EclecticLip

I recently had a chance to catch up on some podcasts.  (Much like my “not-yet-read books” bookshelf, I’ve got many a megabite of unheard podcasts on my hard drive.)  This one was a CBC Ideas episode called The Moral of the Story Is; it’s dated March 22 2010.  It starts off with Bertrand Russell’s remark that:

“Most of the greatest evil that man has inflicted upon man comes throuhg people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.”

Partway through, the narrator interviews one Dr. Robert Burton, a neurologist at Mount Zion University of California Hospital.  At about the twenty-minute mark, he suggests that the brain’s reward system activates, when one has the sense of being right — in the same way it activates when people smoke, drink, use drugs, or engage in other addictive behaviours.  Basically, feeling indignant gives you an upswell of (bio)chemical pleasure.

At about 22 minutes, there’s a wonderful exchange:

Narrator: are you suggesting Bill O’Reilly is some sort of junkie, in a way?

Burton:  I’m not suggesting.

This rings true for me.  I’ve experienced the intoxicating sense of indignant righteousness when arguing with people who were “clearly wrong”.  Nowadays, I try to maintain an unrippled calm; and temper any anger with humour.  My media habits reflect this: I used to enjoy listening to American progressive talk radio, but now tend to find it agitating, again on account of the subsurface exasperation.  Of course, that’s nothing compared to what relatively little I’ve experienced of its conservative cousin.  I prefer The Daily Show, Colbert Report and Bill Maher, as their jeremiads are leavened with humour.  Our modern jesters, I suppose.

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While Dawkins maintains his composure here, he carries a lot of anger — indignation — towards the shallower strands of various religion traditions.  If memory serves, he gives Buddhism a pass in The God Delusion; his real problem is with literalism in the Abrahamic faiths, and Christian fundamentalism in particular.  Brutish and backwards as they may be, they’re not worth tripping into addictive indignation over.  Surely other approaches are better.

I’ve been contacting folks from various sectors in the past couple months to get a better understanding of what authentic sustainability implies.  Having started correspondences with folks in manufacturing, I recently turned to mining.  And so it was that I had lunch last week with a friend of a friend — or technically, an acquaintance of an acquaintance — with the purpose of learning about the environmental considerations (or lack thereof) in mining nowadays.  Somewhere along the way, we got sidetracked and at one point wound up discussing the difficulties early Mahayana Buddhist missionairies had translating their sutras from Sanskrit to Chinese, given that the former is an alphabetic Indo-European language and the latter, pictographic Sino-Tibetan.  I can only imagine how much they struggled with chopsticks…

Turns out he’d majored in Sanskrit and minored in (classical) Chinese back in the day.  As you might imagine, he had noooooo idea about technical matters, but gave me the names of several folks who do know that stuff, to follow up with.  He paid for lunch too, which was great; though if he’d told me in advance, I’d've ordered dessert. 

I did find out that a mid-nineties American poll ranked mining companies even lower than tobacco companies in public perception — and that was fifteen years of environmental devastation ago!  Also, Rio Tinto Alcan (generally regarded as one of the world’s most progressive miners nowadays, they even got kudos from Jared Diamond in Collapse) takes its name from a region in southern Spain, where mining has gone on since Gilgamesh wrestled Enkidu in ancient Sumeria.  (In fairness to Enkidu, Gilgamesh was an unwelcome wedding crasher.)  The Tinto River is so acidic that after the medieval Arabs discovered sulfuric acid, they named the Tinto the “river of vitriol” in its honour.  Extremophile microbes are actually responsible for the acidity, which drops the river pH down to 2.0 — three times as acidic as Coca-Cola!  (Coke has a pH of 2.5, but pH being a logarithmic measure, a pH change of 1 unit represents a tenfold acidity difference, and 0.5 units a roughly threefold difference.)

That said, we who recoil most at scabrous mine sites — open sores on the world’s natural splendour — are generally the greatest recipients of their bounty, through our laptops, iPods, autos — even our electrical wiring and indoor plumbing.  To misquote Al Gore, it’s an irritating truth.

This article from Bytesizebio points out that our bodies are only one-tenth human: in our bodies, human cells are outnumbered by the cells of harmless or symbiotic microorganisms, about 10 to 1. Wikipedia concurs. 

What it means to be human, when 90% of our body isn’t?  (To be clear, human cells take up a larger volume than our passenger microbes, as the latter are smaller.)  And that other nine-tenths can literally shape our lives; as the article explains, the bugs in your gut can make you fat!

Most interestingly, Part 2 of the article divulges that while identical twins share the same human DNA (their physical differences apparently being due to variations in gene expression) their gut flora populations are as unrelated as those of randomly-picked strangers. In other words, while identical twins may share essentially the same human cells… they’re as different as any pair of people, when it comes to the other 90% of their body!

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The debate in Christian scholarship about the correct place for the Gospel of Thomas (earliest and thus most authentic Gospel?  Heretical late-comer?) is fun to follow — maybe because I’m not religious, and have no theological stake in the matter.

I imagine it’s similar to the debate in Buddhist circles as to whether the Mahayana tradition is as old as the Theravada tradition, or a centuries-later development.  (Whereas the Theravada tradition has a strongly monastic undercurrent, the Mahayana is more lay-person oriented; Tibetan and Zen Buddhism are strands of Mahayana Buddhism.)

For both Thomas and Mahayana, it seems as though the majority opinion is that they’re latecomers.  My gut feel is that Thomas is early, but Mahayana is a later development, perhaps even mildly influenced by Christian expansion into the Indian subcontinent in the first century CE.  To co-opt John Donne’s words, no religion is an island. 

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I was reading a book of Viking wisdom yesterday.  It included the memorable line ‘no lamb for the lazy wolf‘ (a corollary for ‘the early bird gets the worm’) but peculiarly, no tips on plundering villages.  Personally, I prefer ‘the second worm doesn’t get eaten’, but that’s just me.

Banking and fairies below the fold! 

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