Show notes
[accuracy of times is improving!]
0:53 | Maginot Line
1:17 | George went to the fortress known as Four-à-Chaux; four à chaux means a lime kiln in French, and the fortress was located in the area of a limestone quarry and kiln, which operated until 1939 (wikipedia).
4:45 | R. R. Reno, Return of the Strong Gods
5:52 | The Abrahamic Metacritique Substack (Hussein Aboubakr Mansour)
I use the term [Abrahamic] in an attempt to denote the shared moral grammar emerging from the Hebrew Bible and its venerable offshoots—a foundational substructure that underpins the way Jews, Christians, and Muslims apprehend truth, morality, and the very nature of human existence. (source)
And then, quoting from a different post:
...the Arab radical is not an expression of authentic Islam. He is the heir to a disenchanted Europe, speaking in Qur’anic idioms but dreaming in revolutionary French. (source)
6:48 | Douglas Murray, On Democracies and Death Cults
10:45 | Catherine of Siena’s mystical knowledge about humans vs God:
The gifts of the Holy Ghost give a certain experience of [the Infinite]. Our Lord asked St. Catherine of Siena, “Do you know, my daughter, who you are and who I am? He proceeded to tell her – “You are she who is not; and I am He who is.” When St. Teresa discovered this, she stated that she wished kings might have such knowledge, in order that they might better learn the value of human things and discover their duty in the perspective of the Infinite. (source)
16:30 | Reno on truth vs. meaning
In earlier times, human beings thought that happiness depended upon discerning truth and conforming one’s life to it. Today, we speak of “healthy” beliefs, those which promote psychological well-being and social adjustment. The spirit of relativism that has characterized so much of our culture in recent decades serves these therapeutic goals. Very few people entertain the notion that there are no truths. But we prefer soft truths, which allow us to affirm people as they wish to be affirmed. We withhold strong judgments, thinking it best if individuals are allowed to forge their own moral outlook and their own worldview. This therapeutic mentality is evident in the substitution, since 1945, of “meaning” for “truth,” which the postwar consensus made inevitable. “Truth” has fixed and strong connotations. “Meaning” is personalized, mobile, and weak. The true saint of our time is a patron of meaning, not a martyr for truth. (92)
23:20 | Some facts on religion in Europe; George also found this report that religious decline may have leveled off in the US.
30:12 | The famous paper about the container model of pregnancy: “Sixteen Days” by Barry Smith and Berit Brogaard, March 2003, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 28(1):45-78. Notice the metaphors for pregnancy that they employ below (in bold). As a woman and a mother of four, Acton finds these analogies to be not just wanting, but embarrassingly wrong. They do not correlate at all to the uniquely female experience of pregnancy and birth, and they assume a kind of separateness, individualism, and autonomy that is unwarranted. Such analogies also provide a justification for practices like surrogacy and artificial wombs (Why not put an embryo inside a different woman or inside a new form of technology? Isn’t a womb “just the container” for the child?). The metaphors we use really matter!
We shall argue below, however, that birth is the mere passage of an entity from one environment to another (it is analogous to an astronaut leaving her spaceship). Thus it is a process of a sort that does not affect any substantial change in the entities involved. If the human being exists at birth, then it exists also in the minutes prior to birth, and then our question as to when the human individual begins to exist arises once again.
…
Suppose a visitor is inside your house. Or suppose a tub of yogurt is inside your refrigerator. The yogurt is in the interior of the refrigerator; but it is not a part of the refrigerator. Indeed it and the refrigerator share no parts in common. Rather, it is lodged within a cavity within the interior of the refrigerator, and it relates to the refrigerator as a tenant to its niche. The refrigerator is one substance, the tub of yogurt is a second substance, and the former surrounds the latter.
…
And so also, we now wish to claim, in the case of the amniotic cavity in which the foster is lodged. This, too, is to be identified not as an organ or limb of the mother, but rather, precisely, as a cavity within her interior. Thus the foster, too, because it is included in this cavity, is not a part of the mother either. Hence there is nothing standing in the way of our asserting that the foster occupies a niche within the interior of the mother in a way that is analogous to a palm kernel that is lodged within your digestive tract, or to the kangaroo joey that is lodged inside its mother’s pouch… The foster is in this respect analogous also to a parasite which occupies a host organism. Fosters, like parasites, are both substances and relatively isolated causal systems; they are not parts of their host organisms but are related to them, rather, as a tenant to its niche. Fosters are, on the other hand, unlike tumors, since the latter are, by our criteria, proper parts of the affected host organism.
Elselijn Kingma provides a valuable critique of the “container model” of pregnancy, in favor of the part-Whole model: The Metaphysics of Pregnancy.
See also, “The scourge: moral implications of early embryo loss” by Toby Ord. He argues that if we truly believed that an individual human person begins to exist at the moment of conception, then natural, early spontaneous abortion would be the humanitarian crisis of our age: 200 million people die annually across the globe from this “scourge.” But no one responds like this is a three-alarm fire, even though some of these losses are treatable/preventable. Why? Our actions speak louder than our theories.
The majority of embryos die within a few weeks of conception. This fact is widely known within medical circles, but is a surprise to many in the general public. Embryo death due to natural causes is known as spontaneous abortion and occurs very frequently… During this early stage [8-10 days after conception], the proportion of surviving embryos drops off rapidly and only approximately 50% of them successfully implant. For those embryos that do implant successfully, the risk of death becomes much less significant and most will survive through to term.
These numbers show that spontaneous abortion is an everyday phenomenon. A mother of three children could be expected to have also had approximately five spontaneous abortions. An embryo’s survival to term is the exception rather than the norm.[…]
Cancer, in all its forms, kills 7.6 million people per year, while spontaneous abortion kills 30 times this number (World Health Organization 2005). In 6 years, the Second World War killed approximately 60 million people, whereas spontaneous abortion kills more than three times this number every year.
Other very interesting papers on pregnancy:
“Nested Selves: Self-Organization and Shared Markov Blankets in Prenatal Development in Humans,” (Ciaunica, Levin, Roasas, Friston)
“Not One, Not Two: Toward an Ontology of Pregnancy” (Sidzinska)
“From Mother/Fetus to Holobiont(s): A Material Feminist Ontology of the Pregnant Body” (Takeshita). This article discusses fetomaternal microchimerism and vaginal microbiota being transferred to the fetus (to form its gut microbiome) through vaginal birth. The connection between our gut microbiome and brain function is well-documented.
“The Constitution of the Embryo as Substantial Change” (Alvargonzalez). This article discusses monozygotic twinning and tetragametic chimerism (when two zygotes with two different genetic identities fuse into a single somatic individual). “Human individuals are not substances that can be split or fused, and this is the main argument for believing that morulas and human individuals are different kinds of substances.”
47:31 | Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews. While the other references to this book ended up on the (virtual) cutting room floor, the book is a must-read in George’s opinion — especially on the heels of the murder of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, two young people who worked at the Israeli embassy in D.C.
47:50 | Mr. Mani (by A. B. Yehoshua), which George has now finished, and which she thoroughly enjoyed, typos introduced into the ebook edition not withstanding. Sigh.
52:26 | May you live in interesting times… (Gemini)
53:26 | Marc Zuckerberg will give you AI friends [WSJ, gift link]
56:53 | Illich on key words, from the first essay in Gender, “Sexism and Economic Growth”:
An examination of modern languages shows that key words are strong, persuasive, in common usage. Some are etymologically old but have acquired a new meaning totally unlike their former intent. “Family,” “man,” “work” are familiar examples. Others are of more recent coinage but were originally conceived for specialized use alone. At a certain moment they slipped into everyday language and now denote a wide area of thought and experience. “Role,” “sex,” “energy,” “production,” “development,” “consumer” are well-known examples. In every industrialized language, these key words take on the semblance of common sense. And each modern language has its own set that provides that society’s unique perspective on the social and ideological reality of the contemporary world. The set of key words in all modern industrialized languages is homologous. The reality they interpret is everywhere fundamentally the same.
[…]
To explain the appearance of a dominance of key words in a language, I learned to distinguish vernacular speech, into which we grow through daily intercourse with people who speak their own minds, from taught mother tongue, which we acquire through professionals employed to speak for and to us. Key words are a characteristic of taught mother tongue. They are even more effective than the mere standardization of the vocabulary and grammatical rules in their repression of the vernacular because, having the appearance of a common sense, they put a pseudo-vernacular gloss on engineered reality. Key words, then, are also more important for the formation of an industrialized language than creolization by technical terms because each one denotes a perspective common to the entire set. I have found that the paramount characteristic of key words in all languages is their exclusion of gender. Therefore, an understanding of gender, and its distinction from sex (a key word), depends on the avoidance or wary use of all terms that might be key words. (italics in original, bold ours)
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