French Chicken Breast And Christianity
“It started out with a kiss, how did it end up like this?” - The Killers.
Introduction
There haven’t been too many new beginnings in my life (at least not in my adult life) but this one certainly felt like a big one. I would also say that this ‘new begining’ sometimes feels more like a ‘new in-between’. Signing a letter to the Swiss immigration authorities saying that we would be leaving the country once my 2-year postdoc contract at ETH expires certainly adds to that feeling. Discussions of what will our lives look like in the not so distant future are very frequent. Trying to answer that question leads to many questions about values, lifestyle, career, politics, and much more. Not only does this feel like a big turning point in mine and Victoria’s life but it certainly feels like the world is generating a lot of situations that need to be broken down and reflected on. Hoping to gain some clarity, and record some nice memories and lessons, I felt the urge to write down what was happening during this period. So this marks the beginning of the attempt at doing just that, from the point of view of everyday life.
Cross-border Chicken Breast: St. Louis, France
Being in Switzerland has presented many firsts for us, and today was another one. We just went on our first corss-border walk. The price of food (especially chicken breast, which is a staple in my North American diet) feels quite high here. From our first inspections, 300g of chicken breast is costing around 7 CHF (approx. 10 CAD). Cross-border shopping is especialy popular in Basel since it is nicely located ridiculously close to the border with France and Germany; Google Maps, and my preferred open source alternative, OSM+, estimate about a 35 minute walk to a grocery shop in St Louis, France. We haven’t yet figured out if we’re going to buy a car, or use the seemingly popular car share service, Mobility so we walked. In any case, I’ve gotten used to a 30 minute walk to my office in Kleinbasel.
We had done little research on what was needed (if anything at all) to cross the border and return, so we had our passports with us just in case. When we got to the border crossing, there was nobody so we just walked across. I suppose the borders also take Sundays off in Switzerland. The mood in the small Middle Eastern shop was significantly lighter than many other shops we had visited in Basel. Everyone in the store had their surgical masks at half mast and the clerk joked with me about how he eats 3kg of chicken breast a day. If there were some undertones to that joke, I completely missed them. We walked back to Basel with our 8 EUR 1kg bag of chicken breast.
Reading update: ‘Mere Christianity’
As I waited for Victoria to be ready for our walk, I cycled through some of the books I have laying around the apartment. Currently on my rotation is a ridiculous number of books (approx. 10). I am trying out the breadth-first search strategy to book reading at the moment. In several rooms of the apartment I have a stack of books (in the BFS metaphor it would more aptly be called a queue). I take the top book and read it for a bit, then put it on the bottom of the stack. Today was ‘Mere Christianity’’s turn by CS Lewis where CS Lewis explains to a modern lay audience the core beliefs of Christianity from his point of view. I’m not going to lie, since I discovered Jordan Peterson about 4-5 years ago, I have been exploring religion and Christianity qutie a bit so it has made up a good chuck of my reading topics. My first impression of this is that you can completely disagree with everything in that book and still find it incredibly valuable. The clarity and simplicity with which CS Lewis takes on the worlds’ most difficult questions is remarkable and something worth emulating, especially as paper-writing academic. I also was very pleased to see that very early in the book, he gets to a discussion of a question that had been bothering me for quite some time recently. Can we explain the entirety of our moral behaviour through the lens of evolution? Half of my university education had been in Biology and evolution which all seemed to point towards ‘yes’. I won’t go in much depth but I wanted to briefly note down and try to synthesize CS Lewis’ answer. The argument goes like this: can we not explain our morality as the set of behaviours that would most likely lead to the survival of the species? Lewis goes one step further and asks on what basis we should find the survival of the species a desirable aim? Barring complete nihilism, it would seem that, at least on the individual level, there has to be some moral reference frame that stands outside of materialism.
More next week.