Opinionator | The Stone: When Nature Looks Unnatural

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Nothing makes scientists happier than an experimental result that completely contradicts a widely accepted theory. The scientists who first invented the theory might not be tickled, but their colleagues will be overjoyed. Science progresses when a good theory is superseded by an even better theory, and the most direct route to building a better theory is to be confronted by data that simply don't fit the old one.

Nature is not always so kind, however. Fields like particle physics and cosmology sometimes include good theories that fit all the data but nevertheless seem unsatisfying to us. The Hot Big Bang model, for example, which posits that the early universe was hot, dense, and rapidly expanding, is an excellent fit to cosmological data. But it starts by assuming that the distribution of matter began in an incredibly smooth configuration, distributed nearly homogeneously through space. That state of affairs appears to be extremely unnatural. Of all the ways matter could have been distributed, the overwhelming majority are wildly lumpy, with dramatically different densities from place to place. The initial conditions of the universe seem uncanny, or "finely tuned," not at all as if they were set at random.

Good scientific theories can fit all the data but still seem unsatisfying to us.

Faced with theories that fit all the data but seem unnatural, one can certainly shrug and say, "Maybe that's just the way it is." But most physicists take the attitude that almost none of our current models are exactly correct; our best ideas are still approximations to the underlying reality. In that case, apparent fine-tunings can be taken as potential clues that might prod us into building better theories.

Last week's announcement of the observation of gravitational waves from the earliest moments of the history of the universe will — if the observation holds up — represent a resounding victory for this kind of approach. The observations seem to verify a prediction of the theory of cosmic inflation, proposed by the physicist Alan Guth in 1980 (with both important predecessors and subsequent elaborations). Guth was primarily motivated by a desire to provide a more natural explanation of why our universe looks the way it does.

Guth's proposal was that the extremely early universe was dominated for a time by a mysterious form of energy that made it expand at a super-accelerated rate, before that energy later converted into ordinary particles of matter and radiation. We don't know exactly what the source of that energy was, but physicists have a number of plausible candidates; in the meantime we simply call it "the inflaton." Unlike matter, which tends to clump together under the force of gravity, the inflaton works to stretch out space and make the distribution of energy increasingly smooth. By the time the energy in the inflaton converts into regular particles, we are left with a hot, dense, smooth early universe: exactly what is needed to get the Big Bang model off the ground. If inflation occurred, the smoothness of the early universe is the most natural thing in the world.

Inflation has become a starting point for much contemporary theorizing about the beginning of the universe. Cosmologists either work to elaborate the details of the model, or struggle to find a viable alternative. Which is why excitement was so high last week when cosmologists announced that they had found the imprint of primordial gravitational waves in the cosmic microwave background, the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. These gravitational waves are a direct prediction of inflation. Before last week, our reliable knowledge of the universe stretched back to about one second after the Big Bang; this observation pushes our reach back to one trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.

The theory of cosmic inflation was motivated by the simple desire to have a more natural explanation of the early universe.

Cosmic inflation is an extraordinary extrapolation. And it was motivated not by any direct contradiction between theory and experiment, but by the simple desire to have a more natural explanation for the conditions of the early universe. If these observations favoring inflation hold up — a big "if," of course — it will represent an enormous triumph for reasoning based on the search for naturalness in physical explanations.

The triumph, unfortunately, is not a completely clean one. If inflation occurs, the conditions we observe in the early universe are completely natural. But is the occurrence of inflation itself completely natural?

That depends. The original hope was that inflation would naturally arise as the early universe expanded and cooled, or perhaps that it would simply start somewhere (even if not everywhere) as a result of chaotically fluctuating initial conditions. But closer examination reveals that inflation itself requires a very specific starting point — conditions that, one must say, appear to be quite delicately tuned and unnatural. From this perspective, inflation by itself doesn't fully explain the early universe; it simply changes the kind of explanation we are seeking.

Fortunately — maybe — there is a complication. Soon after Guth proposed inflation, the physicists Alexander Vilenkin and Andrei Linde pointed out that the process of inflation can go on forever. Instead of the inflaton energy converting into ordinary particles all throughout the universe, it can convert in some places but not others, creating localized "Big Bangs." Elsewhere inflation continues, eventually producing other separate "universes," eventually an infinite number. From an attempt to explain conditions in the single universe that we see, cosmologists end up predicting a "multiverse."

This may sound like a very peculiar result. But in the news conference after last week's announcement, both Guth and Linde suggested that evidence for inflation boosts the case for the multiverse. And perhaps the multiverse repays the favor. The fundamental laws of physics obey the principles of quantum mechanics: Rather than predicting definite outcomes, we attach probabilities to members of an ensemble of many different experimental outcomes. If inflation begins in any part of this quantum ensemble, and that inflation goes on forever, it creates an infinite number of individual universes. So even if inflation itself seems unlikely, multiplying by the infinite number of universes it creates makes it quite plausible that we find ourselves in a post-inflationary situation.

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More From The Stone

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If you find the logic of the previous paragraph less than perfectly convincing, you are not alone. Not that it is obviously wrong; but it's not obviously right, either. The multiverse idea represents a significant shift in the philosophy underlying inflation: Rather than explaining why we live precisely in this kind of universe, eternal inflation admits there are many kinds of local universes, and expresses the hope that ones like ours are more likely than other kinds.

Perhaps they are. At this point, however, we simply don't know how to do the math. The multiverse is a provocative scenario, but the specific models that predict it are very tentative, far from the pristine rigor one expects of a mature physical theory. How many universes are there? How do we decide which sets of conditions are most "likely" within the giant ensemble of possibilities? How do we balance the intrinsic probabilities of quantum mechanics with the possible infinite proliferation of local regions? Does absolutely everything happen within the multiverse, or are only some possibilities actually realized?

The questions are daunting, but they're not necessarily hopeless. Physical theories are often vague when first proposed, and only come into focus after a great deal of effort. Inflation was originally motivated by a quest for naturalness, and its audacious extrapolations away from established physics have apparently been vindicated by new observations. The multiverse, in its modern cosmological guise, has a similar origin. It's not that a group of theoretical physicists were unwinding with some adult beverages and starting wondering out loud, "What if there were billions and billions of universes?" It's that the equations we invented to explain observational data (the smoothness of our initial conditions) ended up pointing in the direction of this provocative possibility, and it's the responsibility of scientists to take the predictions of their models as seriously as possible.

Naturalness is a subtle criterion. In the case of inflationary cosmology, the drive to find a natural theory seems to have paid off handsomely, but perhaps other seemingly unnatural features of our world must simply be accepted. Ultimately it's nature, not us, that decides what's natural.

Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, is the author of "The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World."

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Opinionator | The Great Divide: All Economics Is Local

The Great Divide is a series about inequality.

In the face of congressional inaction, the debate on raising the minimum wage is moving to the local level. As more cities and counties consider setting their own wage standards, they can learn from the policy experiments already underway.

Since the mid-1980s, states in every region of the country have raised the local minimum wage, often numerous times. Twenty-one states (and Washington, D.C.) currently have wage floors above the federal level ($7.25), and 11 of these raise them every year to account for inflation. Washington State currently has the highest, at $9.32; California's is set to increase to $10 on July 1, 2016.

More than 120 cities and counties have adopted living wage laws that set pay standards, many of them in the $12 to $15 range. These higher standards usually apply only to employees of city service contractors, like security guards, landscapers and janitors. In some cities, living wage laws cover workers at publicly owned airports or stadiums, as well as at shopping malls subsidized by local development funds. While the impact on the individual workers covered under these laws is often quite significant, their reach is rarely broad enough to affect the local low-wage labor market as a whole.

For this reason, cities and counties are now enacting higher local minimum wage policies that cover all work performed in the area. Cities as varied as Albuquerque, San Francisco, San Jose, Calif., Santa Fe, N.M., and Washington, D.C., have minimum wages ranging from $8.60 in Albuquerque to $10.74 in San Francisco. The District of Columbia, which is raising its minimum wage to $11.50 in 2016, wisely joined with two neighboring Maryland counties to create a regional standard.

Many more cities are getting ready to follow suit. Richmond, Calif., Oakland and Seattle are seriously considering setting their own minimum wage. The Richmond City Council just voted an increase that will go to $12.30 by 2017. Advocates in Oakland are aiming for $12.25. Seattle is discussing $15. Prodded by its new mayor, New York City is seeking the right to set its own minimum wage rate, instead of using New York State's.

With the national debate stuck in the same old rut, states and cities have again become laboratories of democracy. Are they on the right path? For the last 15 years we have been doing research on just this question.

One city we have studied in detail, San Francisco, has passed a dozen labor standards laws since the late 1990s. After adding the effects of other local laws mandating employers to pay for sick leave and health spending, the minimum compensation standard at larger firms in San Francisco reaches $13. Our studies show that the impact of these laws on workers' wages (and access to health care) is strong and positive and that none of the dire predictions of employment loss have come to pass. Research at the University of New Mexico on Santa Fe's floor (now $10.66) found similar results.

These are not isolated cases. Research on the effects of differing minimum wage rates across state borders confirms the results of the city studies. But how can minimum wage increases not have negative effects on employment? After all, according to basic economic theory, an increase in the price of labor should reduce employer demand for labor.

That's not the whole story, though. A full analysis must include the variety of other ways labor costs might be absorbed, including savings from reduced worker turnover and improved efficiency, as well as higher prices and lower profits. Modern economics therefore regards the employment effect of a minimum-wage increase as a question that is not decided by theory, but by empirical testing.

Our research and that of other scholars illuminates how businesses actually absorb minimum wages at low-wage industries. Higher standards have an immediate effect in reducing employee turnover, leading to significant cost savings. Minimum wage increases do lead to small price increases, mainly in restaurants, which are intensive users of low-paid workers. How much? A 10 percent minimum wage increase adds 0.7 cents on the dollar to restaurant prices. Price increases in most other sectors, like retail, are too small to be visible, partly because retail pays more than restaurants.

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Even if Congress finally acts to raise the federal minimum wage, higher standards at the state and local level still make sense. It will surprise no one that living costs are generally higher in cities than in rural areas. They often vary among cities in the same state. The New York City metro area is 26 percent more expensive than upstate Utica; costs in the San Jose metro area are 30 percent higher than in El Centro, in southeastern California. Policy makers need to take these variations into account. This is not just a theoretical idea. It has long been policy in Japan. Minimum wages in Tokyo and Osaka are as much as 30 percent higher than they are in regions with the lowest cost of living.

Here's another way to think about it. One measure of employers' latitude to absorb higher wages compares the minimum wage to the median wage. From the 1960s into the 1970s, the minimum-median ratio in the United States varied between 41 and 55 percent. Since the mid-1980s, it has been much lower, varying between 33 and 39 percent. A minimum wage increase to $10.10 by 2016, as President Obama proposed earlier this year, would restore the national ratio to 50 percent. By comparison, San Francisco's $10.74 minimum wage is 40 percent of the city's median wage. In other words, although some of the proposed rates may seem high by national standards, they look more reasonable when measured against local wage levels.

Local minimum wages also represent a response to growing inequality within cities, in too many of which a growing army of low-paid workers — maids, gardeners, janitors, restaurant and security workers — provide personal services to an increasingly well-heeled minority.

The record is clear. Employers can afford to pay higher wages that raise families out of poverty and bear a closer relation to local living costs. And there's a moral value, too. An increase in the local minimum wage restores, on a very personal level, some of our notion of fairness.

Michael Reich is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment; Ken Jacobs is the chairman of the Center for Labor Research and Education at Berkeley; together with Miranda Dietz, they are the authors of "When Mandates Work: Raising Living Standards at the Local Level."

A version of this article appears in print on 03/23/2014, on page SR4 of the National edition with the headline: All Economics Is Local.

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Room for Debate: Turkey and Twitter

Introduction

Dado Ruvic/Reuters

On Thursday night, the Turkish government blocked Twitter because of security concerns, drawing protests the next day.

What does this attempt to dismantle social media mean for Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkey, his so-called Muslim democracy?

Read the Discussion »

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Opinionator: A Wedding in Intensive Care

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

BOSTON — There wasn't going to be a happy ending. The patient had metastatic cancer and had just gone through her third unsuccessful regimen of chemotherapy. Now it seemed that everywhere we looked, we found disease. An X-ray of her belly revealed an obstruction in her intestines. A CT scan of her chest uncovered a pulmonary embolism. Her labs demonstrated that she had almost no white blood cells left with which to defend herself.

When she arrived in the intensive care unit, she was delirious. I asked her the usual questions, about her medical history, and whether she wanted us to do CPR if her heart were to stop beating, but she didn't answer. I was just setting the clipboard aside when she raised a hand and told me, in a moment of lucidity: "Doc, do everything you can. I need to make it to my daughter's wedding."

She was in a lot of pain. She had a tube down her nose draining her stomach.

"When is the wedding?" I asked.

"Next summer."

I blinked. I blinked again. She didn't — she was looking right at me. At this point, I doubted she'd make it through the hospitalization, let alone eight more months. I didn't know what I could say. I put the stethoscope against her chest and retreated into silence.

I met Stefanie, her daughter, the next morning. She was 24, but was only 8 when her mother's cancer was first diagnosed. Stefanie's mother had Muir-Torre syndrome, a condition that gave her a predilection for malignancies. So Stefanie had shared her home with cancer for many years, and had always seen her mother fight.

But she knew that this time was different. The oncology fellow who had been treating her mother as an outpatient was the one to tell her that her mother was dying. Stefanie broke down, but understood there was no use denying it. The dream of a family wedding under the summer sun turned sour.

Stefanie called her fiancé that morning. Crying, she told him the news. But he flipped the fatalistic script. Without hesitation he told her, "I want her to be there, too," and he proposed not only to have the wedding done sooner, but to have it done right there in the I.C.U.

Our team was used to dealing with all kinds of crises: Handling a last-minute wedding was not one of them. While having more than one opinion on a medical team regarding how best to manage a patient is fairly routine, we received no push back from anyone as we started to make arrangements for the wedding. Soon the whole medical team was involved. We sent a letter to the court to expedite the marriage certificate. A pastor and harp player were booked. The hospital cafeteria baked a chocolate cake, and the nurses brought in flowers. In just a few days, we were ready.

My job was to make sure our patient's pain was controlled while also avoiding the confusion that is a side effect of narcotic medications. But almost miraculously, she didn't need pain medications for hours and was fully aware of everything that was going on. Looking at the bride and groom from her hospital bed, she seemed more comfortable than I had seen her before. The whole day had an unreal feel to it; everything felt like it slowed down. The sun shone through the windows and glistened on the bags of fluid. For once in the hospital, there were tears but no pain. It felt as if, after all these years of chasing our patient down, even the cancer took a break.

The next morning, the family decided to transition to hospice. No intubation, no CPR — nothing that would prolong life. It was all about trying to make the patient comfortable. (And yet, four months later, she is still alive, and doing as well as can be hoped in hospice.)

In today's outcome-driven, efficiency-obsessed medical world, it's easy to forget that healing patients isn't just about treating diseases and relieving symptoms. There are things doctors and nurses can do, meaningful interventions — like helping patients fulfill final goals or spend quality time with their families — that cannot be documented in a discharge summary or be converted into a blip on a screen.

As a physician, I never liked the word "miracle." I preferred to think in terms of "medical outliers." And yet that day of the wedding did feel like a miracle. Physicians often share their patients' sorrow, but rarely their joys. No, we had not discovered the cure to cancer, but we felt that we had achieved something powerful — freeing, if only temporarily, our patient from her disease.

One of the nurses, smiling through her tears, spoke to me after it was all over. "It was magical," she said. "None of the patient alarms went off."

---

Haider Javed Warraich is a resident in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the author of the novel "Auras of the Jinn."

A version of this article appears in print on 03/20/2014, on page A27 of the NewYork edition with the headline: A Wedding in Intensive Care.

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Room for Debate: Drywall Drama

It Can Happen To You

Carrie Schoenfeld, writer

My husband and I had heard the nightmare stories, but we thought it would be different with us. We were mistaken.

Contractors Have Concerns, Too

Timothy Dahl, builder, entrepreneur

Too often the contractors are cast as villains. In a world where "the customer is always right," the entitlement of many clients has spiraled out of control.

The Narcissism of Home Improvement

Joseph Burgo, psychotherapist

The relationship between homeowners and their contractor often resembles an overly idealistic marriage that starts off well and founders in the face of reality.

Happy Worker, Happy Renovation

Fernando Lozano, economist

A day labor center can negotiate on behalf of workers and its reputation can put potential employers at ease.

Keep an Experienced Renovator on Speed Dial

Alison Rogers, real estate broker

The mantra of renovations is "plan, plan, plan" — or as carpenters put it, "measure twice, cut once."

TV Ups the Ante of a (Sometimes) Tedious Pursuit

Daniel McGinn, author, "House Lust"

As with cooking shows, home improvement television is hyper-produced and is usually more about aspiration than actuality.

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Opinionator | Draft: Weighing My Words

Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

As a child, I had a relatively unusual speech impediment: I couldn't form the sounds sh, j or ch properly, and this made a large swath of words difficult to pronounce. The word just would come out sounding like chust or shust; double-whammy words like church never emerged cleanly even if I squared myself and took a good run at them; if I said that I was a Jew someone in earshot might call out "gesundheit!" (everybody's a comedian), and I dreaded having to speak my own name. An adult's uncomprehending "Can you say that again?" was a staple of my life.

Because I found this mortifying, I learned early to plan each word in advance. Given enough determination, almost any message could be recast in less perilous, albeit slightly formal vocabulary — vocabulary that might have seemed a bit peculiar coming from a child, but served me well. I never offered a suggestion or a choice, only an alternative; I never judged a playground contest, only decided or considered or even weighed it; I'd no sooner have used a word like challenge in front of my peers than I'd have ordered chimichangas. When called on in class, I hesitated on the verge, surveying options: a dozen alternate paths for every sentence, an infinitely proliferating map of every possible route to a given meaning. What might have sounded to others like a thoughtful pause was, in reality, the interval in which I hectically planned my route — turning the syntax of a sentence on its head if necessary in order to land nimbly without touching those three dreaded sounds.

If, as often happened, there was no getting around a verbally hazardous name or title, I learned to hesitate long enough — pretending to have momentarily forgotten a word — to induce other people to say it for me. Recently, while explaining to a friend the lengths I used to go to in order to avoid certain sounds, I raised the topic of that movie about the king of England who had to overcome his stutter … (here I trailed off; my friend helpfully offered the movie's title) …. and after making reference to that Australian actor who plays the tutor, I once more paused … (my friend gladly supplied the actor's name). Only then did I alert her to the fact that I'd choreographed my way out of having to say either "The King's Speech" or that sonic double-gainer, Geoffrey Rush.

(Incidentally, no unnecessary words were harmed in the making of the prior paragraph. Hence the use of topic instead of subject … king of England rather than English king … and I'd choreographed my way out of rather than she'd enabled me to avoid. You see how it works.)

Out loud, language was a minefield, hazards looming all around. But on the blank page! The blank page was a different element altogether — spacious, bright, astonishingly unimpeded. Every word at my disposal, crisp and clean and comprehensible. When I wrote, my self-consciousness vanished. I could, if so inclined, tell the world Joshua changed his judgment. I could order a lifetime's worth of fictional chimichangas, swear without anyone thinking I was saying chit. On the page I could speak my own name clearly.

Only later, years after the improvement of both my speech and my self-confidence allowed me to drop my verbal hyper-vigilance, did it occur to me to wonder about the literary watermark left by speech impediments. Sure enough, the literary map is dotted with fellow sufferers. Lewis Carroll and Somerset Maugham had stutters, as did Henry James, whose affliction was immortalized by Edith Wharton in "A Backward Glance." In his memoir "Self-Consciousness," John Updike discusses his own stutter ("a kind of windowpane suddenly inserted in front of my face while I was talking … an obdurate barrier thrust into my throat"); and Margaret Drabble's description of the verbal circumlocutions necessary to avoid words that trigger her stammer will leave any veteran of a speech impediment nodding in recognition.

While one can't know for sure, it seems to me that the flexibility necessary to overcome such verbal adversity must occasionally leave its signature on a writer's style. Drabble has speculated that Henry James's stammer might have helped shape his literary voice, and in a 2004 article in The Telegraph titled "The Literary Stammer," Robert Douglas-Fairhurst discusses James's "snaking sentences, full of measured subclauses and self-qualifications, which may or may not have emerged from the way that stammerers learn to avoid words likely to snag their voices, nimbly sidestepping danger with an alternative word, a new direction." A friend of mine has even suggested, though there's no way to be certain, that the famously playful portmanteau words of "Jabberwocky" might have their origin in Lewis Carroll's need to avoid troublesome sounds.

Certainly it's always seemed to me that, as literary boot camps go, navigating a mild speech impediment has its merits. Not only can the page be a refuge from the harassments of speech, but needing to avoid certain words brings home firmly that most fundamental of writerly lessons: there is always, always an alternate way to get your meaning across. There are, in fact, 50 or 500 ways to say any given thing.

And while treating a segment of one's vocabulary as verboten might not be a sustainable way to write a novel, it's not necessarily a bad form of writerly calisthenics. Not when one is operating in a field where one lives or dies by one's ability to throw a sentence in the air, rotate it in three dimensions — then make it dance on the head of a pin, do a quadruple flip, and stick the landing.

I was 17 when, on one intimidating and lovely day, my own verbal calisthenics ended decisively. I needed to deliver a speech in front of a large audience — and no matter how I tried to divert my vocabulary or my thoughts as I prepared for the event, what I really wanted to talk about was changes. I wrote and rewrote sentence after sentence, only to arrive, exasperated and bored with myself, at the conclusion that no synonym would do — and that enough was enough. Hang the self-consciousness, from then on I was simply going to use the best words — the deliciously, luxuriously right words — for what I needed to say.

But although my verbal hyper-vigilance ended that day at the podium — and although I now enjoy public speaking, and revert to my old speech pattern only when fatigue or a poor phone connection prompts me to make extra effort to pronounce each word distinctly — the gratitude I feel for the luminous, silent and utterly barrier-free world of writing has never vanished.

In high school, our swim coach would have us train wearing drag suits: loose second suits on top of the regular team suits we wore. The intent was to slow us swimmers down, make us have to work just a bit harder on every stroke. Come the day of the race, when we'd pop into the pool wearing only our team suits, the experience never failed to shock. The water felt colder, the submerged lights somehow brighter, the entire underwater world looser and astonishingly unimpeded. A person could fly in that water — and we did, we took off through the chill, clear element like dolphins. It was the same sensation I had as a child, and continue to have, when I turn to the blank page: perfect, sweet freedom.

Rachel Kadish is the author of the novels "From a Sealed Room" and "Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story." Her novella "I Was Here" is currently being released in serial form on the Rooster app for iPhone (www.readrooster.com).

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Room for Debate: Lowering the Deadly Cost of Drug Abuse

As even quaint New England towns deal with desperate residents chasing their next hit of heroin, pain killers or other hard drugs, and with overdose deaths increasing, officials trying to stem drug abuse have begun to focus more on treatment, rather than punishment.

With more people seeing law enforcement's war on drugs as a failure, what are the best, or boldest, ways that experts around the world have proposed to take care of the problem?

Read the Discussion »

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Opinionator | The Stone: What Would Plato Tweet?

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

It began when a writer friend asked me what my Klout score was. We were sitting at the sushi bar of a Japanese restaurant, the master chef assembling edible origami of torched fish and foam. My husband and I used to patronize this neighborhood place quite a lot, until a restaurant critic ruined it for us by his unrestrained rave, so that now you have to make reservations months in advance. But my friend had magically procured us two seats just like that, and when I asked him for the secret of his influence he responded by asking me about my Klout score.

I didn't know what a Klout score was, but I was pretty sure I didn't have one. And yes, under his raised-eyebrow questioning, it was revealed that since I didn't use Facebook or Twitter or any of the other social media by which a website called Klout calculates your online influence, my score was probably low to nonexistent.

Perhaps studying the ancient Greeks might give me perspective on today's social-media obsession.

On either side of us, diners were pointing their cellphones at their plates, taking pictures to be posted on their Facebook pages or Instagram accounts. I knew that's what they were doing. People have taken to putting themselves out there in all kinds of ways, producing — in words, pictures, videos — the shared stories of their lives as they are transpiring. They disseminate their thoughts and deeds, large and small (sometimes very small), in what can seem like a perpetual plea for attention. I wasn't that out of touch that I didn't know about the large cultural changes that had overtaken our society while my attention was directed elsewhere.

The elsewhere was ancient Greece. For the past few years I'd been obsessed with trying to figure out what lay behind the spectacular achievements that had occurred there. In a mere couple of centuries, Greek speakers went from anomie and illiteracy, lacking even an alphabet, to Aeschylus and Aristotle. They invented not only the discipline of philosophy, but also science, mathematics, the study of history (as opposed to mere chronicles) and that special form of government they called democracy — literally rule of the people (though it goes without saying that "the people" didn't include women and slaves). They also produced timeless art, architecture, poetry and drama. What lay behind the explosive ambition and achievement? I'd always planned eventually to catch up on the changes that were going on all around me — once I'd gotten the ancient Greeks out of my system.

Only now did it occur to me that I might be able to arrive at some contemporary perspective precisely because I hadn't gotten the Greeks out of my system. Parallels between their extraordinary time and our extraordinary time were suddenly making themselves felt.

For starters, the Klout on which my friend prided himself struck me as markedly similar to what the Greeks had called kleos. The word comes from the old Homeric word for "I hear," and it meant a kind of auditory renown. Vulgarly speaking, it was fame. But it also could mean the glorious deed that merited the fame, as well as the poem that sang of the deed and so produced the fame. The medium, the message, and the impact: all merged into one shining concept.

Kleos lay very near the core of the Greek value system. Their value system was at least partly motivated, as perhaps all value systems are partly motivated, by the human need to feel as if our lives matter. A little perspective, which the Greeks certainly had, reveals what brief and feeble things our lives are. As the old Jewish joke has it, the food here is terrible — and such small portions! What can we do to give our lives a moreness that will help withstand the eons of time that will soon cover us over, blotting out the fact that we ever existed at all? Really, why did we bother to show up for our existence in the first place? The Greek speakers were as obsessed with this question as we are.

Like us, the Greeks wanted to make their lives matter. And like a Twitter user, they did so by courting the attention of other mortals.

And like so many of us now, they approached this question secularly. Despite their culture's being saturated with religious rituals, they didn't turn to their notoriously unreliable immortals for assurance that they mattered. They didn't really want immortal attention. Something terrible usually happened when they attracted a divine eye. That's what all those rituals were trying to prevent. Rather, what they wanted was the attention of other mortals. All that we can do to enlarge our lives, they concluded, is to strive to make of them things worth the telling, the stuff of stories that will make an impact on other mortal minds, so that, being replicated there, our lives will take on moreness. The more outstanding you were, the more mental replication of you there would be, and the more replication, the more you mattered.

Not everybody back then was approaching this question of mattering in mortal terms. Contemporaneous with the Greeks, and right across the Mediterranean from them, was a still obscure tribe that called themselves the Ivrim, the Hebrews, apparently from their word for "over," since they were over on the other side of the Jordan. And over there they worked out their notion of a covenantal relationship with one of their tribal gods whom they eventually elevated to the position of the one and only God, the Master of the Universe, providing the foundation for both the physical world without and the moral world within. From his position of remotest transcendence, this god nevertheless maintains a rapt interest in human concerns, harboring many intentions directed at us, his creations, who embody nothing less than his reasons for going to the trouble of creating the world ex nihilo. He takes us (almost) as seriously as we take us. Having your life replicated in his all-seeing, all-judging mind, terrifying as the thought might be, would certainly confer a significant quantity of moreness.

And then there was a third approach to the problem of mattering, which also emerged in ancient Greece. It, too, was secular, approaching the problem in strictly mortal terms. I'm speaking about Greek philosophy, which was Greek enough to buy into the kleos-like assumption that none of us are born into mattering but rather have to achieve it ("the unexamined life is not worth living") and that the achievement does indeed demand outsize ambition and effort, requiring you to make of yourself something extraordinary. But Greek philosophy also represented a departure from its own culture. Mattering wasn't acquired by gathering attention of any kind, mortal or immortal. Acquiring mattering was something people had to do for themselves, cultivating such virtuous qualities of character as justice and wisdom. They had to put their own souls in order. This demands hard work, since simply to understand the nature of justice and wisdom, which is the first order of business, taxes our limits, not to speak of then acting on our conclusions. And the effort may not win us any kleos. Socrates got himself a cupful of hemlock. He drank it calmly, unperturbed by his low ratings.

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The divergent Greek and Hebrew approaches went into the mix that is Western culture, often clashing but sometimes also tempering one another. Over the centuries, philosophy, perhaps aided by religion, learned to abandon entirely the flawed Greek presumption that only extraordinary lives matter. This was progress of the philosophical variety, subtler than the dazzling triumphs of science, but nevertheless real. Philosophy has laboriously put forth arguments that have ever widened the sphere of mattering. It was natural for the Greeks to exclude their women and slaves, not to mention non-Greeks, whom they dubbed barbarians. Such exclusions are unthinkable to us now. Being inertial creatures, we required rigorous and oft-repeated arguments that spearheaded social movements that resulted, at long last, in the once quixotic declaration of human rights. We've come a long way from the kleos of Greeks, with its unexamined presumption that mattering is inequitably distributed among us, with the multireplicated among us mattering more.

Only sometimes it feels as if we haven't. Our need to feel as if our lives matter is, as always, unabating. But the variations on the theistic approach no longer satisfy on the scale they once did, while cultivating justice and wisdom is as difficult as it has always been. Our new technologies have stepped in just when we most need them. Kleos — or Klout — is only a tweet away.

It's stunning that our culture has, with the dwindling of theism, returned to the answer to the problem of mattering that Socrates and Plato judged woefully inadequate. Perhaps their opposition is even more valid today. How satisfying, in the end, is a culture of social-media obsession? The multireplication so readily available is as short-lived and insubstantial as the many instances of our lives they replicate. If the inadequacies of kleos were what initially precipitated the emergence of philosophy, then maybe it's time for philosophy to take on Klout. It has the resources. It's far more developed now than in the day when Socrates wandered the agora trying to prick holes in people's kleos-inflated attitudes. It can start by demonstrating, just as clearly and forcefully as it knows how, that we all matter.

Mattering — none of us more than the other — is our birthright, and we should all be treated accordingly, granted the resources that allow for our flourishing. Appreciating this ethical truth might help calm the frenzy surrounding our own personal mattering, allowing us to direct more energy toward cultivating justice and wisdom. In fact, fully appreciating this ethical truth, in all its implications for both thought and deed, would itself constitute a significant step toward the cultivation of justice and wisdom.

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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is the author, most recently, of "Plato at the Googleplex: Why Philosophy Won't Go Away."

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Room for Debate: Are Infrastructure Needs Truly Urgent?

After a gas explosion in East Harlem killed at least eight people on Wednesday, New Yorkers were shocked to learn that some gas mains in the area, and probably elsewhere, are 127 years old. While it's unclear what caused the blast or whether the main was involved, news that such vital equipment dates to the first Cleveland administration has raised alarm about the state of United States infrastructure and renewed concern that more needs to be done.

Does the nation need to allocate resources more urgently to repairing and replacing transmission lines, roads, bridges, etc., or are these concerns exaggerated?

Read the Discussion »

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Opinionator | The Stone: Deconstructing God

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

This is the third in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The Stone. The interviewee for this installment is John D. Caputo, a professor of religion and humanities at Syracuse University and the author of "The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion."

Gary Gutting: You approach religion through Jacques Derrida's notion of deconstruction, which involves questioning and undermining the sorts of sharp distinctions traditionally so important for philosophy. What, then, do you think of the distinction between theism, atheism and agnosticism?

John Caputo: I would begin with a plea not to force deconstruction into one of these boxes. I consider these competing views as beliefs, creedal positions, that are inside our head by virtue of an accident of birth. There are the people who "believe" things from the religious traditions they've inherited; there are the people who deny them (the atheism you get is pegged to the god under denial); and there are the people who say, "Who could possibly know anything about all of that?" To that I oppose an underlying form of life, not the beliefs inside our head but the desires inside our heart, an underlying faith, a desire beyond desire, a hope against hope, something which these inherited beliefs contain without being able to contain.

If you cease to 'believe' in a particular religious creed, you have merely changed your mind. But if you lose 'faith,' a way of life, everything is lost.

If you cease to "believe" in a particular religious creed, like Calvinism or Catholicism, you have changed your mind and adopted a new position, for which you will require new propositions. Imagine a debate in which a theist and an atheist actually convince each other. Then they trade positions and their lives go on. But if you lose "faith," in the sense this word is used in deconstruction, everything is lost. You have lost your faith in life, lost hope in the future, lost heart, and you cannot go on.

G.G.: I'm having some trouble with your use of "deconstruction." On the one hand, it seems to be a matter of undermining sharp distinctions, like that between atheism and theism. On the other hand, your own analysis seems to introduce a sharp distinction between beliefs and ways of life — even though beliefs are surely part of religious ways of life.

J.C.: After making a distinction in deconstruction, the first thing to do is to deconstruct it, to show that it leaks, that its terms are porous and intersecting, one side bleeding into the other, these leaks being the most interesting thing of all about the distinction. I am distinguishing particular beliefs from an underlying faith and hope in life itself, which takes different forms in different places and traditions, by which the particular traditions are both inhabited and disturbed.

I agree they are both forms of life, but on different levels or strata. The particular beliefs are more local, more stabilized, more codified, while this underlying faith and hope in life is more restless, open-ended, disturbing, inchoate, unpredictable, destabilizing, less confinable.

G.G.: O.K., I guess you might say that all thinking involves making distinctions, but deconstructive thinking always turns on itself, using further distinctions to show how any given distinction is misleading. But using this sort of language leads to paradoxical claims as, for example, when you say, as you just did, that beliefs contain a faith that they can't contain. Paradox is fine as long as we have some way of understanding that it's not an outright contradiction. So why isn't it a contradiction to say that there's a faith that beliefs both contain and can't contain?

J.C.: The traditions contain (in the sense of "possess") these events, but they cannot contain (in the sense of "confine" or "limit") them, hold them captive by building a wall of doctrine, administrative rule, orthodoxy, propositional rectitude around them.

G.G.: So the distinction that saves you from contradiction is this: Beliefs contain faith in the sense that, in the world, beliefs are where we find faith concretely expressed; but any given faith can be expressed by quite different beliefs in quite different historical contexts. In this sense, the faith is not contained by the beliefs. That makes sense.

Presumably, then, deconstructive theology is the effort to isolate this "common core" of faith that's found in different historical periods — or maybe even the differing beliefs of different contemporary churches.

J.C.: No! I am not resurrecting the old comparative-religion thesis that there is an underlying transcendental form or essence or universal that we can cull from differing empirical religious beliefs, that can be approached only asymptotically by empirical cases. I am saying that the inherited religious traditions contain something deeper, which is why they are important. I don't marginalize religious traditions; they are our indispensable inheritance. Without them, human experience would be impoverished, its horizon narrowed. We would be deprived of their resources, not know the name of Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, the startling notion of the "kingdom of God," the idea of the messianic and so on.

As a philosopher I am, of course, interested in what happens, but always in terms of what is going on in what happens. The particular religious traditions are what happen, and they are precious, but my interest lies in what is going on in these traditions, in the memory of Jesus, say. But different traditions contain different desires, promises, memories, dreams, futures, a different sense of time and space. Nothing says that underneath they are all the same.

G.G.: That doesn't seem to me what typically goes on in deconstructive theology. The deconstructive analysis of any religious concept — the Christian Trinity, the Muslim oneness of God, Buddhist nirvana — always turns out to be the same: an endless play of mutually undermining differences.

J.C.: There is no such thing as deconstructive theology, in the singular, or "religion," in the singular. There are only deconstructive versions of concrete religious traditions, inflections, repetitions, rereadings, reinventions, which open them up to a future for which they are not prepared, to dangerous memories of a past they try not to recall, since their tendency is to consolidate and to stabilize. Accordingly, you would always be able to detect the genealogy, reconstruct the line of descent, figure out the pedigree of a deconstructive theology. It would always bear the mark of the tradition it inflects.

A lot of the "Derrida and theology" work, for example, has been following the wrong scent, looking for links between Derrida's ideas and Christian negative theology, while missing his irregular and heretical messianic Judaism. I like to joke that Derrida is a slightly atheistic quasi-Jewish Augustinian, but I am also serious.

Derrida said he 'rightly passes for an atheist,' but if we stop there we miss everything interesting and important about his thinking about religion.

G.G.: I can see that there are influences of Judaism, Augustinian Christianity and enlightenment atheism in Derrida. But isn't this just a matter of his detaching certain religious ideas from their theistic core? He talks of a messiah — but one that never comes; he's interested in the idea of confessing your sins — but there's no one to forgive them. After all the deconstructive talk, the law of noncontradiction still holds: Derrida is either an atheist or he isn't. It seems that the only reasonable answer is that he's an atheist.

J.C.: In the middle of his book on Augustine, Derrida said he "rightly passes for an atheist," shying away from a more definitive "I am an atheist." By the standards of the local rabbi, that's correct, that's the position to attribute to him, that's a correct proposition. But if we stop there we miss everything interesting and important about what he is saying for religion and for understanding deconstruction.

G.G.: So if I insist on expressing religious faith in propositions (assertions that are either true or false), then, yes, Derrida's an atheist. But according to you, the propositions that express faith aren't what's interesting or important about religion.

I agree that there's much more to religion than what's stated in creeds. There are rituals, ascetic practices, moral codes, poetry and symbols. But for most people, believing that God exists entails believing such propositions as that there's someone who guarantees that justice will eventually prevail, that no suffering is without meaning, that there is a life after death where we can find eternal happiness.

J.C.: We have to appreciate the deep distrust that Derrida has for this word "atheism." This kind of normalizing category has only a preliminary value — it finds a place to put him in a taxonomy of "positions" — but it obscures everything that is valuable here. This word is too powerful for him, too violent. That is why in another place he said calling him an atheist is "absolutely ridiculous." His "atheism" is not unlike that of Paul Tillich, when Tillich said that to the assertion that God is a Supreme Being the proper theological response is atheism, but that is the beginning of theology for Tillich, not the end.

Derrida is not launching a secularist attack on religion. Deconstruction has nothing to do with the violence of the "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Derrida approaches the mystics, the Scriptures, Augustine with respect — they are always ahead of him, he says — and he always has something to learn from them. He is not trying to knock down one position ("theism") with the opposing position ("atheism"). He does not participate in these wars.

G.G.: You keep saying what Derrida doesn't do. Is there any positive content to his view of religion or is it all just "negative theology"? Is he in any sense "making a case" for religion? Can reading Derrida lead to religious belief?

J.C.: In its most condensed formulation, deconstruction is affirmation, a "yes, yes, come" to the future and also to the past, since the authentic past is also ahead of us. It leads to, it is led by, a "yes" to the transforming surprise, to the promise of what is to come in whatever we have inherited — in politics, art, science, law, reason and so on. The bottom line is "yes, come."

Derrida is reading, rereading, reinventing inherited texts and traditions, releasing the future they "harbor," which means both to keep safe but also conceal, all in the name of what Augustine calls "doing the truth." He is interested in all the things found in the Scriptures and revelation, the narratives, the images, the angels — not in order to mine them for their "rational content," to distill them into proofs and propositions, but to allow them to be heard and reopened by philosophy. Deconstruction is a way to read something meticulously, feeling about for its tensions, releasing what it itself may not want to disclose, remembering something it may not want to recall — it is not a drive-by shooting.

G.G.: But why call this "religion"?

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J.C.: Derrida calls this a "religion without religion." Other people speak of the "post-secular," or of a theology "after the death of God," which requires first passing through this death. In Derrida's delicate logic of "without," a trope also found in the mystics, a thing is crossed out without becoming illegible; we can still see it through the cross marks. So this religion comes without the religion you just described — it is not nearly as safe, reassuring, heartwarming, triumphant over death, sure about justice, so absolutely fabulous at soothing hearts, as Jacques Lacan says, with an explanation for everything. His religion is risky business, no guarantees.

G.G.: If Derrida doubts or denies that there's someone who guarantees such things, isn't it only honest to say that he is an agnostic or an atheist? For most people, God is precisely the one who guarantees that the things we most fear won't happen. You've mentioned Derrida's interest in Augustine. Wouldn't Augustine — and virtually all the Christian tradition — denounce any suggestion that God's promises might not be utterly reliable?

J.C.: Maybe it disturbs what "most people" think religion is — assuming they are thinking about it — but maybe a lot of these people wake up in the middle of the night feeling the same disturbance, disturbed by a more religionless religion going on in the religion meant to give them comfort. Even for people who are content with the contents of the traditions they inherit, deconstruction is a life-giving force, forcing them to reinvent what has been inherited and to give it a future. But religion for Derrida is not a way to link up with saving supernatural powers; it is a mode of being-in-the-world, of being faithful to the promise of the world.

The comparison with Augustine is telling. Unlike Augustine, he does not think a thing has to last forever to be worthy of our unconditional love. Still, he says he has been asking himself all his life Augustine's question, "What do I love when I love my God?" But where Augustine thinks that there is a supernaturally revealed answer to this question, Derrida does not. He describes himself as a man of prayer, but where Augustine thinks he knows to whom he is praying, Derrida does not. When I asked him this question once he responded, "If I knew that, I would know everything" — he would be omniscient, God!

This not-knowing does not defeat his religion or his prayer. It is constitutive of them, constituting a faith that cannot be kept safe from doubt, a hope that cannot be kept safe from despair. We live in the distance between these pairs.

G.G.: But if deconstruction leads us to give up Augustine's way of thinking about God and even his belief in revealed truth, shouldn't we admit that it has seriously watered down the content of Christianity, reduced the distance between it and agnosticism or atheism? Faith that is not confident and hope that is not sure are not what the martyrs died for.

J.C.: In this view, what martyrs die for is an underlying faith, which is why, by an accident of birth or a conversion, they could have been martyrs for the other side. Mother Teresa expressed some doubts about her beliefs, but not about an underlying faith in her work. Deconstruction is a plea to rethink what we mean by religion and to locate a more unnerving religion going on in our more comforting religion.

Deconstruction is faith and hope. In what? In the promises that are harbored in inherited names like "justice" and "democracy" — or "God." Human history is full of such names and they all have their martyrs. That is why the difference between Derrida and Augustine cannot be squashed into the distinction between "theism" and "atheism" or — deciding to call it a draw — "agnosticism." It operates on a fundamentally different level. Deconstruction dares to think "religion" in a new way, in what Derrida calls a "new Enlightenment," daring to rethink what the Enlightenment boxed off as "faith" and "reason."

But deconstruction is not destruction. After all, the bottom line of deconstruction, "yes, come," is pretty much the last line of the New Testament: "Amen. Come, Lord Jesus."

This interview was conducted by email and edited. Previous interviews in this series were with Alvin Plantinga and Louise Antony.

Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, "Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960″ and writes regularly for The Stone.

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