Darwin’s Cosmology

Sunday

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Today is Darwin’s birthday, and therefore an appropriate time to celebrate Darwin by a mediation upon his work. No one has influenced me more than Darwin, and I always find the study of his works to be intellectually rewarding. I also read (and listen to) quite a number of books about Darwin. Recently I listened to Darwin, Darwinism, and the Modern World, 14 lectures by Dr. Chandak Sengoopta. While I enjoyed the lectures, I sharply differed from many of Dr. Sengoopta’s interpretations of Darwin’s thought. One theme that Dr. Sengoopta returned to several times was a denial that Darwin had anything to say about the ultimate origins of life. Each time that Dr. Sengoopta made this point I found myself grow more and more irritated.

To say that Darwin had nothing to say about the ultimate origins of life may be technically correct in a narrow sense, but I do not think that it is an accurate expression of Darwin’s vision of life, which was sweeping and comprehensive. While it may be a little much to say that Darwin ever entertained ideas that could accurately be called “Darwin’s cosmology,” it is obvious in reading Darwin’s notebooks, in which he recorded thoughts that never made it into his published books, his mind ranged far and wide. It is almost as though, once Darwin made the conceptual breakthrough of natural selection he had discovered a new world.

In characterizing Darwin’s thought in this way I am immediately reminded of a famous letter that Janos Bolyai wrote to his father after having independently arrived at the idea of non-Euclidean geometry:

“…I have discovered such wonderful things that I was amazed, and it would be an everlasting piece of bad fortune if they were lost. When you, my dear Father, see them, you will understand; at present I can say nothing except this: that out of nothing I have created a strange new universe. All that I have sent you previously is like a house of cards in comparison with a tower. I am no less convinced that these discoveries will bring me honor than I would be if they were complete.”

Darwin, too, discovered wonderful things and created the strange new universe of evolutionary biology, though it came on him rather slowly — not in a youthful moment that could be recorded to a letter in his father, and not in a fit of fever, as the idea of natural selection came to Wallace — as the result of many years of ruminating on his observations. But the slowness with which Darwin’s mind worked was repaid with thoroughness. Even though Darwin was the first evolutionist in the modern sense of the term, he must also be accounted among the most complete of all evolutionary thinkers, having spent decades thinking through his idea with a Platonic will to follow the argument wherever it leads.

Given that Darwin himself thought that making the idea of natural selection public was like “confessing to a murder,” the fragments of Darwin’s cosmology must be sought in his latter and notebooks as much as in his published works. As for the origins of life, narrowly considered, apart from the cosmological implications of life, Darwin openly speculated on a purely naturalistic origin of life in a letter to Joseph Hooker:

“It is often said that all the conditions for the first production of a living organism are now present, which could ever have been present. But if (and oh what a big if) we could conceive in some warm little pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts, — light, heat, electricity &c. present, that a protein compound was chemically formed, ready to undergo still more complex changes, at the present day such matter would be instantly devoured, or absorbed, which would not have been the case before living creatures were formed.”

Darwin’s 1871 letter to Joseph Hooker

What has widely come to be known as “Darwin’s warm little pond” sounds like nothing so much as the famous Stanley L. Miller electrical discharge experiment.

Darwin revealed his consistent naturalism in his rejection of teleology in a letter to Julia Wedgwood, where he indirectly refers to his slow, steady, cumulative mode of thinking (quite the opposite of revelation):

“The mind refuses to look at this universe, being what it is, without having been designed; yet, where would one most expect design, viz. in the structure of a sentient being, the more I think on the subject, the less I can see proof of design.”

Darwin’s letter of 11 July 1861 to Miss Julia Wedgwood

This same refusal continues to a sticking point to the present day, since, like so much that we learn from contemporary science, appearances are deceiving, and the reality behind the appearance can be so alien to the natural constitution of thue human mind that it is rejected as incomprehensible or unthinkable. That Darwin was able to think the unthinkable, and to so with a unparalleled completeness at a time when no one else was doing so, is testimony to the cosmological scope of his thought.

One of the most memorable passages in all of Darwin’s writings is the last page or so of the Origin of Species, which touches not a little on cosmological themes. Take, for instance, the “tangled bank” passage:

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.”

Besides anticipating the evolutionary study of ecology and complex adaptive systems long before these disciplines became explicit and constituted their own sciences, Darwin here subtly invokes a law-like naturalism that both suggests Lyell’s uniformitarianism while going beyond it.

Darwin places this law-governed naturalism in cosmological context in the last two sentences of the book, here also implicitly invoking Malthus, whose influence was central to his making the breakthrough to the idea of natural selection:

“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

This famous passage from Darwin reminds me of a perhaps equally famous passage from Immanuel Kant, who concluded The Critique of Practical Reason with this thought:

“Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. I do not seek or conjecture either of them as if they were veiled obscurities or extravagances beyond the horizon of my vision; I see them before me and connect them immediately with the consciousness of my existence. The first starts at the place that I occupy in the external world of the senses, and extends the connection in which I stand into the limitless magnitude of worlds upon worlds, systems upon systems, as well as into the boundless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation. The second begins with my invisible self, my personality, and displays to me a world that has true infinity, but which can only be detected through the understanding, and with which . . . I know myself to be in not, as in the first case, merely contingent, but universal and necessary connection. The first perspective of a countless multitude of worlds as it were annihilates my importance as an animal creature, which must give the matter out of which it has grown back to the planet (a mere speck in the cosmos) after it has been (one knows not how) furnished with life-force for a short time.”

Both Darwin and Kant invoke both the laws of the natural world (and both, again, do so by appealing to grandeur of the heavens) and a humanistic ideal. For Kant, the humanistic ideal is morality; for Darwin, the humanistic ideal is beauty, but what Kant said of morality and the moral law is equally applicable, mutatis mutandis, to beauty. Darwin might equally well have said of “the fixed law of gravity” and of “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that he saw them before himself and connected them immediately with the consciousness of his existence. Kant might equally well have said that there is “grandeur in this view of life” that embraces both the starry heavens above and the moral law within.

Darwin did not express himself (and would not have expressed himself) in these philosophical terms; he was a naturalist and a biologist, not a philosopher. But Darwin’s naturalism and biology were so comprehensive to have spanned the universe and to have converged on an entire cosmology — a cosmology, for the most part, not even suspected before Darwin had done his work.

There is a sense in which Darwin fulfilled Marx’s famous pronouncement, from this Theses on Feuerbach, such that: “Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Darwin, however, did not change the world by fomenting a revolution; Darwin changed the world by thinking, like a philosopher. In this sense, at least, Darwin must be counted among the greatest philosophers.

I would be a rewarding project to devote an entire book to the idea of Darwin’s Cosmology. I know that I have not even scratched the surface here, and have not come near to doing justice to the idea. It would be a rewarding project to think through this idea as carefully as Darwin thought through his ideas.

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Happy Birthday Charles Darwin!

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Against Natural History, Right and Left

Monday

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Today it occurred to me how ideological crackpots on the right and ideological crackpots on the left share a common disdain for natural history and, apparently, a desire to exempt human beings from the natural processes of the world we inhabit. While both defy a natural historical account of human life, their perspective differs, and the weight of their moral indignation falls in distinct regions. It is possible to be much more specific that this: the moral horror of the ideologically motivated seems to be inspired by the very idea of human speciation, whether in the past or in the future.

This is the basic idea of speciation.

Ideological crackpots on the right have a problem with human speciation in the past. They are deeply offended by the idea that hominids split off from a primate ancestor shared with monkeys and apes. They take a perverse pride in ignoring one new science after another — genetics, dendrochronology, paleobotany, paleoclimatology, etc. — as these add to the depth and detail of our knowledge of the long history of life on earth and how it is interrelated.

This idea of human speciation constitutes a moral horror for the ideologically motivated right.

I find this attitude puzzling, and it doesn’t inspire the slightest moral horror in me to know that human beings are continuous with other life on the Earth, and that this continuity took the form of a common ancestor. I find that, far from being horrified by the continuity of life, I am edified by the idea. This feeling was beautifully expressed by Darwin near the end of The Origin of Species, where he compared the long history of life to an ancient lineage:

“When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled.”

Ideological crackpots on the left have a problem with human speciation in the future. The ideological left views the idea that the human races represent incipient speciation with moral horror because it implies that there are fundamentally different kinds of people. In Diversity and Pluralism I discussed the idea common to mass society and mass man there is is only one kind of human being. This seems to be one of the sources of moral horror on the ideologically motivated left.

This idea of human speciation constitutes a moral horror for the ideologically motivated left.

It has become fashionable in some circles to proclaim that race has no biological basis and is exclusively a social construction. This view of the social construction of race continues despite rigorous genetic studies that demonstrate that individuals genetically cluster according to the ancestry into divisions that roughly correspond to the popular idea of racial distinctions. (The work of Neil Risch is relevant here.) It is believed that to concede the idea of race is to fall into complicity with the dark tradition of scientific racism and to somehow support social Darwinism and biological determinism, both of which are believed to be invidious to the creation of a better society. One of the reason that transhumanism has evoked such moral horror in its detractors has been that transhumanism more or less frankly acknowledges human speciation in the future.

Even more controversially, we can represent the distinct geographical subspecies of homo sapiens as incipient speciation. The particular division pictured above will not come to pass because the technologically-driven unification of the world has arrested the incipient speciation represented by the races. Geographical barriers no longer foster the allopatric speciation of homo sapiens because distance has been collapsed by transportation networks.

I find this attitude equally puzzling as that of the denial of human speciation in the past. While I certainly understand how scientific findings can be both manipulated and misused for evil ends, this is as true for the physics of electromagnetism as it is for evolutionary biology. If those on the ideologically motivated left really believed as strongly in diversity as they claim to believe, then they should be able to honor the diversity of an ethnically distinct population which represents incipient speciation, and they should be able to honor many hominid species in the future, if it comes to that (through transhumanism or any other speciation mechanism).

A continuation of the Darwin quote above proves to be almost preternaturally appropriate here:

“When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. And of the species now living very few will transmit progeny of any kind to a far distant futurity; for the manner in which all organic beings are grouped, shows that the greater number of species in each genus, and all the species in many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterly extinct. We can so far take a prophetic glance into futurity as to foretell that it will be the common and widely-spread species, belonging to the larger and dominant groups within each class, which will ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species. As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world.”

Darwin’s explicit recognition that, “not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity,” is to recognize the same holds true for human beings. Like much in the Origin, Darwin did not explicitly cite human beings, but we are clearly in his thoughts throughout the work. And the same idea, displaced into the past, means that not one living species in the past transmitted its unaltered likeness into the present.

It is interesting to note in this connection that one of the biological consequences of the achievement of what I call a Stage I civilization leads to the arrest of speciation in a globalized species. Recently in The Fundamental Theorem of Geopolitical Thought I wrote the following:

“Even before the world was industrialized, ships were trading around the globe, although only a small minority (sailors, to be specific) actually experienced the continuity of the human condition. When industrialization mechanized the technologies of transportation, distances were largely obliterated and world culture was transformed by the knowledge of human continuity and unity.”

If human society had remained at the level of a Stage 0 civilization, the incipient speciation represented by the adaptive radiation that led to human races would have continued to this day and beyond, and the unity of our species would have become lost in a way no longer possible to deny.

The moral intuitions of the ideologically motivated left constitute the non plus ultra of what I have earlier called “Enlightenment Universalism,” the unintended consequences of which issued in uncontroversial and unambiguous moral horrors. Seen in this light, the moral intuitions of the ideologically motivated right constitute the non plus ultra of human separateness and uniqueness, which is something of the mirror image of universalism: all human beings are distinct, therefore all are the same; all human beings are the same, therefore all are distinct from other animals.

Although I don’t feel any moral horror arising from human speciation in the past or human speciation in the future, I do understand (and it is important to understand) that these forms of moral horror follow from sincere and genuine motives. The ideologically motivated right feels that they are protecting something valuable in the past (the uniqueness and separateness of human beings) while the ideologically motivated left feels that they are protecting something valuable in the future (a better world based on the moral unity of all human beings). There moral concerns have come to override all other concerns, resulting in a willful obscurantism.

Pascal expressed this succinctly:

“Men never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.”

Both left and right, men do evil out of a desire to do good. The same moral conscience that strenuously objects to a theory of human origins or human destiny that implies an idea of humanity that could be put to evil purposes, does not object to manipulating scientific theory to present it as shoring up a preferred idea of humanity. And so the moral conscience that was so concerned not to go down a slippery slope of denying the humanity of man, instead goes down a different slippery slope. Is is as though we were perched on the peak of a roof and had only to choose whether we fall in one direction or the other.

On my other blog, in Can democracy grow up?, I suggested that a crucial component of intellectual maturity is the ability to master counter-intuitive ideas. One way in which ideas can be counter-intuitive is for them to run counter of our deeply held moral intuitions.

It is this intellectual maturity that is largely absent in the world today. Few among us possess the intellectual hardihood to face squarely what Darwin faced more than one hundred fifty years ago.

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Note Added 11.25.2011: If you think of evolution as a ladder of progress, it only stands to reason that if there are several hominid species (in the past or in the future), or if geographical races are incipient species, that these distinct species within one genus must also represent stages of progress, and so it is that racism (or even pre-homo sapiens speciesism) is logically derived from an incorrect conception of speciation. When speciation is correctly understood in terms of distinct branches from a common ancestor, the “problem” of grading distinct species on a ladder of progress vanishes, because the problem was illusory.

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The Terror of Natural History

Tuesday

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Near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55 passed within 0.85 lunar distances from the Earth on 08 November 2011.

Today an asteroid some four hundred meters across (Asteroid 2005 YU55) passed closer to the earth than the orbit of the moon. Astronomers were careful, prior to the flyby, to let people know that there was no danger of impact, for fear of contributing to a panic. If an asteroid this size hit the earth, it would cause enormous destruction, and would probably alter the climate. If a larger asteroid hit the earth, it could cause a mass extinction, and very probably the end of civilization. If a very large asteroid hit the earth, it could spell the doom of all life.

another view of near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55.

In the earlier years of our solar system, before a great deal of the loose matter in the solar system had either impacted on larger bodies or had been cleared out of the inner solar system by the gravitational influence of Jupiter, collisions between massive celestial bodies were more common than they are in the present epoch of the solar system. One theory of the formation of earth’s moon is that the earth was hit by a very large asteroid (of the size that would today wipe out all life on earth) that tore our a significant portion of earth’s material and flung it up into orbit.

One theory of the formation of the moon, called 'the big splat,' hypothesizes the collision of the earth with a very large asteroid, tearing away a portion of the earth with it.

On cosmological time scales, these things do happen, and although collisions of this magnitude have become rare (even on cosmological time scales) they can still happen today. While the impact of an asteroid the size of Asteroid 2005 YU55 would be an unprecedented natural disaster from a human perspective, most earth life would survive such an event, and civilization would likely survive such an event.

Impacts happen.

Because of the current state of scientific knowledge it is entirely possible to understand such natural disasters naturalistically, that is to say, according to the naturalistic conception of history, although we know that it is human nature (probably rooted in the agency detector of evolutionary psychology) to seek for meaning in events.

Gabriel Malagrida attributed the 1755 Lisbon earth to eschatological causes, and at the end of the long life was horribly executed for heresy, losing his life to the same eschatological demons that he had so readily invoked in accusing the people of Lisbon.

In several posts I have noted the response to the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which occurred during the enlightenment, but at a time in history when the medieval memory of divine retribution was still very much kept alive. In Naturalism and Suffering I quoted a passage from Gabriel Malagrida’s 1756 pamphlet, “An Opinion on the True Cause of the Earthquake” (“Juizo da verdadeira causa do terramoto”), which argued that the disaster in Lisbon was divine retribution for the sins of the people of Lisbon:

“Learn, Oh Lisbon, that the destroyers of our houses, palaces, churches, and convents, the cause of the death of so many people and of the flames that devoured such vast treasures, are your abominable sins, and not comets, stars, vapours and exhalations, and similar natural phenomena. Tragic Lisbon is now a mound of ruins. Would that it were less difficult to think of some method of restoring the place; but it has been abandoned, and the refugees from the city live in despair. As for the dead, what a great harvest of sinful souls such disasters send to Hell! It is scandalous to pretend the earthquake was just a natural event, for if that be true, there is no need to repent and to try to avert the wrath of God, and not even the Devil himself could invent a false idea more likely to lead us all to irreparable ruin. Holy people had prophesied the earthquake was coming, yet the city continued in its sinful ways without a care for the future. Now, indeed, the case of Lisbon is desperate. It is necessary to devote all our strength and purpose to the task of repentance. Would to God we could see as much determination and fervour for this necessary exercise as are devoted to the erection of huts and new buildings! Does being billeted in the country outside the city areas put us outside the jurisdiction of God? God undoubtedly desires to exercise His love and mercy, but be sure that wherever we are, He is watching us, scourge in hand.”

At the time of the Lisbon earthquake there were completely naturalistic accounts given of the disaster, but there were also eschatological accounts of the disaster that found cosmic meaning in suffering and destruction. Thus even though a naturalistic conception of natural disasters was already possible given the state of scientific knowledge in 1755, the eschatological conception of disasters was still a living influence. If a disaster of great magnitude occurs today, it is usually described in naturalistic terms, but there remains a sizable minority of people who understand such things eschatologically and who are determined to find human meaning in natural events.

The 1755 Lisbon earthquake: a natural disaster with philosophical consequences.

The naturalistic understanding of massive natural disasters recognizes that a great cataclysm can befall human beings and all their works, and the event has no meaning at all. In fact, an event of such great magnitude could occur that would annihilate our species and, naturalistically understood, it would have no meaning. This is an idea that is beyond the ability of many apparently rational and intelligent people to comprehend. Indeed, even to say so sounds inhumane. Of course, a great disaster is given human meaning by the stories that emerge from the lived experience of the disaster (if anyone survives it), but this is importantly distinct from an event having an intrinsic meaning apart from that meaning given to it ex post facto by human beings who experienced it.

The mechanisms of anthropogenic mass death realized in the twentieth century gave humanity a new perspective, though its own agency, on disasters of macro-historical scope.

With the mechanized means of mass death that emerged in the middle of the twentieth century — Nazi death camps, firestorms, and the atomic bomb — new potential sources of human extinction appeared from human beings themselves. Now, someone committed to an eschatological reading of history would say that such inventions were demonically inspired, but I think that by the time mutually assured destruction had become a fact of life during the high point of the Cold War that most people understood the existential threat to humanity from nuclear war as being an entirely human creation. This was a time of conscious modernism, before the backlash that made modernity a target of cynicism and nihilistic criticism, and many people embraced a nascent naturalism as an apparently inevitable development of modern history.

Originally published in 1958, Jasper's work was one of the first of many philosophical treatises attempting to come to grips with the new reality of potential self-annihilation.

Nevertheless, eschatological language was routinely employed to discuss nuclear war: Nuclear Armageddon was a typical phrase one heard during the Cold War. Despite the persistence of eschatological language, the possibility of human self-annihilation was rightly understood to have human meaning because it was a possibility brought about by human agency. Human beings were forced to recognize that they had created a power capable of destroying themselves, and many philosophers as diverse as Karl Jaspers and Bertrand Russell bent every effort to impress this fact upon the popular mind.

Russell wrote several works on the dangers of nuclear war, attempted to intervene in the Cuban Missile Crisis by sending telegrams to Kennedy and Kruschev, actively participated in demonstrations, and was arrested for his activism.

With the advent of atomic weapons and the possibility of human self-annihilation philosophers realized that humanity was faced with a qualitatively new and unprecedented historical development, and they quite frankly struggled to take account of it and to create new categories of evil and new ways of thinking about history in order to convey this qualitatively changed historical circumstance. This effort is unfinished in our day. Much work remains to be done. It also suggests parallel work that might be done in understanding natural disasters.

Philosophical reflection on anthropogenic extinction by way of nuclear war contributed to the realization that history has its terrors both natural and unnatural, and it can be difficult to draw a clear line between the two.

It may well be that human beings do not yet possess an adequate conceptual infrastructure, and sufficient historical experience, to be able to understand massive natural disasters naturalistically. Because of our limited conceptual infrastructure and limited historical experience, in times of great duress we are thrown back on eschatological conceptions that so dominated earlier forms of human civilization. While our industrial-technological civilization (predicated as it is upon a relentless naturalistic instrumentalism) has far outstripped most of the institutions of nomadic and agricultural society, we do not yet possess the intellectual institutions commensurate with the forces that have been unleashed. We are all of us like the sorcerer’s apprentice.

Mircea Eliade formulated the idea of 'The Terror of History' in his The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History.

We could make a start in the direction of a conceptual infrastructure adequate to the exposition of natural and man-made cataclysms by adapting the idea of the “terror of history” to natural history. It was Mircea Eliade who introduced the phrase “The Terror of History” (in his famous book The Myth of the Eternal Return), and it is one of those rare historical bons mots — like, for example, Weber’s “The disenchantment of the World,” to which it is related — that sententiously encapsulates a paradigm shift in a single phrase.

Eliade's idea of the terror of history has been understood in terms of humanistic history, but given the intrinsic naturalism of industrial civlization we would do well to extend the idea of the terror of history to the terror of natural history.

The transhistorical models and metahistorical meanings that Eliade attributes to non-historical peoples in their understanding of history can all be found in relation to natural history as well as humanistic history. Once the disenchantment of the world takes away the possibility of investing the world with transhistorical meaning and we are, as it were, left naked before the depredations of time, we experience the terror of history. Human history had its terrors of war, disease, failed harvests, famine, riots, and cruel monarchs that could all be blunted (to some degree) by an “understanding” that all of this had happened before, all of this would happen again, and there is nothing new under the sun. Natural history is similarly replete with disasters such as earthquakes, fires, floods, and droughts.

Mircea Eliade, 13 March 1907 to 22 April 1986

Several of these disasters, most particularly famine and disease, are in equal measures human and natural disasters, so that any distinction one draws within them cannot but be conventional. Given that human history emerged incrementally from the natural history with which it is continuous, I would argue that the cyclical and eschatological conceptual means employed to effect the devalorization of history probably emerged first in relation to natural disasters and were only later applied to specifically human history. I don’t think that Eliade would have disagreed with this, and it may well have been his intended meaning.

The four horsement of the apocalypse -- war, disease, famine, and death -- constituted a traditional litany of the disasters to which humanity was subject, i.e., the familiar terrors of history.

As far as my knowledge extends — and this is not as far as I would like — the idea of the terror of history has been exclusively applied to a traditionally humanistic conception of history. To extend the terror of history to the terror of natural history both preserves the continuity of the idea while acknowledging its extension beyond humanistic history to natural history. And the intrinsic naturalism of industrial-technological civilization intrinsically places that civilization in the context of natural history rather than eschatological history.

The idea of history has been dramatically expanded by the application of scientific methods to inquiry into the past, so much so that the distinction between humanistic history and natural history breaks down at some points (I have addressed this in several posts, especially The Continuity of Civilization and Natural History). While calling this a “break down” carries a certain negative connotation, the assertion of the essential continuity of history seems to me to be a good thing. Indeed, I have devoted a great many posts of an extended conception of history that I once called integral history and which I now call metaphysical history.

So far I have above only discussed catastrophic events in the context of naturalistic and eschatological conceptions of history, but I have divided conceptions of human history into four categories based on the conception of human agency involved:

● Political history understood in terms of human agency

● Cataclysmic history understood in terms of human non-agency

● Eschatological history understood in terms of non-human agency

● Naturalistic history understood in terms of non-human non-agency

Since I have already covered (to a limited extent) naturalistic and eschatological conceptions of natural disasters, for the sake of completeness I ought also to comment on cataclysmic and political conceptions of natural disasters.

How could there possibly be a political conception of natural disasters? One of the consistent themes in Machiavelli, to which he frequently recurs, is that while human beings cannot control fortune, they can certainly control the circumstances that dictate one’s response to fortune. In other words, one may never know when the river will flood, but in times of social stability one can build dams and levees and make every effort to assert one’s control over fortune so that, when the worst happens, it can be managed.

Chapter twenty-five of Machiavelli’s The Prince is titled, “What Fortune Can Effect In Human Affairs, And How To Withstand Her.” It is here that Machiavelli gives his famous formulation in which he compares fortune to a river:

“I compare her to one of those raging rivers, which when in flood overflows the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil from place to place; everything flies before it, all yield to its violence, without being able in any way to withstand it; and yet, though its nature be such, it does not follow therefore that men, when the weather becomes fair, shall not make provision, both with defences and barriers, in such a manner that, rising again, the waters may pass away by canal, and their force be neither so unrestrained nor so dangerous. So it happens with fortune, who shows her power where valour has not prepared to resist her, and thither she turns her forces where she knows that barriers and defences have not been raised to constrain her.”

Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter XXV

In this sense, then, the political conception of natural disasters, almost all disaster planning in the industrialized world constitutes an exercise in the political conception of natural disasters. Disaster and recovery planning has become more sophisticated than at any time in the past, and wealthy governments (as well as some NGOs) have contingency plans in place for all manner of contingencies, not excluding visitation of the earth by extraterrestrials. This conception of natural disasters is closely related to the naturalistic conception, and in some contexts the two many be indistinguishable.

Similarly, the cataclysmic conception of natural disasters is nearly indistinguishable from the eschatological conception, only that the eschatological conception adds a layer of meaning that is absent from the brute recognition that unprecendented and unpredictable disasters can befall us for no reason at all, just as the political conception of natural disasters adds a layer of meaning to the naturalistic conception of natural disasters.

A sensitive and subtle account would bring out the differences between the natural and political conceptions of natural disasters on the one hand, and on the other hand the eschatological and cataclysmic conceptions. I will try to work more on this later, but for the moment I have another idea I want to sketch.

In relation to the eschatological conception of history and its realization in the concept of cosmic war, I have noted that when grievances are formulated in eschatological terms, only a cosmic war is felt to address this particularly eschatological concerns. An eschatological grievance answered with pragmatic and utilitarian measures will leave those who have asserted the grievance still with an eschatological hunger than has been unfilled. And so it is that apparently happy and prosperous peoples will throw themselves into disastrous wars (seemingly exemplifying the cataclysmic conception of war) when as eschatological need has gone unfilled and the only obvious way to fill it is to undertake some action of great moment (even if ill-conceived) equal to the feeling that demands satisfaction.

Similarly in the case of natural disasters, how they are conceived, according to what conception of history they are understood, will have much to do with the kind of aid and comfort that the victims will find to speak to their needs. Given the instrumentalist presumptions of industrial-technological civilization, those of us in the industrialized world want to know that every practical effort is being taken in order to minimize our suffering and maximize our comfort in the midst of great disruption and turmoil. Conventional disaster planning models speak precisely to these needs.

It is typically later, once the initial danger has passed, and the political process reasserts itself, that people begin asking the political questions and aligning their thinking according to the political conception of natural disasters: why there the levees and flood walls allowed to degraded? Why were they not maintained or even strengthened? Why was not more planning done, and why were not more adequate contingency plans formulated.

For the eschatological conception of natural disaster, what is wanted is spiritual aid and comfort. We can cite numerous examples from medieval and early modern history in this context. When great plagues swept across Europe starting in 1348 and continuing throughout the early modern period, the response was not typically to undertake public health measures, but rather to parade religious statues, reliquaries, and sacred objects in great processions through affected areas in order to act upon the relevant eschatological concerns.

While this sort of response is somewhat rare today, it is not absent, in in circumstances in extremis, it is not at all unusual for religious leaders to call for repentance and atonement, and to point to the disaster as an opportunity for individuals to realign themselves with an eschatological conception of the world.

For the cataclysmic conception of natural disasters I cannot imagine any response, for in the grip of actual cataclysmic events, the cataclysmic conception is, as it were, actively unfolding and proving itself. In the face of such events, what could possibly be done? For the true believer in the cataclysmic conception of history, I cannot at present imagine any more appropriate response than running and screaming in terror.

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Why we are all Eskimos…

Wednesday

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I have been listening to Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans by Brian Fagan and am thoroughly enjoying the book. Professor Fagan has written a great many books about prehistory and climatology, and I have previously recommended his lectures for The Teaching Company, Human Prehistory and the First Civilizations. In fact, I was so enthusiastic about this set of lectures that I urged by mother to listen to them also, since she shares my interest in prehistory and anthropology. This led to an interesting coincidence. My mother was listening to these lectures before she took a cruise to Alaska with one of my sisters. A day later when she got on the cruise ship she heard the distinctive voice of the on-board naturalist for this cruise, and asked him, “Are you Brian Fagan?” And indeed it was Brian Fagan.

In any case, I have derived a lot of value (and a lot of enjoyment) from the works of Professor Fagan, and I heartily recommend them. In this recent (2011) book on Cro-Magnons, Fagan is in fine form, delivering both anecdote and research results that enliven the human condition in its earliest iteration. Fagan places particular emphasis on two events, although I hesitate to call them “events” since they have more to do with the longue durée than with any ephemeral or momentary event.

What is now Lake Toba was once Mount Toba, site of one of the most devastating volcanic eruptions during human prehistory.

He references the Mount Toba eruption, thought to have happened between 69,000 and 77,000 years ago, and which may have had a major impact upon our early ancestors. Although Fagan emphasizes (as do most anthropologists) that human beings were anatomically modern from the emergence of Homo sapiens (between 200,000 and 120,000 years ago), he implies without explicitly stating that a kind of cognitive modernity emerged during the period of privation following the Mount Toba eruption. I would suggest that the climatological winter following the eruption may have provided an opportunity for cognitive competition, and therefore triggered the emergence of cognitive modernity through evolutionary escalation. In short, only the cleverest of the at-that-time very small population of Homo sapiens in Africa would have survived.

The Mount Toba eruption compared to other volcanic eruptions.

Professor Fagan also places great emphasis upon the last glacial maximum (between 26,500 and 19,000–20,000 years ago) of the last ice age, when the human population, by that time having passed into Europe and Asia, was again under great climatological pressure, and came through a very difficult time. Most human beings alive today would possess neither the skills nor the knowledge to survive during the last glacial maximum, were they set down in Europe or Asia 25,000 years ago. And it is important to emphasize that it is skills and knowledge that make the difference: we are not talking about hulking, cold-weather-adapted Neanderthals, we are talking about fully anatomically modern human beings, indistinguishable from ourselves.

Both of these events — the Mount Toba eruption and the last glacial maximum — were cold weather events. Our ancestors survived and even thrived because of the skills that they developed to carry them through extreme cold weather conditions. Professor Fagan mentions winters lasting nine months of the year, and temperatures routinely colder that our relatively balmy inter-glacial temperatures. And they mastered these skills without the sort of high technology that we would imagine would be necessary to survive such conditions.

Professor Fagan emphasizes the importance of the eyed needle, which he compares to the domestication of fire as an event of the first importance in the history of human technology. It was the eyed needle, cut from bone or antler with a very fine flint blade, that made possible the sewing of close-fitting clothes, and it was close fitting clothes mostly made of reindeer hides that made survival through the past glacial maximum possible.

Eyed needles from the Solutrean (dating to MIS 2) at Grotte de Jouclas, France (redrawn from White 1986, p. 78).

We are all the descendents of these hearty ancestors who found ingenious ways to live in a hostile climate — and not only a hostile climate, but a climate that changed dramatically in the course of a lifetime, and even more dramatically over a few generations. And while these ice age ancestors were not Eskimos sensu stricto, the closest thing to their lives is preserved by the remnants of the peoples of the far northern polar regions who still survive in extreme cold, who still wear the skins of the animals they eat, and who still cling to the nomadic hunter-gatherer way of life, and who still have the migration of the reindeer at the center of their lives and their culture. The reindeer is perhaps the central animal in human experience taken over the longue durée.

The reindeer has been central to human life throughout the greater part of our history.

It is interesting to note in this connection that Toynbee, in his attempt at a systematic survey of civilizations, did identify an “Eskimo civilization,” but he identified it as an “arrested civilization” and in this capacity classed it with Polynesian civilization and with nomads generally speaking. These “arrested” civilizations are not to be confused with the “abortive” civilizations of Viking Scandinavia and Far Western Christendom (the “Celtic Fringe”).

Arnold Toynbee, author of A Study of History, called the Eskimos an arrested civilization, but I don't think that this is quite right.

The “arrested” civilizations actually play a central role in Toynbee’s “challenge and response” argument for the vitality of civilizations. Toynbee regarded Eskimo civilization as arrested because it confronted a challenge that was too great to overcome and thus to produce a civilization that would not be characterized as arrested. Here is how Toynbee puts it:

“In addition to the two classes already noticed, developed civilizations and abortive civilizations, there is a third, which we must call arrested civilizations. It is the existence of civilizations which have kept alive but failed to grow that compels us to study the problem of growth; and our first step will be to collect and study the available specimens of civilizations of this category.”

Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. 1., p. 164

And,

“All these arrested civilizations have been immobilized in consequence of having achieved a tour de force. They are responses to challenges of an order of severity on the very borderline between the degree that affords stimulus to further development and the degree that entails defeat… we may add that four out of the five we have mentioned were in the end compelled to accept defeat. Only one of them, the Eskimo culture, is still maintaining itself.”

Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. 1., p. 164-165

I do not necessarily disagree with this, though I wouldn’t formulate the idea of arrested civilizations in exactly the same way, but it is instructive and interesting. Where Toynbee goes seriously wrong is a couple of paragraphs further along:

“As for the Eskimos, their culture was a development of the North American Indian way of life specifically adapted to the conditions of life round the shores of the Arctic Ocean.”

Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Vol. 1., p. 165

Here Toynbee has gotten it exactly backward: it is not that the Eskimos were a development of North American Indian cultures, but that North American Indian cultures were a development of Eskimo culture — or, to be more precise, a development from a way of life that is the direct cultural ancestor of contemporary Eskimo life.

The order of derivation is important here because it refers to what is most fundamental in human experience over the longue durée, and this is largely the experience of Eskimo life, taking the latter in its broadest signification. For this reason I would not call Eskimo civilization “arrested” civilization but rather Proto-civilization.

Eskimo civilization is the ancestor of all human civilization, and in a world in which glaciation is the norm (as has been the case throughout the Quaternary Glaciation, which comprises the better part of the duration of human evolution) and brief, balmy inter-glacial periods have been the exception to the climatological rule, Eskimo life also represents the robust and sustainable way of human life to which homo sapiens can return time and again as the ice sheets advance and retreat.

Settled civilizations in an inter-glacial temperate zone — that climatological region most friendly to the growth of civilization that for Toynbee represents the norm for human society — would be fatally threatened by the arrival of a glacial maximum, but homo sapiens can always return to the ways of Eskimo life to weather the storm of severe climatological conditions. This makes of Eskimo civilization the source and the root of human life.

Had it not been for the game-changing emergence of industrial-technological civilization, this calculus would still hold good, but this unpredictable and unprecedented historical contingency has thrown everything into question, including verities that have shaped human life from its beginnings up until the Industrial Revolution only two hundred years ago.

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Confirmation Bias and Evolutionary Psychology

Tuesday

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William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827)

If the Sun and Moon should doubt,
They’d immediately Go out.

William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

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I was thinking about confirmation bias today and what a perfect topic of study this would be for evolutionary psychology. It is one thing to get at exactly what confirmation bias is, and how it functions in distorting out thinking, but it is quite another matter to get to the root of confirmation bias and understand it in an Aristotelian sense, i.e., in terms of its causes.

As soon as I started to think about confirmation bias in the context of evolutionary psychology it immediately made sense and revealed connections to other things that I’ve thought about.

What survival benefit could possibly derive from self-deception? At first thought this seems counter-intuitive. The persistence of discredited beliefs would seem to have a negative survival value. That is to say, stubbornly persisting in believing something to be true when it is not ought to land an agent in a good deal of trouble.

Coming at this from a different perspective, however, one can easily image the survival value of believing in oneself. There are many situations in which the difference between believing in oneself and not believing in oneself could mean the difference between survival and death. If this is true, then confirmation bias may lead to differential survival, and differential survival is the conditio sine qua non of differential reproduction.

In the Afterword to my Political Economy of Globalization I attempted to investigate what I called the “naturalistic basis of hope.” What does this mean? Hope has traditionally been treated as one of the three “theological virtues”: faith, hope, and charity. I wanted to investigate the phenomenon of hope from a naturalistic perspective.

I continue to believe that this is an important undertaking, but when I wrote this Afterword about the naturalistic basis of hope, I didn’t make any connection between hope and evolutionary psychology. Hope comes in many forms, and one of these forms is a hope against all rational odds that things will go well for oneself. This kind of hope is a belief in oneself that would have survival value.

This not only anthropocentric but also egocentric conception of hope has obvious limitations, but it stands in relation to other forms of hope that are less anthropocentric and less egocentric. In a more general sense than a belief in oneself that might give an advantage in survival, hope is an affirmation of one’s life not only in the present moment of struggle, but also throughout the course of one’s life — past, present, and future — and, in an even larger sense, one’s life taken on the whole must be seen in the context of one’s life in the community taken on the whole.

To live is to engage in an existential gamble. Pascal knew this, and this is why he frame his Christian (actually, Jansenist) apologetics in terms of a wager. The existential choices that we make that shape our lives (and shape the life of the community to the extent that we are able to use our lives to shape the larger world) are bets that we place, and we bet that the world is one way, and not another way.

If you place your bets unwisely, and invest your existential choices in dead ends, your life is wasted for all intents and purposes. To believe this to be the case — especially with a social species whose members need each other for cooperative survival — would be debilitating. To believe that one’s life was wasted because one believed the wrong thing would constitute a kind of spiritual suicide. I can’t imagine that many persons could keep this sense of wasted effort in mind and at the same time fully invest themselves in the business of furthering personal and communal survival.

To believe in one’s existential choices is probably a condition for optimal exertion in the struggle for life. In so far as confirmation bias makes it easier to believe in the righteousness of one’s existential choices, even in the face of conflicting evidence, it would have a substantial survival value, not only for the individual, but perhaps especially in regard to kin selection.

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A Hundred Years of Machu Picchu

Thursday

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Hiram Bingham, 19 November 1875 – 06 June 1956

Today, the 7^th of July, is the day that the rediscovery of Machu Picchu is celebrated, and this year is the 100^th anniversary of Hiram Bingham’s 1911 expedition that brought him to Machu Picchu. I read that there was an official celebration held at Machu Picchu for the centenary.

Inevitably, revisionists have stolen the thunder of the traditional narratives, and there are few if any traditional narrative histories that tell the epic or heroic story of scientific discovery in the way that these stories were told during the era of colonialism and Orientalism. Good bye to all that. And it is not difficult to understand how we came to say good bye to all that.

As attractive as the traditional swashbuckling narrative is, especially for children, I can remember, even as a child, hearing stories about exotic ancient things being “discovered” and wondering about the people who had been living in the area for generations, and who often had a minor role in these narratives as guides who led the white explorers to the object of “discovery.” Had these peoples not known of it all along? Had they not their own, local names for the sites?

Perhaps I was an unconscious Marxist as a child, since I had something like the perspective that we find in Bertolt Brecht’s “Questions From a Worker Who Reads” (1935), which includes the following lines:

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone ?

Caesar defeated the Gauls.
Did he not even have a cook with him ?

Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.
Was he the only one to weep ?

Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War.
Who else won it ?

Well, we’ve come a long way since the Spanish triumphantly erected a church over the top of the Inca Coricancha. Bingham came to document and photograph, not to conquer and to destroy. and for that reason I would like to defend the now-quaint notion that Bingham discovered Machu Picchu for science.

We scarcely ever hear this idiom any more of something being discovered “for science,” but it is a legitimate idea. There are looters aplenty who continue to find ancient remnants of civilization only to tear them from context and sell them on the international antiquities market. Bingham and Yale have been criticized for their souvenir hunting at Machu Picchu, but this was no looting. No one disagrees that it was Hiram Bingham who brought Machu Picchu to the attention to Western scientists and historians, and he did so by documenting the site.

Did Bingham make claims for himself like Caesar conquering Gaul without even a cook to help him? Well, in the preface to his classic account of the discovery, Lost City of the Incas: The Story of Machu Picchu and its Builders, he does explicitly state that previous explorers in Peru, Raimondi and Paz Soldan, were unaware of Machu Picchu and made no mention of the site in their works.

However, in his account Bingham is quite up front about led to the site by local guides who were aware of the ruins, though perhaps not fully aware of their extent. The extent of the ruins could only be appreciated by the clearing of nearly five hundred years of foliage, and this didn’t happen until Bingham’s expedition.

Here is part of Bingham’s account:

“We had camped at a place near the river, called Mandor Pampa. Melchor Arteaga, proprietor of the neighboring farm, had told us of ruins at Machu Picchu, as was related in Chapter X.

“The morning of July 24th dawned in a cold drizzle. Arteaga shivered and seemed inclined to stay in his hut. I offered to pay him well if he would show me the ruins. He demurred and said it was too hard a climb for such a wet day. When he found that we were willing to pay him a sol, three or four times the ordinary daily wage in this vicinity, he finally agreed to guide us to the ruins. No one supposed that they would be particularly interesting. Accompanied by Sergeant Carrasco I left camp at ten o’clock and went some distance upstream. On the road we passed a venomous snake which recently had been killed. This region has an unpleasant notoriety for being the favorite haunt of “vipers.” The lance-headed or yellow viper, commonly known as the fer-de-lance, a very venomous serpent capable of making considerable springs when in pursuit of its prey, is common hereabouts. Later two of our mules died from snake-bite.

“After a walk of three quarters of an hour the guide left the main road and plunged down through the jungle to the bank of the river. Here there was a primitive “bridge” which crossed the roaring rapids at its narrowest part, where the stream was forced to flow between two great boulders. The bridge was made of half a dozen very slender logs, some of which were not long enough to span the distance between the boulders. They had been spliced and lashed together with vines. Arteaga and Carrasco took off their shoes and crept gingerly across, using their somewhat prehensile toes to keep from slipping. It was obvious that no one could have lived for an instant in the rapids, but would immediately have been dashed to pieces against granite boulders. I am frank to confess that I got down on hands and knees and crawled across, six inches at a time. Even after we reached the other side I could not help wondering what would happen to the “bridge” if a particularly heavy shower should fall in the valley above. A light rain had fallen during the night. The river had risen so that the bridge was already threatened by the foaming rapids. It would not take much more rain to wash away the bridge entirely. If this should happen during the day it might be very awkward. As a matter of fact, it did happen a few days later and the next explorers to attempt to cross the river at this point found only one slender log remaining.

“Leaving the stream, we struggled up the bank through a dense jungle, and in a few minutes reached the bottom of a precipitous slope. For an hour and twenty minutes we had a hard climb. A good part of the distance we went on all fours, sometimes hanging on by the tips of our fingers. Here and there, a primitive ladder made from the roughly hewn trunk of a small tree was placed in such a way as to help one over what might otherwise have proved to be an impassable cliff. In another place the slope was covered with slippery grass where it was hard to find either handholds or footholds. The guide said that there were lots of snakes here. The humidity was great, the heat was excessive, and we were not in training.

“Shortly after noon we reached a little grass-covered hut where several good-natured Indians, pleasantly surprised at our unexpected arrival, welcomed us with dripping gourds full of cool, delicious water. Then they set before us a few cooked sweet potatoes, called here cumara, a Quichua word identical with the Polynesian kumala, as has been pointed out by Mr. Cook.

“Apart from the wonderful view of the canyon, all we could see from our cool shelter was a couple of small grass huts and a few ancient stone-faced terraces. Two pleasant Indian farmers, Richarte and Alvarez, had chosen this eagle’s nest for their home. They said they had found plenty of terraces here on which to grow their crops and they were usually free from undesirable visitors. They did not speak Spanish, but through Sergeant Carrasco I learned that there were more ruins “a little farther along.” In this country one never can tell whether such a report is worthy of credence. “He may have been lying” is a good footnote to affix to all hearsay evidence. Accordingly, I was not unduly excited, nor in a great hurry to move. The heat was still great, the water from the Indian’s spring was cool and delicious, and the rustic wooden bench, hospitably covered immediately after my arrival with a soft, woolen poncho, seemed most comfortable. Furthermore, the view was simply enchanting. Tremendous green precipices fell away to the white rapids of the Urubamba below. Immediately in front, on the north side of the valley, was a great granite cliff rising 2000 feet sheer. To the left was the solitary peak of Huayna Picchu, surrounded by seemingly inaccessible precipices. On all sides were rocky cliffs. Beyond them cloud-capped mountains rose thousands of feet above us.

“The Indians said there were two paths to the outside world. Of one we had already had a taste; the other, they said, was more difficult—a perilous path down the face of a rocky precipice on the other side of the ridge. It was their only means of egress in the wet season, when the bridge over which we had come could not be maintained. I was not surprised to learn that they went away from home only “about once a month”.”

Whatever your politics of exploration, I hope you’ll join me in wishing Machu Picchu a happy hundred years in the limelight.

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Silent Worlds, Empty Worlds

Wednesday

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A Question of Absence:

A Meditation on SETI

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At present I am listening to The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence by Paul Davies. I’m only a little more than half way through the book so far, so while I have much more to say on the book, I’ll reserve more extensive remarks until I’ve gotten through more of it.

For the time being, I will content myself with some brief remarks on the central theme of the book. This theme is emptiness, silence, absence, lack, privation, nothingness…

Are we alone?

The eerie silence is the deafening nothingness that has greeted those SETI scientists listening among the stars for extraterrestrial radio signals. They haven’t heard anything in fifty years. Some in the discipline are having second thoughts, and these second thoughts have largely inspired this book. Davies describes the difference between “old” SETI and “new” SETI, the latter being an attempt to think through, and hopefully go beyond, the presuppositions of the original SETI program.

Davies’ book is fairly comprehensive, so he takes the reader through much familiar material, such as Fermi’s Paradox — which asks of any extraterrestrial intelligence, “Where are they?” — which leads immediately to the equally familiar refrain, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Let us, for the moment, grant the SETI skeptics the argument, if only hypothetically, and ask what kind of galaxy we live in, if we live in it quite alone.

Suppose we are alone, or nearly alone. What then? Then the cosmos is filled with empty worlds, silent worlds. It is an odd feeling simply to know this. Our bustling planet is a loud place, filled with noises. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote a justly famous short essay, “On Noise” which begins with the following paragraph:

“Kant wrote a treatise on The Vital Powers. I should prefer to write a dirge for them. The superabundant display of vitality, which takes the form of knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about, has proved a daily torment to me all my life long. There are people, it is true — nay, a great many people — who smile at such things, because they are not sensitive to noise; but they are just the very people who are not sensitive to argument, or thought, or poetry, or art, in a word, to any kind of intellectual influence. The reason of it is that the tissue of their brains is of a very rough and coarse quality. On the other hand, noise is a torture to intellectual people. In the biographies of almost all great writers, or wherever else their personal utterances are recorded, I find complaints about it; in the case of Kant, for instance, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and if it should happen that any writer has omitted to express himself on the matter, it is only for want of opportunity.”

Though Schopenhauer is remembered to philosophical history as a pessimist, he could be a very amusing writer, and this brief essay offers an excellent display of his wit and charm.

If the Milky Way is empty of intelligent life except for us, it is empty of that particular variety of noise that Schopenhauer protested. Schopenhauer specifically mentioned “knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about,” which is more or less synonymous with the activities of early industrial civilization. Schopenhauer quotes Thomas Hood as saying of the Germans, “For a musical nation, they are the most noisy I ever met with.” Schopenhauer attributes this to the obtuseness of mind of his people, but I think this is rather a universal, or nearly universal, condition of civilization, and a condition that is heightened by industrialization.

An empty universe would be a marvelous place for silent meditation and contemplation, interrupted by only the soothing sounds of nature in its various forms. How far would these forms of nature extend in a universe empty of intelligent life? This is perhaps more interesting and promising question than appears at first.

The rare earth hypothesis, upon which the empty universe is predicated, involves a suspension of the principle of mediocrity, which in some formulations is essentially the same thing as the Copernican Principle. If the kind of life, intelligence, and technological civilization that we have here on the earth is a rare event, and perhaps a unique event, then the earth and the civilization that it hosts is in no sense mediocre, but is the exception to many rules.

In several posts I have noted how our expanding knowledge of the universe has only pointed toward confirmation of the Copernican Principle. For example, in More Evidence for the Copernican Principle I argued that the discovery of extrasolar planets in the Helmi Stream extends the Copernican Principle to other galaxies, since the Helmi Stream associated with the Milky Way is the remnant of a captured galaxy once separate from the Milky Way.

Earlier, in Other Worlds, I wrote the following:

“…claims to cosmic uniqueness are being disproved as soon as the technological means are available to disprove them. For example, there is a large and growing body of evidence on extrasolar planets. We now know for a fact that there are planetary systems other than our own. Since we already know that planetary atmospheres are not unique (from the example of Mars, Venus, and several planetary moons), and we know from the moons of Jupiter that volcanic activity is not unique to the earth, it would be foolish to suppose that these extrasolar planets are all without atmospheres, and if they are small, rocky planets, they will be, like Mars, places not unlike the earth. And among these places not unlike the earth, there will be very interesting places, beautiful places, places unique in their own way, and well worth seeing. It is entirely reasonable to want to see such places quite apart from the question of whether there is life or whether such places are inhabited by sentient creatures or civilizations.”

These worlds upon which I speculated would not be silent, but they would not have noise in the Schopenhauerian sense. What sounds would they have? As near to us as Mars, if we could listen through the suits that would be necessary to survive on the surface, we could hear the Martian wind whistling among the dead rocks and stones on the Martian desert. The shifting sands of Mars might also produce the phenomenon of “singing sands” known on earth, though these would be the singing sands of Mars — plaintive, alien sounds of an alien world.

Farther afield than Mars, since we now can prove that there are extrasolar planets, and recent technological improvements have yielded smallish, rocky planets within the habitable zones of stars, there may be alien worlds with water, perhaps even entire oceans. Water in lakes, ponds, streams, waterfalls and oceans would make sounds. A waterfall can be nearly deafening if you are close to it, as can the tide washing upon the shore.

This last example, the sound of the tide, points to the interesting fact that the earth has one large moon. If we had no moon, the oceans would be attracted by the gravity of more distant celestial bodies, but this would not likely be sufficient to create the tides we know. If the earth had several moons, or much smaller moons, again we would not have the familiar tides. The sound of the tides would vary according to the gravitational environment of the ocean in question. It would be a definitely odd experience to stand on the shore of an alien ocean moved by no tides at all. In fact, the effect might be so dramatic that a person might want to travel there simply to experience this uniquely contemplative environment.

If we add into the picture further elements, in line with the principle of mediocrity but not fully violating the rare earth hypothesis that leaves us stranded alone in the Milky Way, there may be worlds — empty worlds, nearly silent worlds — in which the only sound to be heard is the wind in the grasses and the trees. Or, if there is animal life as well, the sounds of wings, and the clicks and chirps of insects. If you have ever been in the Amazon at night, you know that the ambient sound is almost as deafening as a waterfall, a torrent of white noise produced by countless organisms going about the ordinary business of life, but once again this is not Schopenhauerian noise.

If you had the leisure to listen long enough in any of these environments, you would hear periodicities in the ambient sound — diurnal periods, seasonal periods, annual periods, and perhaps also periodicities governed by unique forms of life.

These silent, empty worlds would only be silent and empty in so far as we identify meaningful sounds with human acitivity, which seems to me to be the antithesis of the spirit of SETI. No natural scientist would suppose for a moment that a world without “noise” would be a world without interest. One of the most surprising claims I found in Davies’ book was this:

“If there is somebody at the destination planet already, then why bother to make the trip? If the purpose of space travel is exploration, well, the aliens can send us the content of their latest DVD. On the other hand, if it is conquest, then the fact that the target planet already has a far more advanced civilization ensconced would constitute a pretty strong deterrent. All in all, it would make more sense for the newcomer civilization to stay put and simply join the Galactic Club.”

Paul Davies, The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, pp. 119-120

In this context, Davies doesn’t even consider the kind of motivations that inspire people to climb mountains, though just a few pages after this quote he considers these motivations in a different context.

Exploration is about much more than knowing what it out there. It is also about experiencing what is out there, and even touching what is out there. While there will always be some people content to know, just as there are always some people content with ignorance, there will also always be people who want to go and see for themselves, and this motivation will not be dampened by the possibility that there are no other technological civilizations in the Milky Way. The Cosmic wilderness awaits us.

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Addendum on Crony Capitalism as Macro-Parasitism

Tuesday

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Thinking further on the theme of crony capitalism as macro-parasitism, which I introduced in my post Crony Capitalism: Macro-Parasitism under Industrialization, I came to realize that we can extrapolate this (regrettable) development of advanced industrialized economies backward and apply the same insight into previous economic revolutions, mutatis mutandis. More specifically, we can look for a similar pattern in the transition from the hunter-gatherer paradigm to the agricultural paradigm of the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Indeed, in so making the comparison I find it quite illuminating, and it perhaps allows us to exercise our faculty of historical a priori imagination (paying homage to Collingwood in the process) in reconstructing some of the structural adjustments that accompanied the long term transition from nomadism to settled urbanism.

In my previous post I mentioned that the familiar macro-parasites of human history — a rapacious nobility, greedy landlords, and unscrupulous merchants — all date from the socio-economic structure of the agricultural paradigm. These particular socio-economic institutions have either changed or been extirpated from history with the industrial revolution; kings and popes rarely oppress us today, though there is no shortage of those who would today conspire to oppress us.

Under the socio-economic institutions of nomadism, during the hunter-gatherer paradigm of social organization, the institutions of oppression having their foundation in agricultural society did not yet exist. These institutions were brought into being gradually over a period of thousands of years. The institutions of macro-parasitism under the agricultural paradigm were created (i.e., they are not intrinsic to the human condition), just as certainly as the institutions of macro-parasitism under industrialization are in the process of formation today.

I imagine that in the earliest stages of the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution there were agricultural “entrepreneurs” who were among the first to see the possibilities of agriculture and to exploit it. They would have settled down, kept the “secret” in the family, their settlement would have become a village, and the village would in time become a city. As the success of agriculture proved itself able to produce food surpluses, the technique spread throughout the lowlands, progressively marginalizing those who continued to follow the “old ways” of nomadism. Eventually, the holdouts and traditionalists retreated into mountainous regions unsuited to agriculture, and the agriculturalists had the fertile lowlands to themselves.

The dead-enders eking out a marginal living in the mountains looked down on the rich cities of the plain, and determined that they should take from the city dwellers whatever they pleased to take from them, because the excess food and the extended families and the sedentary way of life in the cities had made the people soft, whereas the people in the mountains knew hardship and deprivation. And so they raided the cities, and the city dwellers learned to build walls and to conscript armies. By this time, civilization as we know it was in full swing, and the nomads were already squeezed to the margin and were becoming more marginal with every agricultural innovation.

Civilization is like a Ponzi scheme, an enormous pyramid in which those who were the first in make out like bandits, while the latecomers are lucky to break even. The organizers of the Ponzi scheme are the entrepreneurs of history, the first to seize on new developments that will, in the fullness of time, transform the entire life of man. This happened with the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, and it happened again with the Industrial Revolution. Each of these transitions of metaphysical history brought with it new opportunities. The first to seize upon these opportunities literally made themselves central to all further developments. I say “literally” because in the case of the agricultural revolution, the villages and cities grew up around the first successful sedentary agricultural settlements. In the case of the industrial revolution, industrial cities grew up around the first successful industrial production centers.

In the first phase of the development of a paradigm of metaphysical history — the phase of expansion — macro-parasitic institutions are created and remain in a semi-fluid formative stage. In the second stage of the development of a paradigm of metaphysical history — the phase of consolidation — the expansion of the first stage has reached the limits of land that can be turned to agriculture, or land that can be put to industrial uses, and here the macro-parasitic institutions truly come into their own as the civilization turns back on itself and consolidates the socio-economic structures that have been developing during the period of expansion. (This is what the contemporary left calls “self-colonization.”)

Much of this ground was covered by Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. I need to study this work carefully in order to formulate an informed critique of macro-parasitical institutions and to give an account of their development in the context of metaphysical history.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) by Maurice Quentin de La Tour.

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Crony Capitalism: Macro-Parasitism under Industrialization

Friday

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Recently I was reading the Macroeconomic Resilience blog (which I recommend) and noticed one of the author’s tweets, which ran: “Just another example of our descent into crony capitalist hell.” This includes a link to a Rolling Stone story, The Real Housewives of Wall Street: Why is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?. The story was predictably depressing, but it also set me to thinking.

I guess I’ve thought of crony capitalism as an economic illness that besets other people’s economic systems, but was not a problem of the industrialized Western nation-states. The Rolling Stone article, and Ashwin Parameswaran’s comment upon it, seem to recognize crony capitalism as a fait accompli of the most advanced industrialized economies.

In an earlier post I wrote about what may be called the existential condition of the ratepayer. We need only shift this analysis by an increment to note that almost everything that I wrote about ratepayers also applies (perhaps especially applies) to taxpayers.

Recently on my other blog, in a post called The Culture of Corruption, I wrote:

“An oft-quoted line from the travel writer Paul Theroux is this: “The Japanese have perfected good manners and made them indistinguishable from rudeness.” (This is from The Great Railway Bazaar, Chapter 28, p. 290) In parallel to this, I would say that Americans have perfected good governance and made it indistinguishable from corruption.”

Our good governance has not prevented the emergence of institutions that are virtually indistinguishable from some of the most abusive crony capitalist regimes in the world.

In his deservedly famous book Plagues and Peoples, William H. McNeill makes a distinction between micro-parasites and macro-parasites. Micro-parasites are the familiar infectious diseases that live off us, and when they begin to kill off their host population we say that they are “epidemic.” Macro-parasites also live off us, but instead of being invisible microbes, they are the animals that formerly ate us outright, but most it is others of our own species that live off us.

The examples that McNeill gives of macro-parasitism are mostly taken from agricultural civilization. These are the most familiar examples — emperors, kings, nobles and all the peerage who exploit the mass of the peasantry whose mean lives can never amount to much with the obscene wealth of royalty extracted from their toil. Certainly this is what macro-parasitism was. But, as I have pointed out repeatedly in this forum, profound social changes have followed from industrialization, and it should also be expected that relations of macro-parasitism should also change.

William H. McNeill

Whereas I once thought of crony capitalism as an arrested form of the development of a fully industrialized commercial economy, a condition that might ameliorated if not transcended by measures expressly undertaken to remove a crony capitalist elite from power, from the perspective of the economic ecology of McNeill, it could be claimed that crony capitalism is in fact the mature form that industrialized economies will take.

Crony capitalism, with its entrenched plutocracy, is a stable and iterable socio-economic structure that may promise a social paradigm for the longue durée — something that I have argued has been lacking from industrialized civilization (cf. Social Consensus in Industrialized Society) — much like the thousand years of the Roman Empire in classical antiquity or the thousand year of medieval feudalism. These latter two examples are instances of a stable macro-parasitic socio-economic system under the agricultural paradigm; crony capitalism may be the stable macro-parasitical socio-economic system under the industrial paradigm.

Whether we call it macro-parasitism, corruption, rent-seeking, or tax farming it all comes to pretty much the same thing.

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Self-Dissimilarity

Sunday

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In A Note on Fractals and Banach-Tarski Extraction I suggested that there is a sense in which the mathematical methodology of Banach-Tarski extraction is the antithesis of a fractal, but I have realized that there is another kind of antithesis to a fractal, and this realization came to me by a rather circuitous chain of reasoning. The short version is this: fractals are self-similarity iterated to infinity, therefore the antithesis of a fractal is self-dissimilarity iterated to infinity. But it took me some time to get that far, so let me back up a bit and give a more detailed account of how my mind got from point A to point B.

My post Popular Revolt in the Arab World was tweeted by Ashwin Parameswaran, who added the cryptic (to me) comment: “The resilience-stability tradeoff in political regimes.” Mr. Parameswaran, a former banker, has a blog, Macroeconomic Resilience, which I of course took a look at, and found it to be of the greatest interest. Mr. Parameswaran describes his blog as, “Mostly about markets and macroeconomies as complex adaptive systems,” and in some of the posts he has written he draws heavily from ecology. This was of great interest to me given my recent formulation of Integral Ecology. His applications of ecological theory to economic theory are certainly in the spirit of a generalized conception of ecology that is universally applicable in formulating our conception of the world.

In his post The Resilience Stability Tradeoff: Drawing Analogies between River Flood Management and Macroeconomic Management, Mr. Parameswaran wrote:

“[The 2008 Bihar flood] was a disaster caused by the loss of system resilience, highlighted by the inability of the system to ‘withstand even modest adverse shocks’ after prolonged periods of stability… With the passage of time, a progressively greater degree of resources were required to maintain system stability and the eventual failure was a catastrophic one rather than a moderate one… stabilisation transformed the system into a state where eventually even minor and frequently observed disturbances would trigger a catastrophic outcome.”

As soon as I read this, while simultaneously acknowledging the truth of this as far as it extends, I immediately began thinking of counter-examples, of instances when this does not seem to be the case, instances when stability takes the form of a stable pattern that repeats over time (like a fractal in time). Do we perhaps think of stability a little too much as a form of Platonic eternity, in which the emphasis falls on the timeless, the unchanging, and invariant, and time is the mere moving image of eternity?

But what is stability? If an ecological system swings like a pendulum between too many predators and not enough prey, and too much prey and not enough predators, that is to say, if an ecosystem swings between feast and famine, is this a stable equilibrium, or is it an unstable system? One way to distinguish the two would be to say that if the change in the ecosystem escalates catastrophically resulting in damage to or destruction of that ecosystem, then this is not a system in equilibrium. On relatively short time scales this works out rather well, but if we think of longer time scales in which ecological succession, including stages of nudation, are common parts of the ecosystem, we have to ask in what sense the “destruction” of an ecosystem is a catastrophic failure and in what sense it is part of a larger ecological structure. When we consider the even longer time scales of evolutionary biology or geomorphology, in which the fungibility of the biome and the fungibility of the landscape mean that seas disappear and in time become mountaintops, then creation and destruction of entire ecosystems are part of the ongoing drama of life.

I have had similar thoughts in relation to punctuated equilibrium. The first time I ever heard about punctuated equilibrium I immediately said to myself, “Well, it all depends on how much of a period of time you take. What from a close-up perspective seems atomized and discontinuous may from a distance appear smooth and continuous. What appears as an exception to a rule on a small, local scale of time, in a larger, more comprehensive scale of time is the confirmation of a pattern.” I kept this idea of punctuated equilibrium in my thoughts, and when I went for a hike some years later on Mount Hood I saw a concrete illustration of in the White River Gorge, which runs down the east face of Mount Hood. I sat down in on a rock in the White River Gorge, thinking of punctuated equilibrium and the history of life, and I read the whole of Shelley’s (unfinished) poem The Triumph of Life. It was a memorable experience, and it stays with me to this day.

What about the White River Gorge put me in mind of punctuated equilibrium? The White River, fed by melting snow from the mountain, runs through a gorge with steep, slanted slopes of rounded, rolling rocks. It is quite difficult in places to walk over these rocks. The slopes seem to be just a little steeper than the angle of repose, so that if you wait and watch, you will eventually see rocks tumble down the slope. Most of these rocks are fairly small, but if you wait long enough you will eventually seek larger rocks roll down the slope. Is this a gradual process or a punctuated process? For each rock that rolls down the face of the slope, it is a punctuated event, but if you set up a camera to take one picture per day, and then made a film of several years worth of the White River Gorge, it would look like very slow and gradual change.

The White River Gorge on the east slope of Mount Hood.

I wasn’t the only one to have this reaction to punctuated equilibrium. I remember one day reading an issue of Scientific American in the Newberg library (I was there on my lunch break; this had to be in the mid-1980s as that was the timeframe when I was driving to Newberg every day) there was a story on evolutionary theory in which the author stated something to the effect that what to the paleontologist appears as a rapid if not sudden change may appear to the biologist as a smooth and incremental transition. The punctuated equilibrium-oriented paleontologist and the gradualist biologist may simply be speaking at cross purposes.

The library in Newberg, Oregon, where I frequently spent my lunch breaks while my job at the time involved a layover in the town.

After I wrote the above paragraph I did a little research and I found the article “The Evolution of Darwinism” in the June 1985 issue of Scientific American. Here is the paragraph that remained in my mind (more or less) all these years:

“The dispute with the punctualists loses some of its focus when one recognizes that it is partly an artifact of a radical difference in time scales: the time scale of the paleontologists who propose the theory of punctuated equilibrium and that of the geneticists who were instrumental in formulating the synthetic theory. Since successive layers in geologic strata may have been laid down tens of thousands of years apart, morphological changes that developed over thousands of generations may make an abrupt appearance in the fossil record. In contrast, geneticists refer to changes that require 200 generations or more as gradual, since they exceed the time span of all experiments except those on microorganisms. In speaking on the one hand of sudden change and on the other of gradual evolution, the punctualists and the gradualists are in many cases talking about the same thing.”

Much later, only recently, I came across the scientific language used to express this distinction, and it is the language of symmetry. Richard Feynman, in his short book The Character of Physical Law, has a chapter on symmetry in physical theory, and here he observes that if you construct an apparatus for a scientific experiment in one place, and then do the same thing in another place and get the same result, this is spatial symmetry, sometimes called translation in space. Similarly, we can conduct a scientific experiment at two different times and this is temporal symmetry, or translation in time. Then he considers the possibility of constructing an experimental apparatus at one scale, conducting an experiment, and then trying the same apparatus and experiment conducted at different scales, either much larger or much smaller. This is translation in scale, and it demonstrate symmetry or asymmetry of scale. Many scientific experiments that can be translated in space or time cannot be translated in scale. Step back for a moment and this becomes obvious: macroscopic observations that, say, conform to Newton’s laws of motion, do not conform to the laws of quantum physics which operate on the scale of atomic and subatomic particles, and vice versa.

One way to define a fractal is that it is a structure that retains its properties under magnification. Fractals possess self-similarity, or symmetry, across translation in scale iterated to infinity. We can see from this that symmetry is the more comprehensive concept, and we can only define self-similarity (symmetry) or self-dissimilarity (asymmetry) in the context of symmetry construed quite broadly, which might be applied to translation in scale, but it might also be applied to translation in space or time.

In any case, the sense of symmetry sought in contemporary physical theory can be formulated in a much more intuitive sense, as well as a much more traditional sense, by understanding the it is a search for constants, or what would have once been called universal truths. This idiom of universal truths has fallen into disfavor (it has the flavor of theology about it), but if you are looking for a property that remains invariant under translations in space, translations in time, or translations in scale, with each of these symmetries you demonstrate you approach more closely to something that is universally true (whether or not you choose to call it that). This is a sense of “science” that would have been immediately recognized by Plato or Aristotle, before any distinction between science, philosophy, and theology was even imagined. For Plato, knowledge, in contradistinction to mere opinion, was about changeless, eternal truths, and in so far as physicists today are seeking symmetry in physical theory, they are seeking that within the changing appearances of the world that does not change.

It is the natural response of the philosophical mind, when presented with a putative universal truth to immediately seek counter-examples. Universal generalization (the “universal affirmative” in traditional logic) is given the lie by a single counter-example. That doesn’t mean that we have to necessarily give up on the universal generalization, though we do have to modify it, at very least acknowledging an exception. Much of science is also built on this instinctive contrarian response, and in so far as contemporary science deals more with statistical regularities than universal truths, we can except a law with the occasional exception, as long as we can account for the exception with some other law.

In seeking counter-examples to proposed universal laws, we are seeking asymmetry, that is to say, we are seeking self-dissimilarity within the world. While Feynman said in the same book of his mentioned above the human beings have a natural response to symmetry, that we intuitively appreciate and enjoy symmetry, it is no less human to exercise skepticism by calling symmetry into question, and perhaps even appreciating asymmetry. Ruskin’s famous essay on Gothic architecture makes much of what he calls the “wildness” of Gothic art, and anyone who has visited both ancient Greek temples and European Gothic cathedrals knows well the difference between Hellenistic rationalism framed in terms of eternal verities and universal truths on the one hand, and on the other hand Gothic irregularity and the insistence upon the particular and the exception, which is, in a sense, a form of empiricism.

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