Fire and Knowledge

Facts in isolation are false. The more isolated a fact or set of facts is, the more false it is. A fact is true in the absolute sense only in association with all facts. This is why the departmentalization of knowledge in our colleges and universities is fundamentally wrong.

–Wendell Berry, “Going to Work” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 41

It is certainly much less violent now than it was three centuries ago. In most hunter-gatherer societies, the number-one cause of death is murder. In Canada, it is fourteenth (at a rate half of that of accidental falls).

Public violence, in the form of torture and execution, was a stable of European life right through the middle of the 19th century. Imagine watching someone being burned alive. Or considered what it means to be “drawn and quartered.” Yet not two hundred years ago, parents used to bring their children to observe such spectacles. The guillotine, when first introduced during the French Revolution, was a symbol of enlightenment and progress. Previously, the executioner would often have to chop away four or five times in order to sever a convict’s neck. The guillotine was quite humane by comparison.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 45

The immense diversity of the insects and flowering plants combined is no accident. The two empires are united by intricate symbioses. The insects consume every anatomical part of the plants, while dwelling on them in every nook and cranny. A large fraction of the plant species depend on insects for pollination and reproduction. Ultimately they owe them their very lives, because insects turn the soil around their roots and decompose dead issue into nutrients required for continued growth.

So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months. Most of the amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals would crash to extinction around the same time. Next would go the bulk of the flowering plants and other terrestrial habitats of the world…. The land would return to approximately its condition in early Paleozoic times, covered by mats of recumbent wind-pollinated vegetation, sprinkled with clumps of small trees and bushes here and there, largely devoid of animal life.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 133

It turns out that being a stepchild is the strongest risk factor for child abuse yet found. And a child is 40 to 100 times more likely to be killed by a stepparent than by a biological parent.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 280-281

I think it is a kind of folly to assume that new knowledge is necessarily truer than old knowledge, or that empirical truth is truer than nonempirical truth. But I also do not believe that factual truth is or ever can be sufficient truth, let alone ultimate truth.

–Wendell Berry, “Going to Work” in Citizenship Papers (2003), p. 40

I think that there’s some brainwashing going on with this idea that we don’t have time to cook anymore. We have made cooking seem much more complicated than it is, and part of that comes from watching cooking shows on television — we’ve turned cooking into a spectator sport. We’re terrified to play tackle football too when we watch how it’s played on TV — we’d get killed. But cooking’s a whole lot easier than it appears on Iron Chef.

We cook every night here. My wife and I both work, and we can get a very nice dinner on the table in a half hour. It would not take any less time for us to drive to a fast-food outlet and order, sit down, and bus our table. [But] when you create this image of people as being hurried, and harried, and of course you need TV dinners, that kind of sinks in. They kind of flatter us by telling us we’re too busy and that we have such rushed lives, but in the end we find time for what matters. In just the last 10 years we’ve found, what, two or three hours a day to deal with the internet? It’s a matter of priority, it’s not really about ability. Some people are very intimidated about cooking and I think that’s a shame, and I think we have to help people get over that by teaching them how to cook, teaching kids how to cook in school.

–Michael Pollan in “A Conversation with Michael Pollan,” Grist Magazine.

Unlike religion, which promised paradise after death, advertising promised paradise right around the next corner: through purchase of a new car, a suburban home or a labor-saving appliance. Consumer goods had become the new opiate of the people.

–Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (UK Edition, 2004), p. 27

Almost as soon as [HIV] starts multiplying, our immune system starts recognizing the infected white blood cells and destroying them, wiping out the viruses in the process. But despite the immune system’s ability to kill HIV by the billions every day, HIV can survive these attacks for years. The secret to its longevity is its ability to evolve. The enzymes that HIV uses to make new copies of its genes are very sloppy, making one or two mistakes on average every time they duplicate the virus’s genome. Among the many mutants that spring up, a few strains will turn out to be hard for the immune system to recognize. Because HIV replicates so quickly, these resistant viruses quickly become the dominate strains in a person’s body. It takes time for our immune system to shift its attack toward the new strain, and once it does, the viruses evolve even newer forms that escape the immune system yet again.

–Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, p. 218