Manifesto

I have been posting regularly here at Points of Inflection since 2011, or about six years.  A lot has happened in that time. The intention was to write down my thoughts and reflections about mathematics and sustainability, and especially about the challenges presented by the GreenFaith program that I had just joined.  But our youngest child was just about to embark on a journey of gender dysphoria, a gender which would test their courage to the limit and beyond, a journey to bleak places of mental illness, a journey that would ultimately bring us all to a place of terrible loss.  And that's spilled over onto Points of Inflection, though I've tried also to make a more focused site at Are You Receiving Me?

And then at some point during that awful journey, and during the original thinking process that this blog was intended to document, came the call from the family doctor - "I want you to make an appointment with a brain surgeon". Though it turned out that a brain surgeon was not who I needed (that was the result of some strange appearances on the MRI) I did need some very delicate surgery, which I received at Johns' Hopkins, and when it and chemo and radiation were done there was still some chance of a recurrence.  Guess what? I was in the recurrence group. So I am now looking at life-ending metastatic cancer, and meanwhile I have just finished Math for Sustainability thanks to the wonderful work of coauthors Russ and Sara, and it will, I hope, appear early next year.  I am really blessed by the gift of this team to work with.

So it feels like time to write a "manifesto".  If I wanted to say something for the future, for the next six years, what would it be? Are there ways in which I would want to change the fundamental metaphor of "points of inflection"? Is there something I'd like to add? Some error I feel I should defend against?

Here's a really early post which I still feel hits the nail right on the head.  A new manifesto, if there is such a thing, should start here I think.

American households are drowning in "stuff".  But why?

There's a ready answer that many preachers and people of faith would give.  Materialism! Too much attention, too much attachment to physical objects; not enough to the realm of the spirit. Surely this is the ground for a culture of endless accumulation.

I don't think this is right; or, a least, I don't think it cuts deep enough. When you think of a greedy materialist, you might think of a miser returning every evening to gloat over the beautiful objects he has hoarded.  But that kind of greed is not really characteristic of consumer society.  When I've acquired the IPhone 4, I may gloat for a while; but only until my neighbor gets an IPhone 5. Perpetual dissatisfaction, rather than gloating satisfaction, is what I feel about my stuff.

William Cavanaugh writes, "What really characterizes consumer culture is not attachment to things but detachment.  People do not hoard money; they spend it.  People do not cling to things; they discard them and buy other things...Consumerism is not so much about having more as it is about having something else; that's why it is not simply buying but shopping that is the heart of consumerism."

What if our unsatisfying overconsumption is a symptom, not of materialism, but of a restless and misguided spiritual quest?  What if we're not materialistic enough? 

"Bother", Said Pooh

Last month, a judicial nominee named Amy Coney Barrett appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee for her confirmation hearing.  California senator Dianne Feinstein focused on the nominee’s Catholic faith. “The dogma lives loudly within you” said Senator Feinstein, in a Yoda-like remark which was presumably intended to suggest that Barrett’s Catholic faith might undermine her judicial independence. (For the record, Barrett’s jurisprudence apparently indicates a clear conviction that judges should recuse themselves from cases where their religious convictions might interfere with their faithful and impartial execution of the law.)

I want to use this little story as a peg on which to hang some reflections about my own writing, both here and on Caring Bridge, as I approach my death from cancer. Unsurprisingly, as the end approaches I find myself reaching more often for the language of my faith, talking more about Jesus and the “work he accomplished at Jerusalem”, about God and God’s revelation which, while some demand a miraculous sign and others seek after wisdom, is in fact “Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God”, the one in whom “all the promises of God find their Yes”.  And this talking causes me several sorts of botheration---like Winnie-the-Pooh, another easily botherated sort of guy.  If you wonder where all this faith language is coming from, and perhaps share or at least want to understand my botheration, read on...

A Long Silence

There's been a long silence on Points of Inflection.

Some friends and readers, knowing that I am dealing with terminal cancer, might have been wondering whether I am still around.  For sure, this blog will at some point be shuttered when the cancer wins - or thinks it wins.  Not that it really does win. Cancer is stupid. When it kills me, it kills itself too.  But it is then gone forever: while I await the resurrection at the renewal of all things. It is like a tiny parable of  "the death of death in the death of Christ".

Review: "Merchants of Doubt"

(Crossposted from GoodReads) Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've been familiar with the basic message of Merchants of Doubt for some time. It is that much of the (alleged) controversy that we perceive around climate change was and is an example of motivated reasoning, generated deliberately by a small group of aging scientists who had previously employed similar tactics to undermine the scientific consensus on the links between smoking and disease; between chlorofluorocarbons and ozone depletion; and between powerplant emissions, acid rain, and damage to forest ecosystems. Funded to a significant extent by industries that feared the consequences of regulation, this group generated the appearance of controversy, and then relied on reporters' unwillingness to make scientific judgments and respect for the "Fairness Doctrine" to ensure that consensus science was depicted in the media as simply one side of a "he said...she said" face-off.

Why did these people do it? Here is where I found the book helpful (apart from its exhaustive documentation of the story I just told in the previous paragraph). The authors show how many of the key figures had backgrounds in the Manhattan Project or the Cold War physics community that grew out of it. For them, the conviction that communism and socialism were the real enemy never went away; in fact, it hardened into a certainty that any government regulation at all was the first step on a road towards complete loss of freedom. Therefore, any science which identified a problem whose solution seemed to require such regulation had to be blocked. Because it seemed to lead to unacceptable conclusions in a different realm (the realm of politics and governance), the science itself had to be wrong somewhere. When the tobacco industry or the fossil fuel industry or whoever it might be went looking for scientific "hired guns" who would fight the dangers of regulation, these scientists were ready, because of their ideological stance, to hear the call.

Oreskes and Conway don't mention it, but I have often wondered whether creationism has a part to play in this story also. Here again, consensus science (in this case the theory of evolution) led to unacceptable conclusions in a different realm (a certain kind of theology). Creationist authors like Whitcomb and Morris (The Genesis Flood) assured their readers that the views of mainstream scientist could be disregarded because "the evolutionist seeks intellectual justification for escape from personal responsibility to his Creator", a foreshadowing of the climate "skeptics" who similarly claim that mainstream climate science is poisoned by the prior ideological commitments of its practitioners. There is probably no direct connection between Fred Singer and company and the "creation scientists"; but the work of the latter may have prepared an audience to accept the arguments of the former.

View all my reviews

News on "Math for Sustainability"

If it seems as though I have been talking about the "Math for Sustainability" project for years, that's because I have.  I think it was in 2012 that I first proposed something like it  as part of my Fellowship class for GreenFaith.

So it is exciting that in two weeks we should have submitted the "final" version of the book to Springer.  "Final" is in quotes here because their readers and copy-editors still have to make their comments on it, and we then have to respond and incorporate them in the TeXscript, but this is a major milestone.

Part of the project is to build a website to support readers of the book, and I'd like to let you all know that is now live at https://math-for-sustainability.com.   I encourage you to head over there and take a look!

The very last section of the main text, Section 6.4, is called "After Math".  In this section we try to go beyond mathematics and open up the idea that sustainability requires not just numbers, but values: our full ethical engagement.  Readers of this blog will know that, for me, such questions need to be viewed through the lens of Christ's presence as the meaning and as the master of creation.  I can't go that far in a general textbook, of course; but I can (and I hope we do) challenge readers to discern what it is that they value, and how well those values hold up under the challenges that the Anthropocene epoch is sure to bring.

Peace
John

Memories XIII: Eli/Miriam Memorial Site

For the last year we have used the Are You Receiving Me web address (receivingme.net) as a pointer to the series of talks and events on campus that we have helped to sponsor in memory of our dear child.

As time moves on, it is not so relevant to use this address to point simply to a schedule of talks that are past.  Liane and I have decided to use the address to point to a more permanent memorial for Eli/Miriam. This will include the talks and events but also other material like Eli's obituary in the Centre Daily Times, other writing and interviews we have done, and so on.

Thanks for visiting receivingme.net

Ichabod

Moses and Joshua Bow Before the Ark, by James Tissot

So Donald Trump has decided to walk away from the 2015 Paris climate accord.  Count me among those who believe this will make less difference that may at first appear to the ultimate outcome of humanity's battle with climate change - which is, at root, a battle with ourselves; whether the interests of our future selves can overcome the greed and inertia of our present selves.  Aquinas would have called this temperance (before that word became associated specifically with alcoholic indulgence):  "a disposition of the mind that binds the passions".