Forces and events vastly larger than us

...the key to the enigma of the universe and to all history

Maria Popova enjoys the richness of the autobiography Let Your Heart Be Broken by classical composer Tina Davidson. Entering into the spirit of Davidson's story of her life, Popova writes:

We spend our lives trying to anchor our transience in some illusion of permanence and stability. We lay plans, we make vows, we backbone the flow of uncertainty with habits and routines that lull us with the comforting dream of predictability and control, only to find ourselves again and again bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us. In those moments, kneeling in a pool of the unknown, the heart breaks open and allows life — life itself, not the simulacrum of life that comes from control — to rush in.

Those words, that in life we often "find ourselves [...]bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us" took me just the few weeks back to the Easter night celebration of the rising from the dead of Jesus, who is God who took flesh to come among us. I want to complement Popova's sentiments of wonder with a perceptive reflection on the understanding of life that Christians express at Easter:

The  Easter Vigil begins with a wonderful ritual. In the darkness of the night, out under an open sky, before a fire, a candle, the work of the Mother Bee, is blessed as the priest prays: ‘Christ yesterday and today, the beginning and the end, Alpha and Omega, all time belongs to him and all the ages, to him be glory and power, through every age for ever.’ Christian hope is rooted in more than the story of an individual who once vanquished death, whose victory can still affect the life of other individuals. Christian hope is rooted in the certainty that Jesus Christ is the key to the enigma of the universe and to all history.

Easter is more than a firework of revelation preceded and succeeded by dark silence. God’s incarnate Word is the same Word that was from the beginning, that speaks in Scripture and still operates in the Church, Christ’s Body. That is why it is essential for us Christians to be deeply rooted in the past. It is essential that we know Scripture well, that we know the history of the Church and of the saints.

Avoid, then, a disproportionately contemporary and self-centred vision of things which may make the faith more graspable, perhaps, but also reduces it to something banal. No political or sentimental aim will rejuvenate our soul and inflame our heart, but only the unchangeable promise of God revealed in Jesus Christ, the same today, yesterday, and forever.

— Erik Varden, a Trappist monk and bishop of Trondheim, Norway

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Recovering our humanity — an urgent task

Dr Iain McGilchrist, an English researcher of the thinking processes that make humans human, has spent 25 years analysing the respective tasks of the two halves of the brain. Commenting on McGilchrist's books reporting his findings, Hugh Dickinson offers a useful summary of what makes his work so important:

In summary, [the science is that] the right hemisphere (RH) is wide-ranging, imaginative, creative, poetic, fascinated by the arts; it is prepared to take risks and to go with the flow. The left hemisphere (LH) is meticulous about detail, grammar, spelling, and conventional rules; it loves tools, machines, spreadsheets, and orthodoxy. To summarise: LH loves maps; RH loves exploring the world. 

Dr McGilchrist’s diagnosis of the malaise of the modern world is that LH has taken over and tried to eviscerate all RH activity. LH knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

LH thinks that the purpose of education is to train people to be useful workers and, through vigorous competition, to obtain well-paid jobs. RH thinks that education’s purpose is to make fine, happy, creative, mature, morally courageous, emotionally intelligent, co-operative human beings. Margaret Thatcher’s announcement that “There is no such thing as society” is an LH broadside to sink the RH ship called social conscience.

"Ideas have consequences", a statement that has become somewhat of a cliché these days as it posits that how we form the ideas that carry weight in our thinking is a matter of significance to our personal lives and to the functioning of society.

McGilchrist's findings bear close attention, as he and his work are increasingly seen to be insightful given that the manner of reasoning and institutional decision-making in many domains are being found to be unbalanced. 

Dr Iain McGilchrist ... "our reason is not reasonable enough, it’s too dogmatic"

Therefore, we do well to tap into an interview transcript just published in which McGilchrist explains his findings in light of the present malaise in society:

What I think happened during the Renaissance was this sudden flowering in which there were great steps forward in so many aspects of life — a great richness. (This is not about the humanities versus the sciences by the way, nor is it true that the humanities are somehow right hemisphere and sciences somehow left hemisphere; good science and good reasoning involve the right hemisphere as much as the left.) Then towards the end of the 17th century came a sense that science had solved all our problems and we were beginning to understand how to control everything ourselves.

Unfortunately, we now believe that if we just had a little bit more power (which is the raison d’etre of the left hemisphere: to grasp, to get) — if only we could do a bit more manipulation — we would solve everything. But at the same time, we’re making an unholy mess of the world in so many respects. We’re destroying nature, we’re destroying humanity. We’re certainly destroying this civilisation. I’d say we’re taking a sledgehammer to it. And so, this is a very sad outcome for this know-it-all left hemisphere.

There are several reasons why I think the left hemisphere has become more potent. One is that it’s the one that makes you rich. It’s the one with which you do the grabbing and getting. Another is that it’s much easier to explain the left hemisphere’s point of view: “If we do this, it leads to that.” When you start to openly analyse what your civilisation is about, rather than getting on with it, then you lean more and more into this left hemisphere point of view. A.N. Whitehead, who I consider one of the all-time greatest philosophers, said: “A civilisation flourishes until it starts to analyse itself.” And that’s remarkable because Whitehead was a mathematician and a physicist, but he was able to see the limitations of science and reason.

I happen to believe our science is not scientific enough. It’s too dogmatic. I happen to believe our reason is not reasonable enough, it’s too dogmatic — and it’s dogma that’s always the problem. We need science, we need reason, but we also need to see that they can’t answer all our questions. Love is very real. Anyone who’s experienced it knows that it’s one of the realest things that can happen to you — but according to science, for it to be real, you’ve got to be able to see it in the lab, measure it, manipulate it. 

'The Machine' becomes dogmatic

McGilchrist has observed that in history there has been corrections one way or the other but the Industrial Revolution has been a key influence on the world we live in today:

[..]the power of the Industrial Revolution led to this machine-like way of thinking about living things, and we’ve never really lost that.

There are great artists in Modernism and Postmodernism. But it’s interesting: the ways of seeing the world that normally would only happen to somebody who had an injury in the right hemisphere began to be represented in the visual arts in the 20th century. There’s a wonderful book called Madness and Modernism about this topic, showing how things you find in schizophrenia are now happening, and are being portrayed in our culture.

It’s not that we’ve all got schizophrenia — of course we haven’t — but what I think is that we’re all neglecting the right hemisphere. Schizophrenia is a case in which the left hemisphere has gone into overdrive, and the right hemisphere has been wound down or is not really being listened to, and this leads to delusions and hallucinations. I think we are now in a world which is fully deluded. We’re all fairly reasonable people, but now it’s quite common to hear people say — and for them to go completely unchallenged — things that everybody knows are completely impossible. They don’t have any science behind them. [My emphasis - BS]

There are aspects of our culture that have become very vociferous and very irrational, and very dogmatic and very hubristic. “This is right, and anyone who says otherwise is wrong.” That’s the way the left hemisphere likes to be. Cut and dried, black and white. But the right hemisphere sees nuances, gradation: there’s good and bad in almost everything. 

The dogmatic nature of society's thought processes are unprecedented, McGilchrist notes, and he goes on to identify why this is:

I’d like to make a distinction, by the way, between what I would call a rationalistic approach and being reasonable. Being reasonable was something I remember from when I was growing up. There were reasonable people and they were admired. The idea of education was to make you reasonable. But now, that has been supplanted by something quite different: a rationalising framework such as a computer could follow. So we’ve been pushed by the increasing sophistication of machines — the intoxicating feeling that we have power over the world —  into viewing the world in this reductionist, materialist way. And the trouble with power is that it’s only as good as the wisdom of the person who wields it. And I don’t notice that we’re getting wiser. In fact, I think that would be an understatement. So it’s rather like putting machine guns in the hands of toddlers and then hoping there’s going to be a happy outcome.

So we’re not living in an age of reason, after all?

We’re living in an age of rationalising and reductionism in which everything can be taken apart. I suppose there was an almost equivalent period — it was very short lived — of Puritanism, when it was absolutely not tolerated for you to disagree with a certain way of thinking — which was, in fact, a very dogmatic, reduced, abstracted way of thinking. But I think at that point, we hadn’t reached the stage that we’re at now. Because at that time in history, people lived close to nature. Most people belonged to an inherited culture, a coherent culture. Art had not been turned into something conceptual, but was visceral and moving. Religion had not been presented as something that only a fool or an infant would believe. These are all very arrogant positions that we now hold.

We know that some things are key to human flourishing: proximity to nature; a culture; some sense of something beyond this realm. They make people healthier, both physically and mentally. We’ve done away with that and now all we’re left with is public debate.

How to escape our self-made prison 

To trust one another in working together, especially to safeguard nature, heads an agenda in learning afresh how to flourish. Secondly, we need to recognise the difference between mere processing information and the form of reasoning that focuses on the common good. McGilchrist puts it this way:

We can begin the work of limiting the damage we do to nature. I think we also need to reestablish some sense of who we are and what we’re doing here. Although we’ve got all this power, and machines that can “think”, they can’t think at all, they can only process information extremely rapidly. We’re not really wise.

One of my answers, when people say, “What should we do?”, is pray. And by that, I don’t mean, as Heidegger said, “Only God can save us now.” I don’t mean that God will suddenly come down with his divine hand, sort everything out, and it’ll all be okay. That’s not going to happen. What I mean is that we adopt a different, less arrogant, less hubristic attitude to the world; that we have some humility; that we re-kindle in ourselves a sense of awe and wonder, in this beautiful world, and with it bring some compassion to our relations with other people. Not shouting them down, vilifying them, telling them they’re frightful, but reasonably talking and saying, “Okay, you disagree with me. I’m interested, explain your point of view.” What we mustn’t do is follow the strident shrieking voices, whatever they may be saying.

That there is a prison ready to hold us captive, one of our own making, is demonstrated by a global survey that has just published findings. The survey asked more than 42,000 respondents in 26 countries across continents questions based on the four dimensions of health: mental, physical, social, and spiritual. Note that the focus is on the so-called Gen Z age group, that is, those between the ages of 18 and 24. The survey report states:

According to the McKinsey Health Institute 2022 Global Gen Z survey, those between the ages of 18 and 24 report poorer spiritual health than older generations, with Gen Z respondents almost three times more likely than baby boomers to report poor or very poor spiritual health.

Spiritual health enables people to integrate meaning in their lives. Spiritually healthy people have a strong sense of purpose. While people who are experiencing poor mental health could have good spiritual health, or vice versa, Gen Z individuals who experienced poor mental health were five times more likely to report poor spiritual health than those with neutral or good mental health. 

A crucial finding: "In most surveyed countries, a higher share of Gen Z survey respondents report poor mental, social, and spiritual health compared with other generations."  The survey finds that:

Although many individuals around the world are struggling with their health, there are meaningful differences within groups.

Globally, one in seven baby boomers say their mental health has declined over the past three years, compared with one in four Gen Z respondents. Female Gen Zers were almost twice as likely to report poor mental health when compared with their male counterparts (21 percent versus 13 percent, respectively).

In most surveyed countries, a higher proportion of Gen Z respondents said their mental health was poor or very poor when compared with other dimensions of health (16 percent in Gen Z and 7 percent for baby boomers). However, in China, Egypt, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam, Gen Z respondents reported that they struggled most with their social health. Overall, mental health experiences varied by region, with Gen Z participants in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Nigeria rating their mental health as “very good” with the highest frequencies.

While Gen Z tends to report worse mental health, the underlying cause is not clear. There are several age-specific factors that may impact Gen Z’s mental health independent of their generational cohort, including developmental stage, level of engagement with healthcare, and familial or societal attitudes. 

This report did, however, investigate the role of social media:

Gen Zers, on average, are more likely than other generations to cite negative feelings about social media. They are also more likely to report having poor mental health. But correlation is not causation, and our data indicates that the relationship between social media use and mental health is complex. 

We need to go to the likes of Jonathan Haidt's research to get a firmer grasp of how social media are such an important cause of distress among young people:

A big story last week was the partial release of the CDC’s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller.

From that horrendous set of statistics Haidt is confident enough to declare:

There is now a great deal of evidence that social media is a substantial cause, not just a tiny correlate, of depression and anxiety, and therefore of behaviors related to depression and anxiety, including self-harm and suicide.

A final word as to the arrogance that governs much of the thinking within technology and science, and the dangers that that governing ideology creates, we take note of the alarm sounded today about a world where AI is pushed into territory without boundaries set with humanity's common good in mind.

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Prayer vs false values posing as ideas

Tucker Carlson at a gala gathering on the Friday before his ousting from Fox News

How quickly formerly exhilarating ideas stumble and fade! One example most recently has been New Atheism, with its momentum all but stalled. 

Upon us still is the attempted overthrow of moral safeguards for the individual and society as the spirit of the Enlightenment's rationalism ebbs, evidenced by the capitulation of the health and science community to the newly entrenched Critical Theory activists, and by the loss of the mutual tolerance and freedom that Liberalism championed, all based on Christian principles. To the degree those principles are ignored, rational, respectful discourse is made impossible (see more below). 

Note that the Marxist “Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition. "Since the 1970s, critical theory has been immensely influential in the study of history, law, literature, and the social sciences" (Source; see also here). Key to understanding the Critical Race Theory and the Transgender Ideology that is dominant among the Western elite is the materialism and subjectivism of this age, in which everyone can espouse a "truth" of their own making, but in doing so increase the domination of others and the decrease of freedom. 

 But Truth will win out:

Truth contains within itself the ability to resist and to blossom in the light of day, even if [truth’s opponents] try very diligently and carefully to hide it. Those who proclaim the truth do not need to be numerous. Falsehood is what requires a lot of people, because it always needs to be renewed and fed. Our duty as Christians is to abide in the truth, even if it costs us dearly. ‒ Jerzy Popiełuszko, a priest killed by Poland's former Communist regime.

 And this view has drawn this comment:

What especially strikes me is the true observation that falsehood cannot stand on its own. It requires bands of flunkies. This gives it a ridiculous aspect it is important to remember. We mustn’t trifle with falsehood; but it is good to recognise its absurdity. What we can laugh at heartily has no power over us.

The comment is by Erik Varden, aged 48, a Norwegian Trappist monk, bishop of Trondheim, and writer on spiritual and cultural matters. For 10 years he studied theology and philosophy at Cambridge University, where he gained a doctorate.

A typical post on Varden's website (in English) follows:

POST-SECULARISM

21 April 2023

In a column in this morning’s Aftenposten, the Swedish scholar Joel Halldorf asks why Swedes connect more readily than Norwegians with the spiritual dimension of contemporary literature. He writes:

We [Swedes] were long considered the world’s most secularised country. Over some years, however, there has been a steady movement towards faith and religiosity, especially in the world of culture. The trend has often been remarked on in the media. It indicates that we have passed from a stage of secular rupture to a post-secular stage. This doesn’t mean that all Swedes are about to return to Christianity; but materialistic atheism is not longer regarded as the obvious final stop on humanity’s religious journey. Atheism is no longer the norm; the norm is openness to a many-faceted religious search.

This is well observed. Materialistic atheism does come across, now, as rather moth-eaten and old-fashioned. But we Norwegians tend to lag behind a little.

Where is the respectful discourse?

That the key pillar for building healthy relationships within and between societies is constructed from what amounts to a checklist of Christian principles is realised in this statement:  

New Atheists failed to realize that religion, especially Christianity, was the proverbial branch upon which they were sitting. For example, the freedom of expression depends on a number of assumptions, that there is objective truth, that it can be discovered, that it is accessible to people regardless of race or class, that belief should be free instead of coerced, that people have innate value, and that because of this value they should not be silenced. Every one of these ideas assumes the kind of world described in the Bible and mediated across centuries of Christian thought. Not one of these assumptions can be grounded in a purposeless world that is the product of only natural causes and processes.  

Notice, too, how Tucker Carlson, in the speech  that apparently led to his sacking from Fox News, stressed that neither mainstream political and social leaders, and certainly not those dedicated to performative activism, are looking to achieve the common good but are committed only to their own "truth". The corporate domain is likewise corrupted, with virtue signalling and the marketing of whatever is fashionable are employed as welcome means to swell profits.

The emotional harm and public disorder that is the inevitable consequence of the disregard for Truth in the form of well-based solutions to human problems are, in Tucker Carlson's word, "evil", which he described as “a manifestation of some larger force acting upon us”.   It's worth staying with his speech to grasp the horror he feels at the unwillingness of many players on the public stage to address reality. The horror arises as the hand of the devil provokes disorder and confusion.

 I don’t think we’re watching a debate over how to get to the best outcome. [...] There is no way to assess, say, the transgender movement with that mind-set.

Policy papers don’t [count] at all. If you have people who are saying, “I have an idea. Let’s castrate the next generation. Let’s sexually mutilate children.” I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate. That’s nothing to do with politics. What’s the outcome we’re desiring here? An androgynous population? Are we arguing for that? I don’t think anyone could defend that as a positive outcome, but the weight of the government and a lot of corporate interests are behind that.

[And] if you’re telling me that abortion is a positive good, what are you saying? Well, you’re arguing for child sacrifice, obviously.

Well, what’s the point of child sacrifice? Well, there’s no policy goal entwined with that. No, that’s a theological phenomenon.

And that’s kind of the point I’m making. None of this makes sense in conventional political terms. When people, or crowds of people, or the largest crowd of people at all, which is the federal government, the largest human organization in human history, decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, “Hey, let’s tear it down,” what you’re watching is not a political movement. It’s evil.

I’ll put it in nonpolitical or rather non-specific theological terms, and just say, if you want to know what’s evil and what’s good, what are the characteristics of those? 

I think the Athenians would’ve agreed with this. This is not necessarily just a Christian notion, this is kind of a, I would say, widely agreed-upon understanding of good and evil. What are its products? What do these two conditions produce?

 [G]ood is characterized by order, calmness, tranquility, peace, whatever you want to call it, lack of conflict, cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness. It’s true. It is.

And evil is characterized by their opposites. Violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth. So, if you are all in on the things that produce the latter basket of outcomes, what you’re really advocating for is evil. That’s just true. I’m not calling for religious war. Far from it. I’m merely calling for an acknowledgement of what we’re watching.

Those of us who were in our mid-50s are caught in the past in the way that we think about this. One side’s like, “No, no, I’ve got this idea, and we’ve got this idea, and let’s have a debate about our ideas.”

They don’t want a debate. Those ideas won’t produce outcomes that any rational person would want under any circumstances. Those are manifestations of some larger force acting upon us. It’s just so obvious. It’s completely obvious.

Avoiding the hell self-will creates 

Carlson does recommend two remedies, the first being to recognise that the ideologies trumpeted all around us are not to be examined as to their actual value to the common good. The cult that would deliver the world from oppression proscribes free debate since it is not based on rational or scientific foundations. 

And I think two things: One, we should say that and stop engaging in these totally fraudulent debates, where we are using the terms that we used in 1991 when I started at [The Heritage Foundation], as if maybe I could just win the debate if I marshaled more facts.

I’ve tried. That doesn’t work. And two, maybe we should all take just 10 minutes a day to say a prayer about it. I’m serious. Why not?

And I’m saying that to you not as some kind of evangelist, I’m literally saying that to you as an Episcopalian, the Samaritans of our time. I’m coming to you from the most humble and lowly theological position you can. I’m literally an Episcopalian. And even I have concluded it might be worth taking just 10 minutes out of your busy schedule to say a prayer for the future, and I hope you will.

That call for everyone to pray for protection against the evil that the devil has sown in the world was the way Carlson ended his address to the members of society's aristocracy gathered at the Heritage Foundation's celebration near Washington D.C. , the centre of the most powerful nation in the world, and the most culturally influential nation in the world.

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Myth of progress takes a hammering

Sometimes it takes a time of humiliation and suffering for a nation to come to its senses. For the United States of America, World War II was just such a time, encouraged on its path of self-recovery by speakers such as Fulton J. Sheen who had a vast radio audience.

In a broadcast on April 12, 1942, Sheen stated that the war would bear fruit for Americans:

We are being stripped of our rags of self-righteousness and as we're stripped of these we will begin to be great. First of all we are beginning to die to that false notion that there's no such thing as evil. How often we have said in our schools in the last generation ‘There's no distinction between right and wrong’; ‘Good and evil are only points of view’; ‘There's no absolute’. But now we're dying to that false notion. We are all pointing our fingers across the seas and we're saying, ‘They're evil’, ‘They're wicked’, ‘These men are devils’.

Well if they're wrong then there must be a right. […] We're being forced onto God's side.

Fulton John Sheen was an American bishop (later archbishop) of the Catholic Church known for his preaching and especially his work on television and radio. Ordained a priest in 1919, Sheen quickly became a renowned theologian. For 20 years he hosted the night-time radio program The Catholic Hour on NBC (1930–1950) before moving to television and presenting Life Is Worth Living.

The theme of his broadcast of April 12, 1942, just a few months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the US into World War II, was how his nation could learn from the suffering and sorrow enveloping them.

Above all the battlefields of the world, beyond the din of national slogans, or the scheming of foxes amid the debates of politics, or the selfish classes of economic forces… [good] will rise again not because of any reshuffling of politicians, or any new theory of economics, for their eyes for politics again will fail, economists again will blunder, foxes will be caught in their own traps, and schemers will be caught in their own schemes but because … 

And he goes on to talk about how victory in life comes through a willingness to suffer and die for the good and the true. 

Sheen looks at all the countries around the world enveloped in the world war or suffering under internal aggression as in Mexico where the government had been killing priests and persecuting Christians.

Sheen now applies the consequences of the "evil hour" of suffering and sacrifice testing Americans. As well as awakening them to the reality of evil, and the powerplay of the devil, he identifies other boons for a nation that had been heading on the wrong path: 

We're being stripped, too, of another rag, the false rag of self-expression.

[There are educators in the United States] who are still talking about self-expression. They want no discipline, no authority, no restraint.

But fortunately we're being stripped of that now by the war and sacrifices being imposed upon us. Now, like Nicodemus, we're beginning to see that nations, like men, must be reborn before they can live.

And finally, we're being stripped of another rag, the rag of progress. We've been saying up to this time that progress was in an ascending straight line; that the mere fact that we lived we got better – the blind cosmic forces were sweeping us on until we became kind of supermen.

But this war reveals to us just the contrary, namely, that no life becomes better unless it dies to the lower self.

This spring which we are now enjoying is not an ascending progress from the old spring. It is a result of the death of the old one.

So must all nations and civilizations die in this hour of darkness before they will come to the day of their victory. 

There will be an hour of humiliation, of this there is no doubt. Our choice as a nation is not between being humbled and not being humbled. The choice is who shall humble us. Will it be our enemies or will we humble ourselves?

Can we pass through that hour of that will bring us to the day of peace and if, therefore, we pass through that hour in such a way that labor lifts up its hand as Christ lifted up his in the carpenter shop in service of his father and, if capital like Joseph of Arimathea gives of its wealth for the service of [society]…

We have been like little eagles quite satisfied with the little nest of this world of ours, smug, satisfied and self-complacent. We forgot that we had immortal souls, we forgot that our souls had wings and we're destined for God who can carry us to heights above the earth. Because we forgot this destiny, God had to stir up this nest of America to unearth us from our smug worldliness and to make us realize that we had another destiny..

That destiny was for Americans of the war years as it is now,  to know love and serve the God for whom they and we were made.

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Collapse of US society — a family portrait

A snapshot of the state of collapse of society in the U.S. of A. is provided by the results of a survey on important values. The Wall Street Journal's headline on its report of its survey's findings was this: "America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined It."

One of the best commentaries on the survey is by Katherine Boyle, the co-founder of American Dynamism, which invests in companies building to support the national interest. She writes:

Purpose is on the decline these days. A recent Wall Street Journal–NORC poll found that faith, family, and the flag—the constants that used to define our national character—have eroded in importance in the last 25 years. Only 38 percent of poll respondents said patriotism was very important to them, down from 70 percent in 1998. Of religion, 39 percent said it was very important, down from 62 percent.

Beyond God and country, a desire to have children and community involvement plummeted by double digits, too. Meanwhile, the once universal value of “tolerance for others” has declined from 80 percent to 58 percent in the last four years alone. We’re replacing “Love thy neighbor” with “Get off my lawn.” The only “value” that has inflated in recent years is the one that can be easily measured: money. 

It’s not hard to see why Americans are losing a sense of membership in any kind of mutual enterprise, especially since 2020, when the steepest drops in sentiment occurred. Between global lockdowns, a fentanyl epidemic, school shootings, seemingly inevitable great-power wars, and a looming recession, Americans are losing hope. It’s the sort of poll that if America were your best friend or your child, you’d urge her to seek help.

The decline in traditional values isn’t particularly new. The things that make people feel as though their presence matters, such as civic-mindedness and religious observance, have declined in tandem. From Bowling Alone in the late ’90s to Coming Apart in 2012 to a slew of recent “End of America” essays from every major publication, researchers believe these trends are accelerating further. This decline in civic belief and religiosity predated the mobile internet. We can’t blame the phones this time.

For a while, we tried in vain to replace the default traditional values with something equally noble or even more sophisticated. Classical liberalism, which upheld individual rights and liberty until we started hating half of the individuals in this country. New Atheism had a good run until “trust the science” became a meme. There was meditation. Yoga retreats. Eating clean. Worshipping politics and politicians. Chasing influence. 

But it turns out none of those things filled the national void either. Perhaps if they had, we wouldn’t see story after story about teenage depression and midlife crisis depression and deaths of despair. We have become a treatment-resistant Prozac Nation. 

Increasingly, the void is being filled with. . . you. A relentless focus on the self that tells us you are enough. When I asked ChatGPT for the origin of the phrase “You are enough,” it told me the saying is so ubiquitous it can’t give me an answer.

Ω See the survey results in full here. The survey runs over a wide range of subjects.

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Video: Eight weeks after fertilization

 This is what a "clump of cells" looks like 8 weeks after fertilization.

Watch the baby's movements; listen to the heartbeat here.

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Mysteries of space keep confronting us

Andrew Griffin, science reporter at the UK's Independent, highlights some of the gaps in our understanding of the world around us when he digs into findings arising from the wonderful achievements of the James Webb space telescope. Humans, it seems, are still at the kindergarten level on the learning curve when it comes to cosmology.

The findings from the Webb telescope are these, Griffin writes:

The James Webb Space Telescope keeps finding galaxies that shouldn’t exist, a scientist has warned.

Six of the earliest and most massive galaxies that Nasa’s breakthrough telescope has seen so far appear to be bigger and more mature than they should be given where they are in the universe, researchers have warned.

The new findings build on previous research where scientists reported that despite coming from the very beginnings of the universe, the galaxies were as mature as our own Milky Way.

It's noteworthy that Griffin has used the term "warned" in describing the reaction of the scientific community to the findings. 

This seems to be because, as Griffin declares:

[A paper just published] suggests that, if scientists have not made a mistake, we may be missing some fundamental information about the universe. 

It suggests that the information from the JWST proposes a profound dilemma for scientists. The data indicates that there might be something wrong with the dark energy and cold dark matter paradigm, or ΛCDM, that has been guiding cosmology for decades.

Mike Boylan-Kolchin, associate professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, the author of the new paper examining the unusual galaxies, says:

 “If the masses are right, then we are in uncharted territory. We’ll require something very new about galaxy formation or a modification to cosmology. One of the most extreme possibilities is that the universe was expanding faster shortly after the Big Bang than we predict, which might require new forces and particles.”

Professor Boylan-Kolchin’s paper, ‘Stress testing ΛCDM with high-redshift galaxy candidates’, is published in Nature Astronomy. The earlier research that he reworked was described by Griffin in this way:

Scientists found six galaxies, which together threaten to change what scientists know about the beginnings of galaxies in our universe. Researchers say they refer to the objects as “universe breakers” and that they are in tension with 99 per cent of existing models of the universe.

A scientist involved in Webb Telescope research, Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, states:

“We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”

If they can be confirmed, they suggest that our history of the early cosmos may be wrong, and that galaxies grew far more quickly than we realised. That would require changing either our models of the universe or our understanding of how galaxies began.

“We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find,” Leja said. “It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”

Erica Nelson, co-author of the new research and assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder, tells how nothing is settled in the theories astrophysicists often pontificate on:

“If even one of these galaxies is real, it will push against the limits of our understanding of cosmology,” said 

And even other objects would still be shocking, researchers say. “Another possibility is that these things are a different kind of weird object, such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting,” said Professor Nelson.

The search for the reality around us goes on, and in the meantime we can enjoy our amazement at the splendour of it all, and thank God.  

Ω See also:

'James Webb Space Telescope images challenge theories of how universe evolved' at phys.org  

Wonder at the latest hi-res images from @NASAWebb  available to view and download here 

The luminous, hot star Wolf-Rayet 124 (WR 124) is prominent at the center of the James Webb Space Telescope’s composite image in the constellation of Sagitta.

In the image, WR 124 is surrounded by a ring nebula of expelled material known as M1-67. It is one of the fastest runaway stars in the Milky Way. The image is a  combination of near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths of light from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team.

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