Measuring the Size of the World

Saturday

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A Scientific Research Program That Never Happened

Carl Sagan liked to characterize the Library of Alexandria as a kind of scientific research institution in classical antiquity:

“Here was a community of scholars, exploring physics, literature, medicine, astronomy, geography, philosophy, mathematics, biology, and engineering. Science and scholarship had come of age. Genius flourished there. The Alexandrian Library is where we humans first collected, seriously and systematically, the knowledge of the world.”

Carl Sagan, Cosmos, 1980, pp. 18-19

Clearly, before the scientific revolution there were many intimations of modern science, but these intimations of modern science, these examples we have of scientific knowledge prior to the scientific revolution, are isolated, and almost always the work of a single individual, like Archimedes or Eratosthenes. Thus Sagan used the example of the Library at Alexandria to suggest that there was, in classical antiquity, at least an intimation of a research institutions in which scholars worked in collaboration with each other. How accurate of a picture is this of science in antiquity?

The philosopher of science Imre Lakatos used the phrase “scientific research program” to refer to a number of scholars working jointly on a common set of problems in science. These scholars need not know each other, or work together in the same geographical location, but they do need to know each other’s work in order to respond to it, to question it, to elaborate upon it, and to thus contribute together to the growth of scientific knowledge, not as an isolated scientist producing an isolated result, but as a community of scholars with shared methods, shared assumptions, and shared research goals. Did any scientific research programs in this sense exist in classical antiquity? And was the Library at Alexandria a focal point for ancient scientific research programs?

If there were scientific research programs in antiquity, I am unaware of any evidence for this. No doubt at some humble scale shared scientific inquiry did take place in classical antiquity, but no surviving accounts of research undertaken in this way describe anything like this. In Athens, and later at Rome and Constantinople, the ancient philosophical schools did exactly this, investigating common research problems in a collegial atmosphere of shared research findings, and since there was, in classical antiquity, no distinction made between science and philosophy, we can assert with confidence that scientific research institutions (Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum) existed in antiquity, and scientific research programs existed in antiquity (Platonism, Aristotelianism, etc.), but even as we assert this we know that this was not science as we know it today.

When universities were founded in the Middle Ages, these universities inherited the tradition of philosophical inquiry that the ancient schools had once cultivated, and they added theology and logic to the curriculum. If there is any research program in a recognizable science that extends through western history all the way to its roots in classical antiquity, it is the research program in logic, which we can find in antiquity, in the Middle Ages, and in the modern period still today. But the Scholasticism that dominated medieval European universities was, again, nothing like the science we know today. Scholars did collaborate on a large, even a multi-generational research program, in Aristotelianism and Christian theology, and in the late Middle Ages this began to approximate natural science as we have known it since the scientific revolution, but when the scientific revolution began in earnest, it often began as a rejection of the universities and Scholasticism, and the great thinkers of the scientific revolution distanced themselves from the tradition in which they themselves were educated.

One could even say that Galileo worked essentially in isolation, when, during the final years of his life, living under house arrest due to the findings of the Inquisition, he pursued his research into the laws of motion in his own home, building his own experimental apparatus, writing up his own results, and being segregated from wider society by his sentence. What is different in the case of Galileo however, what places Galileo in the context of the scientific revolution, rather than being simply another isolated scholar like Archimedes or Eratosthenes, perhaps with a small circle of intimates with whom they shared their research, is that Galileo’s work was shortly thereafter taken up by many different individuals, some of them working in near isolation like Galileo, while others worked in community (in some cases, in literal religious communities).

Alexander Koyré’s 1952 lecture “An Experiment in Measurement” (collected in Metaphysics and Measurement), details how Filippo Salviati, Marin Mersenne, and Giovanni Battista Riccioli all took up and built upon Galileo’s work. Some of the experiments undertaken by Mersenne and Riccioli demanded an almost heroic commitment to the attempt to make precision observations despite the technical limitations of their experimental apparatus. Riccioli built several pendulums and, with the aid of nine Jesuit assistants, counted every swing of a pendulum over a period of twenty-four hours. The many individuals who were inspired by Galileo to replicate his results, or to try to prove that they could not be replicated, is what made the scientific revolution different from scientific knowledge in earlier history, and this community of scientists working on a common problem is more-or-less what Lakatos meant by a scientific research program.

Since the scientific revolution we have any number of examples of the work of a gifted individual being the inspiration for others to build upon that original work, as in the case of Carl von Linné (better known today as Linnaeus), whose followers were called the Apostles of Linnaeus, and who spread out across the world collecting and classifying botanical specimens according to the binomial nomenclature of Linnaeus. During Linnaeus lifetime, another truly remarkable scientific research program was the French Geodesic Mission, which sent teams to Lapland and Ecuador in order to measure the circumference of the Earth around the equator and around the poles, to see which distance was slightly longer than the other.

While there were, in classical antiquity, curious individuals who traveled widely and who attempted to gather empirical data from many different locations, there was no community of scholars, inside or outside any institution, that, prior to the scientific revolution, engaged in this kind of research. We can imagine, as an historical counter-factual, if other scholars in antiquity had been sufficiently interested in Eratosthenes’ estimate of the size of the Earth that they had sought to replicate Eratosthenes’ work with the same passion and dedication to detail that we saw in the work of Mersenne and Riccioli. Imagine if the Library at Alexandria had conducted Eratosthenes’ experiment not only in Alexandria and Syene, but also had sent teams to the furthest reaches of the ancient world — the great cities of Asia, Europe, and North Africa — and had repeated their investigations with increasing precision with each generation of experiments.

If Eratosthenes’ determination of the circumference of Earth had been the object of such a scientific research program in classical antiquity, there would have been no need of the French Geodesic Mission two thousand years later, as these results would already have been known. And given that Eratosthenes lived during the third century BC, the stable political and social institutions of the ancient world still had hundreds upon hundreds of years to go; the wealth and growth of the ancient world was still all to come in the time of Eratosthenes. There was, in the post-Eratosthenean world, plenty of wealth, plenty of time, and plenty of intelligent individuals who could have followed up upon the work of Eratosthenes as Mersenne and Riccioli followed up on the work of Galileo, and the Apostles of Linnaeus followed up on the first research program of scientific botany. But none of this happened. The scientific knowledge that Eratosthenes formulated was preserved by others and repeated in a few schools, but no one picked up the torch and ran with it.

Why did no Eratosthenean scientific research program appear in classical antiquity? Why did scientific research programs appear during the scientific revolution? I cannot answer these questions, but I will note that these questions could constitute a scientific research program in history, which continues today to be weak in regard to scientific research programs. History today is in a state of development similar to natural science in medieval universities, before the scientific revolution. This suggests further questions. Why was there was scientific research program into logic that has been continuous throughout the history of western civilization (including the Middle Ages, which was particularly brilliant in logical research)? Why has history escaped, so far, the scientific revolution?

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The Achievement of Columbus

Monday

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Christopher Columbus (31 October 1451 – 20 May 1506)

There is a list on Wikipedia of seventy European and American voyages of scientific exploration from the French Geodesic Mission of 1735-1739 to the Valdivia mission of 1898-1899. This list does not include the voyages of exploration during the Age of Discovery, but these voyages of exploration, while not organized for strictly scientific purposes, did constitute, among other things, a form of scientific research. One could say that exploration is a form of experimentation, or one could say that experimentation is a form of exploration; in a sense, the two activities are mutually convertible.

Late medieval and early modern voyages of discovery were undertaken with mixed motives. Among these motives were the motives to explore and to discover and to understand, but there were also motives to win new lands for Christendom and to convert any peoples discovered to Christianity, to find riches (mainly gold and spices), to obtain titles of nobility, and to seize political power. Columbus sought all of these things, but it is notable that, while he did open up the New World to Christian conversion, economic exploitation, and the unending quest for power, he achieved virtually none of these things for himself or for his heirs, despite his intentions and his efforts. Columbus’ lasting contribution was to navigation and discovery and cartography, while others exploited the discoveries of Columbus to receive riches, glory, and titles.

Although I can attempt to assimilate the voyages of Columbus to the scientific revolution, there is no question that Columbus conceptualized his own life and his voyages in providential terms, and his motives were only incidentally scientific if scientific at all. Certainly Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and others also had mixed motives, and indeed a mixed mindset arising from the collision of a medieval conceptual framework with early modern discoveries that added to this conceptual framework while challenging it, and eventually destroying it. Of these early modern pioneers, Columbus had the greatest sense of mission — the idea that he was a man of a great destiny — and perhaps it was this sense of mission that prompted him to extract such spectacular concessions from the Spanish crown: the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Governor General of islands discovered and these titles to be inherited in perpetuity by his heirs. If Columbus’ plan had unfolded according to his design, the entirety of the Americas today would still be ruled by the descendants of Columbus.

The Age of Discovery was part of the Scientific Revolution, the leading edge of the scientific revolution, as it were, thus part of the origins story of a still-nascent scientific civilization. Today we still fall far short of being a properly scientific civilization, and how much further the European civilization of the time of Columbus fell short of this is obvious when we read Columbus’ own account of his explorations and discoveries, in which he insists that he found the route to India and China, and he insists equally on the large amount of gold that he found, when he had, in fact, discovered very little gold. Despite this, Columbus is, or deserves to be, one of the culture heroes of a scientific-civilization-yet-to-be no matter how completely he failed to understand what he accomplished.

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To celebrate Columbus Day I visited one of my favorite beaches on the Oregon coast, Cape Meares. While yesterday, Sunday, was stormy all day, with strong winds and heavy rain, today was beautiful — warm with no wind, a blue sky, and even the ocean was not as cold as I expected when I walked in the surf. When I arrived there were only three people on the beach besides myself; when I left, there were about ten people on the beach.

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Happy Columbus Day!

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The Unbuilt Monument of Mount Athos

Sunday

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Mount Athos Carved as a Monument to Alexander the Great, 1796, by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, 1750-1819

There was once a plan to carve the likeness of Alexander the Great into Mount Athos

As Mount Rushmore has been carved with the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt, and as the Crazy Horse Memorial is now being carved into Thunderhead Mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Dinocrates imagined carving Mount Athos into an enormous likeness of Alexander the Great. This is one of the most ambitious unbuilt projects known from classical antiquity.

This sculpted mountain would not only have carved the likeness of Alexander, but would have carved an enormous statue of Alexander into the mountain, such that the statue would cradle an entire city in one hand. There were many cities that there built as a result of Alexander the Great — not only Alexandria, but also a string of Greek cities across West Asia along the line of march of his army — but if the statue and city had been built at Mount Athos, this would have been the great architectural monument of Alexander’s moment in history. It was not built, however, nor even started and abandoned, so all we have is the idea of a monumental statue and city dedicated to Alexander.

Here is how it is described in Vitruvius:

Dinocrates the architect, relying on the powers of his skill and ingenuity, whilst Alexander was in the midst of his conquests, set out from Macedonia to the army, desirous of gaining the commendation of his sovereign. That his introduction to the royal presence might be facilitated, he obtained letters from his countrymen and relations to men of the first rank and nobility about the king’s person; by whom being kindly received, he besought them to take the earliest opportunity of accomplishing his wish. They promised fairly, but were slow in performing; waiting, as they alleged, for a proper occasion. Thinking, however, they deferred this without just grounds, he took his own course for the object he had in view. He was, I should state, a man of tall stature, pleasing countenance, and altogether of dignified appearance. Trusting to the gifts with which nature had thus endowed him, he put off his ordinary clothing, and having anointed himself with oil, crowned his head with a wreath of poplar, slung a lion’s skin across his left shoulder, and carrying a large club in his right hand, he sallied forth to the royal tribunal, at a period when the king was dispensing justice.

The novelty of his appearance excited the attention of the people; and Alexander soon discovering, with astonishment, the object of their curiosity, ordered the crowd to make way for him, and demanded to know who he was. “A Macedonian architect,” replied Dinocrates, “who suggests schemes and designs worthy your royal renown. I propose to form Mount Athos into the statue of a man holding a spacious city in his left hand, and in his right a huge cup, into which shall be collected all the streams of the mountain, which shall then be poured into the sea.”

Alexander, delighted at the proposition, made immediate inquiry if the soil of the neighbourhood were of a quality capable of yielding sufficient produce for such a state. When, however, he found that all its supplies must be furnished by sea, he thus addressed Dinocrates: “I admire the grand outline of your scheme, and am well pleased with it: but I am of opinion he would be much to blame who planted a colony on such a spot. For as an infant is nourished by the milk of its mother, depending thereon for its progress to maturity, so a city depends on the fertility of the country surrounding it for its riches, its strength in population, and not less for its defence against an enemy. Though your plan might be carried into execution, yet I think it impolitic. I nevertheless request your attendance on me, that I may otherwise avail myself of your ingenuity.”

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, de Architectura, Book II, Introduction, sections 1-3

There is also a parenthetical mention of this proposal in Strabo, 14.1:

“After the completion of the temple, which, he says, was the work of Cheirocrates (the same man who built Alexandreia and the same man who proposed to Alexander to fashion Mt. Athos into his likeness, representing him as pouring a libation from a kind of ewer into a broad bowl, and to make two cities, one on the right of the mountain and the other on the left, and a river flowing from one to the other) — after the completion of the temple, he says, the great number of dedications in general were secured by means of the high honor they paid their artists, but the whole of the altar was filled, one might say, with the works of Praxiteles.”

from Pope Alexander VII Kupferstich François Spierre Pietro da Cortona 1666

Several artists have been inspired by this idea, including a painting by Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (top), François Spierre and Pietro da Cortona (above), and Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (below). The project, though never built, continued to live in the imagination of artists and architects.

Plate 18 from Entwurff Einer Historischen Architectur (Leipzig, 1725) by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1656–1723)

Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach’s monumental work Entwurff Einer Historischen Architectur includes the following description of the proposed city:

Plate XVIII

Mount Athos, cut into a Gigantick or Colossal Statue

It is to Dinocrates, Architect to Alexander the Great, that historians attribute this extraordinary Project of cutting Mount Athos into the Form of a Man, who was, in his left Hand, to hold a City, capable of containing 10,000 Inhabitants, and in his Right a Cup or Basin, which was to receive all the Water, that rolled down this Mountain, and afterwards distribute it to the Sea by great Precipices, not far from the Isthmus, which Xerxes caused to be cut.

Strabo seems to be mistaken, when, speaking of the Enterprise, he names Cheromocrates as the Architect. He mentions a Design of adding another City, below the former, on the Left, thought which the Water, that flowed out of the Cup or Basin, might be made to pass.

This Project Alexander thought worthy of his Greatness, and only disapproved of it, by Reason of the Difficulties, which would have arisen, how to furnish a City thus situated, without Corn-fields or Meadows, with the common Necessaries of Life. He looked upon Dinocrates to be a great Architect, but a bad Economist.

As for the Invention of cutting Rocks into humane Forms, it is more ancient than the Age Dinocrates lived in, even though we should not give Credit to some ancient Historians, who assure us, that Sermiramis executed a Project like unto this on Mount Bagistan in Medea, where she caused a Rock of 17 Furlongs to be cut into her own and several other Figures, But what may seem more surprising to those, who are not apprised of it, is, that such a Project has been really Brought to Perfection in Suchuen, a Province of China, near to the Metropolis Chunking, on the Brink of the River Fu, where there is a Mountain cut in such a Manner as to represent the Idol Fe sitting.

Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Entwurff Einer Historischen Architectur, Leipzig, 1725, Plate 18. I got a facsimile copy of the Entwurff by inter-library loan, and I believe that it was a facsimile of the 1737 edition with the wonderful Enlightenment title as follows: A plan of civil and historical architecture, in the representation of the most noted buildings of foreign nations, both ancient and modern : taken from the most approv’d historians, original medals, remarkable ruins, and curious authentick designs; and display’d in eighty-six double folio-plates, finely engraven : at a very great expence, by the most eminent hands : divided into five books : … / all drawn with excellent skill, and the utmost diligence by Mr. John Bernhard Fischer, of Erlach … ; first published at Leipzig, with the explanations of all the plates, in German and French, out of the best ancient and modern writers; and now faithfully translated into English, with large additional notes, by Thomas Lediard, Esq. … I scanned the pages associated with plate XVIII so that I had a copy of the text, which I have reproduced above, modernizing the spelling and punctuation, neglecting the italics, but retaining the idiosyncratic eighteenth century Capitalization. If you’re interested in more information, write me and I will send you the scans I made.

It would be interesting to find out how and why Strabo cites Cheromocrates (spelled “Cheirocrates” in the Strabo transliteration quoted above) whereas both Vitruvius and Fischer von Erlach cite Dinocrates. It could be a mere error, but Strabo cites Cheromocrates as the final architect of the famous Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient world. it seems unlikely that the architect of such a work would be mistaken, but there was also an implicit tradition in antiquity of attributing great works to great men. One got a larger audience for one’s book if one published it under the name of a now deceased author of great reputation, as compared to publishing it under one’s own name. There are so many interesting counterfactuals here it would be difficult to name them all. If the Mount Athos monument had been built, it might have also found its way onto lists of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and so one would expect that a work of such stature be credited to an architect already know for similar greatness.

Detail from the above plate.

Connoisseurs of music sometimes discuss the relative merits of the unfinished fragments of incomplete works by great composers. Some of these unfinished works have become renowned in their right, as, for example, with the case of Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor, more commonly known as the Unfinished Symphony. I have a fascination with unfinished, or, rather, unbuilt architectural designs. I can still remember the first time I saw a picture of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenotaph for Isaac Newton (which I have written about in several posts, for example, in Central Projects and Axialization), which is among the greatest examples of unbuilt architecture. Would that Dinocrates had left drawings of his plan for Alexander’s monument as Étienne-Louis Boullée drew up for Newton’s monument!

Étienne-Louis Boullée’s design for a Cenotaph for Newton, which remains unbuilt. This is perhaps one of the most famous unbuilt structures in the history of architecture.

Today, Mount Athos is known as a famous monastery (actually, twenty monasteries, also known as the Monastic Republic of Mount Athos). If the vision of Dinocrates had been realized, the history of Mount Athos would have been quite different, and its environs today — whether the monument and the city had survived the ages and grown into a modern city, or had it become a monumental ruin — would have a different aspect. Rather than being an entire peninsula consecrated to monasticism and a goal of Christian pilgrimage, it might have been a celebrated pagan shrine and the goal of pilgrimage in classical antiquity, and for tourists today. But one could easily formulate an alternative history in which the monument and the city were built, stood as a thriving metropolis for hundreds of years, was eventually depopulated, after which time early Christian monks settled in the ruins of the city so that Mount Athos became an monastery anyway, albeit by a more circuitous route than that by which it did in fact become a monastery.

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Plate 18 from Entwurff Einer Historischen Architectur (Leipzig, 1725) by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1656–1723)

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The Blank Slate of Outer Space

Monday

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In his book, A Theory of Justice, John Rawls presented several highly influential doctrines that have come to be widely discussed. Rawls says that justice is fairness, and his method for arriving at fairness in social structures is that these structures should be formulated from behind a “veil of ignorance,” with that ignorance being the ignorance of the individual as to their place in the society in which they would live. The method that Rawls formulated is a thought experiment called the “original position.” Here’s how he stated it:

“In justice as fairness the original position of equality corresponds to the state of nature in the traditional theory of the social contract. This original position is not, of course, thought of as an actual historical state of affairs, much less as a primitive condition of culture. It is understood as a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice. Among the essential features of this situation is that no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does any one know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances. Since all are similarly situated and no one is able to design principles to favor his particular condition, the principles of justice are the result of a fair agreement or bargain.”

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 11

As noted in the above quote, this stands in the tradition of “state of nature” thought experiments familiar from Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Pufendorf. State of nature or original position thought experiments posit a time before human societies existed — a blank slate upon which human beings were free to write as they pleased — so as to try to imagine how the existing societies with which we are familiar came into existence.

Many formulations of visions of the human future (including spacefaring futures) implicitly incorporate something like Rawls’ thought experiment without even realizing that this is what they are doing. Outer space as a place for human activity and achievement gives us the same opportunity as state of nature thought experiments to reflect on counterfactual human societies against a backdrop that has been putatively purged of contemporary social presuppositions, though, with outer space, applied symmetrically to the future instead of the past. In so far as we perceive outer space as a blank slate, and in so far as we attempt to project a future upon outer space as though it were a blank slate for future human spacefaring societies, then outer space takes on the properties (or, rather, the lack of properties) of a blank slate.

In the case of outer space, we try to imagine how existing societies with which we are now familiar will pass out of existence and be replaced by some future society. Since the advent of spacefaring futurism (probably traceable to the Golden Age of Science Fiction) outer space became a place where human beings could project what was best in themselves in order to cultivate a hopeful future. Early science fiction such as Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells was markedly dystopian, but the genre rapidly transformed into an optimistic and expansive vision of the future. With this minimal framework of sapcefaring and optimism and progress toward a better future, outer space became a blank slate for human hopes and dreams. For a time, utopianism reigned, but when the simple utopianism faded, it was replaced sometimes by dystopianism, but, more interestingly to me, by the idea of outer space as the kind of blank slate for a better tomorrow in spite of the problems we have today.

This latter conception is something I have personally encountered many times. The idea seems to be that human beings have made many mistakes on Earth so that outer space is a “second chance” for humanity and we consequently have a moral obligation to only establish human societies away from Earth when we are fully prepared to do a better job than we have done on Earth — hence the waiting gambit. Sometimes this position is presented such that humanity does not deserve to establish a presence beyond Earth, because we have made such a mess of things here.

Here the “original position” has been transposed with a “final position” for human society — the ultimate form that human society is to take, projected onto a spacefaring future in which outer space is the setting for a perfect society that has not been realized on Earth, and which cannot be realized on Earth because of our history. Thus the “final position” takes the form that it does because the “original position” was corrupt. This is very much in the spirit of Rousseau, who saw the original foundations of human society to be corrupt, and this inherited corruption (not of the individual, who, according to Rousseau, is naturally good, but of social institutions) has been passed down to all subsequent human societies. Thus outer space presents itself as a domain free from this inherited corruption where a “final position” can be brought into being, and humanity can, for the first time in its history, realize a righteous society.

It is interesting to note that this is in no sense a revolutionary view, as it imagines human beings confined to the purgatory that is Earth for an indefinite period of time until the sins of the youth of our species have been burned and purged away. Only when we have fully completed our penance — a gradual and excruciatingly incremental process — and become perfect, do we deserve to take the next step and inhabit the blank slate of outer space as newly innocent beings, a humanity that has made itself innocent, and thus worthy of the final position, through great moral effort.

A revolutionary view, in contradistinction to this moral incrementalism, would be that the final position is there before us, suspended in the air like Macbeth’s dagger, which we can reach out and grasp at any time. We can, in this view, attain the final position simply by taking a sequence of revolutionary steps that will transform us and our world because we have the boldness to take these steps. This revolutionary moralism vis-à-vis the final position would fit well with what I have called an early spacefaring breakout in The Spacefaring Inflection Point (and further elaborated in Bound in Shallows: Space Exploration and Institutional Drift).

An early and sudden inflection point in the development of spacefaring civilization could be both the revolutionary step required to put in place the final position as well as the advent of a new kind of civilization. This view seems more historiographically justified that the more prevalent incrementalist view, but I have only ever heard the incrementalist view — though, I ought to say, I know of no one who has formulated the incrementalist view in the full sweep of the vision. One usually gets only bits and pieces of the vision, which leaves its advocates with a certain plausible deniability in regard to the future final position implicit in their conception of human destiny in outer space.

It may sound like I am here advocating one conception of the final position over another, but I find both to be as profoundly mistaken as original position or state of nature thought experiments. While I think there is something to be learned from both thought experiments — the original position and the final position — I regard them as being as Rawls has characterized them, “…a purely hypothetical situation characterized so as to lead to a certain conception of justice.” Hypotheticals have a value, but that value is not absolute. Moreover, we know that hypotheticals, whether past or future, are not actual depictions of the past or accurate predictions of the future; they are scenarios that allow us to rehearse certain ideas as they might play out in practice.

In practice, there are no blank slates. Human societies don’t arise from nothing; they arise from prior societies, and these societies can be traced backward in time to long before human beings existed. The same is true of our brain and our intelligence, that we use to shape our social order: both have a deep history in the biosphere, but both bear the lowly imprint of their origins. We can’t even say, as Nietzsche said, that all this is human, all-too-human, because it all precedes humanity. It is terrestrial, all-too-terrestrial.

There was no paradisaical state of nature to which we might dream that we can return (if only we could deconstruct the injustices of human social institutions, which seems to have been Rousseau’s position), and there will be no final position of a perfectly just human society in the future, whether on Earth or in space. Both ideas are painfully naïve, and if we are ever to make real progress, and not the imaginary progress of utopias safely compartmentalized in the distant past or the distant future, we must disabuse ourselves of the idea that humanity is ever going to be anything other than human, all-too-human. Justice and morality did not reign in the past, and they are not going to reign in the future, whether on Earth or in space, world without end. Amen.

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Note added Friday 28 February 2020: A perfect example of the blank slate of outer space can be found in the recently announced contest for a design for a city of a million persons on Mars, Mars City State Design Competition Announced. The text of the announcement includes this: “How, given a fresh start, can life on Mars be made better than life on Earth?”

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I have previously written a number of blog posts on the idea of the blank slate, including:

● The Metaphysical Blank Slate: Positivism and Metaphysical Neutrality

● Addendum on the Metaphysical Blank Slate

● Further Addendum on the Metaphysical Blank Slate

● Blank Slate Cosmology

● Of Vacuity and Blankness

● Two (or Three) Metaphysical Themes

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Addendum on David Hume’s Book Burning Bonfire

Sunday

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David Hume

Today I had a new comment on a blog post that I wrote ten years ago. The comment was from Luke Thompson, and the blog post in question was Counter-Cyclical Civilization. I had to re-read my ten-year-old blog post to remind myself of what I had written, and of course I don’t recall in detail what I had in mind ten years ago.

In my ten-year-old post I discussed how the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution (what I would subsequently come to call the Three Revolutions, of which these constitute two) have changed the pattern of previous civilization, which seems to have more-or-less exemplified an organic model of civilization, such that civilizations behave like biological individuals and pass through predictable life cycles from birth to growth to maturity to decline to death. I argued that the scientific revolution and the industrial revolution had disrupted this pattern and thus suggest that the organic model of civilization is inadequate to describe civilization as we know it today. These revolutionary forces are “counter-cyclical” to the predictable cycle of the organic model of civilization.

Mr. Thompson asked what exactly I had meant in that blog post where I had written, “…this time around, the pattern has been interrupted. New forces are at play, and the result must be as unprecedented as the circumstances.” In my response I offered a number forces present in the modern world that apparently work counter-cyclically to the predictable forces of decay and disintegration that begin to break down a civilization when it has run its course and started on its decline.

In my recent post David Hume’s Book Burning Bonfire I described the “dark underbelly of the Enlightenment,” that is to say, the aspects of the Enlightenment that we are less apt to discuss, like Hume’s eagerness to burn the books of “school metaphysics” (by which he meant Scholasticism). Reflecting on this in the light of reading my old post about the organic model of civilization and counter-cyclical forces working against cyclical decline, I see now that I could have (had I remembered) characterized the Enlightenment era interest in book burning and clearing away of the relics of the past as a predictable force in history. When a new kind of civilization appears in the world — in this case, Enlightenment civilization — it is on the rise as the traditional form of civilization is on the decline. Thus Enlightenment civilization, as it emerges, engages those familiar forces of the organic model of civilization, hastening the decline of its predecessor so that it can more rapidly take its place in history.

The high-water mark of communism in the twentieth century similarly sought to eliminate the traces of traditionalist civilization in Russia and China, and in the domains controlled by these superpowers during their communist phases, so that that communist millennium could all the more rapidly take its place as a new communist civilization. During the twentieth century, when communism was the revolutionary ideology par excellence, the transition to a communist social order was seen (and was theorized by Marx to be) the inevitable outcome of historical progress, and all the devices of historiography and philosophy were mobilized to make it seem so. One of the examples I like to cite in this connection is the idea of a new “Soviet Man,” Homo sovieticus, that would mark a new stage in the development of humanity, and not merely a new stage in the development of history.

As catastrophic as the Enlightenment willingness to preside over the destruction of the medieval past, Soviet purges, and the Cultural Revolution were each to the past of the relevant society, these disruptions of the historical record must be considered little disruptions in history, because the intent of those engaged in these historical projects was to continue civilization, but to continue in a radically new direction. This meant that some of the ground had to be cleared in order to make way for the new civilization, but it did not necessarily demand that the entirety of the past be erased.

Radical disruptions in history sometimes do call for the complete effacement of the past and as the necessary step toward clearing the ground for a new civilization that will rise de novo from the ashes of the former civilization. The early Christians and some Muslims today often have this attitude to the past. Some revolutionary groups have this attitude to the past. The most radical communist groups, like the Khmer Rouge, who emptied out cities and sought to force the population into utopian rural agrarianism, had this attitude to the past.

This distinction between limited effacement (like Hume’s book burning) and radical effacement of the past (as in the collapse of Roman civilization) may be useful in theorizing the scope of historical disruption, and it could be employed to further articulate the organic model of civilization in relation to non-organic conceptions of civilization.

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David Hume’s Book Burning Bonfire

Tuesday

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David Hume, philosopher of the Scottish Enlightenment and advocate of book burning.

The Dark Underbelly of the Enlightenment

There is a well known passage from the final paragraph of David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

“When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, XII. “Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy”

In the dialectic that is human history we would expect that a dominant paradigm — like the Enlightenment today — would alternate between its benevolent expression and its malevolent expression, sometimes showing to a world a bright and cheerful aspect, while at other times betraying a dark and sinister aspect. This is not distinctive to the Enlightenment, it is a function of human nature, with its ever-present shadow side that we attempt to suppress and obscure and ignore. We can find this dialectic in all stages in the development of human civilization, and in all civilizations in all parts of the world. There are inspiring moments of brilliance, and devastating moments of horror, both flowing from the human heart in all its complexity and mendacity.

We prefer to focus on the novel and edifying aspects of the Enlightenment, and to pass over in the silence the destructive and sinister aspects of the Enlightenment, but both aspects are fully present in the Enlightenment no less than in other historical periods and other intellectual movements. The Enlightenment not only promoted a set of humanistic values, it also anathematized a set of traditional values associated with a form of society that preceded the Enlightenment.

There is another passage from Hume (which I earlier quoted in The Illiberal Conception of Freedom) that drives home the Enlightenment imperative not only to advance its own program, but also to extirpate tradition:

“Celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude, and the whole train of monkish virtues; for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment? We observe, on the contrary, that they cross all these desirable ends; stupify the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper.”

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 1777, Section IX, Conclusion, Part I

Hume has here lined up all virtues given pride of place during the Middle Ages (admittedly honored more in the breech than the observance) and roundly condemned them as being counter to human interests and therefore to be cast aside in favor of the values and virtues of the Enlightenment. For Hume, it is not enough merely to promote the rationalism and humanism of the Enlightenment, it is also necessary to extirpate rival moral systems.

When Hume wrote his philosophical works, the memory of the burning of heretics and witches was still fresh in European memory. Indeed, the Enlightenment was largely a reaction against the excesses that followed the Protestant Reformation, and especially the Thirty Years’ War. No doubt Hume saw the representatives of celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, and solitude as responsible, in whole or in part, for the atrocities of the religious wars that had so devastated early modern Europe. The book burning advocated by Hume has a spectacular theatricality that invokes both the auto-de-fé of the Inquisition and the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence under the brief rule of Savonarola. One good bonfire, it seems, deserves another.

The motives that led Hume to advocate book burning were not qualitatively different from motives that led earlier and later ideologies to advocate book burning and equivalent forms of censorship and the destruction of a former tradition now believed to present an obstacle to the construction of the kind of society that is to be built. During the Protestant Reformation, the furnishings of Catholic churches were looted and destroyed. Perhaps there were cases in which there was a desire to profit from this, but the many damaged sculptures and paintings demonstrate that there was also a desire merely to destroy for the sake of destruction, and to do so with a clear conscience because one was destroying in pursuit of a higher good.

I have previously quoted Montaigne on destructive enthusiasms excused by religious fervor in Transcendental Humors:

“The mind has not willingly other hours enough wherein to do its business, without disassociating itself from the body, in that little space it must have for its necessity. They would put themselves out of themselves, and escape from being men. It is folly; instead of transforming themselves into angels, they transform themselves into beasts; instead of elevating, they lay themselves lower. These transcendental humours affright me, like high and inaccessible places; and nothing is hard for me to digest in the life of Socrates but his ecstasies and communication with demons; nothing so human in Plato as that for which they say he was called divine; and of our sciences, those seem to be the most terrestrial and low that are highest mounted; and I find nothing so humble and mortal in the life of Alexander as his fancies about his immortalisation.”

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays, Book III, “Of Experience”

The Soviets destroyed countless Orthodox churches and monasteries, as the Chinese have destroyed many Tibetan Buddhist temples and monasteries, as the Taliban destroyed the legacy of Buddhism in Central Asia, and the Saudi government has presided over the destruction of almost all pre-Islamic monuments in Mecca (though it should be pointed out that the Saudis, in their enthusiasm for iconoclasm, also routinely destroy sites associated with early Islam). Clearly, this iconoclastic impulse as part of a desire to found a new social order is not distinctive to the Enlightenment or to western civilization. What is interesting here is not a presumption of uniqueness that can be shown to be false, but rather the similarity of the Enlightenment to other movements that look to humanity starting over again with a clean slate. In other words, it is the non-uniqueness of the Enlightenment that interests me in this respect.

The explicit and purposeful destruction of a legacy in order to begin anew from scratch points to an important aspect of contemporary iconoclasm: the blank slate is not a description, but a prescription. If we are to bring forth a new order, we must utterly destroy the old order, because the new order must be brought forth in all its purity and innocence, uncontaminated by the errors of the past. A blank slate is the necessary condition of building the brave new world the revolutionary dreams of founding. The blank slate given an epistemic exposition by Locke during the Enlightenment is thus seen as a moral precondition for the mind of the future, and not a description of the mind of the present. Locke is here engaged in what Nietzsche described as philosophy as the confession of its originator.

Today iconoclasm is viewed as a necessary prerequisite for every undertaking, and the idea of the blank slate continues to wield tremendous influence. I find it frightening that the future is regarded by many as a blank slate, upon which we project our ideals of a better and more just society. These are admirable motives, but they have been the motives of every revolutionary force that has demanded the indiscriminate demolition of all traditional institutions for the sake of a better tomorrow. Most worrisome of all, the lesson of history is that the focus of righteous wrath is usually fixed upon anything that represents a past ideal, as this ideal represents a rival conception of the good that cannot be tolerated. We must expect, then, that that which we have most valued will be most insistently targeted for destruction.

With renewed interest in space exploration in recent years, we are also seeing renewed interest in humanity establishing itself off the surface of Earth, and this interest has contributed to a growing discussion around space settlements. I intend to address these ideas elsewhere, as they are intrinsically interesting, but in connection with the above discussion of Enlightenment iconoclasm I want to focus on just one motif that recurs repeatedly in the discussion of human expansion beyond Earth. This motif is the idea that space is a blank slate for human beings where a new social order can be constructed that leaves behind the problems that have dogged the human condition on Earth. There are those who believe that human beings simply should not leave Earth (and these must be distinguished from those who believe that we cannot leave Earth, because the problem of human space settlement is intractable), but there are also those who do not specifically object to the expansion of humanity beyond Earth, but believe that we should wait until we clean up our act on our homeworld (a position that I call the waiting gambit), or that when we do move out into the solar system, and eventually to other stars, we must do so according to a new social template. In other words, we must abandon the past in order to create new institutions for this new frontier.

Given what has been noted above in respect to Enlightenment iconoclasm, we can see that his conception of humanity’s expansion beyond our homeworld being contingent upon a planetary-scale iconoclasm directed at the entire tradition of human civilization up to the present time is truly a disastrous conceit, and if we attempt to put this into practice, the result will be misery and suffering proportional to the extent that this conceit is realized.

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The Liberal Conception of Freedom

Sunday

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John Stuart Mill, philosopher and economist.

In my previous post, The Illiberal Conception of Freedom, I attempted to describe a conception of human freedom that has become distant and alien to us, but which was familiar to everyone for the greater part of human history. Much more familiar to us, living after the Enlightenment, is the liberal conception of freedom, which had among its greatest exponents John Stuart Mill. Here is one of his classic statements of the liberal conception of freedom:

“…the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinions of others, to do so would be wise, or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him, or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to some one else. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, I

We can understand the work of John Stuart Mill as part of the Victorian achievement, embodying some of the most trenchant social and political thought of the 19^th century, and doing so in admirable Victorian prose that is difficult to quote because Mill’s sentences are long and his paragraphs very long indeed. The passage above is the shortest quote I could tear from context that still carries what I take to be its essential meaning.

It is in Mill that we find some of the most eloquent expressions of human freedom and of the sovereignty, autonomy, and dignity of the individual. These are ideals not only of a conception of freedom peculiar to the Enlightenment, but also perennial ideals of the human spirit, and would probably be recognizable in any age. If we could have transported John Stuart Mill back in time and place him in an earlier social milieu, I suspect he would have had much the same to say, even if in a different idiom.

Even though we can recognize the perennial character of the liberal conception of freedom no less than the perennial conception of the illiberal conception of freedom, the former conception, given eloquent expression by Mill, only fully comes into its own in the modern period, in the context of a social and political milieu that is distinctive to the modern period. And this observation points to an inadequacy in my previous exposition of the illiberal conception of freedom: I failed to place this latter conception in the context of the social milieu and political institutions in which it can best be realized.

That the liberal conception of freedom can only be fully realized in the context of liberal democracy is implied by the fact that both liberal freedom and liberal democracy were ideals expressed by Mill. He was the author not only of On Liberty, but also of On Representative Government. These parallel ideas of the liberal freedom of the individual realized within liberal democracy society are part of the core of the Enlightenment ideal, which is the implicit (and imperfectly realized) central project of contemporary civilization, which could be called Enlightenment civilization.

The illiberal conception of freedom is no less perennial, and could well be realized in the milieu of liberal democratic society, but it would be best realized in the context of a society that understands the meaning of and values the ideals that lie at the center of the illiberal conception of freedom; a society in which the spiritual discipline to attain freedom from the flesh and its appetites is valued above other purposes that an individual might pursue. The ideals of feudalism — as imperfectly realized in actual feudal societies as the Enlightenment is imperfectly realized in our society — constitute the optimal context in which the illiberal conception of freedom could be realized. The chivalric ideal of the knight as an individual who has achieved perfect martial and spiritual discipline (as expressed, for example, in In Praise of the New Knighthood by St. Bernard of Clairvaux) exemplifies the illiberal conception of freedom in a Christian social context.

Both traditional feudal societies and modern Enlightenment societies fall short of their ideals, and the individuals who jointly comprise these societies fall short of the ideals of freedom embodied in each respective social order. That both ideals are imperfectly realized means that there are perversions and corruptions of the illiberal conception of freedom no less than perversions and corruptions of the liberal conception of freedom. We need to say this because it is the nature of an ideal to contrast the ideal to its complement, that is to say, to everything that is not the ideal. This idealistic perspective tends to throw together into one basket everything that deviates from the most pure and perfect exemplification of the one or the other. It would be relatively easy, then, to conflate a perversion or a corruption of the liberal conception of freedom with the illiberal conception of freedom itself, or with a perversion or a corruption of the illiberal conception of freedom. Principled distinctions are important, and must be observed if we are not to lose ourselves in confusion.

Minding the distinctions among varieties of freedom and their corruptions is important because there are substantive differences as well as commonalities. As different as the liberal and illiberal conceptions of freedom are, both are conceptions of freedom realized within a social and political context that optimally actualizes them. There are other varieties of freedom of which this is not the case.

Both the liberal and the illiberal conception of freedom are equally opposed to the anarchic conception of freedom, which could also be called the Hobbesian conception of freedom, which is the freedom that obtains in the state of nature, which is, “…a perpetuall warre of every man against his neighbour…” Or, in more detail:

“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, CHAPTER XIII. OF THE NATURALL CONDITION OF MANKIND

In the state of nature, there is perfect freedom, but this perfect freedom entails the possibility of being deprived of our freedom at any moment by the equally perfect freedom of another, who has the freedom to murder us, as we have the freedom to murder him. This Hobbesian conception of freedom — so terrifying to Hobbes that he thought everyone must give away their rights to a sovereign Leviathan that could enforce limits to this perfect freedom in a state of nature — holds only outside social and political milieux. The liberal and illiberal conceptions of freedom hold only within social miliuex, and each is best realized in a social milieu that reflects the ideals implicit in the respective conception of freedom.

The liberal and illiberal conceptions of freedom, then, have some properties in common, and so are not entirely disjoint. There remains the possibility that an extraordinary individual might exemplify the ideals both of liberal and illiberal freedom, asserting in action the sovereignty, autonomy, and dignity of the individual in both the liberal and illiberal spheres. Mill wrote that, “…over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.” The theorist of illiberal freedom would assert that the individual could never be sovereign over his own body and mind until he had achieved the discipline over body and mind that is the ideal of the illiberal conception of freedom. Realization of the ideal of the liberal conception of freedom, then, may be predicated upon a prior realization of the illiberal conception of freedom.

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The Victorian Achievement

Thursday

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Queen Victoria reigned 20 June 1837 to 22 January 1901.

There is not only an insufficient appreciation of the Victorian achievement in history, but perhaps more importantly there is an insufficient understanding of the Victorian achievement. Victorian civilization — and I will avail myself of this locution understanding that most would allow that the Victorianism was a period in the history of western civilization, but not itself a distinct civilization — achieved nothing less than the orderly transition from agricultural civilization to industrialized civilization. As such, Victorianism became the template for other societies to make this transition without revolutionary violence.

The transition from agriculturalism to industrialism was the most disruptive in the history of civilization, and can only be compared in its impact to the emergence of agricultural civilization from pre-civilized nomadic hunter-gatherers. But whereas the the transition from hunter-gatherer nomadism to settled agriculturalism occurred over thousands of years, the transition from agricultural civilization to industrialized civilization has in some cases occurred within a hundred years (though the transition is still underway on a planetary scale). The Victorians not only managed this transition, and were the first people in history to manage this transition, they moreover managed this transition without catastrophic warfare, without the widespread breakdown of civil order, and with a certain sense of style. It could be argued that, if the Victorians had not managed this transition so well, rather than a new form of civilization taking shape, the industrial revolution might have resulted in the collapse of civilization and a new dark age.

Today we think of Victorianism as a highly repressive social and cultural milieu that was finally cast aside with the innovations of the Edwardian era and then the great scientific and social revolutions that characterized the early twentieth century and which then instituted dramatic social and cultural changes that ever after left the Victorian period in the shadows of history. But Victorian repression was not arbitrary; it served a crucial social function in its time, and it may well have been the only possible social and cultural mechanism that would have made it possible for any society to be the first to make the transition from agriculturalism to industrialism.

Victorianism not only made an orderly transition possible from agriculturalism to industrialism, it also made possible an orderly transition from a social order (i.e., a central project) based on religious tradition to a social order that was largely secular. Americans (especially Americans who don’t travel) are not aware of the degree to which European society is secularized, and much of this occurred in the nineteenth century. Matthew Arnold’s poem Dover Beach was an important early expression of secularization.

Nietzsche already saw this secularization happening in the nineteenth century, and, of course, Darwin, a proper English gentleman, worked his own scientific revolution in the midst of the Victorian period, which played an important role in secularization. Rather than being personally destroyed for his efforts — which is what almost any other society would have done to a man like Darwin — Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey and treated like a national hero.

Considerable intellectual toughness was a necessary condition of making a peaceful transition from agriculturalism to industrialism, and we can find the requisite toughness in the writers of nineteenth century England. The intellectual honesty of Matthew Arnold is bracing and refreshing. Arnold’s “Sweetness and Light” is a remarkable essay, and not at all how we today would characterize the aspirations of Victorian society, but in comparison to the horrific counterfactual that might have attended the industrial revolution under other circumstances, the grim Victorian world described so movingly by Charles Dickens is relatively benign. Since we have, for the most part, in our collective historical imagination, consigned nineteenth century English literature to our understanding of a genteel and proper Victorianism, it is easy to believe that the men of the nineteenth century did not yet possess the kind of raw, unsparing honesty that the twentieth century forced upon us. Reading Arnold now, in the twenty-first century, I see that this is not true.

Matthew Arnold’s world may have been innocent of World Wars, Holocausts, genocides, nuclear annihilation, and the rigorously realized horrors bequeathed to us by the twentieth century, but it was not an innocent world. History may always reveal new horrors to us, but even in the slightly less horrific past, there were horrors aplenty to preclude any kind of robust innocence on the part of human beings. And it is interesting to reflect that, while the Victorian Era is remembered for its social and cultural repression, it is not remembered for the scope and scale of its atrocities.

This is significant in light of the fact that the twentieth century, which has been seen as a liberation of society once Victorian constraints were swept away, is remembered for the scope and scale of its atrocities. Again, the Victorians did a better job than we did in managing the great transitions of our respective times. Voltaire famously said (during the Enlightenment) that we commit atrocities because we believe absurdities. If this is true, then the absurdities believed by the Victorians were less pernicious than the absurdities believed in the twentieth century.

The late-Victorian or early Edwardian Oscar Wilde in his De Profundis was raw and unsparing, but was rather too self-serving to measure up to the standard of intellectual honesty set by Matthew Arnold. (I fully understand that most of my contemporaries would probably disagree with this judgment.) However, Wilde’s heresies, like Arnold’s honesty, was characterized by a great sense of style. We may criticize the Victorian legal and penal system for essentially destroying Wilde, but it was also the Victorian cultural milieu that made Oscar Wilde possible. If Wilde had not been quite so daring, he might have gotten by without provoking the authorities to respond to him as it did.

Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man Under Socialism is a wonderful essay, employing the resources of Wilde’s legendary wit in order to to make a serious point. Like many of Wilde’s famous witticisms, his central motif is the contravention of received wisdom, forcing us to see things in a new perspective. Though we know in hindsight the caustic if not criminal consequences for individualism under socialism, Wilde did not have the benefit of hindsight, and Wilde makes the case that socialism will make authentic individualism possible for the first time. Wilde’s conception of individualism under socialism was in fact a paean to his own individualism, carved out within the limitations of Victorian society. This, too, is an ongoing legacy of Victorianism, which was sufficiently large and comprehensive to include individuals as diverse as Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde.

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A Macro-Implosion Weapon of Mass Destruction

Saturday

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The truncated icosahedron geometry employed for the symmetrical shockwave compression of fission implosion devices.

The simplest nuclear weapon is commonly known as a gun-type device, because it achieves critical mass by forcing together two sub-critical masses of uranium through a mechanism very much like a gun that shoots a smaller wedge-shaped sub-critical mass into a larger sub-critical mass. This was the design of the “Little Boy” Hiroshima atomic bomb. The next level of complexity in nuclear weapon design was the implosion device, which relied upon conventional explosives to symmetrically compress a larger reflector/tamper sphere of U-238 into a smaller sphere of Pu-239, with a polonium-beryllium “Urchin” initiator at the very center. The scientists of the Manhattan project were so certain that the gun-type device would work that they didn’t even bother to test it, so the first nuclear device to be tested, and indeed the first nuclear explosion on the planet, was the Gadget device designed to be the proof of concept of the more sophisticated implosion design. It worked, and this design was used for the “Fat Man” atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.

These early nuclear weapon designs (conceptually familiar, but all the engineering designs are still very secret) are usually called First Generation nuclear weapons. The two-stage thermonuclear devices (fission primaries to trigger fusion secondaries, though most of the explosive yield still derives from fission) designed and tested a few years later, known as the Teller-Ulam design (and tested with the Ivy Mike device), were called Second Generation nuclear weapons. A number of ideas were floated for third generation nuclear weapons design, and probably many were tested before the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty came into effect (and for all practical purposes brought an end to the rapid development of nuclear weapon design). One of the design concepts for Third Generation nuclear weapons was that of a shaped charge that could direct the energy of the explosion, rather that dissipating the blast in an omnidirecitonal explosion. There are also a lot of concepts for Fourth Generation nuclear weapons, though many of these ideas are both on the cutting edge of technology and they can’t be legally tested, so it is likely that little will come of these as long as the current test ban regime remains in place.

According to Kosta Tsipis, “Nuclear weapons designed to maximize certain of their properties and to suppress others are considered to constitute a third generation in the sense that their design goes beyond the basic, even though sophisticated, design of modern thermonuclear weapons.” These are sometimes also referred to as “tailored effects.” Examples of tailored effects include enhanced radiation warheads (the “neutron bomb”), so-called “salted” nuclear weapons like the proposed cobalt bomb, electro-magnetic pulse weapons (EMP), and the X-ray laser. We will here be primarily interesting in enhancing the directionality of a nuclear detonation, as in the case of the Casaba-Howitzer, shaped nuclear charges, and the X-ray laser.

What I would like to propose as a WMD is the use of multiple shaped nuclear charges directing their blast at a common center. This is like a macroscopic implementation of the implosion employed in first generation nuclear weapons. The symmetry of implosion in the gadget device and the Fat Man bomb employed 32 simultaneous high explosive charges, arranged according to the geometry of a truncated icosahedron, which would result in a nicely symmetrical convergence on the central trigger without having to scale up to an unrealistic number of high explosive charges for an even more evenly symmetrical implosion. (The actual engineering is a bit more complicated, as a combination of rapid explosions and slower explosions were needed for the optimal convergence of the implosion on the trigger.) This could be employed at a macroscopic scale by directional nuclear charges arranged around a central target. I call this a macro-implosion device. In a “conventional” nuclear strike, the explosive force is dissipated outward from ground zero. With a macro-implosion device, the explosive force would be focused inward toward ground zero, which would experience a sharply higher blast pressure than elsewhere as a result of the constructive interference of multiple converging shockwaves.

A partially assembled implosion device of a first generation nuclear weapon.

The reader may immediately think of the Casaba-Howitzer as a similar idea, but what I am suggesting is a bit different. You can read a lot about the Casaba-Howitzer at The Nuclear Spear: Casaba Howitzer, which is contextualized in even more information on Winchell Chung’s Atomic Rockets site. If you were to surround a target with multiple Casaba-Howitzers and fire at a common center at the same time you would get something like the effect I am suggesting, but this would require far more infrastructure. What I am suggesting could be assembled as a deliverable weapons system engineered as an integrated package.

A cruise missile would be a good way to deliver a macro-implosion device to its target.

There are already weapons designs that release multiple bomblets near a target with each individual bomblet precision targeted (the CBU-103 Combined Effects Munition, more commonly known as a cluster bomb). This could be scaled up in a cruise missile package, so that a cruise missile in approaching its target could open up and release 12 to 16 miniaturized short-range cruise missiles which could then by means of GPS or similar precision location technology arrange themselves around the target in a hemisphere and then simultaneously detonate their directed charges toward ground zero. Both precision timing and precision location would be necessary to optimize shockwave convergence, but with technologies like atomic clocks and dual frequency GPS (and quantum positioning in the future) such performance is possible.

A macro-implosion device could also be delivered by drones flown out of a van.

A similar effect could be obtained, albeit a bit more slowly but also more quietly and more subtly, with the use of drones. A dozen or so drones could be released either from the air or launched from the ground, arrange themselves around the target, and then detonate simultaneously. Where it would be easier to approach a target with a small truck, even an ordinary delivery van (perhaps disguised as some local business), as compared to a cruise missile, which could set off air defense warnings, this would be a preferred method of deployment, although the drones would have to be relatively large because they would have to carry a miniaturized nuclear weapon, precision timing, and precision location devices. There are a few commercially available drones today that can lift 20 kg, which is probably just about the lower limit of a miniaturized package such as I have described.

The most elegant deployment of a macro-implosion device would be a hardened target in exoatmospheric space. Currently there isn’t anything flying that is large enough or hardened enough to merit being the target of such a device, but in a future war in space macro-implosion could be deployed against a hard target with a full spherical implosion converging on a target. For ground-based targets, a hemisphere with the target at the center would be the preferred deployment.

In the past, a nation-state pursuing a counter-force strategy, i.e., a nuclear strategy based on eliminating the enemy’s nuclear forces, hence the targeting of nuclear missiles, had to employ very large and very destructive bombs because nuclear missile silos were hardened to survive all but a near miss with a nuclear weapon. Now the age of land-based ICBMs is over for the most advanced industrialized nation-states, and there is no longer any reason to build silos for land-based missiles, therefore no reason to pursue this particular kind of counter-force strategy. SLBMs and ALCMs are now sufficiently sophisticated that they are more accurate than the most accurate land-based ICBMs of the past, and they are far more difficult to find and to destroy because they are small and mobile and can be hidden.

However, hardened, high-value targets like the missile silos of the past would be precisely the kind of target one would employ a macro-implosion device to destroy. And while ICBM silos are no longer relevant, there are plenty of hardened, high-value targets out there. A decapitation strike against a leadership target where the location of the bunker is known (as in the case of Cheyenne Mountain Complex or Kosvinsky Kamen) is such an example.

This is, of course, what “bunker buster” bombs like the B61 were designed to do. However, earth penetrating bunker buster bombs, while less indiscriminate than above ground bursts, are still nuclear explosions in the ground that release their energy in an omnidirectional burst (or perhaps along an axis). The advantage of a macro-implosion device would be that the focused blast pressures would collapse any weak spots in a target area, and, when you’re talking about a subterranean bunker, even an armored door would constitute a weak spot.

I haven’t seen any discussion anywhere of a device such as I have described above, though I have no doubt that the idea has been studied already.

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The Historiography of Big History

Friday

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Herodotus, the Father of History

In Rational Reconstructions of Time I described a series of intellectual developments in historiography in which big history appeared in the penultimate position as a recent historiographical innovation. There is another sense, however, in which there have always been big histories — that is to say, histories that take us from the origins of our world through the present and into the future — and we can identify a big history that represents many of the major stages through which western thought has passed. In what follows I will focus on western history, in so far as any regional focus is relevant, as “history” is a peculiarly western idea, originating in classical antiquity among the Greeks, and with its later innovations all emerging from western thought.

Saint Augustine, author of City of God

Shortly after Christianity emerged, a Christian big history was formulated across many works by many different authors, but I will focus on Saint Augustine’s City of God. Christianity takes up the mythological material of the earlier seriation of western civilization and codifies it in the light of the new faith. Augustine presented an over-arching vision of human history that corresponded to the salvation history of humanity according to Christian thought. Some scholars have argued that western Christianity is distinctive in its insistence upon the historicity of its salvation history. If this is true, then Augustine’s City of God is Exhibit “A” in the development of this idea, tracing the dual histories of the City of God and the City of Man, each of which punctuates the other in actual moments of historical time when the two worlds are inseparable for all their differences. Here, the world behind the world is always vividly present, and in a Platonic way (for Augustine was a Christian Platonist) was more real than the world we take for the real world.

Immanuel Kant, author of Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens

The Christian vision of history we find in Saint Augustine passed through many modifications but in its essentials remained largely intact until the Enlightenment, when the combined force of the scientific revolution and political turmoil began to dissolve the institutional structures of agricultural civilization. Here we have the remarkable work of Kant, better known for his three critiques, but who also wrote his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens. The idea of a universal natural history extends the idea of natural history to the whole of the cosmos, and to human endeavor as well, and more or less coincides with the contemporary conception of big history, at least in so far as the scope and character of big history is concerned. Kant deserves a place in intellectual history for this if for nothing else. In other words, despite his idealist philosophy (formulated decades after his Universal Natural History), Kant laid the foundations of a naturalistic historiography for the whole of natural history. Since then, we have only been filling in the blanks.

Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, author of Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit

The Marquis de Condorcet took this naturalistic conception of universal history and interpreted it within the philosophical context of the Encyclopédistes and the French Philosophes (being far more empiricist and materialist than Kant), in writing his Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind), in ten books, the tenth book of which explicitly concerns itself with the future progress of the human mind. I may be wrong about this, but I believe this to be the first sustained effort at historiographical futurism in western thought. And Condorcet wrote this work while on the run from French revolutionary forces, having been branded a traitor by the revolution he had served. That Condorcet wrote his big history of progress and optimism while hiding from the law is a remarkable testimony to both the man and the idea to which he bore witness.

Johann Gottfried von Herder, author of Reflections on the Philosophy of History of Mankind

After the rationalism of the Enlightenment, European intellectual history took a sharp turn in another direction, and it was romanticism that was the order of the day. Kant’s younger contemporary, Johann Gottfried Herder, wrote his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (Ideas upon Philosophy and the History of Mankind, or Reflections on the Philosophy of History of Mankind, or any of the other translations of the title), as well as several essays on related themes (cf. the essays, “How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People” and “This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity”), at this time. In some ways, Herder’s romantic big history closely resembles the big histories of today, as he begins with what was known of the universe — the best science of the time, as it were — though he continues on in a way to justify regional nationalistic histories, which is in stark contrast to the big history of our time. We could learn from Herder on this point, if only we could be truly scientific in our objectivity and set aside the ideological conflicts that have arisen from nationalistic conceptions of history, which still today inform perspectives in historiography.

Otto Neurath, author of Foundations of the Social Sciences

In a paragraph that I have previously quoted in Scientific Metaphysics and Big History there is a plan for a positivist big history as conceived by Otto Neurath:

“…we may look at all sciences as dovetailed to such a degree that we may regard them as parts of one science which deals with stars, Milky Ways, earth, plants, animals, human beings, forests, natural regions, tribes, and nations — in short, a comprehensive cosmic history would be the result of such an agglomeration… Cosmic history would, as far as we are using a Universal Jargon throughout all branches of research, contain the same statements as our unified science. The language of our Encyclopedia may, therefore, be regarded as a typical language of history. There is no conflict between physicalism and this program of cosmic history.”

Otto Neurath, Foundations of the Social Sciences, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1970 (originally published 1944), p. 9

To my knowledge, no one wrote this positivist big history, but it could have been written, and perhaps it should have been written. I can imagine an ambitious but eccentric scholar completely immersing himself or herself in the intellectual milieu of early twentieth century logical positivism and logical empiricism, and eventually coming to write, ex post facto, the positivist big history imagined by Neurath but not at that time executed. One might think of such an effort as a truly Quixotic quest, or as the fulfillment of a tradition of writing big histories on the basis of current philosophical thought.

From this thought experiment in the ex post facto writing of a history not written in its own time we can make an additional leap. I have noted elsewhere (The Cosmic Archipelago, Part III: Reconstructing the History of the Observable Universe) that scientific historiography has reconstructed the histories of peoples who did not write their own histories. This could be done in a systematic way. An exhaustive scientific research program in historiography could take the form of writing the history of every time and place from the perspective of every other time and place. We would have the functional equivalent of this research program if we had a big history written from the perspective of every time and place for which a distinctive perspective can be identified, because each big history from each identifiable perspective would be a history of the world entire, and thus would subsume under it all regional and parochial histories.

I previously proposed an idea of a similarly exhaustive historiography of the kind that could only be written once the end was known. In my Who will read the Encyclopedia Galactica? I suggested that Freeman Dyson’s eternal intelligences could busy themselves as historiographers through the coming trillions of years when the civilizations of the Stelliferous Era are no more, and there can be no more civilizations of this kind because there are no longer planets being warmed by stellar insolation, hence no more civilizations of planetary endemism.

It is a commonplace of historiographical thought that each generation must write and re-write the past for its own purposes and from its own point of view. Gibbon’s Enlightenment history of the later Roman Empire is distinct in temperament and outlook from George Ostrogorsky’s History of the Byzantine State. While an advanced intelligence in the post-Stelliferous Era would want to bring its own perspective to the histories of the civilizations of the Stelliferous Era, it would also want a complete “internal” account of these civilizations, in the spirit of thought experiments in writing histories that could have or should have been written during particular periods, but which, for one reason or another, never were written. If we imagine eternal intelligences (at least while sufficient energy remains in the universe) capable of running detailed simulations of the past, this could be a source of the immersive scholarship that would make it possible to write the unwritten big histories of ages that produced a distinctive philosophical perspective, but which did not produce a historian (or the idea of a big history) that could execute the idea in historical form.

There is a sense in which these potentially vast unwritten histories, the unactualized rivals to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, are like the great unbuilt buildings, conceived and sketched by architects, but for which there was neither the interest nor the wherewithal to build. I am thinking, above all, of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s Cenotaph for Isaac Newton, but I could just as well cite the unbuilt cities of Antonio Sant’Elia, the skyscraper designed by Antonio Gaudí, or Frank Lloyd Wright’s mile high skyscraper (cf. Planners and their Cities, in which I discuss other great unbuilt projects, such as Le Corbusier’s Voisin Plan for Paris and Wright’s Broadacre City). Just as I have here imagined unwritten histories eventually written, so too I have imagined these great unbuilt buildings someday built. Specifically, I have suggested that a future human civilization might retain its connection to the terrestrial past without duplicating the past by building structures proposed for Earth but never built on Earth.

History is an architecture of the past. We construct a history for ourselves, and then we inhabit it. If we don’t construct our own history, someone else will construct our history for us, and then we live in the intellectual equivalent of The Projects, trying to make a home for ourselves in someone else’s vision of our past. It is not likely that we will feel entirely comfortable within a past conceived by another who does not share our philosophical presuppositions.

From the perspective of big history, and from the perspective of what I call formal historiography, history is also an architecture of the future, which we inhabit with our hopes and fears and expectations and intentions of the future. And indeed we might think of big history as a particular kind of architecture — a bridge that we build between the past and the future. In this way, we can understand why and how most ages have written big histories for themselves out of the need to bridge past and future, between which the present is suspended.

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Studies in Grand Historiography

1. The Science of Time

2. Addendum on Big History as the Science of Time

3. The Epistemic Overview Effect

4. 2014 IBHA Conference Day 1

5. 2014 IBHA Conference Day 2

6. 2014 IBHA Conference Day 3

7. Big History and Historiography

8. Big History and Scientific Historiography

9. Philosophy for Industrial-Technological Civilization

10. Is it possible to specialize in the big picture?

11. Rational Reconstructions of Time

12. History in an Extended Sense

13. Scientific Metaphysics and Big History

14. Copernican Historiography

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