Author: Andrew Sullivan

Ambers has the latest.

Christine Rosen reflects on humanity’s changing relationship with machines:

In the early age of machines, they inspired awe by proving capable of doing what man could never do alone (such as power an entire factory), or what we once believed only man could do (play chess). Now we expect our machines to do just about everything for us, from organizing our finances to writing our grocery lists. Our machines not only ease the mundane burdens of daily life (cooking, cleaning, working), but also serve, increasingly, as both our primary source of entertainment and the means for maintaining intimate relationships with others. Henry Adams’s dynamo has been replaced by Everyman’s iPod, and awe has given way to complacence and dependence. Your computer’s e-mail program doesn’t inspire awe; it is more like a dishwasher than a dynamo. Nineteenth-century rhapsodies to the machines that tamed nature, such as the steam engine, have given way to impatience with the machines that don’t immediately indulge our whims.

The decline in humility toward our machines comes at a time when we know almost nothing about how or why they work.

Although overwhelmed by its power, Henry Adams nevertheless had a basic understanding of how the dynamo operated. Most of us know very little about how our laptop computers run or how to repair our washing machines. Today we are less likely to feel awe in the presence of our machines than we are to experience what historian Jacques Barzun called “machine-made helplessness.” This, too, is a form of blind faith, like the people who, devotedly following the instructions of their car’s GPS device, drive right off a hill, all the while certain that this must be impossible – how could their perfectly calibrated machine be wrong?

David Gelernter anticipates the arrival of thinking machines, and argues that Jewish tradition can help guide our relations.

Margie Omero runs through polling on obesity. Americans overwhelmingly see childhood obesity as a major problem worthy of investment but are against taxes on fatty foods. One reason why:

Despite rising obesity rates, and increases in the percentage of people who say they are trying to lose weight, Americans overwhelmingly [pdf] (89%) believe obesity "is something people can control." And this poll [pdf] for the University of Georgia shows few fault marketers for these trends.

A chilling interactive chart.

City Journal has an excerpt from Manzi's forthcoming book. He focuses on the limits of social science:

At the moment, it is certain that we do not have anything remotely approaching a scientific understanding of human society. And the methods of experimental social science are not close to providing one within the foreseeable future. Science may someday allow us to predict human behavior comprehensively and reliably. Until then, we need to keep stumbling forward with trial-and-error learning as best we can.

Ta-Nehisi and Megan tackled this topic a while back. Here's TNC:

Slave-masters often allowed–indeed encouraged–slaves to engage in acts common among people. Slaves married. Slaves were baptized. Slaves were converted to attend Christianity–and even attended white churches, at times. Slaves and masters exchanged gifts on Christmas. Slaves were allowed to hire themselves out and buy their own freedom. Slaves were manumitted by masters. The point is that what you see in all of that is something more complicated than "Are Africans people?" The better question seems to be "Are black people equal to whites?"

But more than that, core reason an abortion/slavery comparison falls down lay in the actions of the enslaved, versus the inability of action amongst embryos.

Abortion is a debate between two groups over the ultimate fate of embryos.  The Anti-Slavery fight was a violent struggle between two groups over the fate of the enslaved, but with the enslaved as indispensable actors. Unlike embryos, black people were very capable of expressing their thoughts about their own personhood, and never held it in much doubt. Whereas the fight against abortion begins with pro-lifers asserting the rights of embryos, the fight against slavery doesn't begin with the abolitionists, but with the Africans themselves who resisted.

It's their turn, after all. And they've been around a great deal longer than the US. Frum on the historical context:

European history extends a long way back: Cro-Magnons were painting caves 25,000 years ago, Celts were making good-looking swords and pots a thousand years before Christ, and the Parthenon is near as old as Confucius.

But here’s the difference between Europe and China, and it takes considerable adjustment to absorb all the implications of this difference.

The history of Europe is driven by sharp discontinuities of period and self-conscious distinctions between peoples … But with China, there really is no choice: You have to study the whole damn thing to understand any of it.

That is not to say that “China” is an unchanging unity. It’s startling to think that through most of the period covered by this volume, tea was regarded as a medicine, rice as an unusual addition to the diet. Over the centuries, the Chinese would worship different gods in different ways. Buddhism would come and then (largely) go. Spoken languages would arise and vanish, the written characters would change their shapes and meaning. Nor was this change always gradual. Chinese history would be punctuated with catastrophes as terrible as the fall of Rome and the Black Plague: millions of people could die in the tumult that accompanied the end of a dynasty.

And yet notwithstanding all that: a literate Chinese of the year, say 1850 lived in a mental universe much more similar to that of a Chinese of 2000 years before than did a literate Englishman of the year 1850 a literate Englishman of the year 1750.

There's much more here. (Details for illustration here.)

A blogger's lament.

An independent Catholic community in San Diego ordains a female minister.