Ever since I heard the Dredg song Pyramid, I've loved the line "We live like penguins in the desert/why can we live like tribes?" It made me think of summer time office buildings that are over air conditioned such that it makes one wish for a sweater.
I went to a conference this last weekend on Christianity & the Arts in Middlebury and I went to a session led by Matt Dickerson, a computer science professor and Tolkien scholar (author of Following Gandalf, Ents, Elves, and Eriador: the Environmental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien, and From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy). So I was pretty excited about that session, and I seem to have emerged with something I'm still chewing on.
We read an essay by Wendell Berry from The Art of the Commonplace, which touched on the difference between a road and a path. Matt said that a road was like conquest of the Earth. A road is the fast place from here to there, never mind what's in between: plow through the hills, uproot the trees. Nature is in the way, and so we plow over it. Whereas a path is a submission to nature. If the hill curves around, so does the path. If there is a cliff, we go around it. It is working within the environment we've got. In short, a road transforms nature to meet my needs, and with a path it is I who conform.
And today it occurred to me that that is really the same idea behind the Dredg lyric - we shape the earth to meet our needs so that it is a pleasant 70 degrees no matter where we are rather than sweating a bit in the summer.
One quote from the session has stuck with me from C.S. Lewis' Abolition of Man:
"There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men".
I think I might present my students with some philosophy of science type questions and ask them to write a reflection on them. I love physics. :)
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In a weird way, this makes me think of human relationships. God told Adam to subdue the Earth. We've taken subdue and turned it into rule at any cost.
It's like men who treat their wives like crap and then say that it's because they're men and it's their headship or whatever crap they use to justify their being idiots.
We forget about things like love, respect, stewardship, and responsibility.
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