In Response to David Brooks' Column in the New York Times II

I am on the cusp of the boomers and gen x, but one who is far more comfortable with the skinny-tied eggheads with cigarettes curling smoke between their fingers on black and white television screens than with the sleeveless emoters who seem to lack a healthy sense of pessimism, which allows them to wrap everything up in the time it takes to make a smoothie. I join Brooks in mourning the shift from the former to the latter in public discourse. Indeed, I really don't think the former exists anymore, so I take refuge in 20th century intellectualism, each era as satisfying as the other but in its own unique way. Yes, Freud, Marx, Gramsci, Orwell . . . but let's not forget the great auteurs of cinema who emerged over the century, especially those of Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave. What I really hope for, however, is the return of old theological terms such as sin, evil and grace, to the stage of public discourse. They are as valid as ever, despite the challenges posed by science and the rational positivism that predominates in the current era, most distressingly in naive forms of scientism. As Michel Serres says: Where do you put the dirt, that is, the things that cannot be explained? No matter how many answers you have, there are always more questions, and therefore an attendant mystery that cannot and should not be ignored, as it adds so much savor to life.

Just as Pauline Kael, a now-deceased and therefore erstwhile film reviewer for The New Yorker, once said that talking about films is just a way of talking about life, or something to that effect, I find that anything I say is really just a way for me to talk about plants. My comment above is not obviously about plants, and perhaps not about plants at all, but the one idea contained in it that connects strongly to my interest in plants comes in the last sentence: plants are just so damned mysterious that I find them utterly fascinating. And the more that science tells us about plants, the more mysterious they become, because while they were at one point just grey-green shapes in the landscape that elicited little attention, they have now emerged, or now emerged only in the pitifully limited context of contemporary industrial socity, as agents in their own right, and to accommodate this debut, we must embrace them as much with scientific curiosity as with a respectful ignorance, the latter providing the fertile humus for our wonder.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/opinion/this-age-of-wonkery.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region&_r=0