Will They Know We Are Christians

 

I fall short daily, but my intentions are to live as a follower of Jesus.  This blog is called "Musings of an Urban Christian."  When I react to current events, and social issues, I do so as one believer in a vast global discourse.  I try to approach my musings with an appropriate level of humility because I am flawed, and seriousness because the things we wrestle with as a society are of eternal importance.

It is troubling to me how often the established Christian voice on issues is either misguided, non-existent, cowardly, or hateful.  As time permits in the weeks to come, I will delve into some examples, but for now let me just say that there is much to commend about this particular faith perspective in offering something substantive to the world around us, and it pains me how little that leavening effect is actually happening.  

Stay tuned for more content on this topic. 

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Here's an excerpt from a book I recently read, "The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal," by Jared Diamond.

Studies of most modern hunter-gatherers with far more effective weapons than early Homo sapiens show that most of a family's calories come from plant food gathered by women. Men catch rabbits and other small game never mentioned in the heroic campfire stories. Occasionally the men do bag a large animal, which does indeed contribute significantly to protein intake. But it is only in the Arctic, where little plant food is available, that big-game hunting becomes the dominant food source, and humans did not reach the Arctic until within the last few dozen millenia. Thus I would guess that big-game hunting contributed only modestly to our food intake until after we had evolved fully modern anatomy and behaviour. I doubt the usual view that hunting was the driving force behind our uniquely human brain and societies. For most of our history we were not mighty hunters but skilled chimps, using stone tools to acquire and prepare plant food and small animals. Occasionally, men did bag a large animal, and then retold the story of that rare event incessantly.

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Here is an excerpt from a magazine article I recently read, "The Myth of a Majority-Minority America," in The Atlantic.

As much as they are competing for economic resources and political power, America’s racial groups are blending now more than ever. According to the most detailed of the Census Bureau’s projections, 52 percent of individuals included in the nonwhite majority of 2060 will also identify as white. By the same token, the white group will become much more diverse, because 40 percent of Americans who say they are white also will claim a minority racial or ethnic identity. Speculating about whether America will have a white majority by the mid-21st century makes little sense, because the social meanings of white and nonwhite are rapidly shifting. The sharp distinction between these categories will apply to many fewer Americans.

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 Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us)," by Tom Vanderbilt.

 

Now, like then, we think of traffic as an abstraction, a grouping of things rather than a collection of individuals. We talk about "beating the traffic" or "getting stuck in traffic," but we never talk-in polite company, at least-about "beating people" or "getting stuck in people." The news lumps together "traffic and weather" as if they were both passive forces largely outside our control, even though whenever we complain about it, we do so because we're part of the traffic.



We have already seen how engineers’ models are unable to fully anticipate how humans will act on “safer” roads, and it is no different for congestion. It makes sense, mathematically, that if a city takes out a road in its traffic network, traffic on other streets will have to rise to make up for the lost capacity. If you removed one pipe in a plumbing system, the other pipes would have to pick up the slack. But people are a lot more complex than water, and the models fail to capture this complexity. The traffic may rise, as engineers predict, but that in itself may discourage drivers from entering a more difficult traffic stream.

Or it may not. Los Angeles currently operates with a freeway system largely built in the 1950s and 1960s. Its engineers never imagined the levels of traffic the city now sees. As John Fisher, head of the city’s DOT, put it, “They say, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ Because we didn’t build it doesn’t mean the people stopped coming. Freeways weren’t built, but the traffic is still coming anyway. There’s more and more traffic. The bottom line is that the L.A. area is going to be a magnet whether we build freeways or not. People are still going to want to come here.”

This raises the question of how much more successful a city Los Angeles could be if it had built all the freeways it never did, if one could magically whisk from downtown to Santa Monica in a few minutes. Then again, how desirable would a place like Beverly Hills be if the freeway that had been planned for it, to “cure” L.A. traffic, was now running through it? Wouldn’t the increased speed just attract even more people? Is traffic failing Los Angeles, or is it a symptom of a thriving Los Angeles? Brian Taylor, the planner at UCLA, argues that people often focus single-mindedly on congestion itself as an evil, which, leaving aside for a moment the vast, negative environmental impacts, misses the point: What great city has not been crowded? “If your firm needs access to post-production film editors or satellite-guidance engineers,” Taylor notes, “you will reach them more quickly via the crowded freeways of L.A. than via less crowded roads elsewhere.” Density, economists have argued, boosts productivity. Traffic engineers like to use the example of an empty restaurant versus a crowded restaurant: Wouldn’t you rather eat at the crowded one, even if it means waiting in line?



The most striking feature of Delhi traffic is the occasional presence of a cow or two, often languidly in the median strip, feet away from the traffic. The medians, it is said, provide a resting place that is not only dry but kept free from pesky flies by the buffeting winds of passing cars. I posed the question of cows to Maxwell Pereira, Delhi’s former top traffic cop who has of late been playing the Colonel Pinto character on Indian Sesame Street.  “Let me correct a little misperception,” he told me as we sat in his office in the Gurgaon district. “The presence of a cow in a congested urban area is no hazard. Much as I don’t like the presence of a cow on the road when I am advocating smoother traffic and convenience, the presence of a cow also forces a person to slow down. The overall impact is to reduce the tendency to overspeed and to rashly and negligently drive.”  Cows, in effect, act as the “mental speed bumps” that Australian traffic activist David Engwicht described. They provide “intrigue and uncertainty”, as Engwicht put it, and the average Delhi driver would certainly rather be late for work than hit a cow.

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 Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language," by Christine Kenneally.

When you access the vast global network of computers we call the Internet, you can travel the world, find information, and interact with people in a way that was never before possible. The creation of the net was an awesome leap in technological evolution. Yet for all that it offers, it is the merest shadow of something much larger and much older. Language is the real information highway, the first virtual world. Language is the worldwide web, and everyone is logged on.

 

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Girl on the Train," by Paula Hawkins (PS there are no spoilers below).

The train rolled slowly past and I looked out towards the tracks. I felt dizzy, as though I were having an out-of-body experience, as though I were looking out at myself.

“Honestly, Rachel, I don’t understand how you could have kept this up for so long.” 

I shrug. “In the morning, I take the 8:04, and in the evening, I come back on the 5:56. That’s my train. It’s the one I take. That’s the way it is.”

Let's Get Real

Interacting with a physical place in an authentic manner is way more important now than it was before.  Maybe I am a bit anomalous, but I recall when applying to schools that I had my heart set on Penn primarily because it had the nation's number one undergraduate business school.  The fact that it was located in Philadelphia was intriguing but neither a draw or a deterrent.  Simply put, at the time I was picking Penn, not Philadelphia.  Whereas nowadays it seems like when people decide on colleges (or jobs), they understand that part of that package is where it's located, and they prioritize and choose accordingly.

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Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Best Investment Advice for the New Century," by Burton Malkiel.

The most important investment decision you will probably ever make concerns the balancing of asset categories (stocks, bonds, real estate, money-market securities, and so on) at different stages of your life. According to Roger Ibbotson, who has spent a lifetime measuring returns from alternative portfolios, more than 90 percent of an investor’s total return is determined by the asset categories that are selected and their overall proportional representation. Less than 10 percent of investment success is determined by the specific stocks or mutual funds that an individual chooses.

Commuter Rail

The unanticipated 15-month experiment many knowledge workers have undertaken in working from home has yielded a resounding negative verdict against that soul-sucking necessity of working in person, which is the daily commute to and from the office.  People are reveling in the time they've gained back into their lives, not to mention replacing gas money and road rage with more serene morning and evening routines.

I've noted previously in this space that a benefit of commuting is the serendipitous connections you make with people and places in between work and home.  But that mostly applies to urban settings, and even for us city dwellers this doesn't feel sufficient enough to compensate for all of the positives listed above.  So for sure the value proposition is even less for suburban and rural folk.