Lift Up Your Hearts!

This article from becomingminimalist.com is filled with shocking statistics about Americans (and a few other nationalities). I'm naturally suspicious of that kind of survey and what goes into the statistics. But were it only half true, it would still be scary. If you click to the article, you'll see reference links to the sources of each statistic. That doesn't mean the data may not be lacking in veracity, but citing sources deserves commendation, and you can find out more if you'd like.

Did I say these statistics are scary? More than that, they're alien—have I landed on another planet? If this is the truth about our society, then we, our families, and our friends are 'way above average (or below, depending on your point of view). Here's an abbreviated version of the numbers, with commentary.

• There are 300,000 items in the average American home. Hmmm. Since the definition of "items" includes paperclips, I'm not sure that number isn't on the low side. Legos alone might account for it in many families. :) I know we have some 2,000 books on the shelves, and an inordinate quantity of office supplies, kitchen utensils, and computer paraphernalia, so we're probably guilty here.
• The average size of the American home has nearly tripled over the past 50 years. It's ironic, isn't it? Families are much smaller now, but have much larger houses—in which they spend much less time.
• One out of every 10 Americans rents offsite storage. Not us. I can see situations in which someone might do that—such as the folks who put up elaborate Christmas displays and need to store everything for the rest of the year, or someone in the process of moving—but mostly I wonder what can be worth the cost of external storage.
• Twenty-five percent of people with two-car garages don’t have room to park cars inside them, and 32% only have room for one vehicle. Exactly what is meant by these numbers is unclear, and it apparently leaves out people with one- (or three-) car garages, but if the number of cars parked on the streets of our neighborhood is any indication, it seems to be a common affliction. Porter made sure that every time we moved into a house, the car(s) went into the garage the first night. Because he knew that if we didn't make that push, it might never happen.... Still, in our extended family it is generally true that garages contain the indended number of cars.
• British research found that the average 10-year-old owns 238 toys but plays with just 12 daily. Define "toy." Are all 300,000 Legos one "toy"? :)
• The average American woman owns 30 outfits—one for every day of the month. In 1930, that figure was nine. I don't believe it, and if true, it's hardly excessive consumption. You can get 30 different outfits with five blouses, three skirts, and two pairs of shoes, which even I would call a pretty minimal wardrobe.
• The average American family spends $1,700 on clothes annually. Thanks to the meticulous financier in the family (not me), I actually have our data for this—since 1984! From then until now we have averaged $519 spent on clothing per year. For the period from 1984 to 2000, when we were clothing two children as well as two adults, the average was $691.
• Nearly half of American households don’t save any money. Of all these statistics, this may be the most shocking to me. All those two-income households and we're not saving? I won't detail our historical savings as I did our clothing expenditures, but I have noticed an attitude change over the years that I find most significant. For much of my life, saving money was a priority for most of the families I knew. We saved for big-ticket purchases like washing machines and vacations, we saved for medical needs, we saved for retirement, we saved for our children's college costs, we saved for unexpected expenses like job loss. What happens now? We run up credit card debt for those big-ticket items so we don't have to wait for them. "Normal" medical care has gotten so far out of whack that we've redefined "insurance" to cover everything, not just catastrophes. We expect the government to provide for our retirement and unemployment. College has become so expensive that we count on scholarships—where having money saved only hurts one's case—and want the government to provide this also. There is very little of a "savings mindset" left, and almost no thought of economizing by forgoing the things that in the past we have done very well without, such as cable television, eating at restaurants, and the latest fashions in clothing, cars, home furnishings, and phones. Worse, I've all too often run into the attitude that saving money is actually bad—evil. They call it hoarding money. This is not a call to charity, but the belief that if you are not out there buying, buying, buying you are not doing your part to support the economy. Never mind that money saved is still working to contribute to the economy (unless it's stashed under the mattress), and that NOT buying, buying, buying may be the best thing an individual can do to save the earth.
• Our homes have more television sets than people. And those television sets are turned on for more than a third of the day—eight hours, 14 minutes. Sadly, I have to plead more guilty than I'd like to here. We still have but one TV for two people, but for a few years now Netflix has encouraged us to have it on more than is good for us. I miss the days when our children were at home and the television was almost never on. On the other hand, the educational opportunities available now are fantastic, from the many subjects available on The Great Courses (good), to travel information from Rick Steves (helpful), to the education in modern culture gained from watching shows like NCIS and Rizzoli and Isles (fun and eye-opening, but almost certainly bad for our mental health). None of our children, however, own even one television set. They do sometimes watch audio-visual media on other devices, but technically, if you count all our immediate family, that's a 1:17 televison-to-people ratio.
• Some reports indicate we consume twice as many material goods today as we did 50 years ago. That's quite possible, especially considering our houses are three times as large (see above). But what is that figure measuring? What would be even more telling than total consumption would be the material goods consumption per person, since the average family size has shrunk. Personally? I doubt that in our case it's twice, but it's certainly more than when I was growing up, and 'way more than in the days of our ancestors, when estate inventories, even of the rich, would delineate down to the level of spoons and articles of clothing.
• Americans spend more on shoes, jewelry, and watches than on higher education. Certainly not in our case (see above clothing expenditures). It's also a suspect figure: How are they counting the numbers for higher education? If they mean what we spend net of scholarships and other subsidies, I can believe it. But if they are counting the whole cost of college (and not excluding technical schools), I'm skeptical.
• Shopping malls outnumber high schools. How is this a meaningful statistic? Even large high schools serve a very small number of people (2800 in the case of our local school, which is huge), whereas shopping malls serve the entire population.
• Ninety-three percent of teenage girls rank shopping as their favorite pastime. Not me! I've always disliked shopping (except maybe for books), even as a teenager. But even for the rest of the population, I doubt this statistic is as much about consumerism as about the lack of meaningful work in teenagers' lives. Sure, the girls are out shopping, and no doubt buying, too. But is the primary impetus consumerism, or an opportunity to interact with friends? (I suspect that for boys the favorite activity is video games, which serves the same social purpose.) That they're not getting together to go hiking, or discuss books, or volunteer at the hospital, speaks more to skewed priorities and lack of convenient opportunity than to consumerism, I think.
• Over the course of our lifetime, we will spend a total of 3,680 hours searching for misplaced items. Phones, keys, sunglasses, and paperwork top the list. I'm guessing this doesn't even count Google searches. :) This fact doesn't surprise me in the least. Certainly it's a logical consequence of having more stuff and bigger houses. And far too many people no longer believe in "a place for everything, and everything in its place." I've saved myself a great deal of time and effort by having a convenient basket that my keys go into every time I come home. If we always filed (and refiled) paperwork whenever we're no longer actively working with it (sadly, I don't) we'd waste less time keeping track of it. To view this apparently staggering statistic in perspective, however, if you figure a good life of 80 years, the time wasted looking for lost items amounts to less than eight minutes per day. I guarantee we all spend more than eight minutes daily on worse activities.
• The $8 billion home organization industry has more than doubled in size since the early 2000’s—growing at a staggering rate of 10% each year. This is a natural consequence of the previous statistic. I'm sure I've spent more time on organizational activities (reading, thinking, planning, doing, re-doing) than in actually looking for lost items.

In a comment to my post, Sometimes Old Family Stories Are True, Heather asked, "Speaking of old family stories, what do you know about the truth of the My grandfather saved Einstein from drowning one?

You can see how these legends grow over time, for the story as I know it was not that Bill Wightman saved Albert Einstein from drowning, but that the deed was done by a local "village idiot" named Johnny Dingle.

Here's what I was able to find out with some quick research.

In addition to the stories Porter and I remember hearing from Bill and other Old Saybrook natives, I discovered this in "Charles Griswold Bartlett: Mapping Old Lyme's Waterways," (Old Lyme Historical Society: River and Sound, Issue 12, Winter 2013, p. 5).

A hermit named Johnny Dingle lived on Great Island until September 1938.

Whether or not Dingle was also a bit mentally incapacitated is another issue, though Bill and others certainly described him that way. If nothing else, it provides great contrast in the story about Einstein.

This Patch article, "Sailing the Connecticut Coast with Albert Einstein," shows that an encounter between Dingle and Einstein was not only possible, but likely.

[Albert Einstein] learned to sail in Switzerland as a young man and continued to do so for more than 50 years. ... He rented a home called the "White House" in Old Lyme during the summer of 1935 and took his 17-foot sailboat named Tinef with him.

Despite sailing for over half a century, Einstein was not a very accomplished sailor. According to his biographers, he would lose his direction, his mast would often fall down, and he frequently ran aground and had near collisions with other vessels.

Often sailing near the mouth of the Connecticut River at Old Saybrook, Einstein ran aground on a sand bar once. The New York Times took note, running the following headline in the summer of 1935: "Relative Tide And Sand Bars Trap Einstein." Another newspaper put it this way: "Einstein's Miscalculation Leaves Him Stuck On Bar Of Lower Connecticut River."

Interestingly, Einstein seemed to be indifferent to the dangers of sailing, and the perils were particularly acute since he didn't know how to swim! It is rather amazing that he didn't drown.

Did Johnny Dingle really save Einstein from drowning? It's quite possible that story is true. What's near certain is that Dingle did help out the brilliant scientist one way or another, given the hapless sailor's predilection for getting into trouble, and that Dingle, however challenged he might have been in the rest of life, was constantly on and around the water where Albert Einstein was sailing, and knew well all the shoals, sandbars, and other hazards of his demesne.

Reflections on the Psalms by C. S. Lewis (Harcourt Brace & Company, first published 1958)

C. S. Lewis fan though I am, I was not prepared for how much I would enjoy this book. Not only does Lewis have wise advice for understanding and getting the most out of even the problematic psalms, but the book is filled as well with general wisdom.

Lewis's take on the Psalms has inspired me to read through them again before starting over from Genesis. It is very helpful to learn more about the culture in which they were written, and about poetry as well. He deals with not only what they might have meant to the writers of these poems, but also with why it's legitimate to view them as prophecy and with a Christian interpretation. A Christian can hardly insist that the Psalms only mean what the writers means, since Jesus freely interpreted them his own way. Nor does Lewis shy away from the parts that are shockingly offensive, such as the last verse of Psalm 137 ("Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!"), which Don McLean wisely left out of his simple, beautiful, and haunting Babylon.

I think it is important to make a distinction: between the conviction that one is in the right and the conviction that one is “righteous,” is a good man. Since none of us is righteous, the second conviction is always a delusion. But any of us may be, probably all of us at one time or another are, in the right about some particular issue. What is more, the worse man may be in the right against the better man. Their general characters have nothing to do with it. The question whether the disputed pencil belongs to Tommy or Charles is quite distinct from the question which is the nicer little boy, and the parents who allowed the one to influence their decision about the other would be very unfair. (It would be still worse if they said Tommy ought to let Charles have the pencil whether it belonged to him or not, because this would show he had a nice disposition. That may be true, but it is an untimely truth. An exhortation to charity should not come as rider to a refusal of justice. It is likely to give Tommy a lifelong conviction that charity is a sanctimonious dodge for condoning theft and whitewashing favouritism.) We need therefore by no means assume that the Psalmists are deceived or lying when they assert that, as against their particular enemies at some particular moment, they are completely in the right. Their voices while they say so may grate harshly on our ear and suggest to us that they are unamiable people. But that is another matter. And to be wronged does not commonly make people amiable. (pp 17-18)

I made a similar point in A Debt Is a Debt Is a Debt.

It seems that there is a general rule in the moral universe which may be formulated “The higher, the more in danger”. The “average sensual man” who is sometimes unfaithful to his wife, sometimes tipsy, always a little selfish, now and then (within the law) a trifle sharp in his deals, is certainly, by ordinary standards, a “lower” type than the man whose soul is filled with some great Cause, to which he will subordinate his appetites, his fortune, and even his safety. But it is out of the second man that something really fiendish can be made; an Inquisitor, a Member of the Committee of Public Safety. It is great men, potential saints, not little men, who become merciless fanatics. Those who are readiest to die for a cause may easily become those who are readiest to kill for it. (p 28)

If I am never tempted, and cannot even imagine myself being tempted, to gamble, this does not mean that I am better than those who are. The timidity and pessimism which exempt me from that temptation themselves tempt me to draw back from those risks and adventures which every man ought to take. (p 29)

There is a stage in a child’s life at which it cannot separate the religious from the merely festal character of Christmas or Easter. I have been told of a very small and very devout boy who was heard murmuring to himself on Easter morning a poem of his own composition which began “Chocolate eggs and Jesus risen”. This seems to me, for his age, both admirable poetry and admirable piety. But of course the time will soon come when such a child can no longer effortlessly and spontaneously enjoy that unity. He will become able to distinguish the spiritual from the ritual and festal aspect of Easter; chocolate eggs will no longer be sacramental. And once he has distinguished he must put one or the other first. If he puts the spiritual first he can still taste something of Easter in the chocolate eggs; if he puts the eggs first they will soon be no more than any other sweetmeat. They have taken on an independent, and therefore a soon withering, life. (pp 48-49)

I am inclined to think a Christian would be wise to avoid, where he decently can, any meeting with people who are bullies, lascivious, cruel, dishonest, spiteful and so forth. Not because we are “too good” for them. In a sense because we are not good enough. We are not good enough to cope with all the temptations, nor clever enough to cope with all the problems, which an evening spent in such society produces. The temptation is to condone, to connive at; by our words, looks and laughter, to “consent”. The temptation was never greater than now when we are all (and very rightly) so afraid of priggery or “smugness”. And of course, even if we do not seek them out, we shall constantly be in such company whether we wish it or not. This is the real and unavoidable difficulty. We shall hear vile stories told as funny; not merely licentious stories but (to me far more serious and less noticed) stories which the teller could not be telling unless he was betraying someone’s confidence. We shall hear infamous detraction of the absent, often disguised as pity or humour. Things we hold sacred will be mocked. Cruelty will be slyly advocated by the assumption that its only opposite is “sentimentality”. The very presuppositions of any possible good life—all disinterested motives, all heroism, all genuine forgiveness—will be, not explicitly denied (for then the matter could be discussed), but assumed to be phantasmal, idiotic, believed in only by children. What is one to do? For on the one hand, quite certainly, there is a degree of unprotesting participation in such talk which is very bad. We are strengthening the hands of the enemy. We are encouraging him to believe that “those Christians”, once you get them off their guard and round a dinner table, really think and feel exactly as he does. By implication we are denying our Master; behaving as if we “knew not the Man”. On the other hand is one to show that, like Queen Victoria, one is “not amused”? Is one to be contentious, interrupting the flow of conversation at every moment with “I don’t agree, I don’t agree”? Or rise and go away? But by these courses we may also confirm some of their worst suspicions of “those Christians”. We are just the sort of ill-mannered prigs they always said. Silence is a good refuge. People will not notice it nearly so easily as we tend to suppose. And (better still) few of us enjoy it as we might be in danger of enjoying more forcible methods. Disagreement can, I think, sometimes be expressed without the appearance of priggery, if it is done argumentatively not dictatorially; support will often come from some most unlikely member of the party, or from more than one, till we discover that those who were silently dissentient were actually a majority. A discussion of real interest may follow. Of course the right side may be defeated in it. That matters very much less than I used to think. The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said. There comes of course a degree of evil against which a protest will have to be made, however little chance it has of success. There are cheery agreements in cynicism or brutality which one must contract out of unambiguously. If it can’t be done without seeming priggish, then priggish we must seem. For what really matters is not seeming but being a prig. If we sufficiently dislike making the protest, if we are strongly tempted not to, we are unlikely to be priggish in reality. Those who positively enjoy, as they call it, “testifying” are in a different and more dangerous position. As for the mere seeming—well, though it is very bad to be a prig, there are social atmospheres so foul that in them it is almost an alarming symptom if a man has never been called one. Just in the same way, though pedantry is a folly and snobbery a vice, yet there are circles in which only a man indifferent to all accuracy will escape being called a pedant, and others where manners are so coarse, flashy and shameless that a man (whatever his social position) of any natural good taste will be called a snob. What makes this contact with wicked people so difficult is that to handle the situation successfully requires not merely good intentions, even with humility and courage thrown in; it may call for social and even intellectual talents which God has not given us. It is therefore not self-righteousness but mere prudence to avoid it when we can. (pp 71-74) [emphasis mine]

Of course this appreciation of, almost this sympathy with, creatures useless or hurtful or wholly irrelevant to man, is not our modern “kindness to animals”. That is a virtue most easily practised by those who have never, tired and hungry, had to work with animals for a bare living, and who inhabit a country where all dangerous wild beasts have been exterminated. The Jewish feeling, however, is vivid, fresh, and impartial. In Norse stories a pestilent creature such as a dragon tends to be conceived as the enemy not only of men but of gods. In classical stories, more disquietingly, it tends to be sent by a god for the destruction of men whom he has a grudge against. The Psalmist’s clear objective view—noting the lions and whales side by side with men and men’s cattle—is unusual. And I think it is certainly reached through the idea of God as Creator and sustainer of all. (pp 84-85)

The next several quotations are from the very helpful chapter entitled simply "Scripture."

The human qualities of the raw materials [of Scripture] show through. Naïvety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not “the Word of God” in the sense that every passage, in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God; and we (under grace, with attention to tradition and to interpreters wiser than ourselves, and with the use of such intelligence and learning as we may have) receive that word from it not by using it as an encyclopedia or an encyclical but by steeping ourselves in its tone or temper and so learning its overall message. (pp 109-110)

We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form—something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table. One can respect, and at moments envy, both the Fundamentalist’s view of the Bible and the Roman Catholic’s view of the Church. (p 112)

We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given us in that cut-and-dried, fool-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the “wisecrack”. He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be “got up” as if it were a “subject”. If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the most elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, “pinned down”. The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam. (pp 112-113)

Descending lower, we find a somewhat similar difficulty with St. Paul. I cannot be the only reader who has wondered why God, having given him so many gifts, withheld from him (what would to us seem so necessary for the first Christian theologian) that of lucidity and orderly exposition. (p 113)

It may be that what we should have liked would have been fatal to us if granted. It may be indispensable that Our Lord’s teaching, by that elusiveness ... should demand a response from the whole man, should make it so clear that there is no question of learning a subject but of steeping ourselves in a Personality, acquiring a new outlook and temper, breathing a new atmosphere, suffering Him, in His own way, to rebuild in us the defaced image of Himself. So in St. Paul. Perhaps the sort of works I should wish him to have written would have been useless. The crabbedness, the appearance of inconsequence and even of sophistry, the turbulent mixture of petty detail, personal complaint, practical advice, and lyrical rapture, finally let through what matters more than ideas ... Christ Himself operating in a man’s life. And in the same way, the value of the Old Testament may be dependent on what seems its imperfection. It may repel one use in order that we may be forced to use it in another way—to find the Word in it, not without repeated and leisurely reading nor withoutdiscriminations made by our conscience and our critical faculties, to re-live, while we read, the whole Jewish experience of God’s gradual and graded self-revelation, to feel the very contentions between the Word and the human material through which it works. For here again, it is our total response that has to be elicited. (pp 113-114)

Yet it is, perhaps, idle to speak here of spirit and letter. There is almost no “letter” in the words of Jesus. Taken by a literalist, He will always prove the most elusive of teachers. Systems cannot keep up with that darting illumination. No net less wide than a man’s whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish. (p 119)

Between different ages there is no impartial judge on earth, for no one stands outside the historical process; and of course no one is so completely enslaved to it as those who take our own age to be, not one more period, but a final and permanent platform from which we can see all other ages objectively. (p 121)

It's time for my annual compilation of books read during the past year. A few patterns stand out: my current C. S. Lewis retrospective; the discovery of several new Rick Brant Science-Adventure books, necessitating a re-read of the whole series; the release of a new Green Ember book, ditto; and the discovery in July of the Brother Cadfael books. Mystery and adventure were heavily represented this year; hence so was fiction. Here are a few statistics:

• Total books: 92, not up to last year's 108, but more than any other year since I started keeping track in 2010
• Fiction 61, non-fiction 22, other 9 
• Months with most books: February and December, tied at 15
• Months with fewest books: September, not a one; June had only two; travel is another way of expanding one's horizons
• Most frequent authors: John Blaine (Harold L. Goodwin) 24; C. S. Lewis 23; Ellis Peters 16

Here's the alphabetical list; links are to reviews. Titles in bold are ones I found particularly worthwhile, but the different colors only reflect whether or not you've followed a hyperlink. This chronological list has ratings and warnings as well.

1. 100 Fathoms Under: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #4 by John Blaine
2. 3000 Quotations from the Writings of George MacDonald by Harry Verploegh (ed.)
3. The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis
4. The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life by Steven E. Landsburg
5. The Bible (The Message paraphrase)
6. The Black Star of Kingston by S. D. Smith
7. The Blue Ghost Mystery: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #15 by John Blaine
8. A Book of Narnians: The Lion, the Witch and the Others by C. S. Lewis, James Riordan, Pauline Baynes
9. The Books of the Apocrypha
10. The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis by Walter Hooper (ed.)
11. C. S. Lewis on Scripture by Michael J. Christensen
12. The Caves of Fear: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #8 by John Blaine
13. The Chronicles of Narnia 1: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
14. The Chronicles of Narnia 2: Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis
15. The Chronicles of Narnia 3: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis
16. The Chronicles of Narnia 4: The Silver Chair by C. S. Lewis
17. The Chronicles of Narnia 5: The Horse and His Boy by C. S. Lewis
18. The Chronicles of Narnia 6: The Magician's Nephew by C. S. Lewis
19. The Chronicles of Narnia 7: The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis
20. The Confession of Brother Haluin (Brother Cadfael #15) by Ellis Peters
21. The Crusades Controversy: Setting the Record Straight by Thomas F. Madden
22. Danger Below!: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #23 by John Blaine
23. Dead Man's Ransom (Brother Cadfael #9) by Ellis Peters
24. The Deadly Dutchman: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #22 by John Blaine
25. Decisive by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
26. The Devil's Novice (Brother Cadfael #8) by Ellis Peters
27. The Egyptian Cat Mystery: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #16 by John Blaine
28. The Electronic Mind Reader: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #12 by John Blaine
29. Ember Falls by S. D. Smith
30. An Excellent Mystery (Brother Cadfael #11) by Ellis Peters
31. The First Fowler by S. D. Smith
32. The Flaming Mountain: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #17 by John Blaine
33. The Flying Stingaree: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #18 by John Blaine
34. Go Wild by John Ratey and Richard Manning
35. The Golden Skull: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #10 by John Blaine
36. The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis
37. The Green Ember by S.D. Smith
38. The Hermit of Eyton Forest (Brother Cadfael #14) by Ellis Peters
39. Innovation on Tap by Eric B. Schultz
40. The Last Archer by S. D. Smith
41. The Leper of Saint Giles (Brother Cadfael #5) by Ellis Peters
42. The Lost City: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #2 by John Blaine
43. Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder
44. The Magic Talisman: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #24 by John Blaine
45. Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
46. Miracles by C. S. Lewis
47. The Misadventured Summer of Tumbleweed Thompson by Glenn McCarty
48. Monk's Hood (Brother Cadfael #3) by Ellis Peters
49. A Morbid Taste for Bones (Brother Cadfael #1) by Ellis Peters
50. More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics by Steven E. Landsburg
51. Ocean-Born Mary by Lois Lenski
52. On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature by C. S. Lewis
53. One Corpse Too Many (Brother Cadfael #2) by Ellis Peters
54. Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger
55. Past Watchful Dragons: The Narnian Chronicles of C. S. Lewis by Walter Hooper
56. Perelandra (space trilogy part 2) by C. S. Lewis
57. The Phantom Shark: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #6 by John Blaine
58. The Pilgrim of Hate (Brother Cadfael #10) by Ellis Peters
59. The Pirates of Shan: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #14 by John Blaine
60. Poems by C. S. Lewis
61. A Preface to "Paradise Lost" by C. S. Lewis
62. A Rare Benedictine: The Advent of Brother Cadfael (Brother Cadfael #16) by Ellis Peters
63. The Raven in the Foregate (Brother Cadfael #12) by Ellis Peters
64. Recasting the Past: The Middle Ages in Young Adult Literature by Rebecca Barnhouse
65. Reflections on the Psalms by C. S. Lewis
66. The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson
67. Rocket Jumper: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #21 by John Blaine
68. The Rocket's Shadow: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #1 by John Blaine
69. The Rose Rent (Brother Cadfael #13) by Ellis Peters
70. The Ruby Ray Mystery: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #19 by John Blaine
71. Saint Peter's Fair (Brother Cadfael #4) by Ellis Peters
72. The Sanctuary Sparrow (Brother Cadfael #7) by Ellis Peters
73. The Scarlet Lake Mystery: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #13 by John Blaine
74. The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast by C. S. Lewis
75. Sea Gold: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #3 by John Blaine
76. Smoke on the Mountain by Joy Davidman
77. Smugglers' Reef: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #7 by John Blaine
78. Son of Charlemagne by Barbara Willard
79. Stairway to Danger: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #9 by John Blaine
80. The Story of Christianity, Volume 1: The Early Church To The Dawn Of The Reformation by Justo L. Gonzalez
81. The Story of Christianity, Volume 2: The Reformation to the Present Day by Justo L. Gonzalez
82. Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
83. Studies in Words by C. S. Lewis
84. Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis
85. That Hideous Strength (space trilogy part 3) by C. S. Lewis
86. Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis
87. The Veiled Raiders: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #20 by John Blaine
88. The Virgin in the Ice (Brother Cadfael #6) by Ellis Peters
89. The Wailing Octopus: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #11 by John Blaine
90. The Weight of Glory and other Addresses by C. S. Lewis
91. The Whispering Box Mystery: A Rick Brant Science-Adventure Story #5 by John Blaine
92. The Wreck and Rise of Whitson Mariner by S. D. Smith

I grew up in a family as wonderful and loving as anyone could want. As close as we were, however, we lacked one thing: a sense of family beyond the here-and-now, including any knowledge of our ancestry. In a world where most of my friends knew "where they came from"—their families having emigrated relatively recently from Poland, Italy, England, Canada, South Africa, and more—my parents insisted that we all were Americans and nothing else mattered. We not only embraced America, we spanned it: my father came from Washington in the west, my mother from Florida in the south, and they met in Schenectady, New York. Our cousins were spread all over the map, and back then keeping in touch was not the easy thing it is today.

Not till much later did I realize how rootless this perspective had left me, but it was well-intentioned and possibly a good thing—a vaccination against the anti-immigrant feelings that occasionally troubled the times. Sadly, though, it was half a century later before I developed an appreciation of the importance of learning history.

Porter's family was different. On his father's side, he had two great-grandparents who came from Sweden, and a great-great-grandmother from England, but the rest of his family was well established in Connecticut long before the United States existed. He grew up hearing "old family stories" of the kind that genealogists tend to debunk: We came over on the Mayflower (turns out to be true), our ancestors fought in the American Revolution (also true), I'm part Native American (a very common belief and almost certainly untrue), and the one of importance today: one of your relatives was a friend of Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin.

The last was just one of many lesser family stories I'd heard upon marrying into the family, and I'd filed it away in the back of my mind, along with Superman mowed my uncle's lawn. (That one's also true: Christopher Reeve was a neighbor.) But after reading Eric B. Schultz's chapter on Eli Whitney in Innovation on Tap (review to come), I decided some further research was called for.

The name Whitney appears several times in Porter's recent family history, all close relatives of Hezekiah Scovil (1788-1849) of Haddam, Connecticut, and his wife, Hannah Burr (1794-1859):

1. Son Whitney Scovil 1813-1837
2. Grandson Whitney Tyler Scovil 1837-1840
3. Grandnephew Whitney Scovil 1847-1940
4. Grandson Whitney Daniel Scovil 1861-1867
5. Great-grandson Whitney Scovil Porter 1886-1958 (Porter's grandfather)
6. 4th great-grandson Spencer Whitney Sloane

By itself this is no indication of a relationship with Eli Whitney, but it is suggestive that the name was nowhere in the family before this.

Hezekiah Scovil, Porter's 3rd great-grandfather, was a blacksmith in the small town of Higganum, Connecticut, and he is the connection to Eli Whitney. He apprenticed to Whitney in New Haven, and later manufactured gun barrels for him in his own shop in Higganum. The following story is taken from the Commemorative Biographical Record of Middlesex County, Connecticut:

[Hezekiah Scovil] became acquainted with Eli Whitney, who came to see him at his home, and spent one night with Mr. Scovil. Mr. Whitney was a very tall man, and the following morning Mr. Scovil inquired of his guest how he had rested. Hesitating some little, Mr. Whitney answered the question of his host by saying: "Well, pretty well if the bed had been longer." As the result of this visit Mr. Scovil turned his skill to the making of gun-barrels by hand, power being substituted later on. He went to New Haven, engaged in this work, and then returned to Candlewood Hill, where he made the gun barrels for Mr. Whitney.

Hezekiah had 10 children, the oldest of which was named Fanny. She married John Porter. Their youngest son, Wallace, was the father of Whitney Scovil Porter (#5 above), who was Porter's grandfather and the great-grandfather of Spencer Whitney Sloane (#6).

Those of you who have followed the story of Phoebe's Quilt may be interested to know that the quilt connects here more than once: Fanny was first cousin to the recipient, Phoebe L. Scovil, and it is through Fanny that the quilt came into Porter's family. Phoebe's father was Hezekiah's brother, Sylvester; Phoebe's brother William was the father of the Whitney Scovil who is #3 above.

The first Hezekiah's firstborn son, Whitney (#1 above), was the father of #2, Whitney Tyler Scovil. It is a sad story: Whitney married in January of 1837, and his son was born in November of that year. He himself died the next month, and his son followed in 1840 at the age of two.

Of the original Hezekiah's other children, I will note three. Many of the others died quite young and/or unmarried. 

His daughter Josephine died at the age of 48, unmarried—but she is notable because we have her portrait hanging on our living room wall.

Having explained the truth of the old family story connecting Porter's family with Eli Whitney, I'll spend the rest of this post on two of Hezekiah's other sons, Daniel and Hezekiah. Hezekiah was the father of Whitney Daniel Scovil, #4 in the Whitney list above.

Daniel and Hezekiah are the famous names in Higganum, and part of the Eli Whitney legacy, having carried on their father's blacksmithing tradition by creating the D & H Scovil Manufacturing Company in 1844. In addition to manufacturing gun barrels, and lovely things like the two iron candelabra that stand in our house, D & H Scovil made hoes. The "Scovil hoe" is what they are famous for.

Daniel made a trip into the plantations of the South, where he discovered that the English hoes being used there were of terrible quality. Family lore suggests that Daniel might have had a travelling companion, Eli Whitney, Jr.—but I haven't found documentation for that. Daniel put his mind to the problem of building a better hoe, and he did. He designed and manufactured what he called a "planter's hoe," which gripped more tightly on the handle and sharpened itself as it was being used.

Every inventor needs a partner with good business sense, and for Daniel that was his brother, Hezekiah. The hoe was a hit, and a success.

The first four minutes of this video show a Scovil hoe and some of its history and features. The narrator gets a few things (and pronunciations) not quite right, but it's mostly true to what I've learned elsewhere.

Here are some references that might be of interest if you want to dig further:

• Commemorative Biographical Record of Middlesex County Connecticut, Chicago: J.H. Beers & Co., 1903, pp 60-64
• Haddam: 1870-1930, by Charlotte Gradie and Jan Sweet for the Haddam Historical Society, Arcadia Publishing, 2005, pp 94-99 (The Google preview skips several of these pages, but there are some very nice photos if you can see them.)
• The Conneticut Magazine: An Illustrated Monthly, Volume 5, pp 598-500

Finally, if you really want to know the D & H Scovil history, I just found these three presentations given at the Haddam Historical Society, and I'm sure they will be fascinating. I admit I haven't watched them, and I sure hope they don't contradict what I've written. I'm looking forward to seeing them with Porter—maybe I'll make popcorn for the occasion—but it's nearly four hours' worth of material, so that's not going to happen for a while.

A Year in the Life of D and H Scovil – Part 1

A Year in the Life of D and H Scovil – Part 2

A Year in the Life of D and H Scovil – Part 3

There is an interesting postscript to this story. Although Porter's family worked with and was inspired by Eli Whitney, they are not related in any way I could find. My family, however, is! Mr. Whitney and I are second cousins, six times removed.

Since my birthday, when I received the first book in the series, I've been delighting in the adventures of Brother Cadfael. I had made it through almost half of the series when my reading threatened to grind to a halt, because I could not get the next book through either of our libraries (one here, one in Connecticut). I have a spreadsheet showing where and in what form (physical or digital) the books are available, and alas, three of them have a sad, red "0" entry.

Then I had a flash of inspiration. We were about to spend some time in another city! And indeed, the tiny Fuller Public Library, which I had been so rude as to denigrate on occasion because of its size, had everything I needed. What a clever solution! I returned home, confident in my ability to complete the works, since the rest were available at our local library.

Or so I thought. (Something about pride, and falls....) Yes, they are among the library's holdings, but only at the East Branch. Not to worry—the library happily moves books from one branch to another. Except for the slight problem that the East Branch is now closed for renovations, re-opening date unknown but likely March at the earliest, and the books are trapped inside.

That was probably a good thing, since I still had Gonzalez's The Story of Christianity, Volume 2 to complete before the end our our Church History class. But I enjoy lighter reading, too, especially in so busy a time as Advent, so I decided it was time to re-read my Green Ember collection, having just acquired the latest (The First Fowler) and anticipating the release of Ember's End in the spring. But I stopped after reading six of them, saving Ember Rising for closer to when I'll be able to follow it immediately with the next book. So, stuck again.

No problem! Christmas brought, depending on how you count, between 11 and 13 new books into the house, including three by David McCullough. So, no lack of reading materials (light and decidedly not so). Having devoured Nathan W. Pyle's Strange Planet, I'm now enjoying Innovation on Tap by my Occasional CEO friend, Eric B. Schultz. I had been waiting for this book for years (as had he, no doubt!) and will save my review for after I've finished it, but the very first chapter has inspired a genealogical blog post (still in progress).

I have great riches in reading material—not to mention the other 2000+ books standing at my service on our bookshelves and Kindles—so I can afford to wait for Cadfael and Green Ember, however reluctantly.

Time to read, of course, is another matter!

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold by C. S. Lewis (Harcourt Brace, 1956)

Of his re-telling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, C. S. Lewis said, "That book, which I consider far and away the best I have written, has been my one big failure both with the critics and with the public." The first time I read Till We Have Faces, I will admit, my sympathies were with those who did not appreciate it.

My ignorance of mythological history was a problem of course. Cupid I knew, but that was about it; how much less could I have told anything about their story as written in Apuleius's Metamorphoses, which was Lewis's inspiration. More than that, however, this novel is written in a different style from Lewis's other works; it is much like George MacDonald's Phantastes and Lilith. Lewis considered those two books among MacDonalds's best writing. I did not care much for either on first reading, but I love them now. 

What he does best is fantasy—fantasy that hovers between the allegorical and the mythopoeic. And this, in my opinion, he does better than any man. (From the preface to Lewis's George MacDonald: An Anthology.)

Till We Have Faces is just such a book, and Lewis crafted it very, very well. It's no wonder he was pleased with his efforts. My second reading found me loving it for what it is, instead of being frustrated that it is not at all like Lewis's other fiction. That this is not a genre everyone likes is evident from its initial reception, though Walter Hooper, in his mammoth compendium, C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, reports that later years have been kinder.

The main charge against the novel when it first appeared was obscurity. "What is he trying to say?" However, in recent years there has been a serious re-assessment of the book, almost an about-face in criticism, and it is generally regarded, not only as Lewis's best book, but as a very great book.

I found Hooper's analysis to be helpful in understanding both the Cupid and Psyche myth and what Lewis made of it in Till We Have Faces.  It's also useful to have read the Biblical Book of Job. However, I think I would have enjoyed it nearly as much this time around simply because of having been schooled in the style by George MacDonald. Some people—our daughter for one—were blessed to love the book on first reading, but if you aren't, you may find it worthwhile to give it a second chance.

Nothing is more pleasing and engaging than the sense of having conferred benefits. Not even the gratification of receiving them.

— Brother Cadfael
(Ellis Peters, The Hermit of Eyton Forest)

Early this morning, photographed from our driveway.

It's still Advent—but here's a little fun as you prepare for Christmas, featuring the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra.

Having now read Justo Gonzalez' The Story of Christianity, I am condemned to remember the following every time I hear the phrase, "Be reasonable!" This event seems to have been sanitized from everything I previously learned about the French Revolution.

The French Revolution created its own religion, called first the Cult of Reason, and later the Cult of the Supreme Being. ... The revolution wished to have nothing to do with the church. Even the calendar was changed, giving way to a more “reasonable” one in which weeks had ten days and months were named after conditions of nature in each season—“Thermidor,” “Germinal,” “Fructidor,” and so forth. Great ceremonies were also developed to take the place of religious festivals—beginning with the solemn procession taking Voltaire’s remains to the Pantheon of the Republic. Then temples to Reason were built, and an official list of saints was issued—which included Jesus, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and Rousseau. Other rites were prescribed for weddings, the dedication of children to Freedom, and funerals. All this would have been merely ridiculous, were it not for its cost in suffering and bloodshed. The promoters of the new religion made use of the guillotine with cruel liberality. 

Religions that grow over time, out of human need and experience, have all been afflicted by great cruelty. However, I also see in them sincere efforts by people to reach out to something transcendent and superior to themselves, and often evidence of God's efforts to reveal His own nature.  But attempts by human beings to create new religions all at once out of whole cloth always seem disassociated from reality, hence ridiculous, and man-centered, hence selfish.

The Story of Christianity, Volume 2: The Reformation to the Present Day by Justo L. Gonzalez (HarperOne, 2010)

The second half of my Church History class, naturally, is using the second book in Gonzalez's series. Gonzalez is a liberal Cuban Methodist who favors Liberation Theology, and as I suspected from the end of the first volume (my review is here), his biases are frustratingly clear. That's okay though—it's an unavoidable failing of those who write books, especially history books—but it means I especially appreciate the class format that allows for questions, explanations, clarifications, and corrections by someone I trust. I take the fact that these books are recommended by someone whose biases must be radically different (Keith Mathison on the Ligonier Ministries site) as confirmation of Fr. Trey's opinion that these are among the best available, and most accessible, for the topic. I'm sure I could get a different perspective from the author who has Mathison's top recommendation, but Nick Needham's 2000 Years of Christ’s Power is four huge volumes and growing (at $20 each for Kindle), and I'm not sure I know I couldn't stomach that much of a Reformed Theology bias at the moment, so let's be realistic. I'll stick with Gonzalez and trust Fr. Trey to provide the necessary balance.

The trouble comes when the book tackles material that I actually know something about. It reminds me of my problem with media coverage: There have been many times in my life when I've seen reported (in mainstream, reputable media) stories of which I have known directly the intimate details, and every one of them has contained significant errors. Why I continue to believe news stories of which I otherwise know nothing is both amazing and shaming to me. Out of charity (and, to be honest, laziness/busy-ness) I won't say that what Gonzalez says is out-and-out wrong, but I will say that his words do not seem to be those of a historian who understands the times and the people of Colonial America, neither of the time and place in which I grew up. It makes me wonder about the accuracy of the other parts of his books.

Take just for one small example Gonzalez's statement, "At first, colonials were not even allowed to own land." The implication is that this is something unusual and shocking, as if those who came over had all been landowners back home. Plus, anyone who has done even minor genealogical research in early New England finds maps indicating the allocation of property among various families. Possibly this was not "ownership" as we understand it today, but very soon in history the people were subdividing, selling, trading, and willing it to their children—which sounds a lot like ownership to me. It's clear that Gonzalez has a particular story to tell, and is picking and choosing his facts accordingly.

Here are a few other random things that struck me, some important, some trivial. Italics indicates quotations from the book.

• Gonzalez's take on Salem in 1692 seems bizarre, and I'm not happy with the mocking tone in which he discusses people who believe that witches might be real. I speak as one whose innocent ancestors really suffered on the wrong end of the New England witch hunt—but who also believes that modern-day America takes the idea of witchcraft much too lightly.
• I know one must condense and condense to cover so many years in two volumes, but how on earth can you talk about Jonathan Edwards without mentioning "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"?
• By the 1950s, television had become a common household feature in most of the industrialized world. Really? My family, solidly middle class North Americans living in a prosperous New York town, did not own a television set until 1959. Gonzalez was born in Cuba, and stayed there at least long enough to graduate from seminary, so perhaps that's what life in the United States looked like to him as a child. But it does not square with what I know of the times.
• The very idea of liberalism implied freedom to think as one saw fit—as long as one did not fall into what liberals called superstition. I won't go into the shifting definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" that Gonzalez uses; it's complex, because the definitions have been as fluid in real life as they are in the book. But this statement struck me because it is my complaint about many who call themselves Liberals today: They insist that you can believe, say, and do anything you want—but that's only true as long as it conforms to their own standards.
• For [John Wesley], as for most of the church through the centuries, the center of worship was communion. This he took and expected his followers to take as frequently as possible, in the official services of the Church of England. Would any modern Methodist recognize this stance?
• Western Christians—particularly Protestants—may have underestimated the power of liturgy and tradition, that allowed [Orthodox] churches to continue their life, and even to flourish, in the most adverse of circumstances.
• Hegel demolishes mathematics: "What is rational exists, and what exists is rational." Take that, pi and the square root of 2!
• Gonzalez insists on framing everything in terms of white vs. non-white slavery and racism; at first it's annoying, then it's almost funny to see how far he can stretch it.
• He labels as "Fundamentalist" nearly everyone and everything not in line with liberal theology, especially anyone in the much-broader category known as Evangelical. Both Fundamentalists and Evangelicals should be insulted. :)
• Some ... even declared that Christians ought to be thankful for Adolf Hitler because he was halting the advance of socialism in Europe. Huh? What part of "National Socialism" don't they (or Gonzalez?) understand?
• Gonzalez manages to distort his coverage of the Vietnam War to imply that Richard Nixon was responsible for the Gulf of Tonkin misinformation, instead of Lyndon Johnson. He doesn't say that directly, but since Nixon is the only president mentioned in connection with the war, what other impression would a casual reader, ignorant of history, receive?
• Cool story from China that I didn't know: While many Chinese Christians capitulated before pressure and persecution, many did not. In some major cities where churches were closed and worship gatherings were prohibited, believers would make it a point to walk in front of the church at the times formerly appointed for worship, nod at one another, and keep on walking. 
• How can you write a book about the Church in the 20th and 21st centuries and leave out important factors like these?
  • Denominations such as the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) and others that formed in reaction to what they viewed as heresy on the part of the "mainline" Presbyterian churches
  • The various Anglican churches formed in reaction to the same problem in the American Episcopal Church. I especially expected Gonzalez to mention this in his section on how the center of gravity of Christianity is shifting from the Northern Hemisphere to the Southern, since many of the new Anglican churches are under the leadership of bishops in Africa. But he doesn't.
  • Abortion. One of the biggest issues dividing the modern Church, and the sole mention is in this statement: Under [Pope John Paul II's] leadership, Roman Catholicism throughout the world reaffirmed its condemnation of abortion, at a time when several traditionally Catholic nations were legalizing it—as if the massive opposition to abortion among Protestants didn't even exist.
  • Widespread campus Christian movements such as Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru), Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), and Asian Christian Fellowship; Wycliffe Bible Translators; international aid organizations such as World Vision, Compassion, and the International Justice Mission; and the many other Christian groups (the Gideons, Youth With A Mission, the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Prison Fellowship—to name just a few) that do the work of the Church across denominational boundaries. A history of modern Christianity without them makes no sense.
• Gonzalez keeps talking about cultural and theological creativity, and that makes me nervous. Creativity is great in certain problem-solving situations, such as figuring out how best to express an idea in terms someone from a different cultural background can understand. But in theology? No thanks. It is the standard Bible translation task: fit the words to the truth, not the truth to the words.

That last point sums up the overall impression I have gained from these two books. For all the flaws of the pre-modern Church, its institutions, and its leaders, they were seeking to determine the truth about God and mankind's relationship with Him—to fit society to the truth. But as we neared modern times—perhaps around the time of the French Revolution, certainly by the 19th century—that changed, and efforts shifted to defining truth to fit society. The result? To my mind, a dust-and-ashes faith, with churches barely discernible from social clubs or secular service organizations. Chaotic and ugly philosophies that remind me of the chaos and ugliness that pass for "serious" art and music in our time. A faith hardly worth living for, unrecognizable by the martyrs who thought theirs worth dying for.

The Story of Christianity is a good introduction to church history, as long as one is aware that it is in large measure the truth, but it is not the whole truth, nor is it nothing but the truth. That accepted, I can recommend it highly. The last chapters were certainly depressing, but Gonzalez has hope for the future, and so do I—though perhaps not for the same reasons. Even though the Church abandons God with distressing frequency, God will never abandon His Church. There are always pockets of beauty in the ashes.

There's a passage in the book God's Smuggler where Brother Andrew, who smuggled Bibles into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, describes his astonishment at the revival that took place in an old, dead, state-sponsored church in Bulgaria during one of his visits. Night after night the priest encouraged Andrew to preach the clearest, most vibrant Gospel-centered sermons anyone could want. They carried on that way for many days before the government finally stopped them—the priest had been such a reliable puppet they couldn't believe he didn't have some "good" motive for what he was doing. Andrew learned through that experience never to call a church dead. It is God's church, called by his name, and at any moment his Spirit may blow through and ignite fires of faith that will never be extinguished.

We spent a week in Rome this September, including a day in Vatican City. We saw fountains and pines, museums and monuments, art and history in overwhelming quality and quantity. But we did not see the Pope. Strangely, he never invited us to a private audience!

I don't consider that much of a loss, although we'd have been thrilled if he had, just as we would have been thrilled to be invited to visit almost any head of state. But seek him out? Never occurred to us.

The strange thing is how many people asked, after we returned, "Did you see the Pope?" When I visited England, no one asked me, "Did you see the Queen?" nor "Did you see the Emperor?" when we went to Japan.

It's a slightly more reasonable question with respect to the Pope, since we did go to St. Peter's Square, and the Pope has been known to address audiences there. But if he had done so when we were in Rome, we would most certainly not have been at the Vatican during that time, any more than we would be anywhere near Times Square on New Year's Eve. Not even for Pope Benedict—for whom I had a great deal of respect until he abdicated—would I brave such crowds. Certainly not for the man who might be a nice enough person but makes me rethink those exchanges that end with, "Is the Pope Catholic?"

On the other hand, Your Holiness, if you really want to meet with us, we'll be happy to consider a return visit to Rome. I still have an unused bus ticket as my version of throwing a coin into the Trevi Fountain.

Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray by Sabine Hossenfelder (Basic Books, 2018)

This is my son-in-law's book, which I started perusing during our recent visit, to see if I might be interested. I found it both more interesting and slower to read than I had expected, so I'm borrowing it.

Sabine Hossenfelder, a German theoretical physicist, is worried about the state of her field. I'm not even going to try to summarize the book, which is an entertaining, if worrisome and frequently confusing, series of interviews with her colleagues. Let's just say that it is getting more and more difficult to test theories in particle physics by the time-honored means of experimentation in the real world; CERN's Large Hadron Collider has not provided the results many people were expecting and indeed counting on; and physicists are beginning to sound more like philosophers than scientists. 

I can't believe what this once-venerable profession has become. Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can't explain what was not observed. And they're not even good at that. (p 108)

In case I left you with the impression that [physicists] understand the theories we work with, I am sorry, we don't. (p 193)

Physics professor and popular science author Chad Orzel^* explains to her,

"As I understand it, there's a divide between the epistemological and the ontological camps. In the ontological camp the wave function is a real thing that exists and changes, and in the epistemological camp the wave function really just describes what we know—it's just quantifying our ignorance about the world. And you can put everybody on a continuum between these two interpretations." (p 135)

That sounds more like theologians than scientists.

Interviewed by the author, cosmologist and mathematician George Ellis looks at the big picture and doesn't like what he sees.

"There are physicists now saying we don't have to test their ideas because they are such good ideas ... They're saying—explicitly or implicitly—that they want to weaken the requirement that theories have to be tested. ... To my mind that's a step backwards by a thousand years. ... Science is having a difficult time out there, with all the talk about vaccination, climate change, GMO crops, nuclear energy, and all of that demonstrating skepticism about science. Theoretical physics is supposed to be the bedrock, the hardest rock, of the sciences, showing how it can be completely trusted. And if we start loosening the requirements over here, I think the implications are very serious for the others." (p 213)

Ellis continues:

"[A lot] of the reasons people are rejecting science is that scientists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss and others say that science proves God doesn't exist, and so on—which science cannot prove, but it results in a hostility against science, particularly in the United States. If you're in the Middle West USA, and your whole life and your community is built around the church, and a scientist comes along and says 'Get rid of this,' then they better have a very solidly based argument for what they say. But David Hume already said 250 years ago that science cannot either prove or disprove the existence of God. He was a very careful philosopher, and nothing has changed since then in this regard. These scientists are sloppy philosophers." (p 214)

What's wrong with physics research today? Here are a few problems: universities no longer provide an atmosphere conducive to creative thinking; research decisions—and possibly results—are driven by funding; and peer pressure is a major unholy influence.

Division of labor hasn't yet arrived in academia. While scientists specialize in research topics, they are expected to be all-rounders in terms of tasks: they have to teach, mentor, head labs, lead groups, sit on countless committees, speak at conferences, organize conferences, and—most important—bring in grants to keep the wheels turning. And all the while doing research and producing papers. (p 155)

The fraction of academics holding tenured faculty positions is on the decline, while an increasing percentage of researchers are employed on non-tenured and part-time contracts. From 1974 to 2014 the fraction of full-time tenured faculty in the United States decreased from 29 percent to 21.5 percent. At the same time, the share of part-time faculty increased from 24 percent to more than 40 percent. Surveys by the American Association of University Professors reveal that the lack of continuous support discourages long-term commitment and risk-taking when choosing research topics. (p 155)

Another consequence of the attempt to measure research impact is that it washes out national, regional, and institutional differences because measures for scientific success are largely the same everywhere. This means that academics all over the globe now march to the same drum. (p 156)

You have to get over the idea that all science can be done by postdocs on two-year fellowships. Tenure was institutionalized for a reason, and that reason is still valid. If that means fewer people, then so be it. You can either produce loads of papers that nobody will care about ten years from now, or you can be the seed of ideas that will still be talked about in a thousand years. Take your pick. Short-term funding means short-term thinking. (p 247)

It's well known that such short-term thinking has already been disastrous for American businesses, as the leaders of corporations focus their efforts on the next quarter's results at the expense of long-term success and the health of the company. Politicians focus on winning the next election instead of building relationships and working together to serve the needs of the country. It's hardly surprising that academic research is suffering a similar problem.

In 2010, [theoretical physicist Garret Lisi] wrote an article for Scientific American about his E8 theory. He calls it "an interesting experience" and remembers: "When it came out that the article would appear, Jaques Distler, this string theorist, got a bunch of people together, saying that they would boycott SciAm if they published my article. The editors considered this threat, and asked them to point out what in the article was incorrect. There is nothing incorrect in it. I spent a lot of time on it—there was absolutely nothing incorrect in it. Still, they held on to their threat. In the end, Scientific American decided to publish my article anyway. As far as I know, there weren't any repercussions." (p 166)

Science is sometimes called the "marketplace of ideas," but it differs from a market economy most importantly in the customers we cater to. In science, experts only cater to other experts and we judge each other's products. The final call is based on our success at explaining observation. But absent observational tests, the most important property a theory must have is to find approval by our peers.

For us theoreticians, peer approval more often than not decides whether our theories will ever be put to a test. Leaving aside a lucky few showered with prize money, in modern academia the fate of an idea depends on anonymous reviewers picked from among our colleagues. Without their approval, research funding is hard to come by. An unpopular theory whose development requires a greater commitment of time than a financially unsupported researcher can afford is likely to die quickly. (pp 195-196, emphasis mine)

You'd think that scientists, with the professional task of being objective, would protect their creative freedom and rebel against the need to please colleagues in order to secure continued funding. They don't. (p 197)

You're used to asking about conflicts of interest due to funding from industry. But you should also ask about conflicts of interest due to short-term grants or employment. Does the scientists' future funding depend on producing the results they just told you about? Likewise, you should ask if the scientists' chance of continuing their research depends on their work being popular among their colleagues. ... And finally ... you should also ask whether the scientists have taken steps to address their cognitive biases. Have they provided a balanced account of pros and cons or have they just advertised their own research? (p 248)

If you believe smart people work best when freely following their interests, then you should make sure they can freely follow their interests. (p 197)

That last quote is hardly limited in its application to academia. Teachers, writers, musicians, mothers ... anyone in a creative field knows the frustration of being required by their jobs to do unrelated work that hinders the creative process. We need to recognize that and free them to do what they do best...

...but maybe not completely. Sometimes the interruptions that keep us from our "proper work" can be the key that pushes our work forward. We all want unlimited time to be immersed in our own narrow interests, but that may not be for the best. Still, I think we can all agree that researchers and missionaries are spending too much time fundraising, teachers are spending too much time on cafeteria duty, and church musicians are spending too much time in meetings.

How patently absurd it must appear to someone who last had contact with physics in eleventh grade that people get paid for ideas like that. But then, I think, people also get paid for throwing balls through hoops. (p 192)

Finally, this quote about the problems of peer pressure and insular communities has much broader implications and needs to be emphasized:

Research shows we consider a statement more likely to be true the more often we hear of it. It's called "attention bias" or "mere exposure effect." ... This is the case even if a statement is repeated by the same person. (p 157)

Oh, one more thing: What does beauty, the subject of the subtitle, have to do with all this, since I've left out all references to it?  Just that, absent sufficient experimental data, theories are being promoted for their aesthetic properties.  Hossenfelder has nothing against aesthetics, but fears that physics is losing its grounding in physical reality in favor of philosophical speculations.