My Name is My Name: Four of my Favorite Clips from The Wire

I have a new favorite show. Sadly, (if predictably) I’m late to the party and it was over before I started. But I am willing to careen into hyperbole and deem “The Wire” the best television drama of all time.

Now, it took me a while to warm up to The Wire. After each of the first three discs (4 episodes each) I gave up on it. But critical acclaim and repeated urgings from people I respect made me give it second, third and fourth chances. But by the end of the first season I was all in.



I eventually came to realize that the very thing that made the series difficult to get into was the thing that made it transcendent. It is a character driven exploration of human nature. In order to tell real, sustentative, narratives about textured, carefully crafted, characters that behave consistently and ‘ring true,’ we had to get to know them. But once we knew them, they were worth knowing. I didn’t anxiously await each disc to see how the writers would resolve some contrive plot cliff hanger[1]…I stayed up late watching ‘one more episode’ because I wanted to see who these people became.

And then there was Baltimore. I have said all I have to say about art that has a sense of place, but the wire is the prototype. Baltimore is as textured and gorgeous, despite and because of its grit[2] and decay as Omar, Freamon, Snoop or Stringer Bell[3].

It is impossible to summarize the series in a post. Do I write about the moments that left me stunned and literally breathless?[4] Do I write about the grief I felt as ‘the game’ claimed character after character with brutal capriciousness and with indiscriminate ferocity? Do I describe the pervasive corruption in the police, politics and press that mirror the wickedness of the street which succeeded in skirting a preachy and false moral equivalency while illustrating the pervasive fallenness of our condition despite our circumstances? Do I pick out the hilarious moments like the British actor who plays Jimmy practicing a bad British accent or every single monologue by Sgt Landsman that registered a 7.5 on the rictor scale of crassness but managed to be not only hysterical, but sublime? No idea. So I thought I’d just post a little commentary on four clips that contain four of my favorite quotes.

Quote #1 - Dan, my preaching partner, and I could not be more different musically. I openly mock him for his love of Sheryl Crowe and he has declared that my indifference for James Taylor is my most glaring personality disorder. But we agree that The Wire is probably the best television show ever…which makes it awkward that we both love a show we cannot recommend in the college ministry we serve.[5] Plus, we both love to illustrate our preaching with our favorite art, and can almost always think of a perfect Wire clip that is totally unusable. But this clip I plan to use.[6]



“You want it to be one way…but it’s the other way.”

There may not be a better summary of Genesis 3.[7]

Quote #2 And while we are talking about Marlo…Marlo is probably the most chilling character in the series. He is devastatingly understated…almost emotionless. Which is what made this scene so powerful:



“My name is my name”[8]

That there is Marlo’s longest monologue of the show and the clearest insight we get into who he is.

Quote #3 Then there was Omar. Omar was, rightfully, the show’s most beloved character.[9] Picking a best Omar scene is almost impossible. But this one was great[10]:



“I shot the boy mike mike in his hind parts, that all.”

Quote #4 Finally, for all of great narrative and characters, The Wire was most powerful when it cashed in those narratives and characters to make some of the most powerful and precise observations about human nature I have encountered in contemporary small screen art. This is most compelling when the ‘heroes’ talk about ‘the job.’



““The job will not save you Jimmy.”

[11] ‘Righteousness’ can be as destructive as ‘wickedness.’ ‘The job’ can destroy you as sure as ‘the game.’[12] Tim Keller could have written this scene.

And a few more….



This post was written while listening to the Ivoryline Pandora station.
________________________

[1] Seriously, I loved Lost as much as the next guy, but I often felt manipulated.
[2] I am going to skip the whole ‘white guilt’ discussion. There were aspects of the wire that I appreciated because it drew attention to the ‘corner’ culture that my Buffalo kids interacted with. But The Wire isn’t great because of it provides a voyeuristic expose on urban life…the wire is great because it told stories that rung true and connected with my experiences of beauty and brokenness.
[3] Its funny how everyone else can be identified by a single name, but it takes two for “Russell.”
[4] E.g. the simultaneous tenderness and coldness of the Chris/Snoop executions. Or, one of my favorite scenes has two Baltimore drug dealers listening to Prairie Home Companion on their way to NY and one of them starts fiddling with the radio as the station begins to cut out. He thought it was broken. He’d never been far enough away from his corner to realize that radio stations are not static entities.
[5] I have written repeatedly about my frustration with HBO’s gratuitous exploration of ‘boob shots’ in what is otherwise excellent, nuanced, art. Also, I usually have a very high tolerance for words with social taboo, but I found myself thinking in a new and colorful vocabulary after banging through a couple discs of this show. Don’t get me wrong, the dialogue is amazing and the language is perfectly apt and believable, but there is one famous episode where the ‘dialogue’ consists of 38 F-bombs in a row (in about 3 minutes).
[6] I’m going to use the middle scene in the convenient store.
[7] Which I am preaching in the fall.
[8] One of the things I love about it is how it makes sense of a seemingly insignificant detail from a former season (this was always happening). There is a great scene when Marlo is in a power struggle with Bodie and decides to assimilate rather than destroy him. He walks up to Bodie and gets his name wrong a couple times. Bodie, responds “You know my name.” This all reminds me of the theme of Yahweh’s name and the demons asking Jesus his name and visa versa in the first and second testaments. It is the classic example of an illustration that ‘cuts the wrong way’ but there is a really interesting parallel here regarding name and power.
[9] SPOILER ALERT – IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE WHOLE SERIES DO NOT READ THIS FOOTNOTE– Nothing in this show was more controversial than Omar’s death. And, I felt outrage…because he was, in some ways, the show’s moral center. “A man has got to have a code.” But Omar had to die, and die unceremoniously, and pass without fanfare. That was the point. We loved Omar, because we knew him, but in the end, he was just another body. The rules were that ‘the game’ could and would claim everybody and an honorable life did not assure you an honorable death. Oh, and he was my favorite gay character in any art…ever.
[10] Though almost ruined by the overacting of the defense attorney.
[11] I think Freamon is my favorite character.
[12] There is an echo of this with Daniels, who has his S#$% together more than Jimmy, but still worships ‘the job’. ‘The job does not love you,’ in the mouth of his wife could be a straight up Keller Quote.

Fragments and Links 9: Zombies, Sex, Science, and the Creative Process (but not at the same time)

So, this is my 100th post…so I thought I’d do a Fragments and Links post to celebrate. Every once in a while I like to collect ideas, quotes and links that did not warrant their own post. This is one of those times. I like to start sentences with the phrase “speaking of…” to give the illusion of connection and coherence. But mainly it is just a bunch of things I think are interesting. Skimming is recommended:

Topic 1: Sex and Zombies (but not at the same time[1])

The OK Cupid blog[2] is worth checking out. The author has access to the data from a major dating site and essentially mines it for statistically interesting observations.[3] And some of them are VERY interesting.[4]

But this one was particularly interesting. He chose several questions that you might want to ask on a first date to get at information that is inappropriate to ask, looking for highly correlated information that it is socially acceptable to ask about.

For example, do you want to know if your date would consider sex with you on the first date but don’t have the bad manners to ask? Ask “do you like the taste of beer?” Answers to these questions are amazingly highly correlated.



The analysis gets more bizarre from there. But one question was particularly interesting: “Are you religious?”

Try to guess the correlated question. ...got it?

Here it is: “Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you?” I was crestfallen. Seriously? People of faith (and presumably, Christians, as it is an American data set) are marked by their legalism and attention to behaviors that don’t matter? So lame. But wait, the question COUNTER-correlates. People of faith are significantly LESS likely to care about spelling and grammar mistakes. This was refreshing to me and should not be surprising to the frequent readers of this blog.

Speaking of having sex on the first date…my brother has documented some of his thoughts on the economics of modern sexuality and how it has been characterized by the “de-unionization of women.” It is a sober analysis (particularly for the father of two girls), but I have two favorite quotes:

“The functional value of male sex is zero.”
“this meant that the R&D cost of switching partners was high”

Speaking of my brother, he has a talk in which he asks the listeners to vote on the following question: Are we are mostly composed of “nature” or “personality”? (i.e. are we more like other humans or more uniquely ourselves)[5]: I think that this needs to be considered in that discussion.

Now I am an unapologetic facebook apologist, but while we are recognizing its flaws, it seems like this needs to be cited.



So as a Buffy fanboy, the current vampire craze leaves me with a “been there done that an order of magnitude better” feeling. But I have recently made a surprising entre into the zombie world. John Green’s opening chapter (which he reads in the below vid) of his zombie apocalypse novella is nothing short of gorgeous:



He released the complete novella “Zombicorns” online with the disclaimer that it is horrible. I disagree.[6] I really liked it. And you can bang it out in an hour.

This work probably resonated with me more than it might have because I have spent a good deal of time thinking about Zombie epidemiology. Two Canadian professors did an epidemiological study of how a zombie epidemic would spread. We learned about epidemiological modeling in one of my ecology classes and, while the prof never mentioned zombies, it was all I could think about.

For future reference, if you ever find yourself giving a dull lecture on epidemiological modeling and how that could interface with Lottka-Voltera predator-prey dynamics and you do not use zombies as your model organism, you can just consider it a breach of pedagogical responsibility.

A couple more things about the vlogbrothers (who are John Green of the zombie novella above and his brother Hank) I just realized why the intro to the old vlogbrother videos is familiar:



This is one of the things I like about these guys. They celebrate non-romantic love and deconstruct the centrality and ubiquity of the romantic connotations of this embattled word. Consider this line from a recent vlog by John.

“Valentine’s day is one of the most potent symbols of our weird obsession with romantic love…if you spend your life singularly obsessed with romantic love you are going to miss out on a lot of what’s fun about being a person.”

****Technical Language Alert**** (This is like a spoiler alert – it allows you to skip to the “end” of the section if it seems unnecessarily obtuse)

One more John Green quote that I really like. "for me fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true." - John Green

I really resonate with his epistemology even though I’m not entirely on board ontologically. John and I see the epistemological problem the same way (and we have a good deal of psychological research to back us up). We do not know most of what we know because we do not actually remember most of what we remember. The brain is a reconstitution software telling stories from relatively few fixed points of actual stored data. But I don't agree that fiction is the only way to deal with this. I think that spiritual disciplines have surprising utility in circumventing this problem. You could make an evolutionary case that this is why they exist…but I prefer the teleological version of this argument: That we were designed to require a regular calibration from a fixed external reality.

****End Technical Language alert****

Speaking of fun Youtube subculture…this is just about the greatest short film I have ever seen.



Topic 2: Weird Science

Speaking of[7] science that is part fun part serious and it is hard to tell how to partition it: I recently encountered the famous Pleistocene Rewilding paper. This is a paper that appeared in Nature (2005) and argued that our ecosystems are degraded because palo-native-Americans hunted the Pleistocene mega-fauna (mastodons and the “American cheetah”) to extinction. Mega-fauna (lions, elephants and cheetah) are also endangered in Africa. So the paper (which was co-authored by over a dozen professors from good programs) argues that we could ‘kill two birds’ with one stone by introducing the megafauna of Africa to the American plains. This is seemingly too bizarre to be true, but there it is in the pages of nature.[8]

Speaking of bizarre science and ‘killing two birds with one stone’…or rather unkilling birds (which also puts me in line with the zombie theme) I have also learned of active attempts to reconstitute lost species(like the passenger pigeon and the auroch[9]) by isolating them genetically from their closes living relatives.

As absurd as these ideas are, one quote at the end of the Rewilding paper really struck me. The authors pose the question: “We ask of those who find the objections compelling, are you content with the negative slant of current conservation philosophy?” I guess this articulates some of my frustration with my initial foray into conservation biology. There is a lot of gloom and a conspicuous lack of innovation. In many ways, it is a ‘conservative’ science. (I mean, there is a guiding principle called "the precautionary principle"). I know that this smacks of engineering arrogance. But I guess that is what makes me an engineer. I got into science to bring it to bear on social and environmental problems. These ideas may be absurd, but my inclination is to evaluate them with a hopeful rather than antagonistic posture…because the current trajectory is entirely hopeless. Which leads me to climate change… …the climate change story is as bad or worse than the biodiversity crisis. I have very little hope that human behavior will change in time to avoid an eventual total collapse of marine ecosystems.[10] Sociology is not going to fix this. In light of this, too little emphasis and too little research funding is going to technology. There is an excellent and accessible paper in Nature that lays out the relative potential of the options currently on the table. I am not a Steven Levitt fan, but he is getting unnecessarily criticized for essentially making the economic argument that we need to start thinking seriously about technological solutions.

Topic 3: Creativity and Music

Several months ago I wrote about the creative process and how most creatives I know or have read about live in constant fear of loosing the ability to tap into whatever it is that makes them creative. Elizabeth Gilbert did a whole TED talk on this that had two really interesting ideas:



1. This is why creatives go mad or turn to addiction or end their lives at a disproportionally high rate. The seemingly fleeting and capricious nature of creativity leaves them powerless.

2. She posits instead a personal version of this force that you can and should talk to…giving responsibility back. This generates a psychological distance between you and the art you participate in and protects you from it. If you work was good or bad, it didn’t reflect on you. “This is how creativity was viewed in the western world for a really long time.” There was a change from having a Genius[11] to being a Genius. “That was a huge error”

Speaking of TED talks I liked, there is also this one.

I feel like the movie Hurt Locker is an artistic expansion of one of the most compelling lines in Audience of One” by Rise Against: “Maybe we've outgrown all the things that we once loved.”

I wrote a bit about Sufjan’s new album and concert a couple months ago. My friend Justin has registered a pretty accurate critique of the new stuff: “It’s like Sufjan got drunk and made an album with Animal Collective, and then they never bothered to edit the raw tracks”

I have watche a little bit of Bones and a little bit of Castle recently and have decided that they are essentially the same show. Take a tall, attractive, professionally exemplary woman who lives by logic and algorithm and put them opposite an intuitive, gregarious Joss Wheddon leading man…boom…you have a show that is not great, but watchable. I think this pretty much sums up why this formula works.

I have been listening to a ton of Brand New lately. Love them. Their track “Jesus Christ” (off The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me) is amazing.

“We’ve all got wood and nails, we’re tongue tied to a hating factory”

Stuff I am working on:

-The Surprising Similarity of Two Uneven Finales: The Final Episodes of Lost and Battlestar Galactica

-“My Name is My Name”: Thoughts on The Wire

-The Two Great Manipulations: Fear and Guilt from the Right and the Left

-Photobox Stratigraphy

-Cities: New Orleans

-A Monte Carlo Statistical Analysis of Hi-Ho Cherry Oh!

-Backloading the Backstory to Maximize Narrative Utility: How Lost Episode 118 is like Revelation Chapter 12

-Theo-Coleoptaphelia: Upon further review, “An inordinate fondness for beetles” is precisely what I would expect

-The Secret World of River Gravel: A Photographic Expose of Riverine Benthic Communities (in 40X Magnification)

-We’ve Been Here Before, and It Wasn’t Good: Climate Change Precedent in the PETM[12]

This post was written while listening to God and the Devil are Raging Inside of Me by Brand New

_________________________

[1] Because that would just be weird.

[2] I owe this to my friend Noam.

[4] Including the standard confusion between correlation and causation.

[5] This is a really interesting exersize, because if we are mostly like other humans, a universal worldview is more likely to be useful because we mostly have the same hopes, fears, and weaknesses. However, if we are all unique snowflakes, then it is absurd to think that one prescription of ‘disease’ and ‘remedy’ could hold universally. Of course, modern psychology has demonstrated that much of our drama stems from our failure to recognize that “we are not as special as we think we are.”

[6] Actually, I picked up a couple of his “real books”, and while I like An Abundance of Katherines and Will Grayson they were not nearly was not as good as Zobiecorns.

[7] You have to go back to the Zombie paper to pick up this train of thought.

[8] I have since learned that most of the authors saw it as a ‘thought experiment’ and not a real study.

[9] The ancestor of the cow. I told my friend Mark this story and he replied “that seems like a species no one has missed.”

[10] The tragic thing about these effects is that they will be locked in in the next 150 years and then will play out for the following two thousand. I am pretty skeptical that standard economic and sociological forces are efficacious against a lagged process.

[11] Which was a spirit that essentially chose to posses the artist.

[12] The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum is the only event anything like a historical precedent for the carbon loadings we are putting into the atmosphere. It provides a template for what the long term effects of our impact will be…and it’s not good news.

Paraguay Journal

So I am in Paraguay and am keeping a travel blog:

http://stanfordinparaguay.blogspot.com/

I will return to regular (well...as regular as I tend to be - about every other week or so) blogging when I return with a new fragments and links post.

Cities Part 4: Caravaggio, Mosasaurs and America’s Hub – Kansas City

My work took me to Kansas City for a couple days last week, and, as is my custom, I have some thoughts about it.[1] Now I can’t say I had high expectations for Kansas City, but I was excited to test my working hypothesis that most places are repositories of wonder and unique flourishes of humanness if you look hard enough. The data confirmed my hypothesis.

The morning before I got to KC, they got 8” of snow. When I arrived it was bright and sunny, but everyone was in winter storm mode, trying to dig out from under the snow. Now the temperature was my first surprise.[2] I have never been to the plains states[3] in the winter, and assumed that they would be warmish, given their smouldering hot summers. I was wrong. It never got above 20 degrees F while I was there.

KC is a river town.[4] The first hint you get of this connection between the population center and the Mississippi’s major Tributary was in the rental car terminal. Like terminal B in the Sacramento[5] Airport, the floor was decorated with an unmistakable riffle-pool design of a great anastamosing channel.


Driving into KC from the airport is impressive. At one point you drive through a stretch with the City in front of you, the great river on your right and a massive train yard on your left, and you realize that this is a city that is on the way to places...the hub of our economic wheel.


Downtown KC is surprisingly fun. There are about 8 blocks of restraints and clubs called the ‘lights district’ and includes some pretty eccentric buildings:


But the second night, I made my way down to ‘the Plaza,’ about 3 miles south of downtown. On the way, I stopped by the Art Museum, which was free and still open. The art museum was situated in Sculpture Park…which is as fun and idiosyncratic as it sounds:


The Art museum was very good…but really the whole experience was dwarfed by a single piece. I walked into the Baroque room, full as usual with a vast array of paintings ‘inspired by Caravaggio.’ Now I have to say, most of the Baroque reminds me of the second and third Matrix movies. Stylisticly similar to the inspired geneius of the original, but actually a pale shadow of its brilliance. But then, a painting on one wall caught my eye. It was undoubtedly the greatest piece in the room and probably in the museum. “It couldn’t be.” I thought…not in Kansas City. But it was. There in the most rectangular of the rectangle states, equidistant from our country’s self proclaimed cultural centers, was just the second original Caravaggio I had ever seen in person:


If you haven’t picked it up, Caravaggio is my favorite artist. In some ways he tries to do with his art precisely what I strive to do with my preaching…place familiar Biblical subjects in their stark, realistic settings, to breath new and accessible life into the horror and grace of it all. I don’t really have any idea what I am doing at art museums. I generally use them to illustrate my timeline of the fits and starts of western Philosophy. But with The Baptist, I tried to just experience it…to let my eyes follow the brush strokes…to notice the detail and take in the whole. I don’t know why I was so shocked to find this painting in this place, but the whole thing struck me as delightfully incongruous. Normally if a painting is the highlight of a visit to a new city, it does not speak well of the city. In this case, it was because of the city. Of course Caravaggio, the master of capturing narrative tension between grace and grit in a single image…the great virtuoso of contrast…would not be best experienced in Paris or London. John the Baptist BELONGS in Kansas City in melancholy contemplation of the hardships and anonymity of the wilderness.[6]

I was told that the Plaza was the place to be in the summer, but it would probably be dead in the snow and cold. It wasn’t. It was fun. The region is built around several old, opulent hotels that tower over a scenic stretch of the Kansas River (a tributary of the Missouri).


The Plaza continued the theme of the incongruous. The architecture of these 8-10 blocks was unified but totally unique:


Yet, these distinctive buildings mostly housed chain stores and restraints. It was an neighborhood that was as personalized as any I had visited in its built environment and yet totally indistinct in its goods and services. Fortunately, I went armed with a restraint recommendation. I only knew two things I wanted to do on this trip before I touched down…and one of them was Barbecue. Now, I have always been a little self conscious about the propensity for cities to highlight their food. I mean, New Orleans is one thing, we all know they’ve got other stuff going on. But a place like Buffalo, for example, it seems like being that proud of food and football is an implicit capitulation to just not being that interesting. I mean, could the BBQ in Kansas City really be that good or is it like the kid in school that was mediocre at poetry but wasn’t good at anything else so he got tabbed ‘the poetry guy.’ Um…the former. I went to Jacks Stacks and got the special and took all the waitress’ recommendations.[7] It was qualitatively better than any barbecue experience I have ever had.


Finally, I was scheduled to go home on Saturday, but Amada agreed to allow me to push my flight back in order to do the other thing I have always wanted to do “in” Kansas City. First some context…In the late cretaceous[8] North America was split in two by a great, shallow sea. Essentially, Kansas, was equivalent to today’s Caribbean except it was overrun by some of the most remarkable Charismatic Paleo-Aquatic-Megafauna that have ever existed. The late Cretaceous Midwest sea[9] teeming with creatures so strange and startling that you’d be sure that they were the careless products of the imagination of a bad-made-for-cable horror movie author, pushing a deadline with ample weed…if the fossils were not captured in a thin chalk bed in West Kansas.

I have wanted to visit the University of Kansas Natural history museum since I read a really interesting book on the Cretaceous seas of North America many years ago when I was contemplating a career change (to paleontology). So Saturday morning I got up and made the one hour drive to Lawrence.

Now, I collect Natural History Museums…so I am hard to impress. In general, because I have been to way more of these than a normal human should, I generally prefer if they specialize in whatever is locally interesting.[10] So, in my opinion, the Kansas museum would be most successful if it had three floors of Mosesaurs and Xiphactinus. But Kansas 6 year olds need to see a Triceratops too. So they only had a few specimens from the Late Cretaceous…but they were worth it.


My favorite was the shark. It looks like the shark’s head is in the middle…but it had just had a bad ass Xiphactinus (see above) in its belly.


Once again, a dull sounding city teemed with the wonder of locatedness and particularity. For all our legitimate concerns about the Walmartification of America, there is something about human community that seems to always manifest a unique signature of its relationship with place. And that is why when I was asked to go to Kansas City, I was genuinely excited…and it didn’t disappoint.



___________________
[1] I realize that in the Vegas post I said that New Orleans was coming next. Here’s the problem. I forgot my camera in New Orleans and had to buy one of those disposable cameras with old fashioned film…and I can’t find anywhere to get it developed.
[2] Actually, my first surprise was that most of Kansas City is actually in Missouri.
[3] I refuse to call Kansas/Nebraska/Omaha the Midwest. I arbitrarily reserve that term for MI/OH/WI/MN et al.
[4] It is not an accident that I disproportionately visit river towns…I do study rivers.
[5] Another river town.
[6] Apparently, one of his other Johnny B paintings is in Toledo…which works in precisely the same way.
[7] This is my new trick for trying food in a new place. As much as possible, let locals or watistaff order for you.
[8] Come on, when I offer context, I don’t mess around.
[9] Incidentally, Jungle The Midwest Sea is a very good album by flatfoot 56, but every time I hear it I think of the late Cretaceous…surely there is not a better unintentional description of a paleo-era.
[10] Cleveland is the best example of this. Most of my understanding of late Devonian fish and amphibians comes from their display of Ohio-centric fossils.

Pascal Surplus

I am giving a talk (MP3) on Pascal Tuesday. I didn’t have room for a third of the Pensees quotes I like, so I am posting the rest of them here.


“We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us…Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future…Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning to be happy it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

“The power of kings if founded on the reason and folly of the people, but especially their folly. The greatest and most important thing in the world is founded on weakness. This is a remarkably sure foundation, for nothing is surer than that people will be weak. Anything founded on sound reason is very ill-founded, like respect for reason.”

“Put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank that is wider than need be: if there is a precipice below, although his reason may convince him that he is safe, his imagination will prevail.”

“Justice and truths are two points so fine that our instruments are too blunt to touch them exactly.”

“Man is nothing but a subject full of natural error that cannot be eradicated except through grace. Nothing shows him the truth, everything deceives him. The two principals of truth, reason and senses, are not only both genuine, but are engaged in mutual deception. The senses deceive reason through false appearances, and, just as they trick the soul, they are tricked by it in their passions, which produce false impressions. The both compete in lies and deception.”

“If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it.”

“How tiresome it is to give up pursuits to which we have become attached. A man enjoying a happy home-life has only to see a woman who attracts him, or spend five or six pleasant days gambling, and he will be very sorry to go back to what he was doing before. It happens every day.”

“…as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might. As they could not fortify justice they have justified force…”

“It is just as pointless and absurd for reason to demand proof of first principles from the heart before agreeing to accept them as it would be absurd for the heart to demand an intuition of all the propositions demonstrated by reason before agreeing to accept them.”

“Man’s greatness comes from knowing he is wretched…”

“If he exalts himself, I humble him.
If he humbles himself, I exalt him.
And I go on contradicting him
Until he understands
That he is a monster that passes all understanding.”

“This means open war between men, in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatist or with the skeptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a skeptic par excellence. This neutrality is the essence of their clique…They are not even for themselves; they are neutral, indifferent suspending judgment on everything, including themselves.”

“Let us concede to the skeptics what they have so often proclaimed, that truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry, that it is no earthly denizen, bt at home in heaven, lying in the lap of God, to be known only in so far as it pleases him to reveal it. Let us learn our true nature from the uncreated and incarnate truth.”

“Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature! Learn that man infinitely transcends man, hear from your master your true condition, which is unknown to you. Listen to God…man infinitely transcends man, and without the aid of faith he would remain inconceivable to himself…Consequently, it is not through the proud activity of our reason but through its simple submission that we can really know ourselves. ”

“Diversion: Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things…That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle; that is why prison is such a fearful punishment…”

“All our life passes in this way: we seek rest by struggling against certain obstacles, and once they are overcome, rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. We must get away from it and crave excitement.”

“…none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words, God himself.”

“When everyone is moving towards depravity, no one seems to be moving.”
“Reason never wholly overcomes imagination, though the contrary is quite common…Imagination cannot make fools wise, but it can make them happy…Imagination exaggerates small objects with fanatical exaggeration until they fill our souls.”

“Our imagination…will grow weary of conciving things before nature grows weary of producing them.”


“I believe with (our) curiosity changed into wonder (we) will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to investigate them with presumption.”

“Do the philosophers, who offer us nothing else for our good but the good that is within us? Have they found the cure for our ills?”

“There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.”

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us (from) seeing it.”

“Jesus came to blind those who have clear sight and to give sight to the blind; to heal the sick and let the healthy die; to call sinners to repentance and justify them, and to leave the righteous to their sins; to fill the hungry with good things and sedn the rich away empty.”

“True conversion consists in self-annihilation before the universal being whom we have so often vexed and who is perfectly entitled to destroy us at any moment.”

“Total Submission to Jesus Christ...Eternal bliss, in exchange for a day of hard training in this world. May I never forget your words.”

2010 A Year In Books

Last year I posted a list of the books I read…and it was fun. So I am doing it again.

Madame Bovary (A)[1] - Flaubert

Definitely more “important” than “good.” MB is a heavy handed morality tale that lacks a single redemptive character. But apparently Flaubert innovated the modern novel…and I can see the template for all of the great ones in it. So there is that.

The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene

LOVED it! This is my new favorite novel not written by a dead Russian[2]. I wrote a post on it.

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs - Klosterman (A)

This is my third time through SDACP[3]. By now it is a period piece. But it remains THE definitive statement of Xer culture. It led to one of my favorite posts ever. And Klosterman is a bit of a rhetorical mentor for me, so listening to him read his best prose is valuable in its own right. I suspect this will not be the last time SDACP ends up on one of my year end lists.

Robinson Caruso (A) - Daniel Defoe

This book is REALLY old. And, while I am always trying to be aware of “chronological snobbery”[4], my brother described it as “a book that passed for entertainment in a time when there wasn’t anything else to do.”

Jesus and the Victory of God - NT Wright

Over 1000 pages into Wright’s scholarly series I am beginning to feel diminishing returns.[5] I might be a one woman man, but I am a promiscuous reader. I am beginning to feel a little smothered in this relationship and really want to “start seeing other people”. Still, this text has been hugely valuable. My basic take on Wright is that about half the time I think his method leads him to a spurious interpretation and the other half of the time his reconstruction of first century Palestine makes complete sense of biblical passages that were previously obscure. His treatments of Mark 13, the cleansing of the temple, and that weird passage where Jesus talks about driving out a demon only to have it replaced with seven stronger ones were worth the price of admission. Oh, and he demolishes the Jesus seminar stuff without breaking a sweat (and without being a jerk).

Lilith – George McDonald (A)

George McDonald might be best known as a character rather than an author. He was the Virgil type guide in CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce. But he[6] was also one of the indirect[7] instigators of Lewis’ conversion. I liked Lilith. It started really slowly but there were a couple of sublime chapters near the end. Friends have suggested that McDonald’s children’s literature is really his best stuff…so expect some of that on next year’s list.



Drive – Daniel Pink (A)

Most of the valuable ideas from this book were summarized by his TED talk. This is the classic case of a book that could have been a pamphlet. Still, the big ideas are pretty compelling. They include 1) for creative problem solving type jobs, monetary incentives impede rather than augment innovation[8] 2) success is not correlated with intelligence but how one perceives intelligence.[9]

Pensees: Christianity for Modern Pagans - Pascal/Kreeft

Pensees was the first book I read for fun by someone who had been dead for several hundred years. I loved it. In many ways, Pascal became my intellectual mentor[10] and introduced me to the many many dead friends and mentors I have had over the years. In a couple weeks, I am giving a talk on his life and thought,[11] wanted to revisit the Pensees, and happened on this fantastic book. Peter Kreeft has selected and organized[12] the best of the Pensees and then wrote a sort of midrash.[13] Some of his reflections on Pascal are more valuable than others, but to have an excellent contemporary thinker articulate the current import of enduring[14] insights of one of the all time great thinkers makes for a fun read. Kreeft’s[15] tone (simultaneously serious and playful) is also a good match for Pascal, whose tone is similar.

Paul for Everyone: 2 Corinthians – NT Wright

As usual, Wright’s popular work is as useful as his scholarly work. I read this little text to orient myself to the scope of 2 Corinthians before I began a detailed study of the passages I was going to preach.

Ezra and Nehemiah – Derek Kidner

The post-exilic OT literature is surprisingly difficult. Haggai and Zachariah[16] only make sense on the backdrop of Ezra and Nehemiah, but the historical books are unhelpfully non-sequantial and kind of confusing. So, when I agreed to teach Nehemiah over the summer I knew I was going to have to do some preliminary heavy lifting. Kidner made it easy. This thin little text laid out the chronology and significance of both books in a readable and insightful way. I highly recommend it for anyone hoping to understand the post-exilic texts.[17]

Home – Marilynne Robinson (A)

I have a friend who met Robinson relayed an off the cuff quote where the author confessed, “I hate plot.” Let’s just say, I believe this story. But she writes beautifully. I knew these characters. I can still picture them better than characters from film. And the last page of this book made me cry. I can’t remember the last time that happened.



In the Beauty of the Lilies - Updike [18]

I just love Updike’s sentences. I was lukewarm on the plot, but plot is not why I read Updike. I read him for his lyrical use of our language and his unshakable Christ hauntedness.

Partial Reads

Letters to my Students – CH Spurgeon (50%)

This was easily the most nourishing volume I read this year. It got squeezed out of the rotation by more pressing books, but it will almost certainly end up on next year’s list as a completed book. The book served two purposes 1) It is the transcripts of his lectures on preaching. His insights were enormously helpful not only for my personal preaching but for the class we are teaching on it. I even assigned a few pages for our students. 2) He uses words so well. I try to work some authors into my rotation who have the gift to select and order words in such a way that the product is qualitatively different than most writing. This is why I read Updike and Robinson, and Spurgeon has the same gift.

The Princeton Guide to Ecology – ed. Levin (40%)

I LOVED this book. It is a compellation of 92 six to ten page reviews of the state of the art regarding the most important ecological principles. The papers are mercifully and maniacally brief literature reviews that oriented me to the watershed ideas and contemporary directions. For someone who is trying to get up to speed on a new discipline, I could not have designed a better text. About 15% of it was assigned as readings for my intro class. I found it way more valuable than that.



Foundations of Ecology: Classic Papers with Commentaries - ed. Real and Brown (50%)

Someday I will write a post on the culture differences between engineers and ecologists. As I am fundamentally a scientist (who likes the rigor and practicality of the engineering skill set for doing science) there are many ways in which I prefer the culture of Ecology. This is one of them. I have found that ecology has a ‘cannon.’ Initiates are told the story of the major Khunian paradigm shifts that is the heritage of our moment. Case in point, my text for the required introductory graduate course was this anthology of seminal papers. I read half of it, which was, again, far more than required.[19]

The Cross of Christ – John Stott (50%)

I used this for Lenten devotions this year. It was extremely valuable in that context. It is a little more technical than devotional, but was a great way to keep up a sustained and substantial meditation on the cross.

This post was written while listening to Deja Entendu by Brand New

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[1] (A) means that I listened to this in an audio format. Most of my reading time goes into scientific journal papers. So I listen to most of my ‘fun’ reading. I did a post on this.
[2] My wife’s reading group also read and enjoyed this one, so it is not just for nerds.
[3] The second time generated one of my favorite posts of all time.
[4] Which is responsible for my attempt to balance my reading diet to include approximately equal parts books by the living and the dead.
[5] One of my principles of getting the most out of a modest reading program is diversity. Most non-fiction authors offer a maximal insight/time ratio early on and returns diminish pretty markedly.
[6] Like Chesterton
[7] There were direct instigators (his contemporaries) like Tolkein and indirect instigators, authors from the previous generation.
[8] Creatives are motivated by intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivators. I believe this. This is how I am motivated. I work harder on (and put more personal time into) the stuff I have less funds to do if I think it is compelling.
[9] I think I am going to do a whole post on this.
[10] Creating the desire to be a philosopher-scientist…which is not easy in the current era of hyper specialization.
[11] Look for it to show up on my MP3 page.
[12] Which is important because, Pascal died very young and not only never finished his book, but never really started it. the Penses are just fragmentary notes and have historically been published in almost arbitrary order. They are also redundant and some have more contemporary utility than others. So, simply selecting them, grouping them and putting them in a logical order was a great service. Incidentally, Kreeft’s take on Pascal’s major themes match mine pretty closely.
[13] A running commentary. It is almost like a Penses blog – in paperback.
[14] And often prophetic.
[15] Kreeft is Catholic – in a fun way. Reading him as a Protestant is like reading Chesterton. You forget that he is Catholic for dozens of pages at a time, until he drops a zinger against Protestants that leaves you saying ‘Ouch, where did that come from.’ Reading Kreeft has the effect of enlarging my affection and alliance with my Catholic friends…while, at the same time, affirming that I am, in fact, not Catholic.
[16] These guys were contemporaries and, presumably, even friends (Nehemiah lists them as both present during a couple big events)…but their writing styles could not be more different. Haggai is a straight forward moral prophet while Zachariah is a “if I didn’t know better I’d think he was high”/ “Predicted things he had no business knowing” apocalyptic type. I’d love to see a HBO quality dramady about the friendship of Haggai and Zachariah (um, minus the boobs – It really sucks that HBO is making some of the best art of our generation but feels compelled to cheapen it with totally unnecessary nudity).
[17] I did some teaching out of Nehemiah this summer. The venue was not amenable to recording, so there are no MP3s. But I did one blog post which revolves around an insight I owe to Kidner. Also, Mark Driscoll’s series on Nehemiah was extremely helpful.
[18] I mentioned in my Portland post that I read this book and home at the same time. They are both about the damaged children of a Presbyterian minister.
[19] No book like this exists for my field. I have contemplated putting one together. Also, engineers do not do meta-analysis like ecologists do…though we could very much benefit from it.

On the 4th Day of Christmas the Internet Gave to Me...

...Four fun, Chistmas themed Youtube clips.

This year, my two favorite Christmas songs are not really Christmas songs. First, vloger Charlie McDonnell put out an album, that is very clever and entirely unique. It includes a fantastic song called The Absence of Christmas.[1]



Second, I have yet to write about mewithoutYou’s new album and concert a year later…primarily because I have surprisingly complicated feelings about the album. But A Carrot and A String may be the best Christmas song that isn’t a Christmas song written since Joy to the World. With all the pabulum that gets played on the airwaves this time of year, it would seem like an occasional descent new song would squeak in.



Amanda and I have struggled with Christmas traditions for years, and more so since we have had kids. We have decided that the American winter festival (which is extremely fun and most people participate in, in some form or another) can coexist in strained peace with the celebration of the incarnation without the former swallowing the latter up. But no one gets at the tension of all this better than Gaffigan:[2]



Finally, I can’t tell you why I like this clip. On one level, it casts the characters of the Christmas story as annoying Christian facebook stereotypes. But I do like it…unironically…so there that is.



I hope you and the people you care about have a great holiday, and if you are into the Jesus thing, I hope the mystery of the incarnation strikes you with new wonder in the coming weeks.

This post was posted while listening to Charlie McDonnall’s This is Me
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[1] The album is mostly goofy but has a couple really poignant moments….my favorite track is “Bread”. I have “In the Absence of Christmas” stuck in my head for a day…but it is a thankful reprieve from “Haley G Hoover” which was just creepy…but unfortunately really catchy.
[2] I have been taking Charis running (in the jogging stroller) through Davis neighborhoods at night to look at lights. It has been a fun daddy-daughter time and a good example of why living in California is cool. Amanda and I have been silent on the whole Santa thing hoping we could go one more year without her noticing – giving us 12 more months to decide how we want to negotiate this strange cultural artifact. I thought I had dodged it when we ran by a house with a blow up Homer Simpson in Santa gear and she said “that doggie has a hat…that’s so silly.” But during one of the runs she asked me “why do so many houses have elmo?” (apparently any cartoonish character clad in red is elmo). So we broke out the story of St Nicholas, a guy we have enormous affection, who saved girls from the sex trade - without the graphic details (one of our Christmas traditions is to donate to organizations that do the same in his honor). Now I just need to come up with a good reason that he would use a reindeer with a glowing nose to rescue girls from a life of forced prostitution.

The Altruism Paradox: The Surprising Confluence of Christian Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology

Altruism is one of the most interesting evolutionary puzzles. Mild forms of “altruistic” behavior have been observed in several distantly related taxa. Some of this has been cleverly and definitively explained on purely Darwinian principles[1] but some of it still seems a little ‘hand waving-ish’[2]…particularly when the theories are applied to humans acting altruistically towards non-relatives.[3] The problem is that pure altruism is not an “evolutionary stable strategy” (ESS).[4] But one of the solutions that evolutionary biologists and behavioral ecologists have floated sounds shockingly familiar to those of us who have spent much time in the ancient texts that compose the normative documents of Christianity.

The story goes like this. Altruism is better than pure competition on the species scale, but selection does not happen on that scale. Advantageous alleles are selected based on the survival and reproductive benefits to the individual. Therefore, in order for altruism to be selected, the bearers of altruist genes have to benefit, on the whole, more than it costs them.[5] This is evolutionarily unstable because cheaters would accept benefits of the altruists, not take the risks, and eventually ‘win’ pushing the altruistic genes from the population. Therefore, altruism requires some sort of ‘enforcement’ on the ‘population’[6] scale. There are some interesting examples of enforcement in non-human altruists, but the really interesting hypothesis is that humans use ‘guilt’ to enforce the terms of altruism on the tribal scale.

But, even with guilt enforcing altruism, it is not an ESS. Therefore, the successful altruistic strategy is that of the ‘subtle cheater.’ In each generation altruistic systems disproportionately propagate individuals that cheat just enough to have a survival or reproductive advantage but not so much that they incur the penalties of the enforcement mechanism.

This is all pretty plausible (especially for non-human species). But the really interesting insight is how ‘subtle cheating’ works out in human populations. If our enforcement mechanism is built into our psychological and sociological hardware and software (guilt[7]) what does it mean to be a subtle cheater? Who do I need to deceive?

Myself.


And that is the shocking and thrilling detail. If human altruism is self enforced through genetic and environmental imprints on our operating systems, getting away with subtle cheating REQUIRES “self deception.”[8] Human success is largely due to our altruistic tendencies…but only if those tendencies include “subtle cheating” which, given our enforcement mechanisms, require “self deception.”

Um, Really? So, let me get this straight. Humans work best in cooperative community. But there is something fundamental in each one of us that will always try to get more than we give. And in order to live with ourselves and our seemingly universal need to perceive ourselves as “a good person”[9] we all engage in self deception to convince ourselves that the real cheater is ‘the other.’ It seems like I have heard that somewhere before. Allow me to introduce: Christian anthropology.

The fundamental premise of Christian anthropology is that we are valuable beyond measure and designed to reflect the altruistic character of our maker but deeply broken and have an insurmountable entropy towards self interested behavior. We describe this causally with the narrative of the fall. Regardless of whether or not you hypothesize a historical Adam and Eve[10] the fall is the process by which we not only tarnish our immense capacity for beauty and generosity with the fundamental entropy of self interest, such that the former merely punctuates than the latter…but then we lie to ourselves about it.

All of this could lead us to argue (with a smile, and hopefully in a cheeky rather than a douchey way) that Christians are more in touch with reality, as specified by behavioral ecology. The Christian operating system which is self aware of our tendency of self deception and our tendency towards subtle cheating, makes it an evolutionary unstable strategy…but also gives it a huge epistemic advantage.[11] But, if Jesus was to talk in the language of behavioral ecology, I think the sermon on the mount might have included something like:

"Blessed are those who are aware of their self deception, it is the first step in actual self forgetfulness.”

Which is actually just my paraphrase of:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”[12]

This post was prepared while listening to The Sufferer and the Witness by Rise Against

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[1] The classic example is eusocial insects who turned out to be haplodiploid, which makes sisters more closely related than they would be to their own daughters, making celibate cooperative labor the most effective way to get genetic material into future generations.
[2] My personal favorite is the argument that we have the impulse to save a drowning unrelated child because the act of heroism may be observed by one of the victim’s hot relatives who would then have sex with the rescuer providing a mechanism where the risk is overweighed by the genetic payoff in the long term, selecting for risk taking altruists. If you think about the kind of selective pressure it would take to preference that genotype as broadly as it exists in our species…that would take a lot of extremely grateful sisters.
[3] Adoption of unrelated children cannot be seen as anything other than an ‘evolutionary trap.’
[4] An ESS is a strategy that is resistant to ‘invaders’ or ‘cheaters’. For example, it was hypothesized that the huge, seasonal gatherings of birds, like those that soil our cars at the U-mall or the Arc parking lot – were a type of self-regulating behavior. The birds were taking a ‘census’ of sorts and then would regulate the number of eggs they laid accordingly in order self-regulate and keep the population size proportional to the resources (under the carrying capacity). This has been widely discredited, however, as evolutionarily unstable…because cheaters would eventually take over. If everyone else is self regulating, a few birds that do not would compose a disproportionate portion of each successive cohort, until they quickly took over. Dawkins calls this “subversion from within.” Therefore, most ‘self regulation’ hypotheses have been jettisoned for resource or predator regulation.
[5] i.e. Alturism must be fundamentally self interested.
[6] Tribal.
[7] Note: Police do not count as enforcing altruism. They reduce the ferocity of our competition but do not require cooperation. You could make a case that liberal fiscal policy enforces altruism…but I will argue in a couple of posts that this is simply an outworking of guilt.
[8] All of the phrases I am using in quotes are not my own reading of this…they are the actual language of the theory from my coursework on behavioral ecology at UC Davis…from phenomenal Prof Sih who is one of the rare professors who is uncommonly brilliant AND a thrilling lecturer.
[9] I totally buy the idea as guilt as an altruism enforcing mechanism. There is nothing as ubiquitous as the idea that ‘I am a good person.’ After Imus was publically called out about his comments on the Rutgers woman’s basket ball team he said “I am a good person who did a bad thing.” After Jim Belushi died, someone said “He was a good man and a bad boy.” We all have this compelling need to self perceive as ‘basically a good person.’ And may be no idea that people will fight harder for despite mounting evidence to the contrary…regardless how much violence we have to do to the word ‘good’ or even ‘person.’ Before I was a Christian, there was nothing about the Christian worldview I found more repulsive than the assertion that I was not a good person. Now there is no insight I find more pragmatically helpful.
[10] I do (as the Homo Sapien ancestors that were contemporary with Australopithecine), but I don’t think you have to. And it is mostly a non-issue because it is non-falsifiable. But what is clear about the first three chapters of Genesis is that it is not the whole story. It has a fundamental pedagogical agenda. So I am more than happy to allow the scientific process to fill in the estimable gaps. Regardless of whether the fall happened in a cosmic moment (which I tend to believe) or over evolutionary time, it is the process by which humans, a special creation in the image of God, traded that image for an evolutionarily stable strategy. (Footnote to the footnote: I am working on a post about the Battle Star Galactica finale…if that seems like a non sequiter – you didn’t see it).
[11]Please note: I am not now, nor have I ever argued that Christians are, therefore, ‘better’ than those who do not go in for the Christian narrative. In fact I have argued often (here and here) that the logic of the Christian story gives the counter-intuitive result that Christians are, on the whole, less moral than their non-Christian neighbors…and that this is exactly what you would expect if it was true.
[12] Matthew 5:3