December 24, 2017

From Harper's:

People tend to think common behavior is moral behavior.

From The New Yorker:

At the beginning of 2017, I started working on a Profile of someone who’s secure in his faith (Rod Dreher, an orthodox Christian); at the end, I wrote about a philosopher who thinks we live in a cruel, pointless universe (David Benatar, an “anti-natalist” who argues that we should stop having children). In between, this turned out to be the year in which I read about the meaning of life. Two writers, in particular, helped me navigate the territory between believing in God and becoming a nihilist. The first was Daniel Dennett, the philosopher of mind, whom I profiled in March. I deeply enjoyed his newest book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back,” but two of his earlier volumes struck me with particular force: the accessible and elegant “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” from 1995, and the more academic “Freedom Evolves,” from 2003. In the first, Dennett helps us understand what it means to occupy a branch on the tree of life; in the second, he argues that free will is real, and shows how it could have evolved along with the rest of the living world. You may be bored of Darwin by now, and of the reductive, triumphalist rhetoric that often accompanies discussions about evolution and our place in the universe. That’s not what Dennett offers. I know of no other thinker who so convincingly shows how human life, in all its vivid, soulful richness, might make sense as part of a purely material universe.

The other writer was Anthony Kronman, a professor at Yale Law School whose book “Confessions of a Born-Again Pagan” took me on a parallel journey. (I profiled Kronman, too.) If Dennett seeks to reconcile the existence of the soul with the physical world—to connect bacteria to Bach—Kronman sets out to do something similar in the humanist tradition: he tries to integrate the many contradictory ways of thinking about life that, as modern people, we want to credit simultaneously. Many of us have intuitions about the sacredness of life but also believe in the scientific method, which leaves little room for the sacred; we find it hard to envision a literal afterlife but want to understand how we might matter after we’re gone. Kronman combs through the history of thought, combining Augustine with Wallace Stevens, or Nietzsche with Melanie Klein, and constructing a belief system of his own invention—“born-again paganism”—which he finds satisfying. You don’t have to read all of Kronman’s “Confessions” in one go, and you’re unlikely to find it all convincing. But his beautifully written book is illuminating and inspiring. It shows that all of us can try, in our own ways, to solve the riddle of existence.

From The Economist:

To keep the temperature below a certain level means keeping within a certain “carbon budget”—allowing only so much to accumulate, and no more. Once you have spent that budget, you have to balance all new emissions with removals.

From The Economist:

No scenarios are at all likely to keep warming under 1.5ºC without greenhouse-gas removal. “It is built into the assumptions of the Paris agreement,” says Gideon Henderson of Oxford University.

From The TLS (Mark Ford on Books of the Year 2017):

The Astroplanets (Pressed Wafer) is a slim pamphlet that collects the handful of lyrics the American poet Douglas Crase has deemed fit for publication in the three-and-a-half decades since his astonishing debut, The Revisionist of 1981. Although it runs to only eighteen pages, it packs a powerful punch. Crase is the master of complex, sinuous sentences that twist and loop and unfurl in the most unpredictable of ways – indeed navigating his poetic idiom can feel a bit like riding the rapids. The title poem in particular succeeds in conjugating the mysteries of our planetary existence with an eloquence and sweep I found at once dizzying and uplifting.