The Long View

Do not believe robots. They do not have our best interests at heart:

(NPR) Morning Edition, March 19, 2008 · Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years. That could mean global warming has taken a breather. Or it could mean scientists aren't quite understanding what their robots are telling them.

I think it more likely than not that this result is an artifact of a design flaw in the experiment than real information about the oceans. However, I don't think it much more likely. Again, give us another four years of anomalous results and we will have to rethink the whole climate-change question.

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If robots could weep, they would have wept at the passing of Sir Arthur C. Clarke this week. If you are a science buff of a certain age, then it is likely that at some point he was your favorite novelist. This passage from the New York Times obituary, which appeared within a few hours of the announcement of the death on March 18, is interesting on several counts:

Along with Verne and Wells, Mr. Clarke said his greatest influences as a writer were Lord Dunsany, a British fantasist noted for his lyrical, if sometimes overblown, prose; Otto Stapledon, a British philosopher who wrote vast speculative narratives that projected human evolution to the furthest reaches of space and time; and Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick.”

Yes, emphasis added. "Otto" was amended to "Olaf" a little later, without comment or acknowledgement. Sometimes I wonder whether we really have been at war with East Asia all these years.

Here is a mystery: Clarke was usually counted among the Big Three of science fiction in the second half of the 20th century; the other two were Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. All of them were anti-religious in one way or another. Clarke took care in his stories about the future to describe the disappearance of Christianity (sometimes forecasting its replacement by Hinayana Buddhism); Asimov did some popular-science anti-theist polemics; Heinlein seems to have had a mystical streak, but he never let it run toward any actual religion. Nonetheless, religious people who are also science-fiction readers (and the overlap between the two groups is very large) usually love all three authors.

The answer may be that these authors may have had a bee in their bonnet on certain metaphysical or historical questions, but none of them were reductionists. That's where they differ from some more recent, very skilled authors of a neo-Darwinist or neuroscience bent. The science in the latter's science fiction is often formidable, but the fiction happens in a conceptual universe that is noticeably more cramped than reality.

By the way, C.S. Lewis was another great fan of Olaf (Don't Call Me Otto) Stapledon.

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Speaking of leading figures of the 1960s, readers may have noted my review of Theodore H. White's The Making of the President 1960. Actually, that "review" is a treatment of just one aspect of White's remarkable book: press bias during the campaign. However, that scarcely exhausts the interest of White's contemporary study. Here is a note on the religion issue in that election:

John Kennedy was not the first Catholic to run for president as the nominee of a major party, but he was the first with some real hope of being elected. In order to demonstrate that, he needed to show that he could win a primary in some overwhelmingly Protestant state, and he needed to make unambiguously clear his devotion to the American understanding of the separation of church and state. He did the first by defeating Hubert Humphrey in West Virginia (just 16 states held primaries; Kennedy was extravagant in competing in seven of them). He did the second in his famous Statement to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, a copy of which is helpfully supplied in an Appendix to White's book. But now look here at these brief remarks that he made on the last day of the campaign:

I will close by telling you of a letter which Lincoln wrote in a campaign very much like this, 100 years ago, when the issues were the same. He wrote to a friend, "I know there is a God, and I know he hates injustice. I see the storm coming and I know His hand is in it. But if He has a place and a part for me, I believe that I am ready." Now, 100 years later, when the issue is still freedom, we know there is a God, and we know His hand is in it. But if he has a place and a part for me, I believe that we are ready. Thank you .

We should mention that, although civil rights were certainly an issue in the campaign, the "slavery" to which Kennedy referred was Communism and its threat to the Western world. In any case, it seems not to have occurred to anyone at the time to characterize Kennedy's invocation of divine providence as a conflation of church and state. It would be another 25 years before the claim arose that the separation of church and state meant the separation of theology from politics, much less religion from society.

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Many readers are no doubt still outraged about David Lynch's mangling of Dune in his execrable 1984 film of Frank Herbert's novel. We note with hope, then, that a remake is in the works:

Peter Berg is attached to direct a bigscreen adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novel "Dune" for Paramount Pictures. Kevin Misher, who spent the past year obtaining the book rights from the Herbert estate, will produce via his Par-based shingle...The project is out to writers, with the producers looking for a faithful adaptation of the Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning book. The filmmakers consider its theme of finite ecological resources particularly timely.

Well, maybe not too much hope: Dune can be read to be about many things, from Insurgents against the Empire to the perils of basing a society on a very limited resource to the curious benefits of controlled substances. What it's not about is preserving the environment; the idea was to terraform Arrakis, remember.

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Do you find the liturgies for Holy Week excessively onerous? Consider this warning from the public health authorities in the Philippines:

The health department has strongly advised penitents to check the condition of the whips they plan to use to lash their backs, the Manila Times newspaper reports...Real nails are used in the re-enactments...They want people to have what they call "well-maintained" whips...In the hot and dusty atmosphere, officials warn, using unhygienic whips to make deep cuts in the body could lead to tetanus and other infections...And they advise that the nails used to fix people to crosses must be properly disinfected first. Often people soak the nails in alcohol throughout the year.

Suddenly I feel like a slacker.