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Monday, September 16, 2002 |
U.S. Trying to Market Itself to Young Arabs. Washington's effort to convince young Arabs of America's good intentions through a new radio station broadcasting in five Arab nations is failing. By Jane Perlez. [New York Times: Politics]
Gosh, that's a big surprise. After all, why wouldn't they want to come to this country where they could get detained for a day, then asked to leave their medical school just because of what a waitress heard them say?
9:49:58 PM Permalink
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Christianity's New Center
Just read a long piece in the current Atlantic by Philip Jenkins about the shift of Christianity from the northern hemisphere to the southern. Population growth in the southern hemisphere, along with evangelization ensures that within a few decades there will be more Christians in Africa, South America, and Asia, than there are in North America and Europe. The brand of Christianity practices in the southern hemisphere is far more conservative, more hierarchical, and more fundamental than that of the northern hemisphere. Much of the southern hemisphere, with its poverty, has not felt the benefits of science, and so still sees the world as miraculous, the new Christianity will be much the same way. Jenkins points out that Christian turmoil during the reformation gave rise to many of the political, social, and scientific ideas of the last four hundred years, and that these changes in Christianity are likely to have equally dramatic consequences during the centuries to come.
On the Atlantic website, there's also an interview with Jenkins, talking a lot about the coming conflict between Christianity and Islam. The two religions are very evangelical, and no matter what fundamentalists will tell you, are very adaptable. In the decades to come, especially in Africa and Asia, there is likely to be a lot of conflict between these two religions.
This is depressing stuff, for a couple of reasons. First, fundamentalist religion doesn't favor human rights, education, scientific exploration, freedom of expression. Second, as the two religious fundamentalist cultures collide, along with the third culture of reason, I'm afraid we can expect a lot continued repression, poverty, violence. Not a pretty picture.
9:12:34 PM Permalink
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The New Pinker Book
In Nature vs. Nurture, a Voice for Nature. Steven Pinker, a psychologist of language, is trying to make it safer for biologists to theorize about the genetics of human behavior. By Nicholas Wade. [New York Times: Science]
This book is going to get a lot of attention; I have a copy on order. Pinker's "The Language Instinct" and How the Mind Works were very smart, provocative books. I read some of Edwin O. Wilson's "Sociobiology," and most of Stephen J. Gould's attacks on it. Those attacks never really made sense to me; they seemed to be mostly straw man arguments. I hope, as the article states, that Pinker can bring some reason to the discussion. I'm very much looking forward to this book.
There's also a long interview with Pinker at Edge.
The main question is: "Why are empirical questions about how the mind works so weighted down with political and moral and emotional baggage? Why do people believe that there are dangerous implications to the idea that the mind is a product of the brain, that the brain is organized in part by the genome, and that the genome was shaped by natural selection?" This idea has been met with demonstrations, denunciations, picketings, and comparisons to Nazism, both from the right and from the left. And these reactions affect both the day-to-day conduct of science and the public appreciation of the science. By exploring the political and moral colorings of discoveries about what makes us tick, we can have a more honest science and a less fearful intellectual milieu.
7:23:10 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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