I don't know who's more late, Al Gore or this columnist:
In closing his 45-minute presentation in Boston, Gore shows one last, majestic shot of Earth. “We don’t have any other home, so our job is to keep our eyes on the prize.”
When he is finished, the audience is slightly stunned, and walks out talking about how they’ll never forget this night. Somebody says maybe delivering this environmental S.O.S. is the former vice president’s true calling. He’s so full-throated now, so sure of himself in this campaign, that maybe this was the thing he was meant to be doing all along? Nah…
DfMoore asks a variant of a question I started to address in a previous post about the phenomenon known as "natural law." He asks:
If nature has purpose (like a telos), but not consciousness or intelligence, then what are ethical ways of treating nature and interacting with it.
Aside from what I wrote before, I had a few things to add, which I will reprint for your reading satisfaction. For the uninitiated, a telos is like an innate plan.
The first issue that comes to my mind is how are we sure we know what the telos is? Even in something widely accepted like evolution theory, which does fundamentally guarantee the existence of a telos in living nature, the "purpose" or adaptivity of a given element of nature is subject to different interpretations. There are a few cases in which we can be pretty absolutely certain of what the telos is. One instance would be the instinct, in conscious or unconscious terms, possessed by a living thing to survive. You don't even have to buy into evolutionary theory to be pretty sure that living nature is set up in such a way that one of its main ends is survival. Then you can ask: well, how do we take into account this basic truth in our interactions with nature? I think it's safe to say there's a pretty universal ethic among humans cultures to not kill something if it's for no good reason. Where does this come from? Are we identifying with a telos we innately sense, or are we are we merely projecting our own personal aversion to death? The issue of our regard for life may offer hints into how we do unconsciously respond to a telos in nature.
But practically, I would argue that there are few things of which we can reasonably be sure we even know the telos. However, this doesn't mean that people don't construct normative systems based on some kind of supposed grand plan in nature. Social darwinism and eugenics are a great example of people trying to facilitate nature, and coming up with ethically monstrous policies in the process. The ethical profile of these things is bleak at best. But my objection to this kind of ethical stance is that for every positive normative argument for facilitating the "purpose" or "function" of nature, I can give a negative normative argument for why we shouldn't do the very same thing, because humans are higher beings and the raw workings of nature are often brutish or inhumane. Which argument wins? It seems pretty subjective.
David Brooks has written what strikes me as a very important op-ed today on the topic of social mobility in America which, needless to say, is a very important thing.
The United States is a country based on the idea that a person's birth does not determine his or her destiny. Our favorite stories involve immigrants climbing from obscurity to success. Our amazing work ethic is predicated on the assumption that enterprise and effort lead to ascent. "I hold the value of life is to improve one's condition," Lincoln declared.
The problem is that in every generation conditions emerge that threaten to close down opportunity and retard social mobility. Each generation has to reopen the pathways to success.
...
Economists and sociologists do not all agree, but it does seem there is at least slightly less movement across income quintiles than there was a few decades ago. Sons' income levels correlate more closely to those of their fathers. The income levels of brothers also correlate more closely. That suggests that the family you were born into matters more and more to how you will fare in life. That's a problem because we are not supposed to have a hereditary class structure in this country.
But we're developing one. In the information age, education matters more. In an age in which education matters more, family matters more, because as James Coleman established decades ago, family status shapes educational achievement.
...
In this way these highly educated elites produce a paradox - a hereditary meritocratic class.
It becomes harder for middle-class kids to compete against members of the hypercharged educated class. Indeed, the middle-class areas become more socially isolated from the highly educated areas.
One of the things that happens when your regional paper is also a newspaper of global reknown is the curious oddity that your local trifles get broadcast and amplified to the world at large. It's not as if this is on the level of a police report, although it's still pretty entertaining to read the editorial's heart-wrenching homage to hawks. I've added bold type to the good parts:
There is no historic preservation district or landmarks commission for hawks' nests. But if there were, the red-tailed hawk's nest at 927 Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park at 74th Street, would surely have qualified. Until Tuesday, the nest stood on a 12th-floor cornice with a sublime aerial view of the urban forest in our midst. Since 1993, 23 young hawks have been raised there, sired by a bird called Pale Male.Thousands and thousands of bird-watchers over the years have followed the lives of the hawks in that nest. But this is not an homage to bird-watching - it's an homage to birds.
Aside from being an entertaining read, this editorial is actually quite remarkable, for several reasons. For one, it contains a kind of overwhelming amount of detail, suggesting that someone has been closely observing the nest like on a daily basis for over 10 years. Second, the author of the editorial has, apparently without irony, penned a name on one of the birds. I mean it's either that or the bird named himself. Or the flock named him, and pasted a name-tag on him. Third - most important of all! - a hawk's nest is getting a full editorial! Don't underestimate the editorial as a mere runoff for the cesspool of overly sentimental and trivial humans... This one makes a few strong observations, we can't deny that:
Perhaps residents were annoyed that the hawks didn't do a better job of cleaning up after themselves by using a pooper-scooper or putting their pigeon bones in the trash, the way a human would. Perhaps they simply wearied of the stirring sight of a red-tailed hawk coming down out of the sky to settle on its nest.
I'm not sure what mix of irony and hoakiness is the appropriate mix for interpreting that passage. Although I'm thinking maybe the authors were being serious?
The hawks have gone out of their way to learn to live with us.
I wouldn't have given them so much credit. I would have thought, maybe I'm wrong, that the hawks didn't notice anyone at all - because they're hawks!
I forgot your schedule. Are you around before Christmas? I'll email you in January to continue our discussions re: Bush, UFOs, Trivia. Oh, and more important things are totally fine as well.
The New York Times prints an article "How do you prove you're a Jew?" on Jewish marriage, or something, by author named Gershom Gorenberg. Am I the only one who sees irony here? Of all the people who should be preoccupied enough about proving they're a Jew to write an article, Gershom should be last on the list. Aside from that, I have nothing else to say about the article because I don't care about its content one bit.
Originally published 7/4/12