourn the decline of liberal education. Even a pathetic one like mine exposed me to Horace’s saying; indeed, we all know it. You may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she will hurry back. I always frown when I hear the word “fragile” applied to earth or nature—until it occurs to me that the speaker is talking about the short term. We’ve had global warming before—swamps, swamps everywhere. Tyrannosaurus was the bad guy on the block. We’ve had an earth, or so I’m told, without free oxygen in its atmosphere and everything barren.

We’ll pay the price for our abuse, of course. The future won’t be pretty. I frankly can’t imagine maintaining  9 billion humans when fossil fuels run out. No problems in the short run. No doubt I’ll ride to the crematorium in a gasoline powered vehicle after I pass. But Nature will reverse the damage after the Troubles that lie ahead.

It is, however, natural for declining civilizations to engage in End Time projections, whether they’re powered by fossil fuels or not. If the tilting point is not yet near, our extraordinary science has yet something even grander up its sleeve. That brings me to the final LA Times story I want to reference (link). It came a week before the tilting point story, on May 31: “Milky Way, Andromeda galaxies set to crash — in 4 billion years.” Human caused? I wouldn’t be surprised.
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Phytoplankton image from Wikipedia (link).