Prufrock: Vicious and Playful Ravens, German Art after the War, and Heavenly Proofs

Here are a couple of pieces on technology that are worth your time on this sunny, Virginia morning: First, it’s a nice idea, Joseph Bottum writes, to think that all scientific research is “scrupulously ethical, but it is “also nutty as the day is long.” Also: Is the lesson of Frankenstein that we should “care for our technologies as we do our children”? Uh, no, writes Brendan P. Foht.

Imitation is inescapable, and autonomy is a lie. These two ideas are at the heart of René Girard’s thought.

German art after the war: “Many of the artists here will be relatively new to American audiences, which are likely more familiar with pre-war German names—Beckmann, Dix, Grosz, Klee, Kandinsky—and contemporary ones—Baselitz, Richter, Kiefer. The exhibition features late works by Otto Dix, as well as by Fritz Winter (including that first acquisition), and an exhilarating range by Willi Baumeister, with exuberant large paintings such as Growth of the Crystals II (1947–1952) and Large Montaru (1953). The energy, colors, and lines of these later Baumeister works, recalling Kandinsky and Klee, delight—but more unexpected are the small early lacquers he produced, along with Oskar Schlemmer and Franz Krause, in Wuppertal in 1941. Their ethereal beauty in the face of such destruction is itself a type of resistance.”

“Before there was Euro Disney the theme park, there was Euro Disney the comic books. Now, after more than six decades, the European adventures of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge will be released in the United States.”

Vicious and playful, are ravens the most human of birds? “Ravens have long been associated with exalted spirituality as well as death and doom. Vikings regarded them as sacred, their Presbyterian descendants as ‘the Devil’s own bairns’. The rich pickings they found on battlefields was one of their more sinister traits. That they were and are killed for good reason is confirmed when Shute visits a New Forest pig farm and, most gruesomely, a Caithness sheep farm. To his journalistic credit he reports the unpalatable facts, such as the lamb unable to suckle because a raven had torn out its tongue. Ravens scavenge but they also kill. They go for eyes and bottoms first, cornering the victims, even full-grown sheep, like dogs. ‘Ravens are really different from other birds… I would say they are evil,’ he was told,” Yet, “Ravens enjoy sliding down banks, repeating the exercise as determinedly as children, and can mimic human responses as well as any parrot. But perhaps their most human quality is they mourn, and can even die from the loss of a mate.”

In search of beautiful proofs: “Paul Erdős, the famously eccentric, peripatetic and prolific 20th-century mathematician, was fond of the idea that God has a celestial volume containing the perfect proof of every mathematical theorem. ‘This one is from The Book,’ he would declare when he wanted to bestow his highest praise on a beautiful proof. Never mind that Erdős doubted God’s very existence. ‘You don’t have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book,’ Erdős explained to other mathematicians.”

Essay of the Day:

In Modern Age, Pierre Manent explores the relationship between liberty and natural law:

“The very notion of natural law presupposes or implies that we have the ability to judge human conduct according to criteria that are clear, stable, and largely if not universally shared. It demands that the motley diversity of the human phenomenon, which is apparent to anyone, be reduced to a single set of characteristics common to all humanity, and thus suitable to provide the foundation for rules of justice that are comprehensible and acceptable by all. We have suggested that the principal motives of human action—the pleasant, the useful, and the noble—constitute such characteristics. There is the question, however, how we can accord a decisive role to the motives of action, that is, to the factual bases of human acting, in an investigation into natural law, that is, into action’s norm.

“Sometimes the emperor of our philosophical scruples isn’t wearing much. A case in point are the modern philosophers who are eager to reproach their predecessors or some of their colleagues for confusing ‘is’ with ‘ought,’ or succumbing to the ‘naturalistic fallacy.’ But in reality there is neither a leap nor a chasm nor an abyss between ‘is’ and ‘ought,’ but only a gentle slope along which we can confidently walk.”

Read the rest.

Photos: Expedition 55

Poem: Derek Mahon, “Glengormley”

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