258 candles-day 13

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: "Such pinnacles of human creativity change our perspective of our place in the universe."

alternatives to church: dying in wisconsin

My dad who lives in The Thick has been visiting us here on The Rim for the past two weeks and this morning he and I attended a local church service. It was a Lutheran service, ELCA, and while he enjoyed it or at least didn't find it offensive, I was disappointed by it. 

It wasn't that it was offensive in some way--to the contrary, my impression was that the visiting pastor was taking pains not to be offensive to anyone Christian--and even someone like me, who my wife calls "a good Christian if it weren't for all that divinity stuff," found nothing offsetting.  And that may have been the problem:  it was so desperately inoffensive no one could object.

The message was "we should pray," and during it he made note of recent scientific suggestions that there is a piece of the human genome that seeks something greater than ourselves.  There is nothing wrong with that, but that was the only contemporary information he used.  Otherwise the sermon might have been given ten, fifty, or a hundred years ago.

Nothing else suggested anything beyond the early twentieth century either.  The hymns, except for one from the 1600s(!), were all from the 1800s; his children's sermon was talked at rather than with them, and was itself about what "hallowed" in the Lord's Prayer meant (what kid younger than a precocious 16 year old would care? and why not ask them something, anything, instead of telling them? While he did have the rapt attention of the youngest, a baby, she was staring at the movement of his mouth and the redness of his face, not taking in, as he suggested, his message); and while I counted nearly one hundred fifty attendees--and that is a remarkably small number in a town of 1300 with only three churches in a predominantly Lutheran state--fewer than a half dozen were younger than 50. 

My dad, who is going deaf in one ear, was impressed that despite his having left his hearing aid in the car, he could hear the entire service well because we sat near one of the post-mounted speakers, so there's that.  And the stained windows and vaulted arches and wood interior was tolerable eye candy.  The organist was fine and the solo pianist was pretty good, and while the guitar player, who affected a folksy, Hank Williams charm was also competent, the teenager who accompanied him on sax was barely that, and her singing was worse. 

When the collection came around I gave them a dollar.  I want this church, like most churches, to continue but not for long.  After we left my dad complimented the service but said it went on too long.  I pointed to my car clock:  it had lasted only an hour.  His watch was a half hour fast:  "That's all?  It seemed so much longer!"  This service and this congregation make a compelling argument for the swift death of American institutional religion.

the banality of enlightenment

One of the most profound bits of information to have an impact on the way I view the world was an article I read in the late 80s that reported that scientists had calculated that there was exactly as much matter present in the contemporary universe as there had been moments after the Big Bang.  This suggests that there is no destruction, finally, that everything continues in one form or another.  A kind of reincarnation, if nor exactly as the Hindus or the Buddhists have it.

This morning I started violently from a dream that was all Japanese characters and and symbols and requires I think a Japanese imagination to parse it, but I understood it all in my dream.  The upshot was that I was a harbinger of some sort, an icon who recognized in others their specialness and my touching them brought that specialness to fulfillment.  It was very comic book influenced and full of allusions to icons that I knew in my dream and that made sense there.  Ultimately, the icon I was at the beginning of this dream, a daughter killing her father, I became at the end, my daughter killing me.  I don't remember the personifications between those two but it doesn't matter.  I woke with a sense of both the impermanence of life and the permanence of--well, I don't know what to call it.  Existence?  Being?  Soul?

It all seems very banal now, drinking cold coffee and typing like a fiend, my head down and recalling my finger exercises from 10th grade's typewriter training in order to put this down.  Even minutes after waking, splashing water on my face and noticing the birds eating the seed I leave out for them, it didn't seem to matter.  That may be the thing about it, though.  We are always expecting epiphany to have life-altering consequences and a booming voice out of the clouds and it may be that it is the mirror image of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil":  call it the banality of enlightenment.  It comes, not with a mighty wind or a cracking like an inner egg opening and the chick of new information peeping out, but with cold water across the face and the familiar tired, unshaven face staring back, and the gentle words "of course."

teach naked!

on occasion, when I especially miss teaching, I swipe an issue of "the chronicle review," the midsection of the larger chronicle of higher education--my rationale is that it's unlikely most visiters to my local libraries are going to read the chronicle anyway, and it might as well go to use--and spend a few days reading it.  last week I brought home a copy with the short essay "against reading lists" by lennard j. davis.

it's a provocative idea, dropping required readings from syllabi (except for some introductory material) and allowing students to determine, through conversation and suggestion and their own outside reading, where to go next.  say, in a 20th century american lit class opening with some early influential stuff--"song of myself," say, or the red badge of courage--and allow them to determine what and who to read next, maybe choosing from a prepared list of options.

davis recognizes the massive change that ebooks and online availability makes for reading. 

on the internet, one link leads to another.  you look up turner, say, on wikipedia.  that site leads you to the national gallery of art, which in turn leads you to romanticism, which in turn takes you to delacroix, and thus to reubens, who isn't a romantic but whose use of flesh, light, and color influenced that movement.  that little stroll was unpredictable, but a fruitful exercise in intellectual curiosity.  in the past, we've operated with a very different model, conditioned not by the internet and the intellectual meandering it allows but by a kind of linear thinking reflected by the consecutiveness that we find on the printed page.  the fixed reading list is the icon of that linearity.

at first, I wasn't certain he understood what some of the realworld costs of that flexibility meant.  for instance, he suggests that in "the new world of e-books, online publications, and next-day book deliveries, we are freed from the dull hand of tradition," apparently oblivious to the fact that for most students not enrolled at a more expensive school like chicago, where he teaches, such sudden cash expenditures are not easy to negotiate (or for working students to plan reading time around).  he does , however, next present a more affordable and workable alternative, suggesting an e-reader (or an option to spring for paperback copies for the more linear among them) for his students onto which they could download preselected texts.  he says he somehow selected his list so that the 2 groups "would end up spending the same amount of money..." 

that format allowed many impromptu changes in the reading list.  it also allowed us to look at a poem or a short story right at the moment in class when it occured to me to refer to that work.  another benefit was that visual material, not included in the course packet or reading list, could be called up at the mention of a specific reference.

this is doable now, of course, using classbased technology, and I've made much use of that in my more recent practice, putting sites and film clips and readings on the overhead computer screens available in most college classes.  but he makes an excellent point near the conclusion of his essay that what we are looking at is not only new in terms of technology in the class but in the way learning is distributed.

we are now presented with a more 3-dimensional model that reaches through time and space in unpredictable and valuable ways.  the philosophers gilles deleuze and felix guattari called that kind of knowledge "rhizomatic," after a type of plant.  a rhizome, such as a potato, reproduces by sending out underground shoots that form another plant, which in turn does the same thing, producing a network of roots.  deleuze and guattari contrast that to the "arboreal" model, in which a single set of roots produces a single tree, with all its branches connected to one trunk.  deleuze and guattari see the arboreal model as the older model of knowing, hierarchical and organized, such as strict taxonomes of organisms.  they see the rhizomatic as a newer, more effective scheme for organizing knowledge.

 

what gives me hope

last week I was asked during a job interview what gave me hope--interview questions for ministers are a little different than for, say, retail workers--and my answer was something akin to the following but lynn margulis does a much better job of putting it together. it is knowing this that helps me to keep on keeping on when a bush is elected or a walker is reelected.

[T]he brilliant American bacteriologist Lynn Margulis has proposed that every kosmos, from the microcosmic organism on up to our macrocosmic planet, has evolved through a very long game of symbiosis, "the coming together that leads to physical interdependence and the permanent sharing of cells and bodies."  Two billion years ago, free-floating bacteria combined to form what Margulis calls "bacterial confederacies."  These confederacies gradually formed a thin membrane that held them together.  Then some of the bacteria turned into the oxygen-using mitochondria, and a command center, the nucleus, took shape.  The cell was born, or rather, self-made through what some scientists today call autopoiesis.  Then cells took up residence inside larger organisms that in turn developed into their own protective membranes.  And they are still with us.  "The descendants of the bacteria that swam in primeval seas breathing oxygen three billion years ago exist now in our bodies as mitochondria," writes Margulis...The larger flora and fauna in turn formed communities within forests and other ecosystems that also acted as even larger, self-regulating organisms.  And all of these biomes are finally protected by an even larger membrane, the atmosphere.  Margulis refers to her theory, her scientific creation story, as symbiogenesis.

--from an american gospel:  on family, history, and the kingdom of god by erik reece

despite all that's been done to it--and earth and the cosmos have done more to it than puny mortal creatures like us can do to it (although that's not to say we can't make it uninhabitable for ourselves or other creatures)--the earth and existence has carried on.  and even despite what we do to ourselves, we continue in more or less the same shape.  that gives me hope on both a species and an individual level.

what if, again?

this is an excellent article in which a couple seti (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) researchers comment on exactly the question I've written on previously.  their takeaway:  because humans haven't been at the center of existence for a while, most religious would simply take it in stride and continue.  I'd like to believe that.  unfortunately, that presupposes a willingness to adapt to circumstances that isn't always borne out by history.  would most religious accept extraplanetary bacteria as evidence of a diversity to the universe we can only guess at or as creations of the adversary meant to be destroyed?  my religious mind believes the former; my political mind suspects the latter.

varying shades of gray

a few weeks ago I found a copy of bruce sterling's 2002 book tomorrow now: envisioning the next 50 years in the $1 bin at a buns & noodles in the hub and I've been impressed both by the way he writes and the optimism which his book gives me. you'd think the guy who helped define the word "cyberpunk" would be more interested in dystopia, but the world he proposes isn't a utopia either. it's like today, only moreso, and with fewer hypocrisies.

this essay on the ethics of using currently ethically-challenged technology to create more ethical technology caught my eye and strikes me as something in that same optimistic vein. I think most people like me fear that, once we have recognized and admitted our privilege, we need to give it up in order to make the changes we know need to happen. but writers from jon sobrino to karl marx to the gospel authors tell us that's not the case: we need to use that privilege to help other people. as leonard writes in relation to social networks and action, "Just because action is easy doesn’t make it irrelevant." it's easy for me to give a 30% tip to a server at a restaurant and that's certainly not irrelevant.

if it's irrelevant to do the easy action then we're stuck in the spanish prisoner's dilemma of doing nothing because for most of us the harder action is useless too. if I give up my privilege and go to work in foxconn's factories in taiwan, what exactly have I done? have I helped anyone? will I have bettered the life of the teen worker next to me or bettered the life of the single mother who would have gotten the job if I hadn't taken it? will even my life or my identification with the oppressed have been improved? it isn't necessarily a false either-or, of course; a third option is that I could forget it all and ignore both the plight of the workers and my own privilege and go on with my consumption and affluence.

jesus and marx both said that the way to personal salvation is through helping others who aren't doing as well as you are. the bodhisattva takes it a step further and actively refuses his own salvation until everyone is saved. how ironic and perfect if the way to do that is the judicious use of the "like" button.

did jesus die for klingons too?

this fascinates me and I've started a conversation about it in the past which I will doubtless talk about again.

to be both in the world and of it

I haven't felt terribly well lately, thinking it was connected somehow to vague feelings of depression I've had about both the state of my employment and the state of society. (why does it seem as if when we are ourselves not doing well we apprehend that much of our neighbors are not doing well either?) it gathered force today like a snowball on a hill and hit me with the force of hot, uncomfortable nausea. my wife is feeling it too--she ascribes it to week-old cheesecake we ate for breakfast--and we have spent the day alternating between lying on the bed and on the couches.

in the throes of such a thing, the only thing really to do is read, and I've been doing that. just in the past 12 hours I've read from intellectual skywriting: literary politics and the nyrb by philip nobile, cosmopolitan crimes: foreign rivals of sherlock holmes collected by hugh greene, god is not 1: the 8 rival religions that run the world--and why their differences matter by stephen prothero, a lengthy review of economic books by anatole kaletsky, glenn hubbard and peter navarro, and robert reich by jeff madrick in the nyrb called "how can the economy recover?", and dozens of pages online (including a new facebook page just started called "your [sic] probably from hudson, ny if...").

but the reading that's got me writing now is from roger shattuck's forbidden knowledge: from prometheus to pornography.

"up through the middle ages, christian theology incorporated and imposed on the faithful a dark suspicion of secular nature. our proper devotion should be to the divine order of grace. st paul and st augustine warn us continually to distrust the original curiosity of adam and eve in a satan-haunted world...well into the 17th century, secular knowledge and natural philosophy represented 'a distraction or seducement' from true spiritual living. 'to study nature meant to repeat the sin of adam.' nevertheless, like a slow-moving glacier, christian theology trundled along within it some unassimilable boulders. in 1336, petrarch, celebrated for his love poetry in italian, climbed mount ventoux in provence just 'to see what so great an elevation had to offer.' he said he almost lost his soul at the summit 'admiring earthly things,' like the view. years later, he wrote an astonishing letter to record the pleasures of that excursion into nature. petrarch came to value the secular world as highly as dante valued the spiritual."

I remember learning in 1 of my earliest american lit courses the puritan appreciation for their being in the world but not of it, of being alive as humans but at the same time remembering that they were destined for a more transcendental existence. (there is a wide streak of this all through unitarianism from the transcendentalists and the utopians, a streak that modern uus have more or less tried to ignore but really should come up with an alternative to instead.) this struck me then as an interesting but failed policy to live by: one can prove one's present existence but can only take on faith any existence beyond that. to hold off enjoyment and appreciation of the now in favor of some potential good that we have no proof we can ever acheive doesn't seem like an efficient way to spend our time.

I remember too a lovely buddhist story someone told me about an early karmapa. this fellow was walking along a path and came across a tiger who gave chase. the karmapa ran until he reached a cliff and crawled out along the limb of a tree that gave way and dropped him flat against the cliff for a minute. below him, the karmapa could see a lion at the bottom of the cliff. as the tree limb gave way he noticed a wild strawberry plant growing in the cleft of the cliff just at the level he was at with a single perfect berry. he plucked it and put it in his mouth, exclaiming, "how delicious!" as the limb gave way and he dropped.

evolution and revolution, part 3

"We may remember comments from our own history, comments we heard repeatedly in the late 1960s and early 70s about our own attempts at change: evolution, not revolution. It’s not necessarily a bad suggestion, a gentle but irreversible change versus a sudden violent alteration in the environment. Its speakers had the best intentions in mind while saying it—let no one be hurt—but to mean it required forgetting that evolution works on a scale of time in which the slightest, most important changes occur at a pace at which they are unfelt and invisible to the subjects. This did not happen in Egypt. It happened over a course of fewer than three weeks. It did not happen in Tunisia, the other African nation credited with lighting the match to what has come to be called the Jasmine Revolution. The Tunisian uprising, reportedly sparked by the December self-immolation of would-be vendor Mohamed Bouazizi, led to the mid-January ouster of that nation’s president Zine El Abadine Ben Ali after twenty-three uncontested years in power.

"The Jasmine Revolution is a name, by the way, given the Tunisian protests by journalists outside Tunisia interested in developing a 'color narrative' of sometimes successful spontaneous popular uprisings in reaction to contested elections; in addition to Jasmine there are the 2003 Rose Revolution of Georgia, the 2004 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, the 2005 Tulip Revolution of Kyrgyzstan, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon that same year, the Kuwaiti Blue Revolution also of 2005, and the notoriously unsuccessful 2009 Green Revolution in Iran. There was also the Bush Administration’s labeling of the Iraqi elections of 2005 as the Purple Revolution, a label that was never picked up by the Iraqis, Americans, or the press. The so-called Jasmine Revolution is credited with sparking similar recent uprisings in Algeria, Yemen and Jordan.

"We cannot forget that the use of “evolution” to describe these events is not meant to somehow suggest they are bloodless or smooth. The word 'evolution' can often mask the uncountable lives lost and pain experienced by real generations of animals to develop a single useful change. Neither must we forget Human Rights Watch has confirmed at least 120 dead in Cairo, Suez, and Alexandria. I don’t know if that number includes the reported sixty-five prisoners shot in their cells at al-Qatta prison outside Cairo in the first days of unrest. Those numbers may grow. [They are now at nearly 300.] The United Nations has reported at least nearly one hundred fifty people killed and over five hundred injured during the protests in Tunisia. Great Britain’s Guardian newspaper has published the identities of over a thousand people killed or jailed during Iran’s 2009 uprising and immediately after, the most famous of which is Neda Agha-Soltan, the 26-year old music student whose cell-phone and videotaped shooting death has been called by Time 'probably the most widely witnessed death in human history.'

"We are spoiled I think by the bloodlessness of our political shifts, even one as charged as the transition from George W. Bush to Barack Obama, into thinking that other such events in other places are equally mundane. Despite the rhetoric used by Obama detractors about the tree of liberty being watered by the blood of tyrants and the multiple deaths of innocents at the weapons of various hard-right figures, including our own deaths at Knoxville’s Tennessee Valley UU Church, the United States has been blessed in recent decades with relatively painless revolutions, almost to the point where the word means nothing anymore: the sexual revolution, the educational revolution, the digital revolution, the cultural revolutions and cultural wars. We toss those sobriquets out too quickly, as if all it takes to be a revolutionary is to disagree with someone in authority, forgetful that, in a real revolution, as in real evolution, people are hurt and people die.

"But the species goes on. Despite revolutions, societies also go on. Tunisia is still a chaotic place but Tunisia continues to exist as a real entity where people eat and fall in love and sell produce and sing and are born and die. There is no telling how events will settle in Egypt and sometime soon we may look back on these days after the uprising with a wistfulness and embarrassment that we could ever be so dewy-eyed and naïve. But Egypt too remains a real place where people are dancing and singing and setting off fireworks and honking truck horns and hoping and expecting. Just as with the American Revolution, history doesn’t stop after the immediate goal is accomplished. Like with evolution, life has a tendency to continue and just because a creature develops an arched foot doesn’t mean the effects end or the problems the change was meant to remedy stop. Work continues, responsibility continues. Reflection will be good for the Egyptians and the Tunisians and for us, looking back at our own euphoria after Barack Obama’s election, to decide whether we have been guilty not of having been somehow taken in but of having too quickly excused ourselves from our responsibilities."

evolution and revolution part 2

"Equally apt was the release Friday of the results of research into the metatarsals found among Australopithecus afarensis bones in Hadar, Ethiopia. The metatarsal is a long bone connecting human toes to the base of human feet. You are probably aware of the discoveries of both hominids called Lucy and Lucy’s Baby, but I’m going to quote myself in refreshing your memories in explaining the importance of their discoveries. This is from a 2008 sermon of mine about the history of walking:

"'That our earliest known progenitor...

"The new findings of the research published in the journal Science report that the feet of Australopithecus afarensis were similar to our own. There were no feet bones uncovered either with Lucy or with Selam so scientists were uncertain, as Solnit points out, as to whether our ancestors’ feet were still accustomed to clinging to tree branches. The research team, led by integrative anatomist Carol Ward of the University of Missouri, discovered by examining the metatarsals, which predate Lucy and Selam by multiple millions of years, that the hominids 'were fully humanlike and committed to life on the ground.'

"The metatarsal itself was stiff and arched, like our own, and not flexible like an ape’s. Ape metatarsals are spongiform to allow their feet to clutch like our hands do when their prehensile toes grabbed branches. Ward writes, 'The development of arched feet was a fundamental shift toward the human condition, because it meant giving up the ability to use the big toe for grasping branches, signaling that our ancestors had finally abandoned life in the trees in favor of life on the ground.'

"Like the forebears of Australopithecus aferensis, the Egyptians are standing and walking on unsteady feet accustomed to something different. The progenitors of Lucy and Selam who were themselves our progenitors had made the fateful decision at some point to leave the shelter of trees and step out into the wide, hostile, unknown world. Similarly, the people of Egypt at some point realized they needed to leave the shelter of a political system many of them had known all their lives to step out into the wide, hostile unknowable result of changing that system. Their decision, I’m certain, is no less fateful. There is no little consequence in both cases: in our ancestors’ case, there was the awful certainty of death by long-teethed predators on the savannah. No less, for the people of Egypt, there is the uncertainty of chaos, ruled now by the Egyptian military—in which, I should note, many of them have the amount of confidence many of us would have in our own military, for good and for bad—but in the near future by whatever strong political faction, secular, religious, civilian or military or a combination, might be strongest. Fox News, for instance, fans fears that they will be eaten up by a government harnessed to the worst elements of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and while that’s as unlikely as a US government composed of members of Christian Identity militias and the Ku Klux Klan, it remains a possibility all the same."

evolution & revolution pt 1

after yesterday's inclusion of part of my evolution sunday sermon, I've decided to publish the rest of it in pieces and with links. today is part 1:


EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION
A Sermon Delivered to Dakota Unitarian Universalist Church
On February 13, 2011

The images are electric. People dancing with flags. Small fireworks zipping up into the night sky. Hands high over heads that are shouting and singing. Truck horns honking. Innumerable numbers of people surrounding Tahrir Square in Cairo and in public squares in Memphis, Alexandria, and other cities, in symbolic spinning circles that mimic the spinning circles of pilgrims on hajj around the Kaaba in Mecca.

Can we imagine anything like it? Yes, I think we can. Many of us remember similar euphoria, dancing and singing and crying, over the swiftly developing ruins of the Berlin Wall. Or the joy and release of revolutions in South Africa and Czechoslovakia that left former government prisoners Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel as their presidents. And of course many of us felt a similar elation a little over two years ago after the results of the 2008 election were announced and Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush in the Oval Office.

Of course, I would be remiss not to refer also to the joy and elation many of us experienced at other times that didn’t turn out well. In February 1979 we watched the Shah of Iran run with his tail between his legs, defeated by the twin intensity of protests by students and religious leaders and heard the thanking of god and thanking of history; and it was only a few months later, in November, when some of those same students rushed the American embassy, taking fifty two hostages for nearly a year and a half. Some may remember the exultation when economics professor Robert Mugabe entered the President’s Palace as the first elected black African leader in the coup that replaced notorious corrupt Rhodesian leader Ian Smith; our cheers would stick in our throats within two years. And of course we all remember the images from Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, as the students and intelligentsia there, emboldened by the success of other revolutions, occupied the Square demanding democratic and economic reforms, and the iconic photo of Tank Man, a lone protestor who stared down four tanks armed with nothing more than shopping bags; and we may remember the images from seven weeks later when the People’s Liberation Army, on orders to clear the Square, did so with bayonets and clubs and bullets, leaving an unknown number of civilians dead, their numbers estimated between eight hundred and three thousand, and countless others injured.

It’s entirely apt that Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt since the assassination of Anwar Sadat in October 1981, should find the exit door from Cairo the day before Charles Darwin’s birthday. Like everything else, political entities and societies evolve. And like evolution itself, it’s not always to the immediate benefit of the subject and it’s not always pretty. Of course, political revolution, played out in the space of years or months or, in the case of the Egyptian uprising, eighteen days, is far different than biological evolution, which takes place over a sense of scale that dwarfs our ability even to imagine it. But I think it’s fair to make a connection between the two.

walking and evolution

I'm in the process of writing a sermon for tomorrow's evolution sunday and, in order to explain the background to the importance of lucy and selam to the anthropological record, and thus the importance of friday's science article about hominid metatarsals, I quote myself from a 2008 sermon about walking. I am rather proud of this writing and, in the spirit of telling my students they ought to bring attention to the things they do that make them proud, I've reproduced it below.

"That our earliest known progenitor is Lucy, the skeletal remains of Australopithecus afarensis found in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974 by Donald Johanson—now joined by another Australopithecus afarensis found in Dikika, Ethiopia, and nicknamed Selam, the so-called Lucy’s Baby, although Selam is approximately 120,000 years older than Lucy and so would be Lucy’s multiply-great grandmother, except that she was killed when 3 years old—these facts are unassailable. When [Rebecca] Solnit [the author of the seminal book Wanderlust: The History of Walking] wrote, only Lucy had been found, and she describes her thus:

"'[Lucy] was apelike in many respects; she had little in the way of a waist or neck, short legs, longish arms, and the funnel-like rib cage of an ape. Her pelvis, however, was wide and shallow, and so she had a stable gait with hip joints far apart tapering to close-together knees like humans and unlike chimps (whose narrow hips and far-apart knees make them lurch from side to side when they walk upright). Some say she would have been a terrible runner and not much of a walker. But she walked. This much is certain, and then come the arguments.'

"The arguments Solnit refers to relate not to the how our progenitors walked, but the why. On this few concur. Solnit, in reporting on the 1991 Paris-based Conference on the Origins of Bipedalism, call these
'a kind of academic stand-up comedy routine. [The] ‘schlepp hypothesis’…explained walking as an adaptation for carrying food, babies, and various other things; ‘the peek-a-boo hypothesis,’ which…connected bipedalism to penile display…to impress females rather than intimidate other males; ‘the all wet hypothesis’…involved wading and swimming during a proposed aquatic phase of evolution; ‘the tagalong hypothesis’…involved following migratory herds across the…savannah; ‘the hot to trot hypothesis,’ which was one of the more seriously reasoned theories, claiming that bipedalism limited solar exposure in the tropical midday sun and thus freed the species up to move into hot, open habitat; and the ‘two feet are better than four’ hypothesis, which proposes that bipedalism was more energy-efficient than quadrupedalism, at least for the primates who would become humans. '

"Whatever the reason we started walking upright, albeit in an ungainly manner, it is important to note that doing so is the single development that made us what we are: separate from the other animal species. It’s what made possible higher-brain development and, ultimately, a sense of entitlement that led to permanent homes, agriculture, the five-day work week, the Humvee and the Mall of America."