Economic development as we know it started with Europe’s conquest of the New World, a bonanza of found wealth. Before the conquest, European societies were politically, economically, and socially closed. But once flooded by a surge of new energy from the Americas, they began to open and develop. All the philosophies, institutions, and values characteristic of modern life, above all liberal democracy, slowly emerged. Over time, as the New World bonanza was supplemented and then supplanted by fossil fuels, economic and political development proceeded in tandem to transform the world and to create the luxuries and freedoms we enjoy today. With a return of ecological scarcity, however, what abundance has given will be taken away—to what extent and how rapidly remains to be seen, but we can hardly expect liberal democratic institutions fostered by abundance and predicated on abundance to survive in their current form.
The science of epidemiology evolved to make sense of infectious diseases, not common chronic diseases like heart disease. Though the tools of epidemiology—comparisons of populations with and without the disease—had proved effective in establishing that a disease such as cholera is caused by the presence of micro-organisms in contaminated water, as the British physician John Snow demonstrated in 1854, it is a much more complicated endeavor to employ those same tools to elucidate the subtler causes of chronic disease. They can certainly contribute to the case against the most conspicuous determinants of noninfectious diseases—that cigarettes cause lung cancer, for example.
Still one of my favorite science books.
Think of the macrophage—and, for that matter, the entire diverse assembly of immune cells—as a pack of friendly wolves patrolling the area inside our skin, attacking the things that might hurt us. What happens when those wolves no longer have regular prey? They go stir-crazy. They get bored. And they might turn on themselves.
Following the "wolves" metaphor, part of what I understand to be one of the lethal attributes of the (at least the original) COVID virus is the "storm" of antibodies it triggers. The wolves go too wild, in a manner of speaking. N.B. Here, Carney is referring to autoimmune diseases.
EASTER 2013 IN BUCHAREST also illuminated the work of Patrick Leigh Fermor, that craftsman of irreducible godlike essences whose every sentence belongs in a time capsule—to call him a mere travel writer is to diminish him.
I was tipped off to Patrick Leigh Fermor at the Jaipur Literature Festival (thank you, William Dalrymple). Having read Fermor's work, and having lived in Romania, I heartily concur with Kaplan's appraisal. Great writing!
The wealth of religion is a pearl of great price hidden in a field; it is wheat growing among tares. You cannot have the glory and comfort of religion without its superstition, its magic, its brutal hatreds and slavish fears. In the highest and sternest religions these elements are kept in check, but no more. They are always present at the back of the mind, always ready to break out and devastate human life. Religion is always looking forward to the day when it shall be set free from this body of death which, as its own shadow, it perpetually carries with it. That freedom is nothing but the self-revelation of thought, the discovery by the mind of its own nature as a thinking mind.
However abstract and barren may be the first-fruits of this discovery, the discovery itself is an incalculable advance in the history of man. As art and religion lift man above the level of the beasts, science lifts the civilized man above the level of the savage. The material utility of science, its service in feeding and clothing and sheltering us, carrying us from place to place and providing us with comforts, is the least part of its importance. Its real gift is simply the end of dreaming and the promise of a waking life. It sweeps aside with a ruthless hand all mythology, all symbols that are heavy with unrealized meanings and dark with the terrors of dreamland, and bids the mind face the world’s mystery armed with nothing but its five senses and the sling of its wit. What that means, no one knows who has not long and carefully weighed the debt which he owes to the scientific consciousness. But when that is done, he will hardly shrink from praising the founders of science for the gift of spiritual freedom even in the words of the ancient poet.
America, we like to think, has been specially “graced.” Set apart. The first child of the Enlightenment, it was “declared” to others as the harbinger of a new order. Yet this rationally founded nation was also deeply devotional, a redeemer nation. Reason and religion, which should have contended near our cradle, conspired instead. If we kept ourself isolated from others, it was to avoid contamination. If we engaged others, we did so from above, to bring light into their darkness. To deal with others as equals would betray our mission.
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