LifeItself

Two years ago, almost to the day, I wrote a blog, The Bird of Dawn , full of hope for the indomitable human spirit which can transcend and erode all repression, whether religious or political. A year ago, in The Way We Were , I connected the liberal Western Civilization, where my soul and body reside, to its ancient Greek roots. Both pieces have been wildly popular with the readers around the world, because they spelled out hope for humanity and its future. Today we are in Cefalù in Sicily, immersed again in a simpler world of the past, the world which graces us only occasionally when we leave our thoroughly modern, connected academic cocoon, powered by a high-rate throughput of fossil fuels that appear mostly as research funding, electricity, computers, and airplane tickets. Compared with Cefalù’s Arab fortress of 1063, and the Norman cathedral with the magnificent twelfth century mosaics our world is truly ephemeral. It cannot last for longer than a few more decades. Yet, this...

According to the rigorous peer-reviewed research by The Onion , the grown-up population in the U.S. has plummeted dramatically since 1950, when a Census count found that more than 24 million Americans could both admit when they were wrong and respect a viewpoint other than their own. Today, only one in three million citizens can provide thoughtful advice to a fellow human being instead of immediately shifting the topic to their own personal issues or what they had for lunch. A good example is provided by a comment to my recent post that actually talked about the runaway energy consumption in the U.S., and used obesity as a metaphor for how much hydrocarbon energy we gulp every day from the bucket-size energy drink containers.  Here is the comment: Fatphobia in the environmental movement hurts our cause. It is really disappointing to me to see my fat friends and allies insulted in this headline. I was so angry I didn't read the rest of the article—which is sad because it...