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O: Is it ok if we don’t go for a drive and look at stars tonight?

Me: Yeah, that’s fine. It’s a good idea. We can save it for another time.

O: But will the sky ever be clear again?

Hubble – You Decide: let your Weltanshauung shape science

As part of an extended program celebrating the 4ooth anniversary of Galileo’s telescope, you can help decide what the Hubble space telescope looks at next by voting on six candidate targets. Click here to vote. If you need some help choosing, here’s some advice on what might be interesting to see:

Dr. Summers advocates deciding by what you find interesting, but I propose that we vote according to our larger conception of existence in this universe. Interested in being hopeful, excited about new things? Vote for image 1 — a region where new stars are being born. More inclined these days to the red in tooth and claw vision of the universe, want to look destruction in the face? Vote for target 2 or 3 — planetary nebulae where stars are silently expelling their last gasps into space. Images 4 and 5 seem utterly boring to me, scientifically and existentially. But if you’re in an apocalyptic frame of mind, perhaps the colliding galaxies in image 6 will appeal to you.

I think I will vote for image 2:

Let me know how you decide. And do it soon! Voting ends March 1!

A little litany for the masses

Feeling like the world is basically ok? Well, you shouldn’t be, least of all days today, Ash Wednesday, least of all worlds this one. To put yourself in a more proper Lenten frame of mind or, better, a proper frame of mind for any day of the year, read the Anglican Great Litany. You can find it here, in the original version of the 1549 Book of Common Prayer (“The Letany and Suffrages” begins on p. 30). If you don’t want to wade through 16th century typeface, you can also find it here, but the typesetting of the original, especially of the final prayer, is very beautiful.

The current Episcopal version, with the supplications for king and crown pared down to a one-line prayer for the President, and with “fornicacion” replaced by “all inordinate and sinful affections” is here. You can also hear it sung:

Old money

The bathroom stalls in Eckhart Hall, where the University of Chicago math department resides, are made of some sort of gray, polished stone – it could almost be marble, but the color is pretty dull, so I’m not sure. The doors to the stalls are hardwood, with little antique-looking metal locking mechanisms. From the ceiling hang two energy-saver florescent bulbs, bare. Whoa.

The emotivist self at home

Alasdair MacIntyre characterizes the modern self as emotivist — cut from objective, rational criteria for basing moral judgements, it sees all moral discourse as only expression of preference. This has social correlates:

The bifurcation of the contemporary social world into a realm of the organizational in which the ends are taken to be given and the means are not available for rational scrutiny and a realm of the personal in which judgment and debate about values are central factors, but in which no rational social resolution of issues is available … is itself an important clue to the central characteristics of modern societies which may enable us to avoid being deceived by their internal political debates. These debates are often staged in terms of a supposed opposition between individualism and collectivism, each appearing in a variety of doctrinal forms. … But in fact what is crucial is that on which the contending parties agree, namely that there are only two alternative modes of social life open to us, one in which the free and arbitrary choices of individuals are sovereign, and one in which the bureaucracy is sovereign, precisely so that it may limit the free and arbitrary choices of individuals. Given this deep cultural agreement, it is unsurprising that the politics of modern societies oscillate between a freedom which is nothing but a lack of regulation of individual behavior and forms of collectivist control designed only to limit the anarchy of self-interest. … Thus the society in which we live is one in which bureaucracy and individualism are partners as well as antagonists. And it is in the cultural climate of this bureaucratic individualism that the emotivist self is naturally at home.      

–After Virtue

I feel like we can recognize the opposition he describes, and actually see these two forces alternately holding sway over this or that part of our society. (For example, a single person might be an individualist on abortion, and a collectivist on poverty.)

I do not know if MacIntyre is right, but I’m intrigued by his analysis. He’s saying that absent an ability to conduct moral discourse together from some agreed-upon starting points we get two competing (and secretly conjoined) impulses: individualism (moral judgements are my own to make) and collectivism (bureaucracy takes over to organize this mass of individuals and runs itself on inertia, its means not open to moral judgments which are only individuals’ own to make). This should put the question to the church, the university, etc: can you narrate together a framework for moral discourse robust enough to work at the levels of the individual and of the group so that something more coherent than oscillation between individualist and collectivist emerges?