The literal truth ·
One of the hot points of Christian theology has always been whether or not to take the Bible literally.
Is that true of classical civilization?
Eratosthenes of Cyrene is supposed to have said something to the effect of, “Show me the cobbler who sewed up the bag that King Aeolus used to shut up the winds, and I’ll believe in the literal truth of the Odyssey.”
Well now. If the literal truth of the Odyssey were not an issue, would Eratosthenes have felt moved to make such a remark? It would be hard to imagine why. “Show me the man who built the exhaust system in my car, and I’ll believe in the literal truth of the owner’s manual!” just doesn’t seem like a probabe proclamation.
So it would seem that people have been ascribing literal truth to sacred and secular literature for quite some time, and not just to the Bible, either. Perhaps it is a general characteristic of humanity to take myth as truth?
— Robert Bethune (17 days ago)
The Greek miracle ·
In their book Coming of Age in Ancient Greece, Neils and Oakley define “the Greek miracle”—the dramatic change in visual art that occurred in ancient Greece—as “an ability to depict what they saw as opposed to what they knew.”
That is a good definition of what every artist in every medium should do. Focus on what is there, not on what you think is there, and thereby see things freshly.
— Robert Bethune (18 days ago)
The unimportance of politics ·
As I read about ancient Greece, over and over again I see writers belaboring the same point: that ancient Athens was a city in which the free, adult, male citizen was on top of the world because he was the one who could take part in politics.
This certainly constitutes a viewpoint in which politics is the highest function in society. Why should we think so?
Politics is nothing but a kind of social plumbing, the necessary labor of making sure social flow and drainage happens. The politicians are most like plumbers when they are bent to their work, and like plumbers their butt-cracks tend to show.
— Robert Bethune (19 days ago)
The effect of global warming ·
I frequently hear people who are experiencing unusually cold weather say something like, “So much for global warming!” While that’s usually a joke, often it reflects a misunderstanding of what global warming would mean for ordinary weather.
Let me set aside for a moment the question of whether or not global warming is real. Let me just examine what the effect on ordinary weather would be if it were real. The effects are rather different from what one might expect. In particular, ordinary weather, as experienced day to day in any particular place, does not necessarily become warmer. Here’s why.
Because the earth is a sphere inclined on its axis and revolving around the sun while rotating, the atmosphere—which is merely a large mass of gases—is heated unevenly. The earth’s poles are cold and the earth’s equatorial regions are warm because the planet is heated unevenly by the sun.
Any mass of gas heated unevenly becomes turbulent. That turbulence in the atmosphere is what we call weather. The movements of air masses—fronts, troughs, storms, and so forth—that make up our weather are merely the observable phenomena that result from overall atmospheric turbulence.
If you make the whole atmosphere warmer on average, you still have uneven heating—only more of it. The distribution of heat does not smooth out. The equatorial regions still receive much more heat than do the poles. The whole planet is warmer on average, but the uneven distribution of heat remains.
The effect is to make the unevenly heated atmosphere more turbulent. The heat engine is running hotter, running more actively. Temperature, rainfall, and wind variation increases. It’s the difference between how a pot of water acts when it’s on simmer versus when it’s on boil.
The result is that weather becomes more extreme and less predictable. Warm days in cold seasons, cold days in warm seasons, some areas becoming colder, other areas becoming warmer, more frequent storms in some places, rainy places going dry, drier places becoming rainier, and so forth is what one would see.
I leave the rest of the politics and the science to those who wish to pursue them further.
— Robert Bethune (21 days ago)
Returning to the spoken word ·
When I create an audio production of a text, I return to an ancient tradition of oral transmission—and by ancient I do truly mean ancient, as in the world of ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, of the world in general before the invention of moveable type.
In ancient times, most people did not read, they listened. They either listened to someone else read, or if they read themselves, they read aloud, experiencing the text as a spoken, not silent, object. Literacy was limited, and books were rare and expensive.
Nowdays, many “readers” are rediscovering the pleasures and benefits of the spoken word, as audio productions of texts become easy to obtain and manage. What moveable type accomplished, audio recording has partially undone, for now we can revert to the ancient tradition of hearing, rather than reading, a text.
— Robert Bethune (23 days ago)