From a long and moving theological and philosophical essay about suffering and human society, by Xavier Le Pichon, a geophysicist (a key figure in the development of plate techtonics) who has lived for many years at L'Arche and other communities centered around members who suffer from mental illness. He discusses the ideas in his essay in a wonderful 1hr public radio interview here.

community, horizons of the possible, humanity, poverty, science, suffering

Nate:

Anybody who has experienced fatherhood or motherhood knows about the power of the infants. The arrival of a baby completely changes the structure and life of the whole family. One could say actually that the infant is the one who has the authority. The activities of the whole family are ordered to his needs. What is true for infants is also true for sick, handicapped and aged people. As I have argued above, they have a real power of reorganization of the human communities. But I believe that the experience repeatedly made by humans is that there is something beyond. Entering into relation with the weak may become an experience of discovery and acceptation of our own weaknesses. Discovering indeed that whenever I recognize that I am weak, then I am strong. And entering through this experience into a world of fragility and vulnerability that we share with our friends who have made the same experience, a world that becomes a world of kindness, mercy and love.

A great post by my friend Robin Goldstein about the power of word-choice when it comes to signalling the quality of wine. But I wonder: are some sensory experiences (wine, chocolate) really harder to reproduce than others (the color white, a C-major scale), or is it just that we're culturally trained to be more forgiving of poor reproductions in some areas than we are in others? (Or are the two really the same thing?) The famous whites in John Singer Sargent's portraits are anything but white; the overtones and subtleties of a scale played by Yo-Yo Ma are still near-impossible to reproduce (let alone synthesize) with true fidelity.

chemistry, copying, food and drink, metaphor, taste

Nate:

We may disagree about our favorite artists and musicians, but it’s relatively easy to agree that a particular color is blue, or that a particular note is C-sharp. They’re described by wavelengths and frequencies along a clearly defined spectrum. That’s why the technologies of visual and auditory reproduction—photo, video, audio—work so well, relatively speaking.

With taste and smell—the so-called “chemical” senses, which are more complex (humans have about 400 different types of olfactory receptors) and less well understood than the others, we don’t have the luxury of those points of reference. That’s why we so often resort to loose analogies—“tastes like chicken”—and it’s also why reproducing tastes and smells is so difficult (grape soda doesn’t taste much like grapes, and nobody’s yet synthesized a bottle of 1945 Pétrus—an activity that would surely yield tremendous profit).

To challenge this barrier, we resort to analogy. Coffee tastes like nuts and chocolate; Sauvignon Blanc smells like grapefruit and cat pee. In a Sauternes, you might sense the brine of the first green olive you tasted in Italy; in a Pedro Ximénez sherry, the viscous maple syrup that your grandmother once drizzled on your pancakes.

But how carefully are we really choosing these adjectives and analogies? How often do they correspond to real chemical commonalities? Does that matter? Do the analogies more frequently serve a more poetic (or at least suggestive) purpose, forging new neural assemblies that connect relatively arbitrary taste and smell memories with each other—connections that, reinforced over time, turn into sensory reality?

It is risky to attempt to analyze, let alone criticize, a technology you do not have firsthand experience with and (to use Polanyi's phrase) "personal knowledge" of. Unfortunately most of Melissa Wiginton's short essay on Twitter illustrates those perils, complete with the awkward generational self-consciousness that seems to be de rigeur in these sorts of critiques. But this comment on the difference between "self-expression" and "being heard" is absolutely spot on. I would add, too, that "self-expression" requires a self worth expressing, and it is very doubtful whether such a self is formed in units of 140 characters.

communication, trends, twitter

Andy:

Some young pastors want to posts tweets on a screen where everyone can see them during worship, I guess to connect by knowing what others are thinking. One said, “You know our generation. We want our voices heard.”

Now, I have learned a few things along the way and one is this: We all want our voices heard. But self-expression is what happens when we tweet. Being heard happens when we listen. It’s not the same thing.

Absolutely fantastic review of the parallel trends in corporate and megachurch architecture, from Spurgeon's Crystal (preaching) Palace to the present. I found the comparison between Saddleback Church's campus and Google's headquarters especially intriguing . . . a reminder that all churches are themselves cultural artifacts, created within the horizons of possibility that a culture creates. But is it just my imagination or does American church architecture almost exclusively adopt, rather than encourage, architectural innovation? Mel McGowan, call your office!

architecture, business, churches, corporations

Andy:

The correspondences between the Googleplex and Saddleback are remarkable: Rigid building models were broken down into amorphous, disaggregated masses, screened from their parking lots by trees and artificial hills; both campuses include plush lounges, landscaped paths, beach-volleyball courts, and cafés (with “outdoor seating for sunshine daydreaming,” Google’s website boasts). The architecture is meant to persuade church members or secular employees—especially younger people—to spend their most productive time there. As Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said, “knowledge workers believe they are paid to be effective, not to work 9 to 5.”

It’s no coincidence that Saddleback mirrors the top office environments of its day. Warren was a good friend of [Peter] Drucker’s (the consultant died in 2005), and the books he has written for pastors quote Drucker liberally. Drucker, in turn, was so impressed with the business acumen of evangelical leaders that in 1998 he declared the megachurch “surely the most important social phenomenon in American society in the last 30 years.”

The only downside I see to this is if stairwell music winds up with as bad a rep as its elevator cousin.

architecture, behavior, buildings, design, disciplines, exercise, music, visual arts

Nate:

So how does one design a building where people actually use the stairs? There are three key features.

1) Fewer turns between the stairs and the closest entrance.
2) Stairs with large surface areas (not too narrow and steep).
3) Create a view, either up, down, or across, from the stairwell. No one wants to walk up a tiny, white box.

The Booth School of Business staircases meet all of these requirements (perhaps it’s no surprise the building won a major design award last year). For those who can’t build new stairwells, there are a few other nudges to try. Displaying motivational signs in the lobby and throughout the building, and playing music in the stairwell can increase stair use. Together, these two nudges can increase usage by as much as 9 percent. Hanging artwork on the stairwell walls, closing elevators occasionally, and offering incentives like fruit are also known to work.

It's fascinating how, along with their obviously useful applications, one thing diagnostic labs do is remove an element of human contact from the medical experience: just the facts of the case, no intuition or fuzzy stuff. You'd think that would be a boon for good medicine (in the way that double-blind studies are), but could it be that losing the face-to-face aspect actually makes for less meticulous diagnostics?

empathy, faces, medicine, photography

Nate:

When Dr. Yehonatan N. Turner began his residency in radiology, he was frustrated that the CT scans he analyzed revealed nothing about the patients behind them — only their internal organs. So to make things personal, he imagined each patient was his father.

But then he had a better idea: attach a photograph of the actual patient to each file.

“I was looking for a way to make each case feel unique and less abstract,” said Dr. Turner, 36, now a third-year resident at Shaare Zedek Medical Center here. “I thought having a photo of the patient would help me relate in a deeper way.”

Dr. Turner’s hunch turned into an unusual medical study. Its preliminary findings, presented in Chicago last December at a conference of the Radiological Society of North America,  suggested that when a digital photograph was attached to a patient’s file, radiologists provided longer, more meticulous reports. And they said they felt more connected to the patients, whom they seldom meet face to face.

Matthew Crawford gives us glimpses of the joy and fulfillment that come from a job well done, and suggests that such fulfillment usually comes from participation in a community oriented toward excellence—such as a well-executed turn at speed on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Loyal readers will know that I fully agree.

community, excellence, matthew crawford, work

Andy:

I like to fix motorcycles more than I like to wire houses (even though I could make about twice as much money wiring houses). Both practices have internal goods that engage my attention, but fixing bikes is more meaningful because not only the fixing but the riding of motorcycles answers to certain intuitions I have about human excellence. People who ride motorcycles have gotten something right, and I want to put myself in the service of it, this thing that we do, this kingly sport that is like war made beautiful.

My job of making motorcycles run right is subservient to the higher good that is achieved when one of my customers leans hard through a corner on the Blue Ridge Parkway, to the point of deliberately dragging his well-armored knee on the inside. This moment of faith, daring, and skill casts a sanctifying light over my work. I try to get his steering head bearings as light and silky as they can be without free play, and his swing arm bushings good and tight, because I want him to feel his tires truly. . . .

I try to be a good motorcycle mechanic. This effort connects me to others, in particular to those who exemplify good motorcycling, because it is they who can best judge how well I have realized the functional goods I am aiming at. I wouldn’t even know what those goods are if I didn’t spend time with people who ride at a much higher level than I, and are therefore more discerning of what is good in a motorcycle. So my work situates me in a particular community. The narrow mechanical things I concern myself with are inscribed within a larger circle of meaning; they are in the service of an activity that we recognize as part of a life well lived. This common recognition, which needn’t be spoken, is the basis for a friendship that orients by concrete images of excellence.

One of the great surprises in writing Culture Making was how much I ended up talking not about creating but cultivating culture. We need to give much more weight to the "tending and keeping" of culture than we usually do in our innovation-saturated world. Matthew Crawford suggests that there is, in fact, something a bit creepy about a world that urges us onward to "what's next."

consumerism, craft, cultivation and creation, matthew crawford, work

Andy:

[T]here is a whole ideology of choice and freedom and autonomy, and . . . if one pays due attention, these ideals start to seem less like a bubbling up of the unfettered Self and more like something that is urged upon us. This becomes most clear in advertising, where Choice and Freedom and A World Without Limits and Master the Possibilities and all the other heady existentialist slogans of the consumerist Self are invoked with such repetitive urgency that they come to resemble a disciplinary system. Somehow, self-realization and freedom always entail buying something new, never conserving something old.

One of the great benefits of Matthew Crawford's book is its challenge to the assumption that the kind of work "cultural creatives" get to do is inherently more fulfilling and valuable, and that therefore our society should be busily "educating" as many people as possible to be such. Consider an alternate view: that many of the most engaging, dignified callings are those that involve more embodied kinds of work than "cultural creatives" usually get to perform.

creativity, cultivation, disciplines, matthew crawford, work

Andy:

The truth, of course, is that creativity is a by-product of mastery of the sort that is cultivated through long practice. It seems to be built up through submission (think a musician practicing scales, or Einstein learning tensor algebra). Identifying creativity with freedom harmonizes quite well with the culture of the new capitalism, in which the imperative of flexibility precludes dwelling in any task long enough to develop real competence. . . . We’re primed to respond to any invocation of the aesthetics of individuality. The rhetoric of freedom pleases our ears. The simulacrum of independent thought and action that goes by the name of “creativity” trips easily off the tongues of spokespeople for the corporate counterculture. . . .

What is it that we really want for a young person when we give him or her vocational advice? The only creditable answer, it seems to me, is one that avoids utopianism while keeping an eye on the human good: work that engages the human capacities as fully as possible. . . .

So what advice should one give to a young person? If you have a natural bent for scholarship; if you are attracted to the most difficult books out of an urgent need, and can spare four years to devote yourself to them, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. But if this is not the case; if the thought of four more years sitting in a classroom makes your skin crawl, the good news is that you don’t have to go through the motions and jump through the hoops for the sake of making a decent living. Even if you do go to college, learn a trade in the summers. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems or low-level “creative.”

Following the news out of Iran, I keep coming back to Lawrence Weschler's writing about the 1980 Solidarty uprising in Poland, perhaps the best summation I've seen of the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions, and of the nature of, as Bonhoeffer put it, costly grace.

grace, horizons of the possible, iran, necessary and sufficient, poland, protests

Nate:

Similarly, these passion pieces are punctuated with grace notes, and this mysterious working of grace is something I’ve likewise often considered in my political reporting: grace in its original sense as gratis, for free. One works and works at something, which then happens of its own accord: it would not have happened without all the prior work, true, but its happening cannot be said to have resulted from all that work, the way effects are said to result from a series of causes. There is all the work, which is preparation, preparation for receptivity, but then there is something beyond that which is gratis, for free. August 1980 in Gdansk, Poland, would never have happened without the years and years of tenuous labor by a small band of seemingly marginal activists—on one denies this—but when that strike suddenly happened, it seemed to come out of nowhere, to happen all by itself. Everyone still talks about this (particularly the activists), talks about and wonders at the sudden overwhelming sense of rightness that descended on the place at that moment.