Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Bridge over the Colorado River

From Popular Science’s “Looking Back at the 100 Best Innovations of 2009.” I love the drama of this photo of a bridge being constructed over the Colorado River:

You can almost feel the drive of the bridge’s arch sections to meet and complete themselves. It struck me as analogous to the energy flow between God’s and Adam’s hands in Michelangelo’s Creation of Man.

Creators indeed.

Here’s the description of the bridge at Popular Science:

“Temperatures upward of 115°F, winds capable of felling cranes, an 890-foot drop below: ‘Inhospitable’ doesn’t begin to describe conditions at the Colorado River’s new Mike O’Callaghan–Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge.

“A 1,900-foot span designed to divert traffic from the narrow, switchback-laden road across the Hoover Dam, it will be the longest concrete arch bridge in the Western Hemisphere when it opens next fall, with 106 segments of ultra-high-strength concrete forming a twin-rib arch. Workers scaled the canyon’s walls, digging notches for concrete foundation columns. To construct the 1,060-foot-long arch, they cast 24 feet of concrete at a time, while a separate, temporary cable-stayed bridge held up the unfinished ends until the gap was closed this year.”

For more wonderful, dramatic, and just plain interesting innovations from 2009 in Security, Health, Entertainment, Auto Tech, Computing, Building Technology, and more, visit Popular Science’s feature.

Heidegger, anti-humanism, and the Left

Tim Black, a senior writer at spiked, has a good review discussion of “Why they’re really scared of Heidegger.” The “they’re” refers to many contemporary academics, and Black’s review is of Emmanuel Faye’s wave-making Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933-1935 (Yale, 2009).

Some key quotations from Black’s essay with some commentary from me:

“The philosopher still makes some academics feel itchily uncomfortable, not because they truly believe his Nazism will leap from the pages of his works, but because his deeply anti-humanist arguments sound a little too familiar.”

Indeed. In the academic world, especially in the Humanities, we are surrounded by anti-humanists postmodernists, left environmentalists, extreme animal activists, and various other sub-species. (I sometimes wonder whether—for the sake of truth in advertising—we should rename the “Humanities” divisions in our colleges the “Anti-Humanities.” Not that I am bitter or anything.)

Yet there is a bit of a puzzle for some commentators given that, on the usual (ridiculous) Left-Right political spectrum, Heidegger and the Nazis are often place on the “Right” while most of Heidegger’s contemporary fellow-travelers are on the “Left.” Tim Black notes: “Heidegger’s influence is such that any attempt to see the fascist thread loses itself in the weave and weft of an immense, largely leftish legacy.”

So we have to go up a level of abstraction to see the connections. Just as “left” Communism and “right” Nazism are two particular applications of a broader collectivist and authoritarian political vision, Heidegger’s particular philosophy and contemporary postmodernists’ particular philosophy share essentially the same anti-reason and anti-human vision.

Black puts it this way: “The discomfort Heidegger’s Nazism repeatedly causes is revealing. … Heidegger prompts discomfort precisely because he was a Nazi propagating a non-Nazi philosophy. He is just not alien enough. His is a philosophical vision that sits too comfortably with many mainstream attitudes, whether it’s an environmentalist assault upon human hubris or a snobbish disdain for consumerism.”

And of Heidegger’s more abstract philosophical commitments, i.e., his stance against reason and modernity, Black says: “what remained consistent throughout, from the Letter on Humanism to the Question Concerning Technology, was that veiled, abstracted, but nonetheless, resonant critique of modernity, and the human-centred rationality he discerned at its fallen heart … . His thought resonates not because he was a Nazi, but because his criticism of modernity echoes many of today’s anti-modern trends.”

Exactly right. Heidegger’s Nazism is a particular application of his broader anti-humanism, and his philosophical influence has to be understood from that level of abstraction and generality. Heideggerian anti-humanism can be applied particularly in a number of ways, so that is why we find his continued resonance with today’s postmodernists, left environmentalists, neo-Luddites, and man-hating animal activists, and the rest.

My own discussion of Heidegger appears in Chapter Three (pp. 58-67) of my Explaining Postmodernism. Four sections of that chapter are devoted to Heidegger:
* “Heidegger’s synthesis of the Continental tradition”
* “Setting aside reason and logic”
* “Emotions as revelatory”
* “Heidegger and postmodernism”
That chapter is also available at the Explaining Postmodernism page.

Why life in America is 40 times better than in 1900

A follow up to my post on Why life is 255 times better now than in 1800.

Some warm-up indicators:

By 1900 the U.S. had recently become the wealthiest economy in the world, slightly surpassing Australia and Great Britain, and it had become twice as wealthy as France and Germany and four times as wealthy as Japan and Mexico, which were then roughly equal.

Percentage of American homes that had electricity: 3
Percentage that had running water: approximately 33
Percentage that had flush toilets: 15
Percentage of infants who died in before age one: 14 (today the percentage is less than 1)
Percentage of students who completed high school: 7
Percentage of men over 65 working full time: over 67 (and the average work week was over 60 hours and 6 days)

But to get to the serious math:

Wealth: Per capita income in 1900 was around $5000, while now it is over five times that amount.

Population: The total U.S. population in 1900 was 76 million people, about one quarter of the current population of of a little over 300 million.

Life expectancy: In 1900 it was 47.3. Currently it is 78.1 or so. So if one is an adult by, say, age 16, the average amount of adult life rose from 31 years in 1820 to 62 years now — a factor of 2.

So people now have 5 times more income; they have 2 times as much time to enjoy it; and there are 4 times as many people.

5 x 2 x 4 = 40.

What Peter the Great saw

I’m browsing Robert K. Massie’s excellent Peter the Great, a book that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981, and came again across this quotation that struck me on my first reading years ago. The context is Peter’s trip to western Europe—an unheard of thing for Russian czars to do.

His objective was the Europe that had produced Bacon, Descartes, Leibniz, Milton, Rembrandt, Molière, Leeuwenhoek, Newton, and many other immortals. Russia, by contrast, seemed a backwater of feudalism and medieval stagnation.

So in 1697 the twenty-five year old Peter set off, traveling semi-incognito and declaring “I am a pupil and need to be taught.”

Here is Massie’s description of what Peter the Great saw:

“What he saw in the thriving cities and harbors of the West, what he learned from the scientists, inventors, merchants, tradesmen, engineers, printers, soldiers and sailors, confirmed his early belief, formed in the German Suburb, that his Russians were technologically backward—decades, perhaps centuries, behind the West. Asking himself how this had happened and what could be done about it, Peter came to understand that the roots of Western technological achievement lay in the freeing of men’s minds. He grasped that it had been the Renaissance and the Reformation, neither of which had ever come to Russia, which had broken the bonds of the medieval church and created an environment where independent philosophical and scientific enquiry as well as wide-ranging commercial enterprise could flourish. He knew that these bonds of religious orthodoxy still existed in Russia, reinforced by peasant folkways and traditions which had endured for centuries. Grimly, Peter resolved to break these bonds on his return” (p. 232).

William Kamkwamba

The boy who harnessed the wind — a 14-year old who decides to design and build a windmill to bring electricity to his remote village in Malawi. A deeply human story of initiative, ingenuity, and independence.

And here is the book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, at Amazon.

High technology — very, very high

I just sent my first email from 36,000 feet, flying somewhere over Iowa or maybe Nebraska now.

Which means we should all watch that excellent Louis CK video again:

We live in a time of wonders.