First Contact

Ultrasound of twins at 6 weeks (not mine, fyi!)

Question of the week (for me) -- when do people have first contact with their children? I may have seen mine very early on, when I was only about 6 weeks pregnant. I saw two blobs on an ultrasound image, anyway. But was that them--Becky and Sam? 

One thing seems pretty clear--it's not until 20 weeks gestation (very roughly, and at the very least) that a fetus starts to be conscious, so there are no "selves" on the scene before then.  Whatever I saw on the ultrasound at 6 weeks, it wasn't a self.

Another thing seems clear--it takes some pretty advanced properties (e.g. self-awareness) to be a full-fledged person.  It's doubtful that there's a person on the scene until some point after birth.  So whatever I saw on the ultrasound, it was neither a self, nor a person. 

That doesn't directly answer the question, though.  Granted what I saw via ultrasound wasn't a self or a person, it could still have been one of my kids -- i.e. one of my kids before they became selves or persons.

One line of thinking says that makes perfectly good sense.  Over time, we take on and lose lots of properties.  One and the same individual will be a child over part of his lifespan, but an adult over another part.   You're a non-parent for the first many years of your life, and then perhaps become a parent.  You can start off not being an American citizen, and then become a citizen. At some point you may become a lawyer or a doctor or a novelist. 

The fact that a property is profoundly important, making you in some sense who you are, once you have it, doesn't mean that it's literally an essential property--one that you can't exist without.  Not all of our important attributes are "born again" attributes--ones that make a new entity exist, once they come on the scene. So it's not out of the question that the very same individual existed as a zygote, later becoming a self, and still later becomes a person ... an adult, a parent, a citizen, a lawyer, etc. 

Another line of thinking says that once a locus of consciousness (a "self") comes on the scene, there's a new entity there that didn't exist before. Selfhood is indeed a "born again" property: when it emerges, a whole new entity emerges. Or you might say no to that, but yes to personhood being that sort of property.  You might think that whenever a person comes on the scene--a locus of self-awareness--a new entity exists. The old entity--the fetus, immature infant, whatever--is replaced by a numerically different entity, a second entity. 

On the second view, Sam only existed when his locus of consciousness existed (or his locus of self-awareness), so I didn't have first contact when I saw his heartbeat on the ultra-sound image. That wasn't Sam, and the other blob wasn't Becky.

The first view says the change from being a fetus to being a self or person is like metamorphosis.  When a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, one entity isn't replaced by a second entity. This is just change.  Butterflies might be ever so proud of being able to fly (if they could think about it), but they have to live with the fact that once they were caterpillars. Similarly, as profound as it is to be a person or self, selves and person were once upon a time zygotes.

The second views says the change from being a zygote to being a self, or from being an immature infant to being a person, is more like the moment in the fairytale when the frog become the prince.  The prince is (presumably) a whole new entity, not the same entity with new properties.  Only with human development, we have a better scientific understanding of how the dramatic changes takes place. The brain matures to the point that the "lights" are on, and then later the brain supports the power of self-awareness.

The first view is associated with the "animalist" account of personal identity--the view that says humans are essentially organisms.  The second view is associated with the Lockean psychological continuity account of personal identity, the one that most philosophers today accept.  I'm leaning toward ...

No, I won't say!  More on these things later in the week.

Are atheist accommodationists hypocritical?

Jerry Coyne finds philosophers very, very, very vexing when they try to reconcile science and religion.  He suspects it's always "political"--

In my estimation, all atheist philosophers who try to reconcile religion and science are doing so for political reasons—as are organizations like the National Academy of Sciences and the National Center for Science Education that engage in the same activity.  It takes a profound hypocrisy to try to reconcile for others things that you can’t reconcile for yourself.

Don't think so!  It's true that most philosophers (70%) are atheists, and that almost all accept science as an important source of knowledge.  But if you reject theism and accept science, it certainly doesn't follow that you reject theism because you accept science.  You might reject theism for reasons completely independent of the reasons you have for accepting science. In fact, I think that's the state of mind of many philosophers.  Many reject theism because of the argument from evil.  Or they reject theism because none of the usual arguments for God are successful, and they think the default, when it comes to a fanciful construct, is disbelief.  So although they accept no religious propositions themselves, it's genuinely an open question, for them, whether you could accept some, and yet accept all of science.

There's nothing at all unusual about philosophers wondering if A can be reconciled with B, but also rejecting A. Theist philosophers can reasonably wonder whether atheism and objective morality can be reconciled, but of course reject atheism.  That's a first class question for anyone who "does" metaethics--not a question just for those who accept the atheist starting point.  If there were a "political" aspect to the question, for theists, that wouldn't be bad either. Perhaps, though a theist, it bothers you to see your atheist friends being beaten up as morality-challenged.  So you care about and promote the idea that atheism can be reconciled with objective morality, even though the reconciliation plays no role in your own life. Hypocrisy? No, obviously not.

Is it any different when atheists try to stop their theist friends being beaten up as science-challenged?  Of course, if the effort is disingenuous, that's one thing.  Maybe you think your theist friends are science-challenged, and you're just trying to be nice.  But if not, not.  I think what some atheist philosophers believe is that a little bit of religion (certainly not all of it) can be combined with all of science, and that's what they insist upon--not more.  That's not hypocritical or disingenuous. In fact, it might even be the truth.

A Puzzle About Twins

Suppose people start existing on the first day after conception--just suppose.  Here's an argument that seems to show that identical twins must be an exception.  Take Betty and Casey, who come into existence as my diagram depicts--

Jeff McMahan makes this argument--

[Betty and Casey] ... cannot both be identical with the original zygote for, given the transitivity of identity, that would imply that they are identical with each other, which they clearly are not. We must conclude, therefore, that when monozygotic twinning occurs, the zygote that divides thereby ceases to exist and two new zygotes begin to exist at that point ....  What this means is that, even if most adult human organisms begin life at conception, monozygotic twin organisms began to exist somewhat later, when a zygote that began life at conception divided. (Jeff McMahan, The Ethics of Killing, pp. 25-26)

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems most natural to say that there are two entities here, Betty and Casey, with an overlapping stage--Zygote (A).   A is a stage of both Betty and Casey.  Betty isn't identical to A, and Casey isn't identical to A, because A is just a stage.  Nevertheless, A is the first stage in the life of both Betty and Casey.  They start their lives when A begins. 

It seems like lots of things have overlapping stages like this, or at least you can dream up lots of things. Take for example The Two Funerals.  Two funerals take place during the same two-hour time period in a funeral home. The scheduler messed up, and the reception for each takes place in the same room.  Mourners talk to each other about their respective deceased, sign the same guest book, drink from the same wine bottles, etc. Then the two funerals split apart, with services taking place in two separate rooms.  Paralleling McMahan's view of the twins, you'd have to say three funerals took place--the reception-funeral, which ended at the end of the reception, and then the two services that took place in the separate rooms.  But no, surely, there are two funerals, which shared a first stage.

Boy, what fun I could have dreaming up more overlapping events like this.  Two parades start off separate, but merge for 10 minutes, then separate again.  Using McMahan's reasoning, we've got to think there are actually five parades here.  At the merge, the first two come to an end.  Then there's the merged parade. After the merge, another two come into existence.  Five, count 'em, five!

If you think life generally begins on the first day of gestation, it seems to me you can think so for identical twins as well.  But is that what we should think? I would like very much to think about personal identity and gestation without playing abortion-chess--i.e. looking ahead to the implications of various views for abortion ethics.  Most of the time when we're coming to terms with when life begins, we're thinking about a life that continued (our own, our children's lives) or that will continue (a wanted pregnancy). It seems like this ought to be the context for reflection at least some of the time, instead of abortion ethics always being the elephant in the room.

Progress Report

I've been working slowly on a book (well, so far a WORD file) about parenthood. I'm dealing with topics in the order in which people encounter them, so the first several chapters are about the reasons why we have children, whether there are good reasons not to have children, and how choosy we ought to be about the kind of children we have. I'm trying to delve into the most thorny puzzles about these things, while also orienting my writing to an imaginary real person, or real couple.  My intended readers are philosophical parents, or prospective parents, who reflect on their decisions every step of the way.  This is basically a conceit, as they say, but nevertheless ... that's how I'm proceeding.

This week I'm feeling pretty excited for my imaginary reader(s). Finally they've decided to go ahead and have a child and (hurray!) she's pregnant!  Hyper-reflective as always, my imaginary readers are studying up on the day-by-day growth of their baby-to-be.  They quickly start to wonder when their future baby starts to exist.  Is it on the very first day of gestation or later on, or will it only be at birth, or even later than that?  My job is to help them think about this, or possibly even tell them the answer. (Philosophy is hard work ... but somebody's got to do it!)

My goal: to think about this as a question about personal identity, and leave abortion completely out of the picture.  In fact, it would be great to pretend (if only I could) that pregnancies simply cannot be terminated, once they begin. Or it might be good to think about when a life starts in relation to gestation in other species.  We don't have pro-choice or pro-life commitments when it comes to the gestation of kittens.  Maybe it would be good to think about when Kitty starts to exist, instead of when Baby starts to exist.  Or you could think about tree reproduction, and ponder when a particular tree has its first day of life.  Or is there something special about people--so plants and animals start existing earlier, and people later?

Anyhow, that's the subject du jour. See next post for an interesting puzzle.

Faith

Michael Kelly's article about his daughter's marriage in the NYT Style section yesterday was a thing of beauty--try reading it without crying!  He starts with the horror of his daughter's rape 10 years ago and ends with this, on her abiding faith--

Ten years ago, bleeding and alone in the field where she had been left to die at 24, my daughter got up and stumbled to a house in the dead of night. She said later that she felt as if she had been “lifted up by God.” I asked somewhat bitterly where God had been 10 minutes earlier.

In the greatest testament of faith I have ever heard, she calmly replied, “He was there holding my hand.”

Now Eric has taken her hand in marriage, a union that is surely blessed by God.

There's something stupendous about being able to see things this way.  Stupendous, not stupid. To my mind, it's an expression of tenacity, determination, an abiding love of life.  You have to appreciate the psychological power of faith.  I don't have it, for philosophical reasons, but I can be glad for people who do.

Dear NRA

Words can't really express how I feel about yesterday's massacre, considering that I have teenagers I routinely drop off at movie theaters, so I'll just pass on a letter that came into my possession. It's from an NRA fan by the name of I. Amanidiot.

***

Dear NRA,

Consider, please, my little Swiss Army knife.

The US Government forbids me to carry it onto an airplane. This really upsets me.  Knives don't hijack airplanes, people hijack airplanes. I have the right to do what I want on an airplane.  Without my little knife, I can't engage in my favorite hobby, which is whittling dinosaurs.

I have no criminal record. I am a law-abiding citizen. How dare they take away my little knife! I'm outraged.

Some might say --"Well, too bad, we've got to get knives out of the hands of people like the 9/11 hijackers who few planes into buildings, killing thousands of people."  What? They did that, not me! My rights are guaranteed in the second amendment.  See, right there--

I belong to a militia--membership: me. "Our" mission is to carve all the dinosaurs we can, using "our" arms--which would be the knife.  And yet the TSA stops me from bringing it on board, subjecting me to a humiliating search. 

They'll tell you it's to prevent this --

But it's so unfair!  It's my right to have fun in any way I like.

Thank you for all you've done to protect the rights of gun-lovers everywhere.

No matter how many people are massacred with guns, you've stood up for the important thing.  Not this--

 

Jessica Ghawi, age 24

 But the fun of guys like this--

But what about me?  If you get to have assault rifles anywhere you like, you get to have Swiss Army knives on airplanes.  Think about it, it does!

And don't give me that Modus Tollens!

1. If you get to have assault rifles anywhere you like, you get to have Swiss army knives on airplanes.
2. You don't get to have Swiss army knives on airplanes.
3. So you don't get to have assault rifles anywhere you like.

Because, because, because ... well, just because.

Sincerely,

I. Amanidiot

Aristotle on Parenthood

Here are some passages from Aristotle that I've been pondering (all from Nichomachean Ethics Book VIII, Chapter 12). Maybe you'd like to ponder too--

1. A parent is fond of his children because he regards them as something of himself; and children are fond of a parent because they regard themselves as coming from him.
2. The parent regards his children as his own more than the product regards the maker as its own. For a person regards what comes from him as his own, as the owner regards his tooth or hair or anything; but what has come from him regards its owner as its own not at all, or to a lesser degree.
3.  A parent, then, loves his children as he loves himself. For what has come from him is a sort of other himself; it is other because it is separate.

In these passages I see insight, as well as confusion, as well as an error.

First, the insight.  Parents do see their children as "something of themselves," as "coming from them," and as "a sort of other himself."  I think this is really fundamental psychologically, and also relevant to some ethical issues. 

Second, the confusion.  In passage 2, Aristotle makes it seem like our children are "our own" in the way our teeth or hair are.  This would give parents supreme power over their children. You could do anything you wanted to them, like you can do anything you want to your hair.  But in passage 3, he does better--"What has come from him is a sort of other himself; it is other because it is separate." The separateness has to be countenanced in any reasonable story about parent-child ethics.

Third, the error. Aristotle thinks the fact that children come from parents has the same positive meaning for parents and for children (see passage 1), but just less so for children (see passage 2 and later in this chapter)  But not really.  The fact that your child comes from you gives you, as a parent, feelings of power and pride. I did this! But as the child grows up, the fact that she comes from her parents at least sometimes has the opposite significance for her--it generates a feeling of dependence, not power. The child starts to want to be her own person, and not "come from" anyone, while parents will always enjoy the feeling that their children are "something of themselves".

Points off for the confusion and error, but I think the insight is still deep!

Circumcision Debate

Interesting debate here that touches on my post about religious circumcision at several points. Fuzzy picture quality, unfortunately. How to pronounce "Kazez"? Kuh-ZEZ.  Looks exotic, sounds pretty plain vanilla!

Graphing Ideas

This is beautiful, check it out.

What is Feminism?

For lovers of Scottish accents and feisty red-headed girls, nothing could possibly beat the movie Brave. So funny, so heart-warming, so adorable.  And a feminist movie for kids, too!  Let's just say I'm in love.  Funny thing, though-- after the movie I gently queried my two kids, 15 year old boy/girl twins, about the feminist message of the movie, and discovered, to my surprise, that they hadn't noticed any feminist message.  No, the message is about everyone controlling their own fate, whether male or female.  Only (wait, wait!), Merida spends the whole movie challenging rigid gender expectations.  Her devoted mother (voiced superbly by Emma Thomson) is trying to get her to put aside bows and arrows and rock climbing and marry one of the boys competing for the privilege. Merida is fighting against having a girl's standard destiny. Right?  Well, right.

So why the resistance to calling Brave a feminist movie?  I'm shocked, really not so happy, to find hostility toward the word "feminism" in my own house.  At my kids' age, or actually a year younger, I organized an event on feminism at my junior high! I've been a feminist forever.  What is it about the word that turns the young folk off? I can only take my interrogations so far (teenagers, who needs 'em?), so this is speculation, but I think kids today take for granted everything we were fighting for back when I was their age. Of course women can be doctors, lawyers, newscasters (remember when all the anchormen were men?), athletes, soldiers. They can do anything they want, and should get equal pay for equal work, etc. etc.  So the substance of feminism is obvious and uncontroversial.  The problem, then, is ... what?

Speculation: to young people today, "feminism" doesn't actually mean freedom, equality, self-determination, and the like. It surely means that, but also ... (what?) ... I guess making too big a fuss about the wrong things, so being (somehow) a pain in the ass.  A feminist is someone who insists on the word "women" instead of "girls", or tries to outlaw innocent fun like calling people "bitches" or "pussies".   A feminist (in the negative sense) is constantly making a mountain out of a molehill. A feminist is against sex, or something, so allying yourself with feminism is unsexy.

But no--I may have to undertake some stealth indoctrinating over the summer--really a feminist is just someone who is tuned in to the disadvantages that still hold women back, and who wants better for women.  Feminists can disagree about all sorts of stuff.  There's no party line about language or anything else, save fundamentals like equality, self-determination, and the like.

The NYT magazine had an amusing article about feminist comedian Caitlin Moran, author of the book How to Be a Woman. I may have to smuggle that into our house and leave it around. Maybe for the young folks feminism + funny = fine.  We shall see.

Religious Circumcision

picture from www.brityy.org

I am against infant circumcision. That said, I hasten to add that I don't think circumcising boys is the world's greatest crime.  Many circumcised boys have lived to tell the story.  They are not enormously deprived.  Circumcising boys is nothing like "circumcising" girls.  Still--I think the practice is wrong and should stop.

But what if you're Jewish? Don't you have to circumcise your baby boy?  This is what some Jewish groups are saying in response to a German court's recent ruling against religion-based infant circumcision.  You could respond with a general attack on religion, or an attack on religious rationales for suspicious childrearing practices (see Brian Earp for the latter). But I think it's interesting to approach this from a Jewish perspective. Does it really make sense for Jews to insist on infant circumcision?

You might say "of course," since in the bible God does demand circumcision on the 8th day.  But let's have a look at the circumcision chapter of Genesis (17) and consider the meaning of circumcision.  Liberal Jews, at least, ought to agree that it's the meaning that matters, as they are prepared to throw out hundreds and hundreds of biblical injunctions--the bits about banning lepers, stoning people for blasphemy, and the like.  What (we) liberal Jews want to retain is what really matters, not every last line and edict.

The circumcision chapter starts with God making a covenant with Abram and offering him enormous success and prosperity (I got these passages from the Gateway Bible website--they're from the New International translation).

17 When Abram was ninety-nine years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, “I am God Almighty^[a]; walk before me faithfully and be blameless. ² Then I will make my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers.”

³ Abram fell facedown, and God said to him, ⁴ “As for me, this is my covenant with you: You will be the father of many nations. ⁵ No longer will you be called Abram^[b]; your name will be Abraham,^[c] for I have made you a father of many nations. ⁶ I will make you very fruitful; I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. ⁷ I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. ⁸ The whole land of Canaan, where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God. ”

God offers great things, and demands something in return--namely, a sign that Abraham and his descendants will be faithful to the covenant.
 

⁹ Then God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your descendants after you for the generations to come. ¹⁰ This is my covenant with you and your descendants after you, the covenant you are to keep: Every male among you shall be circumcised. ¹¹ You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you. ¹² For the generations to come every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised, including those born in your household or bought with money from a foreigner—those who are not your offspring. ¹³ Whether born in your household or bought with your money, they must be circumcised. My covenant in your flesh is to be an everlasting covenant. ¹⁴ Any uncircumcised male, who has not been circumcised in the flesh, will be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant. ”

Yes, it does say "for the generations to come every male among you who is eight days old must be circumcised," but the very same sentence says "including those born in your household or bought with money from a foreigner--those who are not your offspring."  You cannot say the first half of the sentence is sacred and unchallengeable, and then say the second half is barbaric. The second half presupposes there are slaves in a household and that the head of household is entitled to perform surgery on their genitals.  This is obviously to be rejected by modern people who have a grip on the notion of individual rights and personal autonomy.

Any reasonable, modern approach to this chapter will focus on the main underlying meaning--the covenant--not the exact details as to who should circumcise whom, and when. The meaning becomes more clear a little later in the chapter.  First there is this, which stresses the extraordinary generosity of God. He will even give a child to 90 year old Sarah!

¹⁵ God also said to Abraham, “As for Sarai your wife, you are no longer to call her Sarai; her name will be Sarah. ¹⁶ I will bless her and will surely give you a son by her. I will bless her so that she will be the mother of nations; kings of peoples will come from her.”

¹⁷ Abraham fell facedown; he laughed and said to himself, “Will a son be born to a man a hundred years old? Will Sarah bear a child at the age of ninety?” ¹⁸ And Abraham said to God, “If only Ishmael might live under your blessing!”

¹⁹ Then God said, “Yes, but your wife Sarah will bear you a son, and you will call him Isaac.^[d] I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his descendants after him. ²⁰ And as for Ishmael, I have heard you: I will surely bless him; I will make him fruitful and will greatly increase his numbers. He will be the father of twelve rulers, and I will make him into a great nation. ²¹ But my covenant I will establish with Isaac, whom Sarah will bear to you by this time next year.” 

Now it's Abraham's turn to "give back."  

²² When he had finished speaking with Abraham, God went up from him.

²³ On that very day Abraham took his son Ishmael and all those born in his household or bought with his money, every male in his household, and circumcised them, as God told him. ²⁴ Abraham was ninety-nine years old when he was circumcised, ²⁵ and his son Ishmael was thirteen; ²⁶ Abraham and his son Ishmael were both circumcised on that very day. ²⁷ And every male in Abraham’s household , including those born in his household or bought from a foreigner, was circumcised with him.

This is an amazing passage, if you think about it vividly.  Imagine the slicing (without anaesthia), the blood, the pain--all that, done to a sensitive, pleasure-giving organ.  God gave richly, and these men gave back proportionally.  That's the meaning of circumcision: thanking God and making a commitment to him through pain and sacrifice--of a body part, and the pleasure that it brings.

Now, I don't see how it's possible for circumcision to mean gratitude and commitment unless men undertake it themselves, voluntarily, and with full knowledge of how they will suffer and what they're giving up.  Think about Abraham forcing circumcision on his slaves.  That couldn't possibly have the same meaning as undergoing the procedure himself.  ("No skin off my penis..." you can just about hear him say.) Likewise if adults try to express gratitude and commitment by tying down 8-day-old babies and cutting of their foreskins, there's no meaningful sacrifice being made.  You cannot make a meaningful sacrifice by taking something away from someone else.

So I think Jews should make a modification to the circumcision ritual in just the way they've modified hundreds and hundreds of other biblical injunctions. They should become like Abraham and Ismael, and decide for themselves, at an adult age, whether or not they want to have their foreskins removed. At that point, I predict they will feel just as Abraham and Ismael must have--that a foreskin is kind of a nice thing.  If it's more painful to be circumcised as an adult, then so be it. The pain was part of the meaning of the ritual for Abraham and Ismael. Adult circumcision would be a true sacrifice,  a way to express dedication to God. 

Now of course, if circumcision is done in the style of Abraham and Ismael--to adult males--there's a question whether it will continue.  Jewish boys are happy with Bar Mitzvahs as a rite of passage, and are likely to be a lot less excited about circumcision. In fact, I think once they get to know their foreskins, many are not going to want to give them up. They're going to think "what a crazy, barbaric ritual!"  That part of the bible will then be forgotten, like the parts about banishing lepers and stoning blasphemers.  

That eventuality may make some Jews loathe to replace infant with adult circumcision.  They'll want to get 'em while their helpless, to preempt adult males making "the wrong decision" later on.  But that, clearly, is ethically suspect.  We should do to babies what we think they would want us to do, if we could consult their later adult selves.  That's why we give them vaccinations and force them to go to school, despite their protests.  To perform circumcision on a baby boy just because we think he won't perform it on himself, later on, clearly violates the baby's rights.

So: adult circumcision. That's the way to go, especially if you're circumcising for Jewish reasons.

Jeff

When I taught a course on procreative ethics last year, my students were exposed to all sorts of odd thought experiments.  For example, we talked about a thought experiment devised by Gregory Kavka.  Imagine a couple that uses a sex pill to increase sexual pleasure, with the result that their offspring are born with some minor abnormality.  The intuition is that there's something wrong with this, yet it's hard to explain why. After all, if they didn't use the pill, different children would be born (Kavka attributes this to "the precariousness of existence," which is a simple function of the biology of reproduction). The children born will most likely have lives worth living, and be glad they were born.  The couple doesn't seem to harm the children they create, so what's the problem?  Great puzzle. Only my students titter about the example -- AS IF! Who would do such a crazy thing?

I'm awfully pleased that I've discovered a real-life example that will serve roughly the same purpose.  Meet Jeff (from the ABC news website, always a treasure trove of tabloid trash, mixed in with an occasional news story)--

.... for Jeff, breast-feeding seems to be the act that fulfills his sexual desire.
"I really don't care what people think," Jeff told ABCNews.com. "I grew up to try to be a people pleaser and came to the conclusion that you can't please everyone. It works for us and we are consenting adults. And it helps me be able to perform."
"I can't explain it, but when I breast-feed, it helps strengthen my erection," he says. "When Michelle was pregnant with our son and stopped producing milk and I had to drink regular milk, during that time I was unable to maintain a healthy erection. The first time I breast-fed again, it was awesome."
And that's not his only fetish. Jeff is turned on by getting his wife pregnant and has forbid her to use any kind of birth control, even though both their children were born prematurely and doctors have warned Michelle about potential dangers to her health if she risks another pregnancy.
But his wife is just as into it. "It was very erotic," said Michelle. "Breasts are a central sexual object and milk flowing does not just have to be just for the baby. If there is excess, we might as well make use of it."
Jeff puts the sweet breast milk in his coffee and in his breakfast cereal. He's also into vampires, naming their infant son Khayman from a character in Anne Rice's "Vampire Chronicles." Sometimes he bears his teeth into Michelle's areola and sucks the blood.

I admit, I quoted more of that than strictly necessary. The crucial part is in blue. 

Jeff prioritizes his sexual pleasure, so keeps getting his wife pregnant, even though the resulting children are born premature (and her health is threatened--not the key point, but certainly a strike against him). The question is why he and his wife are guilty of anything, as far as their offspring are concerned.  I do think they are, but it isn't easy to explain why. In fact there's a huge ethics literature with relevance to this question.

Kavka's article is here, and the debate about these issues is presented in a powerpoint here ("Kavka"). Next time I teach this course, we may have to talk about Jeff!

Beautiful World

I had my musical interlude, now it's time for natural beauty.  (This is what happens when you try to read an excruciatingly boring book--there have to be a lot of interludes. To protect the innocent, I won't be saying who wrote the book.)  The picture, with credits, is from Jerry Coyne's blog, and he credits it to Jens Kolk.

The Rifle's Spiral

Musical interlude.  At first I thought Port of Morrow was a tad bland, but I've come to love it. No--to be honest!--I'm obsessed with it. James Mercer's voice is perfectly warm and melodious, but with hints of edginess. Reminds me of something from the 60s--but for the life of me I can't think exactly what. 

Conservatives are Happier?

So says Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute in today's New York Times--

WHO is happier about life — liberals or conservatives? The answer might seem straightforward. After all, there is an entire academic literature in the social sciences dedicated to showing conservatives as naturally authoritarian, dogmatic, intolerant of ambiguity, fearful of threat and loss, low in self-esteem and uncomfortable with complex modes of thinking. And it was the candidate Barack Obama in 2008 who infamously labeled blue-collar voters “bitter,” as they “cling to guns or religion.” Obviously, liberals must be happier, right?

Wrong. Scholars on both the left and right have studied this question extensively, and have reached a consensus that it is conservatives who possess the happiness edge. Many data sets show this. For example, the Pew Research Center in 2006 reported that conservative Republicans were 68 percent more likely than liberal Democrats to say they were “very happy” about their lives. This pattern has persisted for decades. The question isn’t whether this is true, but why.

Many conservatives favor an explanation focusing on lifestyle differences, such as marriage and faith. They note that most conservatives are married; most liberals are not. (The percentages are 53 percent to 33 percent, according to my calculations using data from the 2004 General Social Survey, and almost none of the gap is due to the fact that liberals tend to be younger than conservatives.) Marriage and happiness go together. If two people are demographically the same but one is married and the other is not, the married person will be 18 percentage points more likely to say he or she is very happy than the unmarried person.

The story on religion is much the same. According to the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, conservatives who practice a faith outnumber religious liberals in America nearly four to one. And the link to happiness? You guessed it. Religious participants are nearly twice as likely to say they are very happy about their lives as are secularists (43 percent to 23 percent). The differences don’t depend on education, race, sex or age; the happiness difference exists even when you account for income.

Whether religion and marriage should make people happy is a question you have to answer for yourself. But consider this: Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.

There's something really misleading about this. Based on the first paragraph, you'd think Brooks was reporting that being conservative makes people more happy. But no--the finding is that conservatives are more happy, and the explanation is that they're more happy because they're more married and more religious.  (The rest of the article doesn't offer any other answer.)  The obvious question, then, is whether there's a difference between married, religious liberals and married, religious conservatives. Too bad he provides no answer!  Strange story--for some reason the NYT editors thought it was good to present this as a story about politics when it's entirely a story about religion and marriage.

Bullying

I've been on the road a lot in the last month, so away from a full-size computer. For rest and relaxation, I've been on Twitter quite a bit. Hey, it's fun compressing messages! Except some things are too complicated to talk about in tiny bursts. Like Bullying.  Someone started a Twitter hashtag, #FTBullies, meant to call attention to bullying at Free Thought Blogs. If you don't define your terms carefully, the accusation seems absurd.  If you do define your terms, then...well, yes, it certainly goes on at some of these blogs (not all) and of course at many other blogs as well.

So, definition time. I think bullying in this context is not aimed primarily at inflicting suffering. The point of it is not really personal, but to quickly excise certain claims that are deemed "beyond the pale." To accelerate the excision, the usual methods of persuasion--argumentation, evidence, reasoning--are set aside, and new methods are employed.  To bully a claim off the table, you do things like:  deleting comments, editing comments, mocking, straw-manning, piling on, insulting, and generally making life unpleasant for the person who made the claim.  They then withdraw, and the claim vanishes. Wonderful.

Now, it's kind of bad calling this "bullying" because bullying is always bad, by definition.  Non-rationally driving a claim off the table is occasionally just fine.  I don't think we need to spend time talking people out of just anything they might say. Sometimes speed is of the essence. Sometimes we don't want to dignify a claim, or the person making the claim, by putting a lot of time and energy into a rational refutation.  Back when I was blogging at Talking Philosophy, I once deleted the comments of some Holocaust deniers who dropped by for "rational debate." No thanks.  I've closed threads here when I thought people were saying things not worth discussing.  But it takes a lot for me to do that.  The last time I did so someone was challenging the idea that women are raped more than men. Not. Worth. My. Time.

There's a problem, though, if a blog community sets the parameters so that the permitted claims fall within a relatively narrow range, and a very wide range of claims are subject to being bullied off the table. That's my problem with some Free Thought Blogs, some of the time, but also with lots of other blogs. That's the thing about blogs--they tend to be micro-communities in which everyone agrees about the vast majority of what's up for discussion. They do tend to try to preserve ideological conformity by using bullying techniques a lot.  I've noticed that in many different blog communities--not just atheist blogs, but also blogs dealing with animal rights and also blogs about feminism.  This is observed, documented, and made much of in Cass Sunstein's book Going to Extremes: How Like Minds Unite and Divide.

The only reason it's worth observing that this sometimes goes on at some Free Thought Blogs and at other atheist blogs is that it's especially ironic, given that these blogs aspire to open, reasoned debate.  When a debate topic is within the narrow parameters of permitted disagreement people are plenty open and reasonable, but otherwise ... often not.

Will I be giving examples? No. I'm not naming names either. That's a fool's errand and a waste of time.  Please keep comments on a general level. What is blog-bullying? Is it always bad? Is it just a way of quickly excising "horrid" claims, or is there more to the psychodynamics?  That's the kind of thing I'm trying to talk about here.

The Freeloader Argument

Hurray for the Supreme Court's decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, but now there will be increased zeal to strike down Obama himself and elect Romney, who wants to repeal it.  President Obama really needs to get out there and sell Obamacare, and especially the individual mandate, in a way that speaks to conservatives, not just liberals. It's all wrong to think the individual mandate is a nanny-state provision that forces rugged individualists to take care of themselves.  Quite the opposite--it reins in freeloaders who are poised to take advantage of emergency rooms, but don't want to pay for the safety net until they actually land in it. This is like refusing to pay for the fire department until you have a fire, or refusing to pay for the safety net at the circus, until you actually fall off the high wire.  It's also like not having your kids vaccinated, because all the other kids at school are vaccinated. As it stands, people without insurance are ripping off the rest of us, and they shouldn't be allowed to continue.  See? It's an argument that appeals to a sense of fairness, not to the compassion that the anti-Obama conservatives are so evidently missing.   It could easily be done--Republicans against the ACA could be cast as letting freeloaders get away with continuing to rip us all off.  Compassion is part of the argument for other provisions in the ACA, but Obama needs to make the freeloader argument to get conservatives to shut-up about the individual mandate, and its alleged assault on our freedoms. We shouldn't have the freedom to be freeloaders.  That's what Obama needs to say ... over, and over, and over again.

The American Atheists' Harassment Policy

While we all wait to find out what the Supremes think of the Affordable Care Act, let's have a look at the Harassment Policy hammered out by American Atheists in the wake of the recent online brouhaha about such things.  Here's the core of the policy--

That all sounds exactly right. [Update10:10 am:  Is there stuff to quibble with? I just read this, and maybe so, but it strikes me as being mostly on the right track.]

Another part of the policy really ought to be removed. This is just plain silly:

You are encouraged to ask for unequivocal consent for all activities during the conference. No touching other people without asking. This includes hands on knees, backs, shoulders—and hugs (ask first!). There are folks who do not like to be touched and will respect and like you more if you respect their personal space.

What exactly is wrong with negotiating these things as we do the rest of the time--by paying attention to non-verbal cues?  It's better that way, most of us think.  We don't go through life constantly asking "I haven't seen you for a long time--may I hug you?"  Or "I'd like to show solidarity and sympathy--may I touch your arm as I say this next sentence?"  We don't, because (let us count the problems)--

(1) If we explicitly asked, then we'd put the person we want to touch/hug in the awkward position of having to say "no" if they don't want to be touched/hugged.  It would have been so much more thoughtful to notice the cues and not call attention to their sensitivity.

(2) If we had to explicitly ask, we'd ruin spontaneity--so most of us would just do less touching and hugging.

(3) If we asked, it would highlight what is better left subterranean--that touching has some mild sexual undertones, touching is ever so slightly intimate, touching can be gross to some people, some people may find me in particular gross.

If I were thinking of going to an American Atheists convention (to be honest, I am not), I'd find it off-putting to be told how to negotiate touching ("no touching other people without asking") or even just be "encouraged to ask for unequivocal consent." This crosses the line from what's the conference's business (all the stuff in the box above) to what's not.  It's up to me, I think, how I handle the vast number of decisions that are in the realm of etiquette, not law or even ethics.  I'd be appalled if a conference organizer issued instructions about what to say after belching, whether and when to hold doors for other people, when to address someone by their first name, etc.  It's paternalistic and infantilizing -- suitable for managing a bunch of 10 year olds, but not for running a conference attended by adults.

And no, it doesn't help that David Silverman has added that he wants people to have sex at American Atheist conferences.  There's something a little weird going on when it's seen as GRRRREAT!!!! for people to have casual hook-ups, but a serious infraction (worthy of being addressed in a conference policy) to touch someone without first asking permission. Yes, sexual touching without permission is a serious infraction (the boxed policy is all to the good), but mere casual touching and hugging between acquaintances?

I'm struck by the contrast with religious communities.  In a religious community, there is constant touching between acquaintances.  For example, the reform Jewish temple I attend (infrequently) is an extremely touchy place.  Before, during, and after the service you see constant physical interaction.  Ask permission? You've got to be kidding.  There is also a lot of synchronization--people stand up and sit down at the same times during the service. All this synching and touching is part of feeling collective joy, sorrow, etc.--all feelings evoked at times by a religious service. But sex? Well, it's kind of a special thing, reserved (at least ideally) for special relationships. It's a strange inversion to make a big deal of casual touching, putting it on a verbal-permission-only basis, while encouraging casual sex.  That sounds like a recipe for killing off solidarity in a community while ramping up private titillation.  With rules like that, I should think, "things fall apart, the center cannot hold."

***

Supreme court decision is now out.  It looks like ... YESSSSS!  Good news. More on that later.

Mothers at Work

On a recent trip I had a chance to read Anne-Marie Slaughter's much-discussed Atlantic article on working mothers. She says many things that need to be said. For example: we must acknowledge the importance children have for women (and men) and accommodate the demands of parenthood in the workplace.  One nice new point Slaughter makes is that this is no different from accommodating the schedule of a marathon runner or an orthodox sabbath observer. Lots of things prevent people from constantly being "on call" at work, and parenthood is no less respectable than other things competing for our energy and attention. 

I'm baffled why the article has (apparently) drawn a lot of fire. It strikes me as being thoughtful and commendable, if just a bit "safe" -- as if written by a committee and carefully polished by a public relations firm.  But major criticisms?  I don't have any, but do think there's something facile about the reasoning in this one passage--

Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.

It's a lovely thought, but I think Slaughter is overlooking the fact that sometimes putting X ahead of Y means really not having the time and energy to be fully committed to Y. It would be the same with a marathon runner who is constantly training, so only able to work very limited hours. Or someone who chooses novel-writing over lawyering, so rarely shows up in the office.  A choice can be praiseworthy without necessarily being compatible with hiring and retention. This is the cruel and tragic truth.  I don't think there's always a societal solution ("Ultimately, it is society that must change...") to the sort of quandaries people face when they greatly value both X and Y, and there's no practical way to choose them both.  Some of our problems are really our problems, not "society's" (duh).

Maybe it's a noble lie that society must change, that it's always a question of workplaces needing to do more to accommodate choosing family over work.  If we go around telling that lie, workplaces will do more, and at least more women will be able to continue to work. I want that to happen because I'm thrilled when I see more women in top positions. But if you're interested in the whole truth and nothing but the truth, I think you have to admit that the parenting urge can sometimes take you so far from full time work that retention is basically impossible.

A more plausible point here would be that choices to focus on family not work don't usually last forever.  Employers could do a lot more to welcome back people who have temporarily decided to be full-time parents.

The Dark at the End of the Tunnel

I've been meaning to read James Atlas's book My Life in the Middle Ages for a long time.   I'm finally reading it (well, listening) because  a lot of things are conspiring to make me think about aging, the passage of time, and ... death.  Amazon reviewers complain that Atlas does a lot of moaning, whining, and wallowing. He's self-indulgent in the face of things that everyone has to go through.  But then again, if you start thinking about "life in the middle ages" you just do wind up in a whiny, wallowing state. What else would you want in a book on this subject?  With any luck, he'll whine and wallow in some interesting way.  Or he'll be just 2-3% more whiny and self-indulgent than me, so I'll get a chance to feel superior. This cannot help but go reasonably well, I think.  Anyhow, I'm 2/3 of the way through and find the guy good pretty good company. 

Speaking of time and aging and kids growing up and resentment and all that ... another book about these things, but more upbeat (ultimately) is Jennifer Egan's book A Visit from the Goon Squad. In her picture, much really bad crap in life gets redeemed, whereas in Atlas's memoir, crap is just crap.  Goon Squad is an ingenious "puzzle" book -- as in, it's a book that reader has to figure out, and the figuring out is very satisfying. 

Tree Notes

Addenda to my recent post about trees.

1.  There's an amusing and alarming chapter on naming rights in Michael Sandel's generally amusing and alarming book What Money Can't Buy.  I thought of it when I kept on seeing signs like the one below in redwood groves in Jedediah Smith State Park. 

2.   Here Russell Blackford segues from my recent tree post to an interesting (and sympatico) thing he wrote about respect. By the way, the petite person in the sequoia picture is my daughter.

3.  Everyone seems to be talking about plant ethics.  Gary Francione and Gary Marder debate plant ethics here.  Marder makes some pretty wild claims about plant "awareness"--

As I have pointed out, contemporary research in botany gives us ample reasons to believe that plants are aware of their environment in a nonconscious way—for instance, thanks to the roots that are capable of altering their growth pattern in moving toward resource-rich soil or away from nearby roots of other members of the same species. To ignore such evidence in favor of a stereotypical view of plants as thing-like is counterproductive, both for ethics and for our understanding of what they are.

Plants are "aware in a non-conscious way," Marder claims.  How's plant "awareness" different from plants simply being responsive?  Plants are certainly highly responsive to their environments.  The book I'm reading about trees (The Trees in My Forest, by Bernd Heinrich) makes it clear they're much, much more responsive than you would imagine.  Still, why speak of "awareness"?  "Aware in a non-conscious way" may be a concept with some application, but arguably only to things that can also be aware in a conscious way.  For example, it might be okay to say that someone seeing a red spot on the wall via blindsight is aware of the spot's color in a non-conscious way.  I don't see anything but confusion arising from talking about the non-conscious awareness of trees.

4.  Big, big, big mystery: for some reason trees can achieve all the responsiveness they need without any consciousness (or awareness).  It's only when an organism starts being able to move around from one environment to another that (evidently) mere responsiveness is not enough, and it's more adaptive to have a brain with conscious awareness.  Locomotion and consciousness go hand in hand.  That's not something you would have expected, a priori, but seems pretty likely to be true.

5.  The search for plant consciousness. Evidently it has a long history.

6.  I wrote a paper recently about whether experimentation on the great apes should be prohibited (it will appear in Current Debates in Bioethics, to be published by Wiley-Blackwell). One of my arguments is that we can value something over saving human lives, even without attributing rights to that thing.  My example was that trees along French boulevards are preserved, even though it's well known that they cause fatal traffic accidents.  On my trip through redwood country, I discovered a better example.

Along the roads in Jedediah Smith State Park there are colossally big, thousand year old redwoods protruding right into the road. There are warning reflectors affixed to them, and they probably cause some number of fatalities every decade.  It's defensible that we should keep these trees, even at that cost.  Obviously we do so because we value redwoods, not because the trees have rights.  Likewise it's possible to mount an argument for ending the use of chimpanzees in biomedical research without having to get into any perplexing talk of their having rights.  Of course chimapanzees, unlike trees, do have feelings like pleasure and pain, so we have further reasons to be concerned about how we treat them.  But the mandate to spare their lives doesn't have to rest on a rights argument.

Blaming the Victim?

What is it with the atheist online community in the summertime?  Last summer "elevatorgate" was endlessly discussed. This summer there's another brouhaha, also involving the treatment of women. Three years ago there was another interminable debate about very, very little.  You might be forgiven for suspecting that the no-God hypothesis leaves atheists with not enough "meat" on their plates, though it should be said that some atheists do manage to write on real topics, day in and day out.  I periodically criticize Jerry Coyne for some position or other, but he's always writing about something interesting.

Anyhow, I'm paying attention to the latest scandal for only one reason: because it's about the alleged sins of DJ Grothe, and listening to him on Point of Inquiry for a couple of years made me think the world of him.  His alleged crime, in a nutshell, is making this argument (I will number the steps for clarity):

 (1) Some people in the online atheist community have been talking about the mistreatment of women at atheist meetings out of proportion with how frequently mistreatment occurs.  It doesn't occur frequently at all, if you go by a survey of 800+ attendees conducted by DJ at The Amazing Meeting (TAM) last summer.

(2) This disproportionate talk of mistreatment may be scaring women away from further meetings (like this summer's TAM), and gratuitously so, given how frequently mistreatment actually occurs (see (1)).  Thus, the way people are trying to reduce mistreatment is interfering with the separate goal of increasing female representation at meetings.

Now, you could criticize this argument.  About (1), you might say that the survey measured mistreatment at just one meeting, and that it was a singular meeting, coming (as it did) so soon after the elevatorgate controversy. About (2), you could say that it's only possible that all the talk is reducing attendance at this summer's TAM.  That's speculative, and DJ doesn't have proof.

Fine, criticisms like that wouldn't be untoward (which is not to say I find them conclusive). But instead what we see is piles and piles of ... horse excrement.  I don't really want to spend too much time wading through it, so will just pluck out a few examples.  One is the accusation that, by making claims (1) and (2), DJ is guilty of the sin of "blaming the victim."

This is just weird.  Surely it does sometimes happen that people talk about mistreatment of Xs out of proportion to how often it occurs, and this can scare away Xs.  Worrying about this -- and speaking out about it -- can't possibly be out of the question.  If that does sometimes occur, could it possibly be taboo to try to tamp down the excessive talk, to make a plea for proportionality?  No, it really can't.

And when you do point out disproportionality and worry about possible negative consequences, no, you're not "blaming the victim" within the usual meaning of that phrase. You're not blaming victims for being victims.  The blame has got to be about overgeneralization or extrapolation or spurious inferences.  Or perhaps the complaint is about other people, people who are not victims at all, who make it seem as if there are far more victims than there really are.  This worry about disproportional talk and overgeneralization is perfectly consistent with taking injustice to individual victims very, very seriously. All signs are that DJ Grothe does (and I certainly do).

Saying (1) and (2) should have been possible in a community of so-called "skeptics".  People who claim to care about reasoning and data should have taken notice of the survey data that was the foundation of DJ's argument. But no, it's seldom mentioned in the endless discussions at blogs. A rational debate about (1) and (2) could have taken place, but was instead pre-empted by all sorts of histrionics, like demands for DJ's resignation, accusations that he doesn't care about harassment, ludicrous charges about his being gay and being out of sympathy with women, etc. etc.

Good heavens. If I were a religious person, I'd keep close track of what passes for reasonable discussion at atheist blogs and I'd be laughing my head off.  As it is, I'm doing some laughing, but also shaking my head in disbelief. OK, back to trees ....

Thinking About Trees

I'm back from two weeks in northern California, which I spent thinking about two things--(1) trees, and (2) why (on earth) I don't live in northern California.  What a fantastic place.

We started in San Francisco and then drove over the Golden Gate bridge to Sausalito and up the coast to Point Reyes seashore and then to the redwood state and national parks near Oregon, with a couple of nights of camping in Jedediah Smith State Park. OK, I confess -- a couple went from 3 to 2 because we couldn't face putting up a tent in the pouring rain on the first night.  Anyhow, trees.  Wow, redwoods are big!

I got really fascinated with these trees, so acquired a nice little library of books about trees on the road.  First came Coast Redwoods: A Natural and Cultural History, from which I learned about "burls" and "fairy rings."  A redwood deals with the threat of destruction by developing this growth called a "burl" (do other trees do this too?).  This is a big protrusion that looks sort of like tree ooze, or even a tumor. Inside the burl there are thousands of dormant buds.  When the "stem tip" (not sure what that means) of a tree is severely damaged, the buds "wake up" and send shoots down to the base of the tree.  A group of trees then grow in a circle around the original tree, all clones of the original.  This is known as a "fairy ring" or "sprouting ring."  Once I learned about fairy rings I got just a big obsessed with finding them, and they seemed to be all over the place.  Lots and lots of redwoods grow in circles.

Having fallen in love with redwoods, I wanted to test my fidelity by seeing some sequoias too, but that's jumping ahead.  From Jedediah we headed south through wine country (where we discovered not more trees, and not wine, but perfect cappuccino in towns like Calistoga).  We headed further south to Monterrey and then over to Salinas to visit the John Steinbeck museum and e.b. ("eyeball") the vast vegetable farms.  Picking up an armload of Steinbeck books in the museum bookstore (to be exact: one for me, one for my daughter, three for my husband, none for my son), I read this wonderful paragraph by Steinbeck in Travels with Charley:

"Respect--that's the word."  Interesting thought, much in line with Paul Taylor's well-known book Respect for Nature.  Taylor thinks living things have a "good of their own" and this entitles them to our respect.  If you're steeped in Kantian talk about the prerequisites of respect, you might find this very odd.  What?  Respect a tree, when trees lack our self-awareness?

But wait--even Kant respected things without self-awareness. “Two things fill me with wonder,” he famously said, “the starry sky above and the moral law within.” OK, he just said "wonder" here, but I have the feeling "wonder" means something like "awe" and "awe" means something like "respect".  Note how Steinbeck puts these things in one package--"The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect."

My loyalty was rigorouly tested by the sequoias.  After e.b.-ing lots of vegetables in Salinas, we headed back to the coast and drove down to Morro Bay.  Suitably awed by the large rock in the bay (and the unexpected but also sort of awesome power plant), we headed west to Yosemite National Park, stopping to enjoy the avocado orchards and assorted dramatic landscapes on the way. Sequoias are -- humongous, ginormous ... you seem to need new words to describe them.  But burls and fairy rings? No!  There is also something singular about the height of redwoods, their completely erect posture, and how far you have to look to find their branches.  "One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns" ...

I'm going with the idea that respecting trees does make sense, but we've got to reject one idea about respect if we're going to apply the concept this way.  Kant and Taylor both see respect as an equalizer. If you respect X and respect Y, then you've got to respect them equally. If your respect dictates you have to protect X, then you have to protect Y to the same degree.  In my book about respect for animals, I reject that sort of egalitarianism as it applies to members of different animal species, and you're going to be even more obliged to reject it if you think trees and other plants are owed respect.

Speaking of the trees in my backyard, Steinbeck says something very funny about Texas.

Yes, some people never make it out.  Or rather, they make it out, but then they return.  I shouldn't complain.  There's actually a creek behind our house, lined with trees. I have never bothered to take a close look at them, but there are some cottonwoods that blow tufts all over the place.  Once back in San Francisco, we went to the famous City Lights book store and I got a very lovely book by super-nature-writer Bernd Heinrich called The Trees in My Forest.  Turns out ordinary trees (as well as vines, bushes, and little ground plants) do some pretty extraordinary things.  I also learned more about redwoods from him -- like how one can speculate that they got so big to avoid the rapacious appetites of dinosaurs. Cool.

Last but not least, and not on a tree-ish subject, some "bests" and "worsts":  best restaurants on our trip were Greens and Lulu Restaurant, both in San Francisco, Good Harvest Cafe in Crescent Bay, and The Galley in Morro Bay. Most dubious accommodations: Curry Village, the refugee camp-like tent city in Yosemite.  Better to book as early as possible and grab yourself a campsite or room at the lodge. Best avocado orchard: near Morro Bay. Coolest coast walk: Point Lobos near Monterrey.  Most insanely rich but picturesque town: Carmel.  Best family-style restaurant chain with great pie: The Black Bear. Best spooky location for trying to watch the transit of Venus (but the clouds got in the way): the lighthouse near Crescent City.

Just a few more trees and we'll be done:

Brief Reviews

This blog's soon going to go silent for a little while, but first a few book notes --

What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, by Michael Sandel, is really a terrific book, despite the fact that it's almost all "data", with very little "theory".  Most of the book is a journalistic account of what all we can now buy.  It's is stuffed with amazing examples.  Sandel thinks we should be troubled on grounds that commodification leads to unfairness and corrosion of values.  A key concept running through the book is that market values crowd out other values. Lots and lots of food for thought here.

Last Man on Tower, by Aravind Adiga.  The White Tiger was fantastic, so I had high hopes for Adiga's latest novel.  Unfortunately, it's a bit slow and too long and linear.  Obscure analogy, which can only be appreciated if you've read all four of these books:  Rohinton Mistry's book A Fine Balance is to his next book Family Matters as White Tiger is to Last Man on Tower.  I just know that's not going to show up on the SATs anytime soon.  After Mistry wrote A Fine Balance, an utterly gripping novel about poverty, he turned to the quieter topic of middle class families and housing.  Adiga made exactly the same transition.