Once again, it’s the time of year when we ponder endings and beginnings, when we hunker down for the long nights, wonder where this year has disappeared to, and devise all sorts of convoluted theories about what is to come. Despite the endless recycling of “The Little Drummer Boy” in nearly every commercial space, this time of year also seems to have a peculiar kind of gravity, a pressure on the heart and lungs, a sense of urgency that has nothing to do with shopping lists or end-of-year numbers and everything to do with preparing for something final. But what?

I’m more than usually preoccupied with end-times because of a discussion group I’ve been part of focusing on Revelations: Visions, Prophecies, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, by Elaine Pagels. In it, Pagels examines the cultural and political landscapes out of which John of Patmos’s Book of Revelation (the final book of the Christian Bible) arose, and then follows the surprising twists in the history of its interpretation until it became the emphatic omega on the list of officially sanctioned writings that became the New Testament in the latter half of the fourth century CE. She gives the reader a glimpse into the other books of revelation—Jewish, Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Christian—that were written more or less the same time as John’s, books that claim to be “revelations” of a reality that is usually hidden from humanity. While some, like John of Patmos, focus on the end of the world, many do not; they claim, rather, to reveal divine secrets through, as one historian put it, “visions, dreams, and other paranormal states of consciousness.”

The genre of revelation is often associated with high drama and vivid weirdness, writhing with dragons and angels, backlit with blinding lights or drenched in palpable darkness: revelation as conflict. Yet Pagels cites one book entitled Thunder, Perfect Mind whose images seek to unify rather than to divide and to find completeness—the divine—in pollution and purity both:

I was sent forth from the power,
And I have come to those who reflect upon me,
And I have been found among those who seek me…
Do not be ignorant of me anywhere or any time. Be on your guard! 

Do not be ignorant of me. 

For I am the first and the last. 

I am the honored one and the scorned one. 

I am the whore and the holy one. 

I am the wife and the virgin…
I am the barren one 
and many are her sons. 

I am she whose wedding is great, 
and I have not taken a husband. 

I am the midwife and she who does not bear. 

I am the solace of my labor pains. 

I am the bride and the bridegroom, 
and it is my husband who begot me….

The whole of the book—the part that still exists, that is—glows with power of a very different sort than John’s revelation does. Although it is not a Jewish or Christian work—most probably, it is a hymn to the Egyptian goddess Isis—many of its images harmonize beautifully with biblical language:

Hear me in gentleness, and learn of me in roughness. 

I am she who cries out, 

and I am cast forth upon the face of the earth. 

I prepare the bread and my mind within. 

I am the knowledge of my name.

That we learn wisdom in precisely the moments that seem most inimical to it—times of tribulation and violence, of incomprehension and confusion—seems to be the book’s central teaching. The repetition of “I am” throughout the text suggests familiarity with the Jewish/Christian awareness of the power of naming. Who am I? Who am I not? What is my name and who named me? How I am in conversation with that which is not me, with the One who named me?

In John’s compelling depiction, conversation requires the drawing of very stern lines: there are those whom you converse with and those whom you destroy. Once evil is destroyed, the purified remnant enters the glorious New Jerusalem. I have very mixed feelings about this stern line. I know that evil has some people in such a stranglehold that trying to address them seems hopeless, ridiculous, and lethal: people who shoot children, for instance. How would you talk to someone who could do such a thing?

Thunder, Perfect Mind sets forth a very different conversational strategy: no one is excluded. Purity is an illusion, utterly contrary to the divine self-identity. Thunder, Perfect Mind resonates in my heart and mind, an antidote to John’s fiercely tribal, exclusionary, accusatory language. And yet it leaves me wanting as well (although less), wanting the street-language translation for a conversation that took place somewhere in the stratosphere. Is there another idiom in which the intersection between the mortal and the divine can be spoken, one that doesn’t involve violence, secret codes, hallucinations, and abstractions? Of course I think the answer is yes: revelation does not necessarily require a one-time blast from beyond; faithfulness to daily interactions can work the same ground.

I read in a recent New York Times Sunday Magazine article about a Japanese scientist, Shin Kubota, whose work with tiny jellyfish that age backwards—nicknamed “immortal jellyfish”—seems to tap into some of these questions from a completely different direction. Despite the fact that Turritopsis dohrnii is about the size of “a trimmed pinkie fingernail,” and despite the fact that it has no brain, no heart, and that it eats out of its anus, its genetic overlap with the human genome is unnervingly significant (insert punch line here.) “Turritopsis application for human beings is the most wonderful dream of mankind,” Kubota told the Times reporter. “Once we determine how the jellyfish rejuvenates itself, we should achieve very great things. My opinion is that we will evolve and become immortal ourselves.”

Every day for at least three hours a day for the past fifteen years, Kubota has tended to his menagerie of jellyfish, the only captive population in the world. It is “grueling, tedious work,” requiring daily water changes, observation under a microscope, and feeding, which can require cutting up nearly invisible dried brine shrimp eggs that sometimes need to be cut up with two needles under a microscope. “The work causes Kubota to growl and cluck his tongue. ‘Eat by yourselves!’ he yells at one medusa. ‘You’re not a baby!’ Then he laughs heartily.” When he travels to conferences, the petri dishes come with him in a cooler. There are no days off. He is faithful to his tiny, mysterious dependents.

Five years ago, however, he had what he vaguely refers to as “a scare,” a period in which he aged “a lifetime” in one year: “It was astonishing for me. I had become old.” Today the hair that was white has turned black again, his energy as exuberant as a middle schooler’s. As a consequence of the scare, Kubota started a second career as a singer and songwriter and is now something of a celebrity, “the Japanese equivalent of Bill Nye the Science Guy.” He sings about the beauty of his jellyfish and about the natural world, work he now considers the crux of his work. Before humankind can apply what we learn from Turritopsis to ourselves, we must first come to love nature; otherwise, we’ll misuse our knowledge. “We’re very strange animals,” he said. “We’re so clever and civilized, but our hearts are very primitive. If our hearts weren’t primitive, there wouldn’t be wars. I’m worried that we will apply the science too early, like we did with the atomic bomb.”

He considers his science as having a limited value in his campaign to teach love: “‘We must love plants—without plants we cannot live. We must love bacteria—without decomposition our bodies can’t go back to the earth. If everyone learns to love living organisms, there will be no crime. No murder. No suicide. Spiritual change is needed. And the most simple way to achieve this is song. Biology is specialized,’ he said, bringing his palms within inches of each other. ‘But songs?’ He spreads his hands far apart, as if to indicate the size of the world.”

Something about Kubota’s obsessive fidelity and tenderness allow him access to the same conversations that John of Patmos and the author of Thunder, Perfect Mind had (and have) with eternal order. The theatrical volume of famous revelations drowns out the ones that happen quietly over time as a result of the minute, open-hearted engagements to which we’re invited in each minute of our lives: do we converse with the creature in front of us, open to something as solid to as ourselves, containing vigor and disease, song and dissonance, grace and clumsiness? Or do we remain stubbornly monolingual? Kubota looks, as surely as does John of Patmos, for a time where every tear will be wiped away, where death will be no more, nor mourning nor crying nor pain, and he looks for this arrival in a conversation that includes tedium and frustration. Can there be any doubt that something new and beautiful will be born?

What we’re reading
Heather: Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit
Martin: Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

My previous post revealed the furry fury of the fully furrowed Kohout brow, especially when a flurry of furry brows furrow in unison. I’m a Kohout by marriage, not birth, and therefore, perhaps, I do not wield the full power of the brow, but I’m no slouch, either.

The source of my current furrow fest is this: a month after taking on Freeman Dyson—and clearly knocking him out—I’m still struggling with his assertion in the introductory essay of The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010 that environmentalism has “replaced Marxism as the leading secular religion of our age,” and that it “doesn’t have much to do with science.” Although he says he’s hopeful about the future because of the environmental movement, it’s hard to ignore the comparison with Marxism, which by most standards was a dismal failure when put into practice, however exalted its intentions in theory.

I agree with the assessment that environmentalism is a secular religion; what annoys me is the implication that scientists sit on a higher rung of the ladder of knowledge than environmentalists, who are somehow contaminated by their quasi-religious fervor and therefore need to be quarantined to a lower rung. Scientific ways of knowing trump religious ways of knowing.

I also got an email from a friend of mine, a formidable public theologian, who reminded me that the natural world is no replacement for the most amply understood Christian God. He wrote: “I do have a theological quibble (probably more than a quibble) with your view that nature in some way reveals God. If it does, I’m not sure I like this god very much.” As Robert, our redoubtable ranch manager, is prone to say: well, hell. I’m aggravated by the implication that an abstracted theological way of knowing trumps experience of and reverence for nature.

So where’s a huffy environmentalist Christian (or sometime Christian) supposed to stand on the ladder of knowledge, especially if she’s wearing a skirt? Well, any eight-year-old with playground experience can answer that one: get off the ladder and go play somewhere else.

I’m setting up an opposition that’s perhaps unreasonable: from what I’ve read, Dyson honors the mystery and gravity of the natural world, as I know my theologian friend does. But I can’t quite shake the feeling that two of the magisteria of human knowledge—science and religion—tend to regard the natural world as a mere springboard to a more important kind of knowledge: science seeks to control nature and its processes, Christianity to transcend them. Environmentalism at its best requires that we seek understanding of the endlessly changing framework into which we as a species have been born, and that we work for the short- and long-term flourishing of both framework and species. Environmentalism demands a recognition of limits. I think it can be a vital safeguard for both science and Christianity for just that reason.

In his book Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography, Roger Shattuck, late professor of modern languages and literature at Boston University, examines the vexed borderlands between constructive and destructive human knowledge, first in myth and literature, then in the case histories of the atomic bomb, the human genome project, and the Marquis de Sade. In a chapter entitled “Knowledge Exploding: Science and Technology,” he examines the boundary between pure and applied science and wonders if there really is one. Science operates on the assumption that scientists can safely move between two distinct realms, but Shattuck concludes that there is a lawless and often unacknowledged no-man’s-land between the two: “The knowledge that our many sciences discover is not forbidden in and of itself. But the human agents who pursue that knowledge have never been able to stand apart from or control or prevent its application to our lives.” Scientists, Shattuck believes, are often unable to move cautiously when they enter the realm of forbidden knowledge.

Freeman Dyson, who later came to work with most of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project and who now heartily disapproves of nuclear weaponry, said this in 1980:

I felt it myself, the glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come to them as a scientist. To feel it’s there in your hands. To release the energy that fuels the stars. To tell it do your bidding. And to perform these miracles, to lift a million tons of rock into the sky, it is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable power, and it is in some ways responsible for all our troubles, I would say, this what you might call ‘technical arrogance’ that overcomes people when they see what they can do with their minds.

And yet in his book The Scientist as Rebel, published in 2006, Dyson writes: “Science flourishes best when it uses all the tools at hand, unconstrained by preconceived notions about what science ought to be. Every time we introduce a new tool, it always leads to new and unexpected discoveries, because Nature’s imagination is richer than ours.” “New and unexpected,” however, does not necessarily lead to flourishment for all. Dyson’s prediction that we can technologize our way out of the depredations of excessive carbon emissions has a hollow ring for those of us anxious about the lawless borderlands around forbidden knowledge.

Environmentalism at its best can provide science with a prophetic voice, a voice that looks back to a time of equilibrium and harmony within a community, assesses present troubles in light of that ideal, and outlines the consequences of continued disequilibrium. (At its worst, of course, it just sounds condemnatory. There are plenty of stiff-necked literalists in the environmental movement.) In these times when technological advances come so quickly that it’s hard to know what their long-term effects might be, environmentalists can act in the way an ethics panel in a hospital might act, looking to a wider context for particular cases than the science (or business) at hand. Given scientists’ track record of falling in love with the glitter of their tools, the prophets of the environmental world can provide them with a corrective slap.

At the other end of my furrow, environmentalism can provide Christianity with what Old Testament scholar Ellen Davis calls “a wholesome materiality.” (Or it can if the scientists in the movement don’t look down their noses at the part of environmentalism that draws its power from the subjective realms of art and religion.) Within Christianity is a powerful riptide pulling its followers away from the material world, a tide that runs through misreadings of scripture as well as tradition. In her wonderful (really!) book Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, Davis proposes that the Bible takes the health of the earth very, very seriously. When Israel remembers both its covenant with God and its place within the intricately interconnected creation of Genesis 1, then the land drips with milk and honey and everyone is fed. When Israel forgets its covenant and its place, its sin results in devastation of the land. This devastation is not a poetic image: it’s meant quite literally. Thunders the prophet Jeremiah:

I have seen the earth, and here, [it is] wilderness and waste;
And [I look] to the heavens—and their light is gone.
I have seen the mountains, and here, they are wavering,
And all the hills palpitate.
I have seen, and here, there is no human being,
And all the birds of the heavens have fled.
I have seen, and here, the garden-land is now the wasteland,
And all its cities are pulled down,
Because of YHWH, because of his hot anger.

The well-being of the earth is inseparable from human behavior: if we remember that we are meant to be stewards of all the creation (including humans) in a way befitting us as the images of a creative, just, and merciful God, then all will be well. When we forget who we are, our forgetting is made miserably visible on the face of creation, like Dorian Gray’s portrait. Our forgetting is not merely a matter of personal misbehavior, as many Christians seem to think; we forget the enormous scope of creation and delicate balances within which we have our being. In trying to stand on top of creation, we often crush it.

I agree with my theologian friend that it’s dangerous to assume that you can observe the natural world and thereby know the full nature of God. In some ways, that would be like thinking you can reliably deduce knowledge of parents through the behavior and character of their children. Yet the mark of the parent is inevitably found on the child (in this case, both human and non-human creation): expunging God from the operations of nature that are distasteful or terrifying to human sensibilities (by, for example, killing all alpha predators despite their vital place in the biotic community) is as troubling to me as the insistence of some scientists on wandering in the borderlands without a map. Environmentalists in the scientific world can help restore human awareness of the “wholesome materiality” of creation, to look for the intricate and hidden relationships that bind us to one another and make us family—or neighbors, in the salutary command that we love God, neighbor, and self without separation.

Now that I’ve cleared that up, I declare that the era of furrowing is officially over.

What we’re reading
Heather: Roger Shattuck, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Martin: Stephen Harrigan, Remember Ben Clayton

I have a bone to pick with Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and generally acknowledged scientific genius. I bet he’s really nervous.

On a recent trip to Aspen, I picked up The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010, edited by Dyson, and the latest installment in a wonderful series that began in 2000. In the introduction, Dyson laments that most current science writing appears as brief news items rather than “thoughtful essays” like the ones John McPhee wrote for The New Yorker. Apparently magazine editors don’t feel that science as science has much reader appeal. Nature writing is much more common; Dyson notes that the book contains twice as many essays about nature as about science. “Nature is now fashionable among readers and publishers of magazines,” he grumbles. “Science is unfashionable.”

Somewhat later he claims that the essays about nature are “written for nature lovers, not science lovers,” because “the quality of the writing is as important as the subject matter.” The environmental movement is the product not of science, but is rather the “leading secular religion of our age,” a replacement for Marxism. “Environmentalism doesn’t have much to do with science,” he says, although he proudly shares the ethics of the environmental movement. He is hopeful about the future of the Earth because two such committed communities are “working to preserve living space for our fellow creatures….”

While his analysis is in some ways perfectly reasonable, I object to the idea that there is an unbreachable demarcation between science and other disciplines rather than a permeable boundary that encourages heavy traffic and frequent discussion about just exactly where that boundary is, particularly between the sciences and the arts. (I include religion in the realm of art for purposes of this essay.)

Subsequent events since I read Dyson’s introduction have encouraged me to continue this line of thought. Maggie Fox, CEO of the Climate Protection Action Fund, was the featured speaker at the recent Jessica Catto Leadership Dialogues, a program of the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. She opened her talk by suggesting that the bar code would be the symbol for this era; technology, media, and advertising have converged in such a way that we are encouraged in all arenas to chose what we already know and prefer and to live in a bubble that reflects our predispositions. She urged us to step out of our silos both inside and outside the environmental community and to refuse to identify too exclusively with what we already know.

The day after this talk I read an article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Triumph of New-Age Medicine,” by David H. Freedman, that investigates the rise—and apparent efficacy—of alternative, or integrative, or holistic medical practices in America. Mainstream medicine has a mixed reaction to this turn of events. Freedman quotes one doctor willing to consider integrative medicine’s benefits as saying, “Doctors tend to end up trained in silos of specialization.” Those who object to alternative medicine as hokum can be virulently negative about it, despite the opening in recent years of forty-two integrative medical research centers, all of them at major medical institutions like Harvard, Yale, Duke, and the Mayo Clinic. Says one critic, “It’s cleverly marketed, dangerous quackery…. There’s only one type of medicine, and that’s medicine whose treatments have been proven to work. When something works, it’s not all that hard to prove it. These people have been trying to prove their alternative treatments work for years, and they can’t do it.”

From there, Freedman takes a look at what constitutes “proof” in mainstream medicine. He interviews a Harvard researcher who claims that many mainstream medical treatments are little better than placebos. Says Freedman, “The vast majority of drugs don’t work in as many as 70 percent of patients, according to a study within the pharmaceutical industry. One recent study concluded that 85 percent of new prescription drugs hitting the market are of little or no benefit to patients.” But patients keep buying them, because, according to the researcher, “knowing that you’re getting a treatment is a critical part of the ritual of seeing any kind of practitioner.”

It appears, then, that effective treatment relies in part on patients’ perceptions and expectations, two things that are notoriously resistant to empirical testing. The belief that treatment will be efficacious is frequently augmented by a solid relationship between healer and patient. Freedman says that studies “have even shown that patients still get a beneficial placebo effect when practitioners are honest but optimistic with patients about the placebo—saying something along the lines of ‘We know of no reason why this should work, yet it seems to work with many patients.’ Sure enough, it often does.”

Freedman also interviewed a neuroscientist at the University of California at Davis who studies the effects of meditation on the brain and who said, “We have to be careful about allowing presumed objective scientific methods to trump all aspects of human experience. Instead, science has to learn to listen in a sophisticated way to what individuals report to us, and to relate those findings to other kinds of knowledge obtained from external measurements.” This, of course, was my takeaway from the article, which deserves to be read in its entirety and not just in my messily truncated version of it.

After reading this article, I attended a concert in the Aspen Music Festival summer series featuring Beethoven’s third piano concerto. My father and I sat where we could watch Joyce Yang, the soloist, as she played this beautifully complex and lyrical piece. I’m not able to judge whether it was a flawless performance (it certainly seemed like one), but it was utterly riveting. Her performance took a series of givens, of facts, that any performer of the piece faces: the piano, the musical score, the liturgies required in a concert performance, and technical mastery over all of them. These givens, in combination with Yang’s ebullient, unmeasurable, unprovable subjective self, brought forth something beautifully new and of soul-jolting clarity. She was the vehicle of a kind of revelation.

Dyson himself recounted in his own career as a physicist a moment that sounds to me analogous to Yang’s performance. A 2009 profile in The New York Times Magazine entitled “The Civil Heretic” described how he solved a particularly difficult problem given to him by a professor, a subset of a larger problem Einstein had proposed. Dyson had just parted from the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman, with whom he’d been on a road trip through America:

Inspired by this and by a mesmerizing sermon on nonviolence that Dyson happened to hear a traveling divinity student deliver in Berkeley, Dyson sat aboard his final Greyhound of the summer, heading East. He had no pencil or paper. He was thinking very hard. On a bumpy stretch of highway, long after dark, somewhere out in the middle of Nebraska, Dyson says, “Suddenly the physics problem became clear.”

The intersection of the givens of the discipline of physics with Dyson’s unmeasurable, subjective self brought about something new, a revelation. Perhaps the masters of any discipline are more like each other than they are like the competent workers within their disciplines, the people who move a discipline forward without changing its course.

Which gets me back to my irritation with Dyson’s silo-ing off of science writing from nature writing and environmental writing. Of course there are nature/environmental writers whose grasp of science is negligible (like me), whose substitution of sentiment for rigorous thinking is exasperating, whose awareness of the history of nature writing is minimal, or whose identification with a political orthodoxy is absolute. But there are also nature and environmental writers who marry mastery of their craft with their unmeasurable, subjective selves in such a way that something compellingly new arises, something revelatory about the not always entirely overlapping human and natural worlds.

Even as I was reading the new Best of, I was also reading Writing the Sacred into the Real, a compilation of essays on beloved places by poet Alison Hawthorne Deming. The quality of her writing is as important as her subject matter, a statement which Dyson would not necessarily intend as a compliment. I’m not sure why he would exclude scientists from the pleasure of reading her essays, which are as much reflections on writing as they are on nature; she is not a scientist but has read and reflected on science, and it informs her observations without being their subject matter. Her subject matter is the ways in which Americans have been shaped by the natural world, even as much of American culture becomes more removed from it and, consequently, careless in its stewardship. Her purpose is to make us look, really look, at our surroundings: “The human eye does more than see; it stitches the seen and the unseen together, the temporal and the eternal. It wakes me again and again to the astonishment of finding myself in a body moving through a world of beauty and dying and mystery.” She insists on the power and presence of the invisible in human experience, on the ways in which a deep, focused involvement with nature leads to a glimmer of understanding that surpasses the sum of its parts:

For me, the natural world in all its evolutionary splendor is a revelation of the divine—the inviolable matrix of cause and effect that reveals itself to us in what we cannot control or manipulate, no matter how pervasive our meddling. This is the reason that our technological mastery over nature will always remain flawed. The matrix is more complex than our intelligence. We may control a part, but the whole body of nature must incorporate the change, and we are not capable of anticipating how it will do so. We will always be humbled before nature, even as we destroy it. And to diminish nature beyond its capacity to restore itself, as our culture seems perversely bent to do, is to desecrate the sacred force of Earth to which we owe a gentler hand.

This doesn’t sound all that different from what Einstein said about his sense of faith:

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man…. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

These two masters of distinct disciplines sound very much like each other. Given what I’ve read of and by Dyson, I don’t think he would disagree with me, or them. There seems, however, to be within many disciplines a tendency to defend their boundaries with a tribal fierceness, a tendency that Dyson exhibits in his introduction. I hope that the masters of all disciplines find ways to seek each other out and investigate their common ground rather than defend their own turf—not a bad exercise for the drones, either.

What we’re reading
Heather: Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real
Martin: Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows