Now Is The Time For Pants

I'm on book three — The System of the World — of Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" (books one and two being Quicksilver and The Confusion). This is certainly the most epic thing I've ever read, and you get the sense that he could have made it like ten 1000 page books instead of just the three.

There's an interview with Neal on Reason Online right now: Neal Stephenson’s Past, Present, and Future...

It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from all of this. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn't care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don't belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.

Since our prosperity and our military security for the last three or four generations have been rooted in science and technology, it would therefore seem that we're coming to the end of one era and about to move into another. Whether it's going to be better or worse is difficult for me to say. The obvious guess would be "worse." If I really wanted to turn this into a jeremiad, I could hold forth on that for a while. But as mentioned before, this country has always found a new way to move forward and be prosperous. So maybe we'll get lucky again. In the meantime, efforts to predict the future by extrapolating trends in the world of science and technology are apt to feel a lot less compelling than they might have in 1955.

I'd recommend the interview to anyone, and the books to anyone interested in The Royal Society, the history of money, voyages on boats, royalty, religion and politics getting in each other's way, and so on.

NY Times: God and Evolution...

Of course, none of that answers the question of whether God exists. The faithful can believe that God wired us to appreciate divinity. And atheists can argue that God may simply be a figment of our VMAT2 gene.

But what the research does suggest is that postindustrial society will not easily leave religion behind. Faith may be quiescent in many circles these days, or directed toward meditation or yoga, but it is not something that humans can easily cast off.

From my perspective, I think that "people are spiritual" and "evolution occurs" is enough evidence to support the "evolution has allowed spirituality/faith to flourish" conclusion.

I would be absolutely blown away if it turned out that "posessing faith" was, literally, a genetic attribute. I think it's more likely that the capacity for faith is genetic, and the degree to which you embrace it is controlled by the mind. Kinda like having kids. When you can't, you won't - but because you can doesn't mean you do.