Peter Edman
An article from Wired News introduces a contentious theme in an approachable way. New technologies often interfere with traditional cultures and belief systems. The case study here is the vineyards of France.
In this case, new biotechnology and vintnery techniques are threatening the market dominance of traditional French vineyards. Interestingly, the development of the technology is driven as much by a new way of looking at wines—a change in worldview even—as it is by new advances in science.
“As we look at wine more as something that is produced, rather than as a unique product from a particular place, this also allows us to think of ways to increase the level of flavor or speed up aging,” said James Lapsley, a wine economist at the University of California at Davis.
Micro-oxygenation, for example, imparts a barrel-aged flavor to wine stored in stainless steel. Adding oak chips to wine and analyzing the amount of oak flavor is a quick, easy way to add complex flavor.
Some see the science-driven changes as a bad thing because they have sometimes increased yield at the expense of quality. But others think these naysayers are snobby traditionalists worried that high-quality, complex wines will become cheaper.
So, what are the pros and cons here? Is something serious—tangible, intangible, tastable, untastable—being lost? Are there other side-effects that the article does not mention? Must the new technology be used now that it is available?
Gleanings, Business, Science and Technology, Thu 31 Mar 2005
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as if everything is. I believe in the latter.
Albert Einstein
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Humanitarian ‘Impulses’ vs. Convictions
The U.N.’s Human Rights Charade
The Greatness of Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008)
Social Justice and Conservative Politics
Islamist Ideology in the UK: Doing Fine
Invitation to the Classics: A Guide to Books You've Always Wanted to Read by Os Guinness and Louise Cowan, editors.
A paperback edition of our acclaimed guide to literature.
The Real Digital Revolution: Social networking is changing the marketing landscape: “Brand advertising can’t stretch the truth anymore or try and gild the lily. Because if it does, we’re going to find out about it, find out that you’ve been lying to us all along about extras that don’t work and specials that aren’t special. And our reaction is not going to be pretty.” (Alan Wolk, AdWeek; h/t: Ryan Moede • 2008 08 27)
Après Lewis: ‘As it turns out, Tim Keller’s “The Reason for God” (2008), the book recommended by my friend, is the best of the “Mere Christianity” wannabes. Mr. Keller argues that the usual objections to Christianity—that it is a straitjacket, that there cannot be just one true religion—are themselves the product of a particular (secular Western) point of view. He then builds an affirmative case for Christianity, suggesting that the Big Bang and our appreciation of beauty are clues pointing to God and that Christ’s resurrection was so unlikely both to Greeks and Romans (who viewed the material world as weak and corrupt) and to Jews (who expected any resurrection to come at the end of time) that it cannot be dismissed as the clever marketing strategy of a new religion. If this sounds a little like N.T. Wright, it isn’t accidental: Mr. Keller draws liberally from him, as well as Lewis, Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga (a professor at Notre Dame) and others. “The Reason for God” is as sensible and winsome as one would expect from the pastor of a latticework of churches that draw more than 5,000 attendees in New York City every Sunday, most of them young, single, urban professionals. But it too is no “Mere Christianity.” It does not have the original arguments or the magical prose of Lewis’s classic.’ (David Skeel, Wall Street Journal • 2008 08 15)
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: the line within: ‘Solzhenitsyn was far from endorsing the thesis of the “banality of evil” as Hannah Arendt had expounded it. Nor did he see totalitarianism as the ultimate source of the evil that it promotes. Rather totalitarian government is the great mistake, made for whatever noble or ignoble purpose, of putting the final goal before the present dilemma. It is this which gives evil intentions the same chance as good ones, which enables the criminal and the psychopath to compete on a level with the saint and the hero. Yet even in totalitarianism the evil belongs to the human beings, and not to the system. This is the remarkable message that Solzhenitsyn, crawling from the death-machine, carried pressed to his heart.’ (Senior Fellow Roger Scruton, in openDemocracy • 2008 08 11)
Atheism and Evil: Could it possibly improve things to believe that the long pain of human evolution was set in motion by chance alone? The atheist view of the world is actually rather bleaker than that of Jews and Christians: Suffering under the weight of evil is meaningless, and so is any struggle against evil. Everything in the atheist’s world begins and ends in randomness and chance. Few atheists seem to be as rigorously honest as Friedrich Nietzsche, who warned that if God is dead, it is wishful thinking to hold that reason alone can confer “meaning” on life. Reason has been outmoded by chance. (Michael Novak, First Things: On the Square • 2008 07 29)
• Christopher Nolan’s Achievement: The Dark Knight (2008 07 22)
• Unplanned Parenthood (2008 07 21)
• What makes a supervillain? (2008 07 19)
• Pope’s Speech at Barangaroo (2008 07 17)
• Hollywood’s Hero Deficit (2008 07 17)
The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal, Foreword by Os Guinness.
A Jewish concentration camp inmate is pulled from work detail at a makeshift hospital to listen to a dying Nazi soldier’s confession. The SS soldier asks him for forgiveness that he might die in peace. In the Jew’s place, what would have you have done?
