Upturned Earth || John Schwenkler

Ross Douthat and Yuval Levin [UPDATE: Alan Jacobs and now James Poulos, too] have, I think, said much of what needs to be said about that Stephen Pinker screed about the new volume from the President’s Committee on Bioethics. But let me bring out a few laughers that they didn’t touch on. (Full disclosure: I haven’t read the book he’s “reviewing”.)

The first has to do with this:

The problem is that “dignity” is a squishy, subjective notion, hardly up to the heavyweight moral demands assigned to it. The bioethicist Ruth Macklin, who had been fed up with loose talk about dignity intended to squelch research and therapy, threw down the gauntlet in a 2003 editorial, “Dignity Is a Useless Concept.” Macklin argued that bioethics has done just fine with the principle of personal autonomy–the idea that, because all humans have the same minimum capacity to suffer, prosper, reason, and choose, no human has the right to impinge on the life, body, or freedom of another. This is why informed consent serves as the bedrock of ethical research and practice, and it clearly rules out the kinds of abuses that led to the birth of bioethics in the first place, such as Mengele’s sadistic pseudoexperiments in Nazi Germany and the withholding of treatment to indigent black patients in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study. Once you recognize the principle of autonomy, Macklin argued, “dignity” adds nothing.

Now I, for what it’s worth, think that the notion of autonomy is every bit as mythical as Pinker takes that of dignity to be. But even if there is such a thing, then it ought to be as clear as day that the mental capacities that underlie it - the capacities to “suffer, prosper, reason, and choose”, and so forth - are clearly not had to “the same minimum degree” by all human beings. And so how, one wonders, is an appeal to personal autonomy supposed to help us when the “impingements” in question involve the lives of such human beings as embryos, small children, the severely mentally handicapped, and persons in vegetative states who haven’t signed living wills? Does, e.g., a modification of the DNA - or, for that matter, the killing - of a fetus, who is surely in no position to offer “informed consent” to such a procedure, count as something that is ruled out on such an ethic? How about the decision to vaccinate - or, while we’re in controversial territory anyway, not to vaccinate - a newborn infant or small child? Why is it that some such practices are acceptable or even mandated, while others, presumably, are not? Whether the concept is “bedrock” or not, and even if it does rule out the especially demeaning and horrific abuses that Pinker lists, obviously we are not going to “do just fine” by appeals to personal autonomy alone.

But fear not. For as we dig ever more deeply beneath the “squishy, subjective” mess provided by the Council, we come to the notion of a person:

Dignity is skin-deep: it’s the sizzle, not the steak; the cover, not the book. What ultimately matters is respect for the person, not the perceptual signals that typically trigger it. Indeed, the gap between perception and reality makes us vulnerable to dignity illusions. We may be impressed by signs of dignity without underlying merit, as in the tin-pot dictator, and fail to recognize merit in a person who has been stripped of the signs of dignity, such as a pauper or refugee.

Ahh, yes. Here, of course, we have a notion that is not “relative” at all, notwithstanding the considerable amount of research (e.g.) that has argued for its cross-cultural variability, and the fact that bioethicists have argued (e.g.) that it is unequipped to do the kind of heavy lifting that Pinker is demanding of it here. For what could be less controversial than, say, the issue of whether women, fetuses, and slaves are persons, let alone the question of what it is to respect such a being? Personhood, respect, and autonomy. I sure am glad we’ve got a leading member of the “world’s scientific powerhouse”, and not merely some “institutionally affiliated” theoconservative Jew, lecturing us on how to love one another.

Up next, Pinker’s, umm, argument for dignity’s “relativity” (people disagree about it, so Q.E.D.!) needs no more comment than is given to the Philosophy 101 freshman who reasons spouts off in much the same way, nor does his slide, a few paragraphs later, from the incontestable observation that “certain features in another human being trigger ascriptions of worth” to the claim that the properties thereby ascribed are therefore “a phenomenon of human perception”, nothing but “an attribution [triggered] in the mind of a perceiver”. (That Pinker illustrates this claim by reference to depth and position cues, the smell of baking bread, and the sight of a child’s face should be our first clue that something has gone badly wrong.) The same ought to go, I suppose, for the alleged indignities of sexual intercourse. (I confess that I have no knowledge of what goes on in Prof. Pinker’s bedroom.) But in the same vein as that last remark, and to round things off in grand fashion, there is a spectacularly flat-footed confusion pretense at confusion that is really just an attempt to make his audience think ill of the authors being reviewed that is worth exposing as such:

We read that slavery and degradation are morally wrong because they take someone’s dignity away. But we also read that nothing you can do to a person, including enslaving or degrading him, can take his dignity away. We read that dignity reflects excellence, striving, and conscience, so that only some people achieve it by dint of effort and character. We also read that everyone, no matter how lazy, evil, or mentally impaired, has dignity in full measure.

One would expect a professional linguist to be able to do better than this. The idea that the same word can be used in multiple distinct but ultimately interrelated ways - “health”, “integrity”, “property”, “autonomy”, and “respect”, anyone? - is apparently lost on Harvard’s Johnstone Professor of Psychology, to whom attempts to think carefully about “soothsay” the likely outcomes of biotechnological intervention and carry on a discussion about issues of great import “stage-manage social change” are signs of “overweening hubris” and - worse! - “callousness” toward non-geriatric persons. Thank goodness he isn’t a “pro-death, anti-freedom” wingnut like the ice cream cone-despising Leon Kass - we almost succumbed to a miasma of scientific illiteracy.

Poulos is going to have a field day when he gets back.

First, via Rick Saenz, there’s this:

Capitalism the Creator

The Mises Circle goes to Seattle to address contemporary issues in liberty, and the role of capitalism as the main force for every form of progress in our age. We live amidst its fruits — technology, culture, philanthropy, human well being — and have yet to appreciate the source. Indeed, among the most passionate opponents of the free market are those who have benefitted most enormously from it. Here we have a profound failure of understanding at work.

Umm, yeah.

And then, toward the end of that David Brooks column that everyone’s been talking about, we are treated to this gem:

Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

Sigh. Let me just state emphatically that this is not the variety of pantheism I was out to defend.

Go ahead and count me among those who are dumbfounded by this statistic (via Sullivan):

Among college-educated poll respondents, 19 percent of Republicans believe that human activities are causing global warming, compared to 75 percent of Democrats. But take that college education away and Republican believers rise to 31 percent while Democrats drop to 52 percent.

My first reaction, which was shared by my wife, was to credit this to the tendency of a college education - by exposing one, e.g., to the way that scientific theories are falsified and paradigms superseded - to inculcate a certain degree of skepticism, and an unwillingness to take the claims of would-be authorities at face value. After a bit more thought, though, I was inclined simply to blame it on the fact that college very often seems to make us stupid: consider, in a similar vein, ISI’s startling [UPDATE: or maybe not so startling - see FLG] findings on the impact that the college experience has on students’ civic literacy. Then again, it’s hard to imagine how going to college could make someone dumber than this:

”I hope that he will understand, if he is the nominee, the degree of disillusionment that will happen if he doesn’t become a greater man than he will ever be,” Penn said.

(Penn skipped out on college, by the way.)

So color me baffled, then. Just know that it’s not, so far as I can tell, the fault of the philosophers.

[UPDATE: Okay, so I misread the statistic, and somehow came away thinking that college made everyone less likely to believe in global warming. This answer is surely the right one. Stupid partisanship.]

Let me start off by saying that this statistic made makes me sick to my stomach:

One in four Clinton voters and about one in 10 Obama voters said race was an important factor in their vote.

As Sullivan notes, one can only imagine how many more were unwilling to admit it. Appalling, right?

But then I started thinking, then looking around, and it wasn’t long before I had put this together:

(Apologies for my ongoing inability to insert a real table.) The left-hand chart, of course, is the CNN exit polling (scroll to page four) from 95% white, 67% pro-Clinton West Virginia on Tuesday. But on the right we have the polls (again, scroll to page four) from 34% black, 56% pro-Obama North Carolina a week earlier.

It’s the first pair of boxes that’s really the most interesting to me, since it was the “Did race matter?” question that really got my juices flowing in the first place. The way that Sullivan, and I, and I think just about everyone else interpreted that original statistic was as showing that these white West Virginians were just too racist to bring themselves to vote for a black candidate. And that’s right on the mark, of course: just look at the way that Clinton’s share of the vote rises, and Obama’s drops, as the overwhelmingly white West Virginia voters give the candidates’ races greater importance. But now look at North Carolina: almost the same percentage of voters put race among the important factors, and here it was Obama’s share of the vote, and not Clinton’s, that was higher than it was among the rest of the population. Why don’t we call this racism, too?

There is, however, no doubt that pro-Clinton West Virginians gave race a bigger role, or at least were more willing to admit that they gave race a role, in deciding their vote than the pro-Obama North Carolinians, and this is borne out in the second question: while only 64% of Obama voters in North Carolina pointed to race as an “important” factor in their vote, a full 81% of Clinton voters in West Virginia were willing to say this. And this seems to show that race played more of a role in Clinton’s victory yesterday than Obama’s a week before.

But a look at the third pair of boxes makes it clear that we shouldn’t jump to such a conclusion. For more than a quarter of North Carolina’s African-American population - 9% of the total population, but 26.5% of the 34% of the voters who were black - told pollsters that race was important to them: a significantly greater percentage than the 20.5% of West Virginia’s (and 12.9% of North Carolina’s) white population who said the same. And this statistic was no outlier: in Indiana, for example, 12.8% of white voters but 29.4% of black voters named race as an important factor, and in Pennsylvania 15% of whites and 26.7% of blacks said the same. West Virginia, in other words, was a state where race mattered more to white voters than it had in these other states, but the percentage of white West Virginia voters who admitted that was still considerably lower than the percentage of black voters who’d said the same in each of these other states.

Where exactly does this take us? Aside from reinforcing the fact that American voters are startlingly polarized among racial lines and reminding us that Obama’s triumph is not (yet) the “post-racial” achievement that many have hoped it will be, they also suggest some quite fundamental questions about the politics and psychology of race:

• In the first place, why do we - and I mean to include myself here - think of the overwhelming support of black voters for Obama (N/A in WV, 91% in NC, 89% in IN, 90% in PA, and so on) as a case of harmless and unremarkable identity politics, while we treat the considerably less heterogeneous preference of white voters for Clinton (67% in WV, 61% in NC, 60% in IN, 63% in PA) as evidence of racism?
• One natural way to answer this question is to suggest that black voters’ preference for Obama is rooted in what we might call “positive” racism - they think his color is a good thing - while white voters’ preference for Clinton has a more “negative” side - they are voting for Clinton because they dislike Obama’s race. Is this true? Should it make a difference?
• Does the fact that African-Americans have much more of a history of unfair treatment at the hands of white Americans than vice-versa account for these trends? Does it excuse them?

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, of course. Let me stress that I don’t mean these questions rhetorically: as I indicated, I count myself among the number who fall into exactly the pattern of thought described in the first of these questions, and the purpose of this exercise has emphatically not been to come up with excuses for bigotry. I think, though, that anyone who wants to accuse white West Virginians of a morally problematic racism without doing the same for the vast majority of African-Americans has got to have something significant to say about all of this. Race does matter, but it cuts both ways.

Discuss.

While I think that Ross Douthat has made most of the necessary points in opposition to the preposterous notion that John McCain ought to select Joe Lieberman as his running-mate (though a Gore-Lieberman veep debate would be lots of fun …), let me add one more, namely that if there is any wing of the GOP that does not need shoring up in the event of an Obama-McCain presidential contest, it is the hawkish one. The Republicans are, much for worse than for better, the War Party, and John McCain the War Candidate. Given McCain’s militarism foreign policy experience and Obama’s lack thereof, those who identify with the cause of bombing the hell out of the rest of the world protecting our homeland are going to vote Republican come hell or high water: it’s the rest of the ever-dwindling Republican coalition - the pro-gun, pro-life, anti-tax, anti-immigration folks - that’s threatening to jump ship, and turning to a militaristic “moderate” Democrat whose only claim to “conservatism” is his support for a war that a majority of Americans now favor ending is not, as they say, the thing to do. Then again, I could think of worse things than seeing a supposed centrism defined by nothing more than a commitment to atrocious foreign policy go down in a Mondale-like ball of flames, so perhaps you shouldn’t listen to me.

As the handful of people who check in here with any regularity will no doubt have noticed, it’s been another week of slow posting. There are a bunch of reasons for this, but a lack of blog-able content hasn’t been one of them: Lee McCracken’s two posts on vegetarianism and humanism, Andrew Sullivan Peter Suderman’s [How did I get that one wrong?] take on the politics of meaning, Jack Miles’s Commonweal piece on the immigration dilemma, and this New York Times article on urban gardening are all on my queue, as is Rod Dreher’s request for a “list of ways the Republicans can save themselves” less ridiculous than Newt Gingrich’s. But all of that has been pushed aside by a busy week of writing, meeting with students, and - occasionally - trying to think about “real” philosophy, and now - just as I had planned to spend a couple of hours typing away - I’ve received an audio recording of a California Assembly Agriculture Committee hearing on raw milk that I need to listen to for my Doublethink article. But maybe things will lighten up one of these months.

I did, though, want to make a quick point about how hard it is to blog. I love to write, but I’m not someone to whom words come easily or - more importantly - constantly, and so I tend to be productive only in spurts. This is not, or at least not usually, the way to run a blog, though there are people - Prof’s. Fox and Deneen, for example - who do quite well posting only once or twice a week. The difficulty there is that it is hard to post this infrequently and still be sufficiently brief in what one says - and brevity, I think, is exactly the thing, or one of the most important things, that makes blogospheric writing so especially enjoyable. All of which is just a long way of saying that, two-and-a-half months into the endeavor, I still don’t know exactly why I’m doing this. So thanks for your indulgence as I try to get things sorted out.

Apparently Newt Gingrich thinks, and with good reason, that the 2008 elections present Republicans with the possibility of “real disaster”. And the solution, of course, is change - real change, though, as opposed to the merely apparent sort. Change, in other words, like this:

Gingrich then outlined nine acts of “real change” including the gas tax holiday and an earmark moratorium.

The rest of the list is here. I, meanwhile, am at a loss for words.

Suffice it to say that I can think of no consequence more appropriate to the Yankees’ (my Yankees’, dammit!) run of free-spending, clubhouse-destroying, fan-alienating idiocy than to have steroid abuser, adulterer, statutory rapist, and all-around jackass Roger Clemens pictured for the rest of his life like so:

Anyone want to sign him to a short term contract? Anyone? Anyone?

Daniel Larison thinks there is a worrisome double standard - several of them, in fact - at work in the way the public and the punditry have responded to the Obama-Wright and McCain-Hagee relationships. I agree. Rod Dreher does not:

McCain isn’t being held responsible for Hagee because McCain didn’t spend 20 years sitting in the pews at Hagee’s church, and didn’t claim Hagee as his spiritual mentor. Everybody knows that McCain is not a particularly religious man, and doesn’t care for the religious right. Fault McCain for cynicism or weakness by making nice with them, and you’re on solid ground. But most people perfectly well understand that John Hagee’s theology has had little or no influence on John McCain’s thinking.

This seems to me to miss the point several times over. While the distinction between joining someone’s church and accepting his endorsement is an important one, the fact is that even if John McCain were a regular attendee at Cornerstone Church, and even if he had said and written that he regarded Hagee as a “spiritual mentor”, most of the chattering class simply would not care about what this revealed about Senator McCain’s views on foreign policy. And the reason for this is simple, namely that John Hagee’s crazed militaristic Zionism “pro-Israel views”, though far more dangerous in practice than Jeremiah Wright’s racialism and loony conspiracy-mongering, are taken to be simply unremarkable on the American political scene.

That’s not to say that a closer relationship between McCain and Hagee wouldn’t have raised some eyebrows: it would have, though the controversy would have had far more to do with what Dreher calls Hagee’s “crazypants Catholic hatred” than with the aspects of Hagee’s “theology” that actually, well, make a difference to policy. And this, I think, is the point that Larison was trying to make:

Wright has said offensive, untrue and stupid things; Hagee has actively promoted dangerous, destructive and stupid policies and gloried in the bombardment of civilian populations. The latter is treated as a “legitimate” policy view that should not be stigmatised or challenged, while the former must be vigorously policed and punished. Lieberman calls Hagee a “man of God,” while Wright is deemed by pundits left and right to be a crackpot. Would that we could work up as much indignation for the terrible policies that Hagee regularly endorses and promotes as we have for words that are basically irrelevant to the business of government.

Precisely. And the issue here is not, as Dreher so delicately puts it, that “for better or for worse — I think for better, Bro. Larison thinks for worse — most Americans favor Israel”. I suppose that I favor Israel, too, though to be honest I’m not at all sure what that is supposed to mean. What it can not mean, however, is eager cheerleading for military campaigns that involve the indiscriminate slaughter of hundreds of civilians. Our - and I mean to include myself here - inability to summon up the same sort of outrage for John Hagee’s vocal and politically influential support for “miraculous” civilian massacres and aggressive foreign wars that we find so easily when faced with Jeremiah Wright’s harmless crackpot showmanship suggests a severe moral failing. That John McCain is able to stand up and proclaim loudly that he shares Hagee’s views on the Middle East (though without being an anti-Catholic or a “fundamentalist”!) without facing anything that even begins to approach the kind of political backlash and media scrutiny that Barack Obama has suffered for his years in the Trinity pews says all that needs to be said about the sorry state of American politics.

As I said here, it seems to me that federal subsidies of ethanol fuel are every bit as dumb of a federal policy as the much-derided push for a temporary repeal of the gas tax. Which is to say, they’re mind-bogglingly dumb. And that’s why I agree with Andrew Sullivan and Phil Klein that John McCain deserves an awful lot of credit for this:

“I oppose subsidies,” McCain said. “Not just ethanol subsidies. Subsidies. And not just in Iowa either. I oppose them in my own state of Arizona. I am proud of the conservative tradition that the government can sometimes best serve the interests of the American people by knowing when to stay out of their way.”

It is, of course, a damn shame that the same sort of restraint can’t apply to the trillion-dollar war effort, and I’m willing to bet that political observers more astute than me can find plenty of places where Senator McCain has both spoken and voted in favor of subsidies. But to say something like this to a bunch of bioenergy types in the heart of Iowa that ethanol subsidies is pretty much the ultimate non-pander. Bravo.

[UPDATE: Clark Stooksbury reminds us that this is indeed the exception rather than the rule:

The Arizona senator favors a cap-and-trade plan for carbon emission that would surely raise gas prices, yet he also is pandering to voters with his idiotic gas tax holiday plan. McCain also opposes drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, as Hugh Hewitt angrily noted back in January ...

Read Ross Douthat for more of the same. Vive le democracie!]

I’m with James in opposing, on moral grounds, the creation of human-chimpanzee hybrids, but I’m not sure that I see the force of his specific objection to it:

… human ethics requires above all and before anything else a respect for the human that considers human beings, in general and in particular, as biologically inviolable creations. … Using human ingenuity to make humans less human is about as unethical a waste of time as I can possibly conceive.

Unethical? Check. Waste of time? Doublecheck. But how, exactly, does creating a humanzee “make humans less human”? The folks doing the research remain fully human and biologically intact, as do the rest of us, and so - leaving aside the artificially inseminated chimps, of course, whose offspring will only turn out more human than usual - it seems that the only beings involved who will end up biologically violated and with sub-human natures will be ones who weren’t around at the start. (Similarly: what if humanzees turn out to have fully human - or even superhuman! - intellectual, emotional, and spiritual capabilities, only with handy-dandy tails and a heightened capacity for tree-swinging? Will they be less human than the rest of us, or just differently so?) If there’s an “ethical principle behind keeping the human species pure”, it doesn’t seem that this can be it.

More interesting to me, though, is the question of why there should have to be such a principle in the first place. Here’s the quotation that James begins with:

Professor Hugh McLachlan, professor of applied philosophy at Glasgow Caledonian University’s School of Law and Applied Sciences, said although the idea was “troublesome”, he could see no ethical objections to the creation of humanzees.

“Any species came to be what it is now because of all sorts of interaction in the past,” he said.

“If it turns out in the future there was fertilisation between a human animal and a non-human animal, it’s an idea that is troublesome, but in terms of what particular ethical principle is breached it’s not clear to me.

“I share their squeamishness and unease, but I’m not sure that unease can be expressed in terms of an ethical principle [emphasis mine - JLS].”

And this is supposed to be a problem for the anti-humanzee crowd because … well, why exactly? Prof. McLachlan strikes me as exactly the sort of person Aristotle had in mind in the third chapter of the first book of his Ethics:

Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature. And goods also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

And cf. John McDowell’s famous gloss on this passage in his paper “Virtue and Reason”:

Presented with an identification of virtue with knowledge, it is natural to ask for a formulation of the knowledge that virtue is. We tend to assume that the knowledge must have a stateable propositional content (perhaps not capable of immediate expression by the knower). …

… But to an unprejudiced eye it should seem quite implausible that any reasonably adult moral outlook admits of such codification. As Aristotle consistently says, the best generalizations about how one should behave hold only for the most part. If one attempted to reduce one’s conception of what virtue requires to a set of rules, then, however subtle and thoughtful one was in drawing up the code, cases would inevitably turn up in which a mechanical application of the rules would strike one as wrong–and not necessarily because one had changed ones mind; rather, one’s mind on the matter was not susceptible of capture in any universal formula.

A deep-rooted prejudice about rationality blocks acceptance of this. A moral outlook is a specific determination of one’s practical rationality: it shapes one’s views about what reasons one has for acting. Rationality requires consistency; a specific conception of rationality in a particular area imposes a specific form on the abstract requirement of consistency–a specific view of what counts as going on doing the same thing here. The prejudice is the idea that acting in the light of a specific conception of rationality must be explicable in terms of being guided by a formulable universal principle.

It needn’t be, though, and where Prof. McLachlan goes wrong is exactly in his insistence that it must. The idea that mere “squeamishness and unease” can’t provide sufficient justification for an ethical objection - as opposed, say, to the much more reasonable claim that we ought to be careful, and sufficiently self-critical, when we ground our ethics in this sort of way - is spectacularly implausible, and it’s a paradigmatic instance of the kind of hyper-rationalistic thinking that we - philosophers, scientists, politicians, everyone - need to work to get beyond. Jim Manzi’s defense of “moral axioms”, which I discussed at length here, is also relevant to this issue, as - yet again - is Prof. Dupré’s book:

Most [Enlightenment] moralists agreed that human nature constitutes the ground of moralituy. They also admitted that this nature forms part of an all-comprehensive order. But the concept of natural law, through which that order had formerly been thought to rule morality, received a different meaning. What previously had been considered to be grounded in a divinely established order now came to defend exclusively on human reason. Kant eliminated the last remnants of any pre-given element in the moral law when he claimed that good and evil do not exist before the law of reason–they are constituted in and through that law. Nor can we ever appeal to any higher authority than that of reason.

What is lost, in other words, is a recognition of the possibility of a kind of moral perception, the idea that the moral order exists independently of us and we might be able - in the appropriate circumstances - simply to see what is the right or wrong thing to do in a given situation. I do not need to provide any sort of “principle” to justify my belief in the physical character of the world around me; why should its moral characteristics be treated any differently?

Again, it’s of course important to be careful when we approach ethical matters in this way: for one thing, there is a tendency toward disagreement about the fine and the just that simply isn’t there in our non-normative discourse about middle-sized dry goods, and it’s essential that we respond to disagreement with attempts at persuasion rather than mere foot-stomping. And while I don’t mean to minimize the seriousness of the problems that arise when disagreement is present, the fact is that in this particular situation there’s just about no one, except for the scientists who stand to profit from it and of course the libertarians, who actually thinks that the creation of humanzees would be a good thing. But moreover, and more crucially, it’s a mistake to think that the right way to mitigate these problems is to turn to a philosopher, as opposed to a person or group of persons with an ordinary, uncorrupted moral sensibility, to determine whether the course of action in question is right or wrong. Even where “principles” are lacking, sufficiently self-critical moral unease can do just fine.

One of the most oft-cited goods of the industrialization and globalization of the modern diet has been the veritable explosion in the variety of foods available to consumers. This tendency toward diversification is supposed to characterize, not just the processed and packaged stuff whose growth has been unquestionable, but the market for fresh foods as well, e.g.:

Normal grocery shoppers no longer have to agonize over the choice between settling for mealy apples or springing for the pricier exotics like mangoes or hothouse strawberries. These days even the most run-down corner grocery offers shoppers apricots, cartons of blueberries, and ripe cherries out of season. Soon Wal-Mart shoppers might even be able to get an organic pineapple if the mood strikes them.

All this is true enough so far as it goes, but - even if we leave aside questions about the environmental, cultural, and nutritional costs of shipping food halfway across the globe - it’s crucial to recognize that the perpetual presence of a cornucopia of fresh(ish) edible goods from every genus can often manage to obscure the giant sucking sound that is the steady disappearance of most of the species that used to make up each such genus. In general, the industrialized food chain prizes cheap, mechanizable, low-skill production, maximal portability and minimal spoilage, and inoffensive, regionally-unspecific taste at the expense of the parochial, the traditional, the quirky, and the seasonal. It tends, in short, toward monoculture, or rather toward the creation of a lot of different monocultures, each of which generates a certain sort of food in a maximally efficient way while crowding out those related varieties that don’t lend themselves to streamlining.

To say this is not to raise a complaint against the free market, nor is it meant to be a blanket condemnation of industrialized farming methods. In the first place, the presently sorry state of the Western diet is in countless ways the product of government meddling - in the form of subsidies, standards, price controls, research grants, bad nutritional advice, and so on - rather than the free choices of producers and consumers. Secondly, there is really no way of getting around the genuine goods that these changes in our food chain have brought about: not just the availability of cheap food to feed the hungry, but also the year-round sale, to the wealthier among us, of (admittedly mediocre) apricots, blueberries, cherries, and more exotic things like unheard-of spices and frozen, mail-order kangaroo steaks. Finally, and most importantly for the present argument, it’s essential to recognize that even socialist-sounding developments like Community-Supported Agriculture programs, farmers’ markets, and Alice Waters, to say nothing of the availability of local, grass-fed pork in a burrito near you, are themselves elements of a free market - perhaps not the most prevalent ones, but products of and possibilities for personal choice nevertheless. And so the real challenge is to find ways for all of these mini- and mega-economies to coexist: to resist, in other words, the destructive and very un-libertarian characteristics of monoculturation.

All of this is just a lengthy way of prefacing the claim that this is exactly the sort of thing that lovers of culinary freedom ought to get behind:

SOME people would just as soon ignore the culinary potential of the Carolina flying squirrel or the Waldoboro green neck rutabaga. To them, the creamy Hutterite soup bean is too obscure and the Tennessee fainting goat, which keels over when startled, sounds more like a sideshow act than the centerpiece of a barbecue.

But not Gary Paul Nabhan. He has spent most of the past four years compiling a list of endangered plants and animals that were once fairly commonplace in American kitchens but are now threatened, endangered or essentially extinct in the marketplace. He has set out to save them, which often involves urging people to eat them.

Mr. Nabhan’s list, 1,080 items and growing, forms the basis of his new book, an engaging journey through the nooks and crannies of American culinary history titled “Renewing America’s Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent’s Most Endangered Foods” (Chelsea Green Publishing, $35).

The book tells the stories of 93 ingredients both obscure (Ny’pa, a type of salt grass) and beloved (the Black Sphinx date), along with recipes that range from the accessible (Centennial pecan pie) to the challenging (whole pit-roasted Plains pronghorn antelope).

To make the list, an animal or plant — whether American eels, pre-Civil War peanuts or Seneca hominy flint corn — has to be more than simply edible. It must meet a set of criteria that define it as a part of American culture, too. Mr. Nabhan’s book is part of a larger effort to bring foods back from the brink by engaging nursery owners, farmers, breeders and chefs to grow and use them.

“This is not just about the genetics of the seeds and breeds,” said Mr. Nabhan, an ethnobotanist and an expert on Native American foods who raises Navajo churro sheep and heritage crops in Arizona. “If we save a vegetable but we don’t save the recipes and the farmers don’t benefit because no one eats it, then we haven’t done our work.”

Precisely. What Mr. Nabhan sees, which many who write about and work on issues of conservation do not, is that it’s essential that we find ways to preserve - and in some cases, rebuild - what is good and beautiful and true in human culture, too, and indeed that when properly conceived and carried out, this kind of project goes hand-in-hand with that of doing the same for the (non-human-) natural. Saving an animal or a vegetable is one good thing, bringing it back into the human food chain is another, and it doesn’t take an economist to see that it’s very often the market itself that provides the best chance of keeping once-endangered foods around:

Justin Pitts, whose family has raised Pineywoods cattle in southern Mississippi for generations, credits the coalition with saving those animals. The small, lean cattle that provide milk, meat and labor spent centuries adapting to the pine barrens of the deep south, raised by families who can trace their herds back as far as anyone can remember. There are less than a dozen of those families left, and at one point the number of pure Pineywoods breeding animals fell to under 200. In the past few years, it has grown to nearly 1,000.

Mr. Pitts, who has “90 head if I can find them all,” sells New York strips and other cuts at the New Orleans farmers’ market and to chefs.

“I can’t raise cattle fast as they eat them,” he said.

He supports the notion that you’ve got to eat something to save it.

“If you’re keeping them for a museum piece,” he said, “you’ve just signed their death warrant.”

This is, of course, a tricky proposition, and there are bound to be cases - the endangered Carolina flying squirrel is one example that is discussed in the article - in which sustainable hunting and harvesting aren’t possible. But in many others, the best route to sustainability is that of finding a way for humans and other species to coexist in the same sorts of reciprocal ways as any other creatures. Call it compassionate capitalism, if you like, though I’d prefer to put the stress on the second term. Human culture, too, benefits from variety, and it’s a sign of the health of a market when that’s what it provides. Ours has a long way to go, but we should be grateful to people like Mr. Nabhan for helping us to take these small steps toward restoration.

… because heaven knows I’m not voting for one of the other guys.

The decision by Los Angeles County officials to warn parents against allowing their infants to sleep with them is yet another example of well-minded hysterically overconfident nanny-stating run amok. Yes, co-sleeping is “potentially lethal” - but so is breathing, and so is eating, and so - famously - is driving or sitting in a moving car. That something is dangerous is no reason to spend people’s tax dollars telling them not to do it.

Worse, the statistic that the county released to highlight the importance of the warning - 44 dead infants in 2006 - doesn’t differentiate between co-sleeping in a bed as opposed to a couch or a chair, and the recommendation itself allows for no distinction of safe co-sleeping practices from dangerous ones.* (Heaven forbid that we should give people the information they need to make informed decisions.) This is a common feature of the public discussion of co-sleeping: the studies that are trotted out to warn against it are notoriously controversial, and clearly insufficient to support the claims that are made with them as a basis, e.g.:

Most USA and other western infants die from SIDS or from fatal accidents during solitary sleep outside the supervision of a committed adult. Moreover, the overwhelming number of suspected accidental overlays or fatal accidents occur not within breast feeding–bedsharing communities but in urban poverty, where multiple independent SIDS risk ‘factors’ converge and bottle feeding rather than breast feeding predominates. Additional adverse risk ‘factors’ associated with bedsharing in high-risk populations are maternal smoking, infants placed to sleep on pillows or under duvets, with other children and co-sleeping with infants on sofas, waterbeds or couches. Bedsharing when the infant sleeps with an adult other than the mother, maternal exhaustion, alcohol or drug use, or leaving infants unattended on an adult bed also increase SIDS risks and/or fatal accidents.

As a devoted co-sleeper, and as the father of a high-needs child who is intensely bad at sleeping on his own, this is the sort of thing that really gets under my skin, so pardon me if it doesn’t do the same to you. But just remember that “warning” and “urging” turn very quickly into mandating, and thence to bringing in Child Protective Services when the nosy neighbors decide to phone you in. When that happens, I’ll be the one standing at the door with a shotgun, assuming they haven’t taken away that right as well.

First, they came for the co-sleepers …

***

* E.g.: “Some of the co-sleeping deaths were connected with parents who were under the influence of drugs [emphasis mine - JLS], but others were not, Ploehn said.”

Clark Stooksbury is right: the question of whether deindustrialized farming practices can be “sustainable on a national scale” is - at this point, anyway - a red herring in the debate over food policy. It’s the subsidies - which benefit globalized agribusiness at the expense of the local and sustainable - that are the chief problem right now; if they go, the market is freed, and we can begin to get a better sense of what it can provide. Whether or not small-scale farming can “replace the present system” is a purely academic question.

In a similar vein, let me express my agreement with Andrew Sullivan on the excellence, and indeed Iglesias Award-worthiness, of this post by David Freddoso:

… today, liberal environmentalists are not the ones pushing ethanol. It’s Agribusiness, all the way. Most reputable liberals believe ethanol to be a big joke — an enormous corporate welfare subsidy with no real benefits and many downsides.

On many issues, Conservatives have more in common with ideological liberals than we do with the business interests that come to Washington looking for a handout. Our goal should be to persuade the Left — to use clear failures we agree on, like ethanol — to demonstrate that Big Business will always come to Washington for handouts until Washington stops giving them altogether. Each new handout is the next ethanol, the next sugar — and once you’ve started giving a handout, it never ends.

This is the kind of thing that needs to be repeated, and repeated, and repeated. The fact that the 2008 Farm Bill includes some $20 million in subsidies of the organic food industry, for example, is something that can easily be pointed to as a positive sign, an example of handouts gone right, the kind of thing that the federal government ought to be doing more of. But organic farming is precisely not - or at least, not always or even usually - sustainable farming, and the federal government’s role in slapping the organic label on anything and everything that meets some set of minimal standards (standards which, by the way, are notoriously expensive for small farmers to meet) has arguably been a step backwards for sustainability. Here, for example, is a bit from the latest issue of Edible East Bay, my local food magazine, about the organic dairy industry:

… while organic milk comes from cows that are required to be free of hormones and antibiotics and fed on grain and grass devoid of pesticides and GMOs, the USDA’s organic standards state only that these cows must be given “access to pasture,” but do not specify how much access. It’s ambiguous enough, argues Cummins, to allow a number of large dairy operations to significantly limit pasture time, instead keeping their herds enclosed for much of the day and feeding them mainly corn and other grains (which cows aren’t naturally meant to eat). More grazing might mean healthier cows, but it also means less milking, Cummins notes, which in turn generates less profit. Large operators often milk their herds up to three times a day. “You can’t milk three times a day and give enough time to pasture,” Cummins says.

Critics of big-dairy organic point to many ways in which the trend is not environmentally sustainable. Problems include the use of fuel for trucking in organic feed and shipping milk across large distances, pollution generated by huge amounts of concentrated waste, and the impact on local agricultural economies and small family farms across the country. A Cornell University study reported that the number of U.S. dairy farms with under 100 cows decreased by almost 50 percent from 1991 to 2000. It’s all a casualty, Cummins argues, of a corporate agricultural system that has rapidly infiltrated the booming organic industry, one that is profit-driven and run by publicly traded companies beholden foremost to their shareholders.

The nation’s two largest organic mega-dairy operators are Horizon and Aurora, both started by corporate-organic pioneer Mark Retzloff. While Horizon draws raw milk from a number of farms, its main dairy is located in the western desert of southern Idaho, where little grass grows and several thousand cows “graze” in an enclosed dry lot. Horizon is the nation’s largest organic dairy brand and in 1998 became the first publicly traded organic food company in the country. The younger Aurora, which brought in over $100 million in sales last year, operates five dairies in mostly arid regions of Colorado and Texas and has its own processing facilities. The nation’s leading private-label organic milk producer, it supplies organic dairy products to Safeway, Costco, and WalMart under their own respective brand names.

Cummins says neither company provides its herds with adequate pasture time, and their animals are not always raised organically from birth. “It’s no better to buy bogus organic milk produced on a factory farm than it is local, [conventional] milk,” he says.

It’s eminently questionable, of course, whether the fact that food producers are “driven by profits” is really the source of our troubles - Mark McAfee’s Organic Pastures raw milk dairy, which I profile in my Doublethink piece, is a multi-million-dollar operation replete with its own airstrip, and McAfee has actively courted the fortunes of venture capitalists. It’s also very much a place where quality matters, but what McAfee has realized is that - so long as government will leave him the hell alone - he can make loads of money by producing a high-quality product and selling it to the small but growing segment of the population willing to pay top dollar for it. Is this an approach that’s going to be able to provide milk to the entire U.S.? Of course not, but that doesn’t mean that government needs to be in the business of propping up McAfee’s competition.

The crucial point, though, is that that $20 million that will be spent on the Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative will be going, not to the small, innovative farmers who produce a variety of seasonal crops and sell them locally through farm markets, CSAs, roadside stands, and small groceries, but rather to

• … administer competitive research grants, largely through USDA’s Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service. Research is to focus on determining desirable traits for organic commodities; identifying marketing and policy constraints on the expansion of organic agriculture; and conducting advanced research on organic farms, including production, marketing, and socioeconomic research.
• Other research and extension provisions for organic agriculture that are authorized, but not mandated, include data development on organic agricultural production and marketing; facilitated access to organic research conducted outside the United States for research and extension professionals, farmers, and others; and a mandated report on the need for additional funding for research and promotion of organic agricultural products.

… and so on. That’s to say, such federal monies will benefit the Mark Retzloffs of the world much more than the Joel Salatins or even the Mark McAfees. And this is arguably the case with organic “certification” more generally: it works in favor of those large-scale, industrial producers who can find ways to come into minimal compliance with the guidelines, and very much against those who try to go above and beyond them. Everyone gets the same label, consumers are freed from the sense that they ought perhaps to do some work to figure out where their food is coming from and how it is produced, and the race goes to the compliant rather than the creative.

It should go without saying that it would be quite a different story if the large-scale producers were to end up succeeding, as they surely would, in cornering a large share of a free - that is to say unsubsidized, choice-maximizing, and only very minimally regulated - market. The same goes if BP wants to give my university billions of dollars in research on biofuels: if they deem it to be potentially profitable, they should be encouraged to give it a go, but to the extent that their investment was motivated by the promise of federal subsidies, it represented a failure of scientific innovation rather than a success. We’ll never find out what is and isn’t sustainable until we stop piling free manure on the latest industries of choice.

Mike Tyson is HUGE.

(H/T: FLG.)

(Well, not quite. But the title got your attention, didn’t it?)

At the hands of one James Poulos, pantheism has gotten some bad press of late, and understandably so. It’s false, for one thing, and damnable heresy, for another. I’m not God; you’re not God; so let’s cut the crap and figure out Who, if anyone, is.

But.

BUT.

It seems to me that anyone who takes Christian orthodoxy seriously has got to allow that a certain sort of pantheism - not the kind where God, or rather the “sense” thereof, has been invented, but the one where

As God is a being absolutely infinite, of whom no attribute that expresses the essence of substance can be denied (by Def. vi.), and he necessarily exists (by Prop. xi.); if any substance besides God were granted it would have to be explained by some attribute of God, and thus two substances with the same attribute would exist, which (by Prop. v.) is absurd; therefore, besides God no substance can be granted, or consequently, be conceived. If it could be conceived, it would necessarily have to be conceived as existent; but this (by the first part of this proof) is absurd. Therefore, besides God no substance can be granted or conceived. Q.E.D.

- is at the very least no less orthodox, which is to say no more damnably heretical, than the alternative, deist-or-theist-I’m-not-sure-but-there-had-to-be-a-watchmaker conception that predominates among another vocal segment of religious imaginaries (e.g.). Whatever exactly a substance is (Have I told the story where that - “Substance”, I mean - was the promised title of an upcoming sermon at a Unitarian church in San Francisco? Sadly I was on a bus and could not get my camera out in time …), God is surely not the only one. Nor, however, and this is a point that needs to be driven home again and again, is He merely one substance among many, one being to be counted among a horde of others, one cause competing with the rest for some elbow room in the nexus. And allowing ourselves occasionally to succumb to the temptations of the former mistake can, I think, help stem the tendency to slip-slide away into the latter. Put only very slightly differently, taking seriously the idea of a a problematic immanence can keep us from giving up altogether on the notion of real transcendence.

Prof. Dupré’s Religion and the Rise of Modern Culture is, once again, instructive. He writes, for instance, of Schelling’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Mythology:

Formerly some scholars considered the most ancient forms of religion, which possess no polytheistic pantheon, to be “monotheistic,” assuming that a pristine revelation had preceded polytheism. The mythological process thereby came to be seen as a corruption of primeval monotheism. For Schelling, however, polytheism, rather than implying a decline of the religious consciousness, constitutes a necessary phase in the mind’s ascent to a spiritual idea of God. The alleged primitive monotheism merely results from a primitive inability to distinguish the sacred from the nonsacred. At the ground of this modern “monotheist” interpretation of this archaic religion lies a theological misconception of God as a being among others. That dualism still survives in modern dogmatic theories, according to which the link between God and the finite consists in a relation of efficient causality between two beings. Such a conception conflicts with the idea, admitted by the same theologies, that God is Being (esse ipsum) and, as such, must in some way include all that is. The idea of God as Spirit, so strongly asserted in the Fourth Gospel, includes, according to Schelling, that God is present in the inmost nature of all beings. Polytheistic mythologies thereby serve the purpose of reintegrating the multiplicity of creation within the divine unity.

And again, this time discussing Schleiermacher’s Discourses on Religion:

It seems unlikely that he [i.e., FS] ever conceived of God as independent of the world. As late as the third edition he writes: “The usual conception of God as one simple being outside the world and behind the world is not the beginning and the end of religion. It is only one manner of expressing God, seldom entirely pure and always inadequate” … He appears to be favoring a Christian Platonic panentheism, according to which God included the world, while at the same time transcending it. If my interpretation is correct, “the Universe” might not be a substitute for God, but God’s worldly manifestation.

Lest it should seem that what we have is only a record of a pair of heresies, the background story is essential. On Dupré’s telling, which is by no means idiosyncratic, the rise of this sort of pan(en)theism among the German Romantics was the product of a pair of related ways of thinking, long present in the Christian West, which came to a head during the Enlightenment. The first, which I discussed earlier, was the rejection of what Dupré calls the “form principle” - roughly the idea, epitomized in Plato’s idealism, that “it belongs to the nature of the real to appear and to do so in an orderly, intelligible way”. The story of how this doctrine came to be rejected will be known by anyone familiar with the history of medieval philosophy: Scotus insisted on the necessity of placing individuality itself among - indeed, as the ultimate member of - the Platonic hierarchy of forms, and Ockham concluded this development by denying that universal forms have any existence at all outside the human mind. It then fell to Galileo, Descartes, and the rest of the Enlightenment thinkers to drive in the final few nails, settling ultimately on the conviction that “[i]nstead of participating in nature’s immanent truth, the mind has to perform a reconstruction of it”. Form was no longer something “inherent in a given nature”, but rather “an ideal to be pursued by human endeavor”.*

The second transition Dupré describes, which is arguably more directly relevant to the questions at issue here, was the rise of a stark separation between the realms of nature and grace:

Nominalist theologies destroyed the intelligibility of the relation between Creator and creature. If creation depends on the inscrutable decision of a God who totally surpasses the laws of human reason, nature loses its intrinsic intelligibility. Grace also becomes a blind result of divine decree, randomly dispensed to an unprepared human nature. The emphasis upon a divine omnipotence unrestricted by rationality results in a “supernatural order” separated from nature’s immanent rationality.

Again, the story here is a familiar one, and the tendency being described manifested itself most clearly in Protestant approaches to redemption, theologies which gave pride of place to “a concept of fallen nature, which grace would not be able to transform intrinsically. God’s ‘imputed’ righteousness, though expressing a change in the divine attitude, left nature right where it found it”. And this, Dupré argues, led directly to the motivation to set up “a natural religion next to one so tenuously linked to nature”.

But - and this is the crucial point for my argument - this latter development, if that is indeed what it can be called, was presaged by the earlier struggle between Aristotelianism and the Christian Platonism (or Neoplatonism) that had dominated the thought of the Church Fathers. Dupré points to the thought of Thomas Aquinas, in particular his understanding of the relation between God and creation, as the place where these tensions came to a head:

In his early works, in which the Neoplatonic influence was still very strong, Thomas had conceived of this relation as consisting primarily in a participation in the divine Being. In the later Summa Theologiae, however, he adopted the causal explanation stating that the act of existing is the effect of a transcendent Cause, whereby creating means “to produce the existence of things” (ST I, q.45, a.6). But if God, defined as pure Being, in the creative act “produces” finite being, God is separated from creation, as an efficient cause is from its effect.

It is this that is the essential issue. Dupré continues:

The concept of causality in Thomas had not yet been reduced to mere efficient causality, as it was to be in most modern philosophy. It even appears to have included some idea of participation. At the beginning of the Summa he writes: “Being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally present within all things, since it is formal in respect of everything found in a thing. … Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly” (ST I, q.8, a.1). Yet in the reply to the first objection against this position he stipulates how God is present and writes: “He is in all things as cause of the being of all things.” This was a perfectly reasonable answer, but in the context of the later understanding of causality as efficient causality, it could easily be misunderstood to mean: God produces all things as a cause produces an effect.

And misunderstood it was. The challenge for us, in other words, for whom the notion of a non-efficient form of causality is notoriously difficult to get a handle on, is to work to turn that last formulation on its head: God is the cause of the being of all things as the Being that is in all things, and indeed innermostly. Only so can the temptation to regard God as primarily** a pusher of molecules, and so as a mere manipulator of being rather than Being itself, be avoided.

Hence pantheism does have a crucial role to play: not as a resting-place, mind you, but as an element in what is bound to be an inescapable dialectic. “God and gravity” is no better a theological refrain than “God and guns” is a political one: each ranks as one among many what is really the One in Whom the many are found. The temptation to give up altogether on the distinction between creation and Creator, though clearly worthy of resistance in its own right, can aid in resisting potential confusions of a no less problematic - and, for many of us, markedly more tempting - variety. A full trio of cheers would be more than a bit overboard, but the boos and hisses ought really to stop. We’ve got something to learn from the pantheists, too.

***

* But nota bene: “My intention in writing this is not to deny the benefits the nominalist way of thinking brought to the development of science. All too readily, medieval [and Cartesian! - JLS] philosophy had predicted a priori the course of nature on the basis of assumed divine attributes. … Henceforth philosophers could no longer rely on what had to be the nature of a physical process, according to their idea of God’s eternal reason. They were forced to find out how things actually were by empirical investigation. By the same token, however, the delicate medieval balance between philosophy and theology was permanently disturbed.”

** I do not wish to imply that Ms. McGrew regards God primarily in such a way. He may be in the molecule-pushing business too, for all I know, but the point at present is simply that His relation - as it were - to creation is fundamentally of a quite different character than this.

This is a big part of what I had in mind when I denied that the “Limbaugh Effect” threw Texas:

I am one of the individuals that changed his/her party registration from Republican to Democrat.  I did this because the Republican ideals of rational government, fiscal responsibility, and states’ rights over federal rights have been thrown out for religious fanaticism, federal control over every action, and spending out of control.  I changed my registration to vote for change…to vote for Obama.

It is cute that Limbaugh saw that the electorate is upset with the Republicans and made up this Operation Chaos as a means of attempting to jump on the band wagon, but the underlying effect is clear. People are not changing from Republican to Democrat to assist the Republican Party in the fall.  They are changing their party registrations because they lost faith in the Republicans to lead.

Well, that and the fact that a lot of them so despise Hillary that they relish the opportunity to get out and vote against her. The key point, though, is that the only effect that “Operation Chaos” is going to have is that of slightly mitigating the consistently huge cross-over support that Senator Obama has been getting from Republicans and conservative Independents. In all likelihood, he wouldn’t have gotten this far without it. Whether enough of those voters stay on his side when he’s matched up against the loud, lovable War Hero remains to be seen.

Here, here, and here.

[ADDENDUM: I had not noticed this statistic before:

The results also showed evidence of a “worship attendance gap” among Pennsylvania’s Democrats: Regardless of religious affiliation, people who attend worship services at least once a week supported Clinton over Obama 59% to 41%, while people who never attend worship services supported Obama over Clinton 55% to 45%. However, those who attend worship services at least once a week were twice as numerous at the polls as those who never attend worship services, so in the end Clinton benefited more from the effects of this gap.

If this holds up, of course, Obama is toast.]

Apparently Josh Howard of the Dallas Mavericks has admitted to smoking marijuana in the offseason. Watch Stephen A. Smith’s head explode:

The Mavs went on to win, by the way.