Reproduction Fail?

A recent paper by Goodman, Koupil and Lawson, Low fertility increases descendant socioeconomic position but reduces long-term fitness in a modern post-industrial society, in the 2012 Proceedings of the Royal Society (Biological Sciences), has basically affirmed the position many people are in denial about — that is, that the richer people get, the less they want to reproduce.

Why is this so? Well, this strategy essentially produces a limited pool of offspring, all with huge amounts of per capita resources in both human and economic capital. It makes them socioeconomically very competitive. The downside is that the species as a whole becomes less biologically competitive.

But this is not a new problem. Humans have been using technology to avoid the problems of simple biological competition for ages. We can compete with large predators (in fact, we've eliminated many of them or reduced them to zoological exhibits) by using weapons that vastly increase our sensory and attack range. We can compete with the environment by using engineering of all kinds. And we can mobilise energy quantitatively more effectively (although not more efficiently) than most other species. A smart human with high resource levels will out-compete a less-smart, less-resourced human — which is why you see dropping birthrates once a society gets freer access to technology.

In a city-state, where there are few natural threats, the main threat is socioeconomic, no matter what people moan and groan about. It thus makes perfect sense to see a drop in fertility levels in the vast majority of cities and city-states unless they have a large hinterland that is not urbanised.

However, there is always a bump in the implementation of such a strategy. This normally comes in the form of people moaning and groaning about low fertility as if they lived in an agricultural, low population density, high resource density environment. Ridiculous. We're not bacteria in a particularly rich chicken broth.

Separation

I keep reading silly comments from atheists about getting the Church out of schools. But the thing they can't get away from is that the Church (in one of its annoying, glorious, strange or otherwise entertaining manifestations) set up those schools in the first place. It is of course true that there are many schools set up by non-Church organisations or the state itself; so why can't the atheists just stop going to Oxbridge and mission schools and parochial schools and suchlike?

It irritates the heck out of me. No sense of history, no sense of gratitude at all.

And yes, those atheists who want to launch diatribes about the evils of historical religion may do so too. I'm not denying that even the Buddhists have fought vicious wars. But at least get it right; deny the WHOLE package and stick to your God-damned (at least that is one of the things some atheists stress) atheist principles by avoiding everything the Church (and her children) has ever done for humanity.

Sanctimony Redux

If love makes the world go round and sanctimony makes the world go mad, then it might be interesting to map human responses against the shape of the world. We would be able to develop a geography of emotion, a dark grimoire which uses the spiky bits of the human mind as keys to the lumpy bits of the universe.

The Empathy Tango

In the 19 Mar 2012 issue of Newsweek, Jay Michaelson writes, "One of the core assumptions of [various kinds of] civil rights activism is that all of us, no matter how enlightened we are, have prejudice within us."

Exactly. This is an assumption which is biologically supportable. We've found so far that the natural state of human perception is to be wary of what is dark, old, unfit, deviant from the norm, and otherwise unnatural. Yes, there is a 'natural', and it can be defined in terms of how the human brain sees things.

There is too much data to prove otherwise. Humans drop into the 'uncanny valley' easily, feeling subconsciously uneasy when exposed to lifelike simulations that are too lifelike while remaining identifiably non-human. Humans can mask or attempt to control their responses and reasoning, but their visceral cognition can only be conditioned, not controlled.

Which leaves us in a bad place. Activists of all kinds point out we are all prejudiced and lack sufficient empathy to overcome this. We protest that we are sympathetic, that we are reasonable, but fall short of redemption. There is no redemption in the human world of uncomfortable biological and neuropsychological truths.

The tango occasionally brings us closer, but keeps us at arm's length while touching. If empathy is never sufficient, what hell has activism forced us to remain in? Hell, as a wise man once said, is other people. And as Marlowe pointed out, "We are in Hell, nor are we out of it; for where Hell is, there we must ever be."

Which is why the logical conclusion is that if salvation is to be found, it lies outside the brawling mass of humanity.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

"Vanity of vanity, all is vanity," saith the Preacher, king in Jerusalem. "Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upwards." And much of this wisdom was the profit of painful years, for the Preacher pondered much, and the words of the wise are as goads.

I long ago figured out why religion is trouble. The stakes are very high. If religion describes reality ontologically, then disciplines like the sciences and mathematics, which limit their outcomes and scope of knowledge by their own rigour, cannot claim a monopoly on truth.

And yet, it is by their obvious stranglehold on description, manipulation, prediction and control of reality that science and mathematics have gained their hard-won prominence and domination over the souls of men. A scientific or mathematical theory, absent a 'falsifying dream' (as Hughes's Hawk Roosting has it), has great powers to describe, explain, or predict. It is on the basis of these powers that we are masters over reality as we know it.

But mastery over reality as we know it is never 100%. As the old school joke goes, "The more we know, the less we know we know." Science and mathematics are the guiding daimonia of technology and engineering, and humans will gladly forsake those daimonia for these material fruits of application.

That is why science as religion and mathematics as technology are uncomfortably true to life. No scientist knows anything except what he knows — this is the curse of the empirical and the rule of epistemology; no mathematician knows anything except by what he believes through the working of his rules — this is the curse of the logical and the rule of rationality.

It is only the religious who believe that not only do they not know, but that they cannot know, and what they cannot know is nevertheless of the greatest significance. And if they are right, the brightness of science and mathematics is like a light without lenses or augmentation; it is like using nothing but the visible spectrum and calling it 'diagnostic radiology'. In fact, it is worse; it is agnostic radiology.

This is why there are more and more people willing to blacken religion with the radiation of reason. It is the only way to preserve the new monopoly — by destroying the old one. But which one sees more? Which one is of greater value to humanity? Both might contend that they are the only truth. But the key question we have to ask is, "Can anything be supernatural and still be true?"

Masculine and Feminine

I remember Lewis's description of the eldila; they were not merely male nor female, but masculine and feminine. It is now fashionable to denigrate and deride Lewis's Space Trilogy as naïve and simplistic, moralising and overly Christian. But some of his insights remain; one has only to read Ransom's translation of Weston's speech to the Malacandrans to realise how profoundly our world has affected our values.

We are not just man and woman, but masculine and feminine. All that we are is all that is human, and yet what we think of as human is less that what we were, are, and can be. This is what I think when I look at my fellow humans with my grandfathers' eyes, with my grandmothers' eyes. I see now with deeper and deeper sight as my eyes see less and less. I was taught to look for the good and the real in everyone else, as well as in myself.

And there it is: men can be more than merely men; women more than merely women. We can be many things, and some of those things do not necessarily fit the world's own simple conceptions of man and woman. What were our Adam-father and Eve-mother like in Eden, before they fell into knowledge of good and evil? For a while, they ruled all creation, and named all living things.

The Cloud of Unknowing

The world is badly broken. The problem is a simple one: humanity has begun to assume that all difficulties can be overcome, all answers can be found, given enough cerebration and enough data. This is why we invest huge amounts of land, money, energy and hardware in storing enormous archives of data, most of which will be redundant, out of date, trivial, or impossible to convert into information.

The reality is sobering. We will be expending all of those resources because we think we should keep our stuff, our work, the unblessed fruit of our hands and minds, the debris of our data transactions and online interactions. We have overvalued the products of our thinking despite the fact that they have create problems we cannot solve, or created answers insufficient to those problems.

When London grew too crowded and too corrupt, the only solution for its chaotic and filthy tangle was the unthinkable Great Fire of 1666. Totally gutting the medieval Roman inner city, it destroyed the homes of seven-eighths of all London's inhabitants. It was this destruction of existing constructs that instructed the development of modern London and the architecture of Sir Christopher Wren.

Imagine this: what if ALL humanity's electronic data stores, in all forms and formats, media and mediating devices, were destroyed at one blow? A tragedy? A disaster?

I would say not. I would say it would be a golden opportunity to discover exactly what humanity is really made of, and to rebuild anew. However, I am not so sanguine as to think humanity will do better. Rather, I am inclined to believe that we will do worse.

Humanism, Transhumanism and Posthumanism

Humanity is an organic mass mess mass of 'thinking' machines, each one different from each other one and made so by genetic reproduction and other 'genetic' algorithms. This mass appears to have thoughts about itself; it thinks that it has norms, that it has ideals, and that it can have standard types as well as ideal types. It always thinks it can improve on itself.

The problem is that it has insufficient data to actually come to conclusions about what its norms (other than statistical ones, and these too are its own inventions) ought to be; it can have no legitimate idea as to its ideals, based solely on its own perception of self; and it can have no legitimate idea as to how to improve, not having enough data as to where it can improve towards. This mass, however, has elements which will disagree with such a diagnosis, even though it is obviously true.

Once upon a time, an element of this mass said to me (another element of this mass), "Well, it has to be true that making optimal use of energy would be an improvement." I'm not so sure. What is optimal use? Every such idea, ideal, improvement, boundary, definition, norm (etc, etc) is defined by this imperfect mass. As one element named Russell said some time ago, mathematics — which a fair number of elements think is the best (query: best?) mode of thought (query: thought?) — is built on the flimsiest of foundations. So he decided to be a logician, but his project failed too.

Humanism is a work in progress, then. But progress towards what? And if it is a work in progress, what can be said about trans- and post-humanism, which some elements of the human mass also talk about? They are imaginary work in imaginary progress.

Some human elements point out that evolution occurs, and we have strong evidence for it. Of course it does, and of course we do. But there is nothing to show 'fitness' except the promise that we are putatively 'better adapted' to a changing world. In truth, we are adapted, but we do not know if it is better, or will be so, because the genetic algorithms are future-blind. We are reactive, and hence we should have no claim to trans-anything or post-anything.

In fact, the only think we can know is that we are all headed towards thermodynamic 'heat death', and hence it seems good to try to stave it off. Hence the fixation(s) on information, energy, efficiency and effectiveness. But for what? Nobody seems to know. Some, however, have odd ideas about destiny and optimisation. Those too will pass.

In the end is the singularity, as at the beginning, some others say. The point really is that the singularity is the ideal to which all information (whether it is so, or merely an aberration in the energy transactions of the universe) goes, and once it is, nobody knows.

Is it any wonder that man imagines that he imagines God? Or that man (well, some portion or other of the human mass) imagines, "What is man, that [God is] mindful of him?" In the end, faith, hope and love abide; and if not, there is nothing.

Wheelruts

On the home page of the Online Etymology Dictionary, which many of you will know I explore with alarming frequency, is found this statement: "This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago."

One of the problems I've found with young people (by which I mean people aged 25 or so and below) arises from the fact that they were born in the mid-1980s or later, were tiny tots as 9 Nov 1989 passed by with a whimper and a bang, and conveniently missed most or all of the excitement of the Cold War, which they read as historical stuff akin to the rise of Mesopotamian city-states. The problem is that they are thoroughly post-modern.

They think of states as primitive geographical features that somehow arose with the Treaty of Westphalia; they think of societies as pre-Marxist, Marxist and post-Marxist; they have no idea what democracy really is, or why republicanism ought (but isn't) to be a more civilised (Latin) or politic (Greek) form of it. This leads to ludicrous arguments in which they argue that globalisation will destroy the very idea of statehood simply because the physical barriers are easily overcome by technology.

That's a bit like joining Aldous Huxley in predicting that the very idea of parenthood will be destroyed simply because the physical acts of becoming a parent and then parenting are easily overcome by technology. It can be imagined, but it isn't likely unless humans overcome their natures and become post-humans.

Will that happen? Perhaps, it might. But my sincere belief is that if we ever become post-humans of the kind our ancestors might have worshipped, armed with sub-attotechnology and wielding the raw forces of coloured gravitonics and suchlike, we will only be like the gods of ancient Assyria and Achaia and other such old powers.

We will just be humans writ large and strange (or small and stranger), but still humans, attempting to bootstrap our way out of humanity and still being tightly shoelaced via leather to our soles. Or souls, whichever.

In tracing our paths to the stars and the uttermost bounds (or boundlessnessess) of the universe, all we will be doing is extending the wheelruts of a cart drawn by aa tired ox through a dusty, sparsely grassy, valley in the high summer of Mesopotamian hills long gone.

Qoheleth's Defence

The slim Book of the Preacher runs to only twelve chapters. We moderns call it Ecclesiastes, and it is the most entertaining defence that the ancient world ever put up against anomie, mainly because it starts by facing it head-on.

Here is the first chapter, eloquent in its best-known version. That one chapter has donated to the English language a wealth of idiom — 'all is vanity', 'earth abides forever', 'there is nothing new under the sun'. The eponymous author points out that people forget history, that psychology is nonsense, that attempting to use quantitative methods on abstractions doesn't work. He also points out that all the wisdom in the world will not save you from anomie, and that humans are forever going in circles.

And that's just the first chapter. In fact, it goes on like that a lot. It goes through every major philosophy of human existence (you should read his stuff on Epicureanism and hedonism, for example), and trashes the whole lot with fatalism of some sort — 'but time and chance happen to them all'.

Yet, in the final analysis, he points out that one major thing might be good to try: be at peace with your Maker, in the assumption that there is one. After all, if you are a Making, then your entire purpose revolves around your Maker. And if you are a Making, it is unlikely you can understand all the doings of your Maker.

That is why the wisest man on earth realised that the circle of human knowledge will never encompass the answer to, "What is the point of it all?" unless you assume there is a point and that you can't know it. Humans are never satisfied, and having a Maker who refuses to satisfy them on their terms is a great pain.

It is from this that humans get most of their angst and intellectual suffering. You can find a lovely illustration (tongue-in-cheek) of that here. The day ahead is All Hallows' Eve. It is a day full of related significance.

Catastrophic Change

Despite all the financial rumblings and the more geological rumblings of earthquakes and such, this time is a relatively peaceful moment in the short history of mankind. When I step back and look at what might have been and what might yet be, the little bumps and excursions of human history seem a lot less demanding on the road travelled, whether more or less.

Take for example the Zanclean flood. In a period of months, the entire Mediterranean basin was filled by the Atlantic Ocean. The water rise was something like 10 metres per day.

Or consider the Yellowstone supervolcano (graphic here). If it blows, at some unknown future time, the Americas will consist of Laurentia, South America, and a lot of tiny bits.

Catastrophes like that go beyond the normal human scale of activities. Our thin veneer of global civilisation would be struck a hammerblow which, even if not fatal, would be crippling.

As it is, we already have lost our sense of proportion. I read the daily and weekly newsdumps, and they are often about 'the Rise of China'. Well, China has long been the world's #1 economy; only in the tiny period of time from the 19th century till today has it been weakened in relation to the rest of the world. It is more accurate to say that the resurgence might be under way, and that certain western powers might seek to stave it off for as long as possible.

Change is the quick eyeblink of history. We look at the very large and the very small, the stuff of physics, and are happy that we seem to be heading towards the limits of knowledge. But everything in the middle is up for grabs. Predicting the behaviour of dark matter does not tell us anything of the role of India in the 21st century, let alone the 22nd.

In that perspective, nothing is catastrophe, merely apostrophe. And what becomes important on the human level is trying to make humans work as best as humans can, with all the accumulated advantages of whatever sort that are useful to humans.

Perhaps what might be most important, then, is not the very large or the very small. What would be most important is helping humans come to terms with each other, to stop frittering the moments away on accumulation of artificial wealth (stuff gained by computed point-scoring mechanisms) and to work towards accumulation of real things.

Assuming, of course, that we can tell the difference anymore.

The Losers

I was just looking at this trailer for the 2010 movie release, Andy Diggle's The Losers. It strikes me that this is a very ancient tale; elite troops who might know too much, and are not trusted with what they might know, and therefore become targets for elimination.

Look around you, as the tomb of Sir Christopher Wren in St Paul's Cathedral says. You will find many hidden memorials to this ancient tale, even in the workplace you thought was safe and bright. For there is no haven which doesn't have a dark side; a haven is designed to keep you safe, and to do that, it must keep itself safe. What then if the haven-keepers think you are a threat to them?

It is the same with altruism and philanthropy. All philanthropists must constrain their giving. All you have to do is to analyse the patterns of their giving, and you will know what kind of world they prefer. And by preferring one kind of world over another, they are using money to create the world they want. Should they have the right, simply because they have the cash? The answer is beyond us, and perhaps there is no real answer.

That's because in any situation, the one with the motive and the power will force the issue. Resistance is futile; be assimilated or eliminated. As Dante wrote in Vergilius's mouth, "Where will and power are one, so let it be; ask now no more."

There will always be losers, no matter how 'win-win' our narratives and hopeful publicity brochures are. As Jesus said, "The poor you will have with you always."

Does this then mean that we should abandon the hypocrisy of altruism? No. It should mean that even in dark times, we can help others. The light may be faint, and enlightenment therefore dim; but some light is infinitely better than none — for a time anyway, and in this world of all worlds, world without end.

Violence

Violence is necessary even at the atomic or molecular level. There can be no transactions of energy or matter without enormous violence at the submicroscopic scale. This violence continues all the way up into biology at any scale, and thence to sociology and other more macro-level constructs.

The problem with much of the humanities is that they are elaborate narrative artifices or narrative factories designed to allow us to pretend as well as to mask such pretense or pretensions. The simpler (or earlier) the narratives, the less they mask the violence (see the Grimm brothers' fairy tales, for example; also compare Genesis to the Gospels).

The reason we tend to confuse all narratives with religion is that the whole thing is a seamless body of interwoven narratives. There is no literature or avenue of inquiry in the humanities that isn't religious in its roots.

That puts us in a parlous position when discussing violence. Everything is tainted with it, a fact which is as much acknowledged in the old stories (like Cain and Abel) as in the modern narratives.

The argument, therefore, that religious impulses are a major cause of violence (as people like Sam Harris seem to believe) is impossible to test. It is like saying, "Being human makes you prone to violence." The only way to test that is to remove what makes you human and see if you are still prone to violence; since we don't know what it is that we have to remove, and the causes of violence (in general) are too many and too different, we can't really test this assertion.

Likewise, to test the assertion that religious belief is a major cause of violence requires one to believe in turn that the human tendency to be violent is one level higher than the human tendency to have beliefs that can be considered religious. That has to be wrong; it's easier for humans to apprehend and comprehend violence than religion, and requires the use of less brain. Evolutionary biologists would have to agree — it's easier to observe violence in animals (and figure out why and whence this tendency arises) than to observe religion in animals.

Sam Harris and those of his ilk must be wrong. They have been overwhelmed by their own narrative and rhetoric, and have now turned the universe firmly on its head in order to squat in the ruins of the New Atheism.

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Note: Harris is particularly against Islam in terms of one kind of violence. He seems to say that if an increased tendency to commit acts of terrorism can be linked statistically to being Muslim, then all Muslims should submit to the indignity of their ethnicity being used as a tool for profiling. Actually, the statistics can be shown to be distorted by the unique case of the 9/11 incident, which was indeed carried out by terrorists who were Muslims.

Belief (in) Systems (Part II)

This is a sort of thematic sequel to a previous post, in which I wrote about some fundamental underpinnings of worldviews. In that post, it turned out that the punishment-reward or scoring sub-system tended to trump the altruism sub-system in human individuals. Some people think that is natural (it's like the concept of 'original sin') and some people think it is unfortunate (it's like evolutionary biology going up a dead end).

The world today is messy, but the thing about history is that we could have seen it coming a long time ago. Right now, there are five key belief systems out of the thousands of belief systems there are. These five key belief systems may not be important to everyone, but their sheer size (in terms of numbers of adherents), ubiquity (in terms of geographic spread) and significance (in terms of people and policies affected by adherents) make them worth looking at.

The five belief systems I am referring to are (in alphabetical order): Capitalism, Christianity, Globalism, Racism and Secular Humanism. It is quite possible for a person to believe in more than one of these, but it is unlikely that any given person will believe in all five, especially since some of them don't 'play nice' with the others.

Why are these five systems so important?

Capitalism, to begin with, is the child of that long and painful era known as the industrial revolution. Descended from the merchant cartels of the 16th century, it eventually became the guiding economic philosophy of empire-building. Its assertions that people should strive to control the means of production individually, in an environment of free choice (the 'market') and thus create prosperity for all, have been tested and sometimes found wanting. Nevertheless, it has been the dominant economic belief system of the 20th and 21st centuries so far.

Christianity, an eastern religion which sprouted from Palestine about 2000 years ago, is now the world's most widespread and influential religion. Monotheistic and proselytizing, it has butted heads with almost every other belief system on the planet. Although Jesus and his followers seemed somewhat socialist (if not communist) in ideology, for some reason American Republicans seem to conflate extreme capitalism with empire-building AND fundamentalist Protestant (there's an oxymoron for you) Christianity. It blows the mind.

Globalism seems like a modern trend. But it is a venerable belief system espoused by most ancient civilisations; it believes in things like the unity of the world under a single integrated programme (philosophy, creed, religion, whatever) in which individual cultures and ideas can flourish. The Pax Romana and Pax Britannica were pretty supportive of this ideal; the Pax Americana not so much. The United Nations and other international umbrella organisations are all children of this belief system.

Racism, unfortunately, is the extreme and somewhat common response to the Other. In racism, a group of humans believes that by virtue of their narrowly-defined genetic pool, they are superior to all others. This genetic virtue, already a somewhat dubious construct, is supposed to provide intellectual, moral, and even aesthetic superiority. It often co-opts other belief systems to establish itself, and has been shown to have a neurobiological origin in terms of the way humans differentiate between like and not-like.

Secular Humanism (as opposed to other kinds of humanism) is a creed which believes that a rational human, free of all supernatural influences and ideas, is a happy human. Although there are many flavours of secular humanism, the core ideals are a) secular—i.e. without religions or non-rational constructs, and b) humanist—putting human life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness first. It is an ancient creed, often veiled by the fact that earlier societies tended to pay at least lip-service to the idea of the divine, and to frown on those who didn't.

All five of these will crop up as the shadowy or not-so-shadowy influences behind almost every piece of news you encounter, in every medium of communication. I think it is not possible to find any news source which isn't influenced by at least one of these forces. This means that an educated human must at least be able to state and understand the basics of these belief systems, whether he or she (or zie) believes in them or not.

Gaming the System: Why Not?

I think the interesting thing about being human is the capacity to make deliberate sub-optimal decisions. This only occurred to me after spending a decade or so in pursuit of helping other people make optimal decisions. The question then arises: why not? Why would you want to make a deliberately sub-optimal decision?

The answer comes in two flavours, the romantic and the pragmatic.

The romantic reply is that we're human. We aren't designed to game the system, especially when in the longer run, there may be no system, or a system too complex for us to game. We can game specific systems: that's how tiny hairless chihuahuas and pug-nosed pekes can come from the same stock as Russian wolfhounds. Breeding (and all other eugenic-type programmes) are just one example. But purebred show dogs tend to be vulnerable to things that mongrels aren't; if you optimise for 'best of show', you may also be sub-optimising for 'having a good life'.

The pragmatic answer is that the system can't be gamed. We never know enough; so how can we posit an optimal response? Heh, that sounds like the first answer.

But I did say that the answer comes in two flavours. Same ice-cream underlying both, but two flavours nevertheless. The first version stresses that keeping human by avoiding soulless optimisation is good. The second version stresses that systems are not human, despite many of them being anthropogenic. We made them; let's not let them make us.

Breakfast (Again)

The last time I wrote about breakfast, JS reminded me that there are indeed some far-flung corners of the world where minced-pork noodles and other wonderful morning meals are not readily available. You might have to cook them yourself, and you might not be able to find the right ingredients even then. This is a tragic truth.

I suppose the discontentment of globalisation is that it requires all to have equal access, forgetting that without barriers, what remains is mush. It is so in every organic structure. Can you imagine if your whole body decided to do away with its selectively-permeable membranes and mix everything up? You'd not be a viable organism anymore. It is just as true for the world; unless you can maintain some barriers, the virtue of separate qualities is lost.

Think for example of President Obama (well, in a couple of days, that's what he'll be). Much is made of the fact that he is half-Kenyan, half-white-American. Or that he spent his childhood in exotic locales like Kansas, Indonesia and Hawaii. But if everyone was of an indeterminate race or every place had the same quota of McDonald's or Starbucks or Lucky Coffee Shop Braised Pork Noodles, all this would have NO significance at all!

It is all very well to say that one shouldn't care about gender, race, or any of the other primitively simple differentiating elements in human society. But we still choose one breakfast over another. We don't choose to mush everything up in one flat grey or brown disc of homogenised nutrients. We actually spend time preparing food, and write essays that make sense. Homogeneity is rubbish, the lack of discrimination is an enemy.

What? So illiberal and uneducated a view from this blog?

Perhaps. But I'd like to point out that I much prefer the way humour integrates us all. There are Jewish jokes, there are Polish jokes, there are jokes about Englishmen, Irishmen, Welshmen, Scotsmen, Chinese, Japanese... they are all racist jokes. But the interesting thing is that they are all the same jokes. We just re-label them to make fun of someone else. There are very few jokes that can't be transferred to someone else (maybe some Sikh jokes or jokes about unpronounceable Polish or Celtic names); a lot of these are puns that rely on proficiency with a specific language.

The point is that we eventually learn to blend without making too much of similarity or difference, but rather complementarity and a harmony of differences. That's why we eat bacon and eggs, or salted eggs and congee, or bagels with lox. We know the digestive system (from the lips and teeth, down to the other end) will mix everything up and produce a final lump of homogenised crap, but at the input end, we still like to be able to distinguish individual and mixed flavours and aromas all at once.

Small Change

It only takes a little bit of change to make a system run better. Sometimes, we get disgusted with friction and stiction and other reasons why things don't work or work slowly. But often these factors require just a bit of polishing or lubrication. The one thing that cannot be so easily overcome is inertia, which is an innate property of all matter regardless of surface condition.

The only way one can overcome inertia is to develop control over the moment associated with it. There are two plausible and applicable definitions of inertia: 1) the tendency for something to maintain a particular momentum, and 2) the difficulty of altering the direction or other quality of that momentum.

These definitions are particularly plausible and applicable to human institutions of various sorts. Accordingly, the idea of inertia is now in frequent use within the economic, political, social and cultural spheres. The problem in many of the areas within these overlapping spheres of humanity is that free action tends to be opposed by mass action, or by hierarchical control.

Accordingly, inertia can be the product of random mass action or the irrational purposes of hierarchies. As Quentin Skinner writes in his analysis of Milton and what it means to be a free person, "If you are to be your own master, two conditions must in turn be satisfied. You must first of all succeed in mastering your self. By this Milton means that you must be able to control your passions and act in accordance with the dictates of reason at all times. If you instead allow yourself, as he puts it at the beginning of The Tenure, to be governed by blind affections, then your actions will not be an expression of liberty but of mere licentiousness."

Unfortunately, in the absence of a proper research programe, analysis, reflection and careful deep self-examination, institutions can obviously remain ungoverned by the dictates of any reason except affectation – and not admit to it. And the consequences for the system are dire in the extreme. I will end by quoting Skinner's piece on Milton (from the London Review of Books, 30(10), p.16; 22 May 2008) at length:

...he [i.e. Milton] does not in the least dispute that your standing as a free person will be lessened or taken away if you are impeded in the exercise of a choice. To be a free person is to be able to act according to your autonomous will; if you are constrained from exercising your will by force or the threat of it, then your liberty will to that degree be lost. Of greater importance, however, is the fact that it is equally possible according to Milton for your freedom of action to be curtailed even if no one subjects you to the least degree of interference. The reason is that, if you fall into a condition of dependence, your mere awareness of this predicament will have the effect of limiting your choices. This claim admittedly sounds strange, and has often been dismissed as confused. But Milton is making an important point about one of the ways in which liberty can be lost. He is asking you to reflect on what will happen if you come to realise that you are living at the mercy of someone else. As soon as you recognise your condition of dependence, he claims, this will be sufficient to cause you to censor yourself, thereby setting limits to your own freedom of action. You will now take care to do everything, however abject, to minimise the risk that your master or ruler will intervene in your life in a detrimental way, and you will at the same time take care to do nothing that might arouse their envy or rage.

These contentions about the psychological impact of living in slavery are also classical in provenance. Tacitus had illustrated them in a number of passages, always with the implication that servitude can be expected to breed servility, and that servility helps to entrench servitude. Sallust in his Conspiracy of Catiline goes still further, pointing to the baleful implications of the fact that rulers tend to be especially envious of their most outstanding subjects. The opening of Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates echoes the passage so closely as to be almost a translation of it. ‘Tyrants are not oft offended, nor stand much in doubt of bad men, as being all naturally servile; but in whom virtue and true worth most is eminent, them they fear in earnest, as by right their masters; against them lies all their hatred and suspicion.’ The consequence, as Sallust had stressed, is that such subjects find themselves condemned to curbing their most valuable talents for fear of what could happen if they were to display them too visibly.

This is one reason, Sallust goes on, why the citizens of republics always outperform the subjects of monarchs in the glory of their deeds as well as in the originality of their thought. Kings prefer flatterers and time-servers, whereas in republics the most creative spirits can soar unchecked by any craven anxieties. A further reason, he adds, is that there are few civic duties to be performed under kings, with the result that their subjects readily slide into a state of lazy and torpid acquiescence.

Indeed. Perhaps this is why we should read the classics from time to time; not because they are old, but because they remind us that certain things never change about the human condition, its rights, freedoms, and failings.

Corrosive

When you study things like education and psychology, you are really delving into things that develop complexity far too quickly for many useful rules to be formed. Consider the flipping of a truly random coin. At the first flip, you have a 50-50 split as to whether it will come up heads or tails. At the second flip, you still have a 50-50 split. If you flip a coin twice, the four possibilities as to what you might see are HH, HT, TH, TT. There are only four possibilities. The envelope of probability is pretty straightforward, with the total number of possibilities doubling with each flip.

However, in things like psychology or education, you flip a human. Humans may not be totally unpredictable, but they certainly have more than two states. After flipping a human once, you already have many possibilities. These include some which you never thought of, some which are unique to that human, and some which that human never thought of. The possibilities branch dramatically after that, limited only by larger bulk probabilities like those mandated by physical laws.

In the social sciences, you take many humans, on the principle that if you have a lot of them, their differences cancel out statistically and you can predict their mass behaviour. The 'lot of them' part is where you get 'social'; the 'predict' part is where you get 'sciences'. These disciplines include sociology, economics and anthropology as well; some would include geography, history and political science. It is hard to decide where to place philosophy.

But I digress. The main thing about these disciplines is that they attempt to reduce the complexity of human behaviour to the level of particle physics or coin tossing. Statistics are employed to show that correlation is quite likely destiny. All this has a corrosive effect on what we think humans are all about. It is somewhat to do with Richard Dawkins's 'blind watchmaker' idea, that environmental randomness accounts for humanity. Even if we think this is true, the secret to being human is to act as if humans are not statistical elements.

There ought to be a 'treat people as people' movement in intellectual and practical life. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world of the social sciences and lose the soul of the humanities?

The Paradox Of Power

I've just finished studying a large chunk of the Pentateuch, also called the Torah. It has struck me (as it no doubt has struck millions before me) that these books of the early Old Testament say a lot more about power and humanity than many of the others do. They say it in a way that is more raw, more naked than commonly seen or perceived.

Almost always, it is a struggle between legitimate power which must not be overused and subversive power which pushes its limits. Sometimes, other kinds of power and shades of the three main kinds of power compete.

One of my juniors has it right about the circumscribing paradox of power. You can either use it or not; its misuse means loss of power, and so does its rightful use when perceived as unjust. Then again, can rightful use ever be unjust? It is hard to know. In the book of Job, it always appears unfair, that the deck is stacked against a humanity that can never find the right answer to the paradox. At the same time, acceptance of the conclusion found therein leads us to believe that there is a right answer—power can only be fully used where knowledge and wisdom are complete.

This is where we humans muck things up. We have a love of ultimate power that is unrivalled by any love of ultimate knowledge or ultimate wisdom in its ubiquity. We will never attain any of these ultimates, but the quest for the first has been the source of corruption and the undoing of many since the very beginning. What a burden, this paradox of power is for a fallen humanity!

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Note: No, I am not the senior that my junior is blogging about. And yes, I am slowly becoming a source of knowledge about the legitimate and illegitimate uses of power within complex organisations. Not that it will ever be enough.

Two Thousand Years

Aha. The Dancer decided to link Billy Joel and his song from River of Dreams, the one titled Two Thousand Years. I like it because it is one of the best millennium anthems I've heard – it combines the longing for peace and love with the knowledge that both are possible but fleeting, and this is what humanity is about. (Oh yes, by the way, check out BlinkBox for some interesting stuff. Thanks, Nadine!)

Two Thousand Years

In the beginning
There was the cold and the night
Prophets and angels gave us the fire and the light
Man was triumphant
Armed with the faith and the will
That even the darkest ages couldn't kill

Too many kingdoms
Too many flags on the field
So many battles, so many wounds to be healed
Time is relentless
Only true love perseveres
It's been a long time and now I'm with you
After two thousand years...

This is our moment
Here at the crossroads of time
We hope our children carry our dreams down the line
They are the vintage
What kind of life will they live?
Is this a curse or a blessing that we give?

Sometimes I wonder
Why are we so blind to fate?
Without compassion, there can be no end to hate
No end to sorrow
Caused by the same endless fears
Why can't we learn from all we've been through
After two thousand years?

There will be miracles
After the last war is won
Science and poetry rule in the new world to come
Prophets and angels
Gave us the power to see
What an amazing future there will be
And in the evening
After the fire and the light
One thing is certain: nothing can hold back the night
Time is relentless
And as the past disappears
We're on the verge of all things new
We are two thousand years

It's good to realise that this last verse is surely intended to be ironic; and if it isn't, it ought to be.