Life blog

Commentary on Synthetic Biology: Either. Or.

Either "Scientists should NOT be allowed to create artificial life"

Or "Scientists SHOULD be allowed to create artificial life"

Is this really the distinction? So black and white? And when is life artificial?

I guess the Economist is starting this discussion to answer those questions.

Images from James King (who I suspect might have been invovled)

Culture as Augmented Reality?

I was listening to Wade Davis' Long Now talk about the wisdom of ancient cultures. Like all Long Now talks, it got me thinking. One thing that Wade said that stuck out was that other cultures are not failed attempts at being us, but other interpretations of what it means to be human.

He did mention one thing that rubbed me a bit the wrong way. When mentioning Amazonian indians who have a hallucinogen that is made from two parts from two plants, he cited the usual disbelief from our culture of how this came about. He did mention that the indians reply that the plants speak to them. But I feel he failed to say that these indians are as scientific and explorative and systematic about their world as we are and that what was figured out generations ago is now part of how they interact with nature - the plants indeed do speak to them.

He also mentioned Songlines, the songs indigenous Australians sing when traversing the outback. The songlines are an interesting mix of information and culture used to navigate the world.

That got me thinking: Are songlines a form of augmented reality? Indeed, thinking about how the plants "talk" to Amazonian indians, might culture, our encoding of information and norms and etiquette and stories, just be an augmentation over the world, and augmented reality?

By the way, the rest of the talk was mind-blowingly awesome. Listen to it.

Image from StormyDog

Increasing tinkerability - explaining DIYbio

I was with my father this Thanksgiving and he asked me about "that Biology thing" I've been getting involved in. He's known for some time that I've been increasingly focused on science in the past few years and that, with my move back to the Boston area, I've been meeting up with scientists and biohackers.

I explained to him what Synthetic Biology and DIYbiology were all about. I showed him my video of my last DIYbio activity, who were the characters involved, what the impact has been so far.

Being a biz guy, he kept asking me what was the "end goal," to help him wrap his head around what would motivate folks to tinker with Biology. He wanted to know if there was a scientific goal or if there were products folks wanted to build.

After a long circular discussion, he finally realized that the field was so nascent that, really, the goal was to "increase the tinkerability" of Biology. 

Of course, that conclusion is filtered through my view of where these areas are at. Right now, engineers and non-institutional biologists are mostly focused on simplifying and domesticating Biology. Issues like science and products will arise naturally as the accessibility and malleability of biological systems increases.

What do you think? Do you think that's an appropriate assessment?

Image from Matt Biddulph

Mac, Sophia, and the philosophy of 21st-century Biology

Mac has written two short but deep posts, inspired by a talk by Sophia Roosth. What inspired Mac was Sophia's "anthropological insight" that DIYbio is "domesticating" Biology.

While I don't feel that it's an explicit doctrine, domestication of Biology is indeed the spirit of what DIYbiologists are up to. It's something that arises from the curiosity, openness, and tinkering that represents the DIYbiolgist "ethic." Sophia puts it in terms of "episteme" (Knowing) and "techne" (Doing).

Biology, as a discipline, is young in many ways - "science" itself is a product of the Enlightenment. And, as a focus of understanding, Biology is old - Aristotle was a biologist.

But domesticated Biology is at the core of civilization: thousands of years ago folks were breeding animals and plants, and brewing beer, bread, yogurt, and wine. These are the heart of Genetics and Microbiology and Biochemistry.

Mac made a recording of Sophia's talk. It's brilliant and really expresses DIYbio (and synthbio) as it is today and where it can lead. It's a must-listen for anyone interested in the future of Biology.

She makes a very nice story of the mind-sets of institutional and non-institutional scientists. And she pivots around the Homebrew Computer Club analogy as a way to think of the where DIYbio is going.

In many ways, she reminds me of the talks Dana Boyd gave, back in the day, as she watched the early evolution of social networking - Sophie brings together a range of threads from different disciplines to provide some coherence and understanding of the events and thinking unfolding right in front of us. Sophie has articulated what DIYbiologist just knew, just "did," in their hearts.

I think her insights just accelerate the nucleation of the "movement" at these early stages of exploration.

Go listen to it.

Image from pusgums

Is the interent killing storytelling?

I'm always interested in storytelling in its many guises, so the recent article titled "The internet is killing storytelling" was sure to catch my eye [I got it via @stephanierieger].

The author claims that in the modern hyper-connected society the long-form narrative, commonly seen in books, is losing out to the bite-sized snacking culture of the Web.

I read all the comments, many pointing out that narrative was alive and well, the Web full of all sorts of texts and stories and fan-fiction and such (long tail-ish and thru democratized creation and distribution). While a decent rebuttal of the author's thesis, these comments still missed one key fact (below).

Also, this article isn't really saying anything new, but bringing up a recurring theme. We've heard all this before, so it's a bit odd to see this thesis in a modern 2009 article. Indeed, I claim that this article is even weaker now than it would have been 5 years ago.

Why?

What all the commentors missed was that this whole article and all the comments focused solely on text as the medium for narrative. Humans have had many forms with which to tell stories - dance, art, song, theater, radio, TV - all of which are used in some form on the Web.

I claim that the Web has caused a huge transformation in non-text forms of narrative (in oral culture, as it were). We now have easy to use and widely available audio and visual tools and the Web has become a strong discovery and distribution mechanism for these productions. A scan of iTunes, Jamendo, YouTube, or Flickr will reveal of treasure trove of stories.

And, due to the temporary nature of digital media (either due to formatting issues or deletion or loss) we have more features of an oral culture than a literate culture. And that isn't bad. Unless one feels, like it seems this author does, that literary storytelling has primacy over other forms of storytelling.

Eh, I don't think so.

Image from . SantiMB .

The Electric Knife Syndrome

I'm at the Mobile 2.0 conference in Barcelona. I was talking with Mark Kramer, and Bryan and Stepanie Rieger about the things we usually talk about. I had mentioned how I was at a conference where the enthusiasm for the 'technology' made folks forget to use simpler and better solutions. That led Mark to tell us about his stay in Albania where he saw someone using an electric knife to cut bread at a shop. There was no reason to use the electric knife, a regular knife would have sufficed. Mark suggested that it was using the ultimate tech to be cutting edge.

Another example of this came up later in the discussion. I then realized that we were discussing what could be called the 'Electric Knife Syndrome', where the tech used is subtly inappropriate in relation to existing solutions. This is slightly different from Post-Optimal Objects, where the solution itself is useless. But I think the Electric Knife Syndrome occurs more frequently and we forget a simpler solution is available.

Image from tizzle

Great essay by Kevin Kelly on Human Identity

Kevin Kelly has written a great essay on the current challenges to human identity, challenges from tech, society, and new knowledge.

I think this ties a lot into some previous comments I made related to emergence and the like.

Link: Kevin Kelly -- The Technium:

A major theme of this present century will be the pursuit of our collective identity. We are on a search for who we are. What does it mean to be a human? Can there be more than one kind of human? In fact, what exactly is a human?

I posted the following comment:

A while back I had a thought about how things go from simple to complex, hopping to the next layer of complexity and then complexifying once more (the basic emergence thinking). It's similar to SBJohnson's Long Zoom and comments from Alex Wright on information architecture.

One thing that struck me was some sort of subservience to the network above - best exemplified by ants, who seemingly have subsumed their lives to the network at the hive-organism level.

Logically, I concluded that humans (who are clearly a network of individual cells who have subsumed their existence to the human-organism) must at some level subsume their existence to the network above them - society.

Sure we do that, sort of. But I get a feeling that current society is like the volvox to multi-cellular creatures. Or isn't it?

And consequently, what _is_ the network next up that societies must be subsumed under?

But, in all this, I see what gives us humans the anxiety of identity is that we think we _must_ be individuals with free will. But as the network above us gets more complex (indeed mobile phones and the intarwebs are part of this) we refuse to turn ourselves into subsumed parts of a greater network. We try to have a global view or control of that network a layer up.

In summary, our identity was simply a construct as we solidified the strength of the organismal network. Now as we become 'cells' in the next network up, that network will force us to subsume our global views as we become parts in a network.

One more thing: Arthur C Clarke's 'Childhood's End' sort of is a story of humans stepping up into the next level and subsuming their identity.

Entropy is over-rated. Long live Complexity! (Bonus: The Venter)

Does everything tend towards Entropy?

One of the first things we learn in chemistry is that everything tends towards entropy.

How can that be? Whereas Steven Johnson calls it the Long Zoom (in that you can zoom up and down levels of complexity) we constantly are seeing lower-order networks yielding a new level that itself begets new levels.

I lost my notes long ago, but I remember trying to grapple with the way sub-atomic particles glommed on to form atoms to form molecules to form auto-catalytic systems to form cells to form organisms to form societies to form <ad infinitum>. I tried to recapture that thought in an earlier essay, but there are a ton of other folks like Steven Johnson and the folks at the Santa Fé Institute who are also trying to understand the properties of complex systems.

But if all tends towards Entropy, how to we form these complex emergent systems in the first place? Do we have to Zoom all the way down to the fabric of the Universe to understand that single simple little principle that allowed a slight formation of a complex network that caused the domino effect that leads to today, a little principle that has been at War with Entropy since the formation of Everything?

Ufa!

A lot to think of. And I know I am way over simplifying somehow.

Bonus! The Unit of Measurement for Complexity
I don't know if it exists (but I am sure Hugo can find it), but, in the course of writing a script for a graphic novel set in the far future (which I am set to overhaul under the 'show-don't-tell' principle), I started thinking about how reductionist we are and that we have no way for describing complexity in a system (that I know of).

And, as you probably know my fascination (fanboi?) with Craig Venter, I thought he'd be an appropriate label for the measurement of Complexity - he's re-written the books on the Genomic Age so many times and has ushers in the Age of Meta-Genomics.

Venters (Vn), a logarithmic scale of biological complexity. A virus is 3Vn, bacteria 3-10vn, fungi 10-30Vn, single cell 10-20Vn, complex 20-50Vn, planaria+ 50-100Vn, social athropods 100-500Vn, reptiles, birds, fish, mammals, social netoworks...

My original thought was that the Venter would be a logarithmic scale of _biological_ complexity. But I suppose it could be a measure of complexity in general. Complexity can be measured by nested levels of networks, levels of connections between networks, and level of energy to maintain network (the inverse of Entropy, I suppose).

The symbol for Venters would be Vn, as V is widely used and taken for Voltage or Volume.

Any takers?

Heh, really being a geek.

On the balance of top-down and bottom-up

Kevin Kelly is on of the founders of the Long Now Foundation, which you all know I am pretty fond of. He wrote an article (link below) recently on the balance of bottom-up emergence and top-down guidance (not necessarily 'control', more like 'leadership'), that has tipped my hand to finally writing down some thoughts.

Top-down or botton-up?
This topic of balance has been on my mind quite a bit - I have followed emergence (I call it 'complexification') for many years now (heck, I'm a scientist at heart); just finished Steven Johnson's book 'Emergence', heard some great talks by Juan Enriquez and Alex Wright, and had my own personal struggle trying to understand megacorporations (aka 'The Borg').

Kevin revisits (and discusses through the many comments on the article) his 10-year old book 'Out of Control', a book on swarm theory, hive mind, bottom-up emergence. One thing he has learned is that bottom up is not enough.

He uses Wikipedia as an example of something that might seem bottom up - people 'randomly' contributing and editing encyclopedia articles, forming a global encyclopedia of knowledge from the collective actions of a collection of individual. Kevin points out that, actually, there is some level of top-down control in Wikipedia through a set of über-contributors who do have a modicum of editorial control.

The book 'Emergence' relates in many example how 'dumb' local behaviour in a network leads to a 'higher-order' behaviour. The famous example is an ant colony, where the sum total of the colony members' behavior, based on simple rules, leads to a a comlex colony-level (colony as organism) behaviour.

Networks within networks
Alex Wright and Juan Enriquez point out, in their work, that one level network leads to members that then operate at a new level. My example for this is the body. Our cells go about their single-minded business, creating a higher order network that is the body. The body then is the unit item in a network that is our social network.

Yet, Kevin struggles with his interaction with the world of user-generated-content, the swarm of content that leads to something like Wikipedia. Coming from a publishing background, he sees the need for the editor. And I think that's fine. The editor is actually from one level up in the network and not on the level of the swarm. As with the body, the control does come from the next level up, what ever the selected forces on the next level up are.

Global control from above
Drawing a parallel back to ants, Steven Johnson points out that the colony would be in trouble if one of the ants took a global view of the colony and tried to take over. That's because the ants are part of the swarm and should not have global control. The colony has that global control, a control that comes from the selective pressures on the colony, not the ant. The selective pressures of the colony are its survival, interaction with other colonies, its relations with the environment.

I'd claim that what Kevin is struggling with is the publishing process of Wikipedia taps into the swarm perfectly. Contributors are elements following simple rules to just spew content into Wikipedia. But, WIkipedia as an organism needs to compete at another level, which gives Wikipedia a global mandate to force a selective pressure upon the members that constitute its internal network. Yet, this will only work if 1) the network one level down subsumes itself to the collective, and 2) that none of the members of the network one level down try to assume a global view or impact.

Corporations can learn from this
This all leads me to why large corporations are so dysfunctional: too many people taking the global view.

For a network to function, there needs to be rules of action for the members and rules of interaction between the members (think of workers as cells, departments as organs). In corporations, this is done through role definition. Indeed, I think it is wonderful how much individual responsibility my corporation give the workers. And that should be sufficient for emergent behaviours to be visible. And they are, as one can see with how products and services are created.

But, the impact of the corporation (think of it as the body) is at the corporation level (bodies in a social network) and the selection is at the corporation level. Hence, the members of the corporation should not have a global view, or attempt to commandeer the global view. And It think in corporations, the members tend to know the rules, do what the corporation asks, but never return and make sure that what ever potentially global effort they have been asked to do by the corporation does not violate the original rules of being a member of the collective. Likewise, I do not see the corporation exerting its global view in culling activities that violate the network rules and try to act on the level of the corporation (the global level).

I suppose that's my long winded way of saying that employees keep screwing things up by taking on the role of the corporation and the corporation keeps screwing up by not exerting its influence on its employees who try to commandeer the global direction. (I've seen this happen too many times)

Summary
Yeah, global top-down works if it comes from the next layer of network above. It won't work from within the network.

Do folks in the open source world (or others) agree?

Link: Kevin Kelly -- The Technium:

Judged from where we start, harnessing the dumb power of the hive mind will always take us much further than we can dream. Judged from where we hope to end up, the hive mind is not enough; we need an additional top-down push.

We're moving into an oral culture on so many levels

We're rapidly approaching an oral culture. The fluidity of the Web seems to have many aspects of an oral culture in terms of how we can interact with so much of it in a non-literate manner - think videos, audio, images.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. But oral cultures had methods for maintaining what was transmitted orally. For us, everything is going digital. How will we preserve our digital memories?

The Long Now Foundation has been leading a lot of discussions around how to preserve digital records. They have countless stories of how, just in the past few decades, we have been losing data and access to information stored in digital format.

For example, they mention how on the USS Nimitz, opening older files in newer software showed slight differences in annotation and the like. Not a good idea on a nuclear powered war vessel.

In the same article, they bring up a great favorite of mine:

In 1986, for example, the British Broadcasting Corp. compiled a modern, interactive version of William the Conqueror's Domesday Book, a survey of life in medieval England. More than a million people submitted photographs, written descriptions and video clips for this new 'book.' It was stored on laser discs - considered indestructible at the time - so future generations of students and scholars could learn about life in the 20th century.

But 15 years later, British officials found the information on the discs was practically inaccessible - not because the discs were corrupted, but because they were no longer compatible with modern computer systems. By contrast, the original Domesday Book, written on parchment in 1086, is still in readable condition in England'€™s National Archives in Kew. (The multimedia version was ultimately salvaged.)

The thing is, digital data requires software, in addition to hardware. And software is very difficult to recover to to its format, how it is compiled (software to make software), and how fast it changes relative to hardware changes.

In another article, they point out that the Society of American Archivists were going to delete their listserv data. Whoah. If the archivists are not keeping stuff, who will?

The Long Now Foundation asks:

Can anything last forever? The Long Now Foundation is micro-etching its 15,000-page Rosetta Project, an archive of data on human languages, onto a 3-inch metal disk it hopes will last at least 10,000 years. But we still may not have improved on 4,000-year-old technology. Asked what the most permanent medium is, Kahle doesn'€™t miss a beat: '€œThe clay tablets of the Babylonians. Their libraries are readable to us today.'€

Go and read these articles for more examples.

Link: Long Views » Blog Archive » The Digital Ice Age
Link: Long Views » Blog Archive » Publish or Perish

UPDATE 03mar08: I'm not the only one thinking of this (Steven Johnson).

Are Kosovars Albanians or Serbians?

I grew up thinking that nations should be the scale at which people are governed. I could not understand why Israel didn't just make all the Palestinians Israeli, why the Irish and British couldn't just let Northern Ireland be part of the Republic of Ireland. And, as the Balkans, well, balkanized, and the Soviet Union collapsed, why was everyone moving towards smaller units of government centered around cultural lines?

Well, I'm past that. I am beginning to see that the end of the last 10 years has been more about the end of nations, much like the end of the 19th century was the end of empires.

Taking this logic to a further level, I really think current national governments will lose their power as cities and regions (city-states, anyone?) rise in political and economic strength.

For example, many states in the US are clashing with the federal government, making stricter environmental laws. Cities like London and New York are no longer really part of their nation, becoming true city-states, their mayors meeting heads of state for political and economic reasons.

And, empires fell apart as a sort of national identity arose. But, now, there are regional identities that are stronger still, and cut along cultural lines.

So, are the Kosovars Albanian or Serbian? Neither. They are Kosovar, much like the Austrians are not German, but Austrian, or the French Swiss are Swiss, not French.

It'll be interesting to watch Kosovo form a real government and economy now that the question of their identity is resolved (at least for them). There's a lot a work ahead for them and the global economy was not set up for tiny states to prosper in.

Link: Frenzy greets the new Kosovo - The Boston Globe:

In a move that inflamed tensions in this volatile region, the ethnic Albanian government of Kosovo yesterday proclaimed the province independent from Serbia, forming a new and very troubled country in Europe.

Data does not equal knowledge

At LIFT 08 last week, François Grey gave a great talk about the intersection of grid computing, crowdsourcing, and science.

One thing that miffed me was when he was talking about the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) creating huge amounts of data per collision of protons. I don't agree with people who stress the amount of data an experiment produces, comparing it to all the knowledge humanity has produced.

Data is not knowledge.

The LHC indeed will produce oceans and oceans of data, but the amount of knowledge will be much smaller. Indeed, when they make their big discoveries, each will be expressed in a simple hyperlinked publication - a regular scientific paper.

Alex Wright and the history of information systems over the past few billion years

I got through another amazing Long New Seminar (long dog walks are great for that). This one was by Alex Wright, author of 'Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages'.

What I thought was really well done is how he charts the course of the evolution of social systems from bacteria to humans today and showed how such evolution influenced information systems. Very interesting. He also reveals some lost nuggets of history, re-introducing some information systems visionaries that are not well known (particularly Otlet's Mundaneum).

One other interesting thread of his talk was a discussion of literal and oral culture and information. In one of those Long Now kinda of twists, he points out that literal culture is actually not too old. But also, the way the Web is going, there are plenty of analogies to oral culture in terms of how we share and communicate in social networks.

Very interesting.

Link: Long Views » Blog Archive » Alex Wright, The Deep History of the Information Age:

That’s the pattern for the evolution of information, Alex Wright
said. Networks coalesce into heirarchies, which then form a new
level of networks, which coalesce again, and so on. Thus an unending
series of information explosions is finessed.

Elated with Saffo seminar

I finally listened to the Saffo's Long Now talk on forecasting.

What really excited me is that he said some things that I've been thinking about. I wonder if I picked it up from the same folks he's picked it up from. But, for sure, for me, these thoughts were all framed by thinking extremely long term.

Golden Age
One thing he mentioned was the hubris (my words) of folks in the present - we always think we live in a Golden Age.

Link: One night - a global story of one night in the mobile life (a story I wrote)

Granted, every generation thinks they live in the Golden Age, the height of their civilization. And, granted, later generations dwarf previous Enlightenments. Yet, the Dark Ages these are not, the inevitable trumping of our Age by some future Age in no way diminishes the Wonderment of our Hyperconnective Age.

I think it is natural for us to look back to earlier times and think that we've had it best. Of course, it's usually because we are accustomed to life in a certain way and can't imagine what life would be without all our 'accomplishments'. I find it a fun exercise to imagine 1) what it was like to live like in the past; 2) to think like someone from the past looking back and being proud of their 'accomplishments' and how folks in their past were 'behind'.

Acceleration
Which leads me to the other thing he mentioned that I like to throw out at parties - the fact that every generation thinks things are accelerating. He also managed to put in a swipe at the technopositivists who believe in the local exponential trend meaning that in 25 years we'll merge with machines.

I think every generation has seen an acceleration of invention and creativity. I like to think back thousands of years to the Stone Age and the old guy (maybe in his 30s) shaking his head at the pace of change in flint technology.* Saffo give me more material, quoting a guy from 1902 and also mentions records lamenting the rate of acceleration, one all the back from the 15th century. Heh.

City-state
One thought that came to my head while trying to thing way long term was what happens to our governments. I was thinking 5 thousand years from now (was writing a story, actually), so I looked back 5 thousand years. If you chart the arch of human social organization, from a corse perspective, you see tribes going to city-states to kingdoms to empires (collection of 'nations') to nations (especially in late 19th century) - which is where we are at.

But if you look closely, in the past 20 years or so, nations have been breaking up along cultural lines - think of the Balkans and the CIS. My favourite example is how Kosovo does not want to be part of Albania (any more than Austria wants to be part of Germany).

I then took it further, also keeping in mind the rise of the cities (half the world in urban areas), and figured there was a trend towards city-states.

Indeed, Saffo fills out the thinking by mentioning that cities are more relevant to the citizen than a large nation. He was bold to say that city-states would dominate already this century. Wow.

But, look at how in the US the states are becoming stronger (due to weak federal leadership). This is not bad (at least not any more to me, with this city-state thinking).

It was refreshing to hear Saffo. I was always intimidated by him, but finally hearing one of his seminars (especially with him touching on some pet issue) just made me a fanboi.

Heh.

*As an aside, I find humans to be pathologically inventive (hence all gods create the world) and I think, much like we sit around gabbing about mobile phones and the latest tech (in previous times it was hi-fi or cars or what not of the day), cavemen sat around gabbing about the latest flint or carving technology. As a species, we can't NOT invent.

The future of zoos

Society has come a long way in animal welfare. But we still are caught trying to balance the needs of humanity and the needs of the animal. Zoos are one example.

How do we balance conservation (needed due to the effects of human activities), education, and animal welfare?

Certainly, large carnivores always seem to suffer.

Link: Tiger escapes pen, kills visitor at San Francisco Zoo - The Boston Globe:

A tiger escaped from its pen at the San Francisco Zoo yesterday evening, killing one visitor and injuring two others before police shot it dead, authorities said.

From the Boston Globe comes a great essay on colleges ignoring life's bigger questions

The Boston Globe has this great essay, by Yale Professor Anthony Kronman, about the teaching of the meaning of life in US colleges and universities. It's long, but an excellent read.

Link: Why are we here? Colleges ignore life's biggest questions, and we all pay the price (registration may be required)

The essay was prompted in part by the start of the school season in the US. The author ponders the history of the teaching of the meaning of life, tracing the history of upper education in the US in the process.

"In a shift of historic importance, America's colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life's most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom."

The author goes on to describe how the focus on research, while bringing great benefits, also seemed to give the humanities short shrift. I was once part of this focused research world. But, as one may be able to guess after being with me for a bit, or reading my stuff, it wasn't enough for me - there was always a part of me that had questions outside my domain. In college, I tried hard to get as much exposure to things like philosophy, art, history, often with more interest than my major subject (of which I took the minimum requirements).

The author makes a great comment:

"In the humanities, however, the legacy of the research ideal has been mixed. We know vastly more today than we did even 50 years ago about the order of Plato's dialogues, the accuracy of Gibbon's citations, and how Benjamin Franklin spent his time in Paris. But the research ideal has excluded the question of life's meaning from serious academic concern as a question too large, too unformed, too personal, to be a subject of specialized research. A tenure-minded junior professor studying Shakespeare or Freud or Spinoza might re-inspect every scrap of his subject's work with the hope of making some small but novel discovery - but would be either very brave or very foolish to write a book about Spinoza's suggestion that a free man thinks only of life, never of death; or about Freud's appealing, if enigmatic, statement that the meaning of life is to be found in work and love."

Heh, that's something I can sink my teeth into.

It was interesting to learn that in the 20s, the president of Amherst College, Alexander Meiklejohn, "defended the idea of spiritual seriousness in a nonreligious age, and thought it could be studied without dogmatic commitments". I agree with the author that we need more programs that do this, and the author lists a few. Indeed, my freshman year (the one year I was at Allegheny College), I was fortunate to take a humanities course that I can say significantly shaped the way I think, learn, and interpret the world.

And the author makes no bones about the complexity of the question. But it is the complexity that enriches the student:

"The first is that there is more than one good answer to the question of what living is for. A second is that the number of such answers is limited, making it possible to study them in an organized way. A third is that the answers are irreconcilably different, necessitating a choice among them. A fourth is that the best way to explore these answers is to study the great works of philosophy, literature, and art in which they are presented with lasting beauty and strength. And a fifth is that their study should introduce students to the great conversation in which these works are engaged - Augustine warily admiring Plato, Hobbes reworking Aristotle, Paine condemning Burke, Eliot recalling Dante, recalling Virgil, recalling Homer - and help students find their own authentic voice as participants in the conversation."

The author points out that in many ways, education has split long dogmatic lines, such as race and gender, and all that comes with political correctness. But my feeling is summed up as in the essay:

"There is an increasing demand among undergraduates for courses that address the big questions of life, in all their sprawling grandeur, without reticence or embarrassment."

Complexity and honesty are critical here. And this is about spiritual direction, a spiritual direction that the simplification of religion and belief have usurped.

"What it needs is an alternative to religion, for colleges and universities to become again the places they once were - spiritually serious but nondogmatic, concerned with the soul but agnostic about God."

And my thoughts echo what the author thinks, that this kind of education could go far in fixing the dogmatic thinking that now pervades the US.

"A richer and more open debate about ultimate values; an electorate less likely to be cowed into thinking that only the faithful have the right to invoke them; a humbler regard for the mystery of life in a world increasingly dominated by technocratic reason."

It's long, but a good read.

Incidentally, the author has also written a book (drink!) on the subject: "Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life."