Meanderings, 1 October 2022
Welcome October! The weather has cooled off substantially around here. Our morning walks have begun with the temperatures in the 30s this week a couple times. We’ve spotted a few warblers, the hummingbirds are no longer at our feeder, and we are awaiting some migrating ducks to show up on our little lake.
And baseball is about to begin it’s great dance for a World Series champion.
Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash
On misusing Lewis’ “men without chests”
How does a posh Oxbridge don famous for fairy stories end up alongside John Wayne and Jack Donovan (who brands himself a “modern barbarian”)? It’s easy to dismiss lists like this as silly, clueless clickbait, but Lewis’s presence here is actually representative of a much larger trend of citing his 1943 book The Abolition of Man in favor of macho masculinity.
The Abolition of Man, which consists of three short philosophical lectures, is a polemic against moral relativism and a defense of what Lewis calls the “Tao”—the objective moral law common to many religious and cultural traditions. In the first lecture, “Men Without Chests,” Lewis attacks a certain secondary school English textbook for suggesting “that all sentences containing a predicate of value are statements about the emotional state of the speaker, and secondly, that all such statements are unimportant” (604). In other words, it’s wrong to say “That waterfall is sublime,” because what you really mean is “That waterfall gives me sublime feelings.”
Lewis thinks this dismissal of the emotions in favor of pure reason is dangerous because humans are not capable of virtuous action by reason alone. Instead, following Aristotelian virtue ethics, he believes the emotions need to be taken seriously and disciplined so that one actually loves what is good: “Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism” (703). In the Platonic metaphor of the tripartite soul, if the head is the seat of wisdom and the stomach the seat of the appetites, the chest (where the heart is) is the seat “of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments” (704).
Lewis thought his contemporary English society, and education system in general, was undervaluing these trained emotions. But he did not think they were exclusive to men, and he was bemoaning a hollowing out—a chestlessness—of human nature, not merely of manhood.
But as it turns out, this phrase “men without chests” has taken on a bit of a life of its own. Conservative Christian pastors, bloggers, and radio hosts love to cite the phrase before launching into laments about the current state of Christian manhood in America, despite the disconnect between this argument and Lewis’s own.
Jason K. Allen, president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote in 2016 that too many men are “engaged in effeminacy, fornication, perversion, passivity, and—to borrow a modern phrase—protracted adolescence.” Too many men are either acting like women or celebrating “gruffness” when they should be recovering “biblical manhood, Christian masculinity—what we might think of as sanctified testosterone.”
After citing Lewis’s “men without chests” quote, Allen continues, “In the spirit of Lewis, let’s not unwittingly hollow out biblical manhood in our churches by making light of God-ordained gender roles.” But again, “God-ordained gender roles” were not Lewis’s concern in The Abolition of Man. For Lewis, the hollowing was of well-trained emotions, which are a necessary part of human nature, not just masculine nature.
FOREST PARK, Ill. — Jough Dempsey lost track of his weight when the indicator on his scale went beyond the maximum — 450 pounds.
“I don’t know what my upper weight limit was,” Dempsey said. “Because when I bought a scale that went up to 450, I pinned it. I went over it.”
Dempsey, 46, said he has battled obesity since childhood. He moved from Philadelphia to Chicago in 2006, and he gained more than 100 pounds.
Clothes were hard to find, he said. He needed a 6 XL shirt and size 64 pants.
“It was getting hard to buy clothing even at the big and tall men’s stores,” he said. “It was just getting hard to live my life being that heavy.”
Simple activities became chores. He was out of breath when he stood up, and out of space when he sat down.
“It was hard to do normal things – sit in a chair,” he said. “If I saw a chair that had arms, I’d think of those as width constraints. I would know that I have bruises on my thighs from the sides of the chair, just sitting in a normal human chair.”
But when his twin boys were born nine years ago, it was the weight of fatherhood, a new responsibility, that spurred action.
The world’s vital insect kingdom is undergoing “death by a thousand cuts,” the world’s top bug experts said.
Climate change, insecticides, herbicides, light pollution, invasive species and changes in agriculture and land use are causing Earth to lose probably 1 percent to 2 percent of its insects each year, said University of Connecticut entomologist David Wagner, lead author in the special package of 12 studies in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences written by 56 scientists from around the globe.
The problem, sometimes called the insect apocalypse, is like a jigsaw puzzle. And scientists say they still don’t have all the pieces, so they have trouble grasping its enormity and complexity and getting the world to notice and do something.
Wagner said scientists need to figure out if the rate of the insect loss is bigger than with other species. “There is some reason to worry more,” he added, “because they are the target of attack” with insecticides, herbicides and light pollution.
Co-author and University of Illinois entomologist May Berenbaum, a National Medal of Science winner, said, “Insect decline is kind of comparable to climate change 30 years ago because the methods to assess the extent, the rate (of loss) were difficult.”
Making matters worse is that in many cases, people hate bugs, even though they pollinate the world’s foods, are crucial to the food chain and get rid of waste, she said.
Insects “are absolutely the fabric by which Mother Nature and the tree of life are built,” Wagner said.
Two well known ones — honeybees and Monarch butterflies — best illustrate insect problems and declines, he said. Honeybees have been in dramatic decline because of disease, parasites, insecticides, herbicides and lack of food.
In state, out of state tuition dollars, oy!
Imagine you need a service that your home state (State A) provides to its residents, but only in a limited capacity. State A requires individuals to meet certain criteria to qualify for access to this service.
Unfortunately, your home state says you do not qualify.
Fortunately, State B, which, for all practical purposes, provides an identical service, says you do qualify. The only rub is that because you live in State A, State B is going to charge you three times more.
Sound good?
Welcome to “The Great Student Swap,” also the title of a recently released report by Aaron Klein of the Brookings Institute, which looks at the phenomenon of declining in-state enrollment at state “flagship” institutions (the public institutions at the top of the food chain in a given state—your University of Illinois/Delaware/Michigan/Wisconsin).
Mining information from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, specifically from 2002 through 2018, Klein finds that 48 out of 50 state flagships have seen an increase in the share of out-of-state students during that time period, in some cases by more than 50 percent.
Or lots more than 50 percent. In 2002, the University of Alabama had an in-state–to–out-of-state ratio of roughly 75–25. By 2018, that ratio had almost flipped, to 34–66, the equivalent of a 180 percent increase in out-of-state students.
Polyethylene is one of the world’s most commonly used plastics, found in bottles and packaging film, but it’s also one of the hardest to break down. By itself, it would take polyethylene hundreds of years to completely decompose. Scientists have been working to tackle this problem as polyethylene trash is clogging up landfills and littering beaches and oceans.
A major obstacle to breaking down polyethylene is a feature of its molecular structure. It contains unreactive carbon chains, which are covalent bonds that hold atoms together so tightly it takes a high amount of force and energy to pull them apart. But scientists have been making efforts to find a solution for breaking down polyethylene. A new study published Thursday in the journal Science proposes a method to effectively transform polyethylene into propylene, a chemical that’s easier to use for future chemical reactions.
Turning polyethylene into usable polymers can increase the plastic’s value and provides an alternative to throwing it away, explains Susannah Scott, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an author of a seperate new study that used a similar technique to achieve the same goal. In that preprint study, published on Tuesday, Scott and her co-authors also described an approach in which they removed hydrogen from the polyethylene chains, creating reactive bonds that are easier to cut apart.
Polyethylene has been around since the 1930s, but it took 20 years for scientists to refine the plastic to make it stiffer, harder, and more heat-resistant. Fast forward to the present, and polyethylene’s carbon-carbon and carbon-hydrogen bonds are nearly unbreakable, which has helped in creating a variety of materials from plastic water bottles to cable insulation. However, those same chemical bonds have made it difficult to break down without incurring a high energy cost.
I had not heard of spotted lanternflies but I have now:
Spotted lanternflies are thriving in the Northeast this summer. In New York City, where this year’s invasion seems particularly extreme, people squash them on the streets, on railings and even on their restaurant tables. The exterior walls of Big Apple buildings are blanketed with speckled, red bugs.
Some are dead. Some are twitching. Many are still very much alive.
The good news is the invasive fly does not sting or bite humans. But they do tremendous harm to plants and trees. According to the US Department of Agriculture, spotted lanternflies feed on the sap of food crops such as grapes, apples and peaches, and trees like maple, timber and walnut.