Reviews and News:
Revisiting C. S. Lewis’s defense of natural law: “If there is no objective standard of morality, then the universe is simply a vast empty wasteland. It does not determine what our values ought to be; rather, we project our values onto it. These values would then not be derived from Nature or Nature’s God. Instead, they would originate with us. But exactly which part of us would tell us what to value? Not reason, since reason (on this account) does not apprehend anything objectively good in the world. No, it would simply be our base wants and desires, which are arbitrarily shaped by our environment.”
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Blake Seitz goes to an off-Broadway show trial of George W. Bush: “The play asks what if the United Nations Security Council—a body that includes the United States—referred Bush to the International Criminal Court for war crimes? And what if Bush decided to show up at this court, which has no police power? And further, what if he decided to represent himself at the trial, so it was just Bush wrangling mano a mano, pardner, with the blue-robed magi of The Hague?”
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A report on Muslims in France: “On the one hand, it shows that radical sentiments, qualified as “secessionist” because they set religious law before French law, are prevalent among a strong minority of the French Muslim population. But it rejects many far-right conspiracies or outrages. For example, through a voluntary survey (ethnic and religious polling is forbidden in France), it establishes the Muslim population as 5.6 percent of French population aged 15 and above (and 10 percent of those under 25); these figures are significantly lower than those often found on right-wing websites. Half of those Muslims were born French, 24 percent acquired French citizenship, and 26 percent are foreigners. Nine out of ten have a father who was born abroad. Furthermore, the report shatters the very notion of a French “Muslim community” by pointing to the diversity of French Islam, whether one measures it by levels of observance, national origins, or generational divide. It also rues the fact that current Muslim organizations do not adequately represent this diversity. The report’s purpose, additionally, is to ensure the successful integration of French Muslims within France, not to strike alarmist or fatalistic tones. To avoid the trap set by extremists, political discourse must, according to El Karoui, promote and encourage examples of successful French Muslims while building a French Islam that is compatible with national values, locally funded, and representative of the silent majority of its adherents.”
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No, America is not Rome: “By reading back into history today’s milieu and preoccupations, we look into the past but see only ourselves.”
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The story of epilepsy: “Enlightenment about epilepsy existed, at times, in the pre-Enlightenment world; Herodotus, in discussing the illness of Cambyses II, distanced himself from the notion of a ‘sacred disease’; the Hippocratic text On the Sacred Disease is an attack on the very notion of epilepsy as a deity-induced illness. And for all the advancement that has been made, epilepsy retains much of its mystery: considering the visionary, logorrhoeic experiences of Philip K. Dick, Grant writes that ‘all too often it has been assumed that psychiatry offers the best model to describe some of the behaviours and personality changes in temporal lobe epilepsy, but maybe these behaviours have only the appearance of similarity, and something altogether different is going on in the brain’. The book is something of a hybrid; the disease memoir crossed with a more detached journalistic account of the history of a particular condition in history.”
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David Stirling’s SAS: “Their training was uniquely rigorous. Apart from parachuting, it included explosives, map reading, radio operating, first aid (including amputation in the field), navigation and intensive weapon training, memory training and, most daunting of all, night marches of up to 100 miles ‘with full load’. Their first sortie was a complete disaster, largely because of appalling weather conditions which would have caused a less obstinate commander to postpone operations. Of the 55 men who set out, only 21 returned, without having fired a shot or planted a single bomb. But another maverick unit, the Long Range Desert Group took the survivors back to the Eighth Army forward base, and it dawned on Stirling that if the LRDG could get them out from a raid it could equally get them in. Luckily their next raid, on the enemy airfield at Sirte, went much better, in spite of Stirling treading on a sleeping Italian soldier in the dark. Sixty enemy aircraft were destroyed on the ground, 60 enemy killed or wounded and a large ammunition dump blown up, without the loss of a single SAS man.”
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Essay of the Day:
“Give natural history museums back to the grown-ups,” Brian Switek argues in Aeon:
“You’d think that a hall of taxidermied animals would be the epitome of quiet. The animals were all shot, skinned and propped up against idyllic backdrops decades ago, mute muses for visitors ready to lose themselves for a few quiet moments in nature scenes that they will likely never see firsthand. But on this afternoon in the depths of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, the whispers of the wild were drowned out by a different sort of noise. Screeches of ‘Smash it! Smash it!’ bounced off the wood and glass cases as a trio of children jumped and danced across an interactive floor mat, trying to squash as many virtual insects as possible.
“The pixelated mat seemed out of character for a museum conceived to inspire affection for nature, even for the creepy crawlies. A dragonfly is as worthy of wonder as a bull Steller’s sea lion or wolf pack. But the purpose of the mat was all too clear. Tired-looking parents slouched in chairs around the out-of-place stomping ground, staring off or checking their phones as their kids went nuts. Museums were originally meant to be places of inspiration, literally the ‘seat of the Muses’. In our 21st-century interpretation, however, we expect them to function as providers of kid-oriented entertainment more than anything else.
“I wish I could say that the cacophony I encountered in Denver was an isolated case. It’s not. Whenever I visit a natural history museum, especially if I’m intent on seeing the dinosaurs, I try to arrive early and race over to the exhibits before the school groups and strollers are set loose upon the floor. And I’m not alone in my concerns. As I’ve chatted with other museum-goers, the same lament has come up over and over again: as a culture, we’ve been steadily nudging natural history museums to become more like theme parks or the cartoonish restaurant chain Chuck E Cheese’s…If visitors leave with even a chunklet of new knowledge, it’s a win.”
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Image of the Day: Foula Island
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Poem: A. E. Stallings, “Empathy”
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