Velikovsky Redux

In Steven Shapin's review of The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe by Michael Gordin (LRB Vol 34, No 21, 35-38, 8 Nov 2012), he concludes:

A rule of thumb for sound inference has always been that if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. But there’s a corollary: if it struts around the barnyard loudly protesting that it’s a duck, that it possesses the very essence of duckness, that it’s more authentically a duck than all those other orange-billed, web-footed, swimming fowl, then you’ve got a right to be suspicious: this duck may be a quack.

I think this is great advice for students attempting to collar a few books, collate the ideas therein, and collectivize them into an extended essay or two. Beware the self-proclaimed big ideas that claim to unify or to apotheosize existing ideas. And remember Velikovsky, who was probably better-read than you, had greater scope than you — and was likely more of a duck than you.

Multipolar

The world is becoming multipolar, according to all kinds of sources. But that's a silly 'sky is falling' sort of statement. The world has always been multipolar; it's just that sometimes, the narrative has required some sort of Zoroastrian dualism (e.g. 'The American Way' vs 'The Evil Empire') or some sort of divine exceptionalism (e.g. 'Rule Britannia'). The complex poetry of the world has always been made prosaic by clever people who hate the messiness.

Look at science. Science is democratic. In theory, everyone can be part of the formal discourse because everyone shares the same starting axioms and the same reasoning process. In practice, science is elitist. It creates spiraling towers of horn and ivory, as more of it is formed into more and more specialised stuff and fewer and fewer people know what to do with it — or what can be done with it.

Look at democracy. Democracy is evil. Why? Because humans very well know that the worst thing to trust is humanity. And yet we claim that we want everyone to have the same rights and powers and privileges because all humans are equal in some sense. But democracy is good, because it gives us the comforting illusion that someone who is better than us isn't really better, and that anyone can be as good as anyone else.

These two forces are the greatest movements of the modern age. They have undeniably done much to improve human conditions from a human point of view. But they persist in making enemies, not because they are good things (and thus persecuted) but because they are human, and thus imperfect. And they love trampling over other ideas because they are good at it.

But shouldn't they win, since they are better ideas? The point is that we don't know for sure that they are better ideas. There is no objective point to view them except through the anthropocentric lens of being. We can philosophize all we want, but all we know is that they are convincing ideas to many humans. They win a lot of 'marketplace of ideas' competitions — but the marketplace of ideas can only exist in a world where democracy and science have a significant presence.

I like both democracy and science because they make my life comfortable. If that is how we decide what is good, then I guess that's good. But I'm uncomfortable about thinking that. So what else should I think?

I think I should not conform to the pattern of this world, I think.

Word of the Day: Ideolatry

We're all familiar with the horribly elided term 'idolatry', from Greek eidolon (often translated 'graven image') and latreia (often translated 'worship' or 'service'). The original Greek was eidololatria, but I guess it had one 'lol' too many for the English, who chopped the word short.

However, the lesser-known word 'ideolatry' actually comes from a more basic concept — it comes from the Greek idea, or 'form', or (almost literally) 'imagining'. The Greek idea carries with it the sense of constructing a visual image in the mind's eye. To indulge in 'ideolatry' is to worship an idea, something that exists in the internal workings of one's mind as a virtual image.

In what way is ideolatry different from ideology, which is more familiar to most of us?

Ideology in general is the science of putting ideas into a rational system. An ideology is a construct of ideas, a conceptual framework or system incorporating ideas which may or may not have a rational basis. A consistent ideology (which is what ideologies are supposed to be but sometimes are not) is one in which all the incorporated ideas are linked by a consistent internal logic within the ideological system. Whether it is a rational ideology is a different matter.

In what way is ideolatry different from idolatry, which is more obvious to most of us?

Ideolatry is more subtle. Instead of worshipping Mammon, we worship a concept of finance, or the idea of money. Instead of sacrificing children to Moloch, we worship a concept of education, or the idea of drill-and-practice. Instead of venerating Ishtar, we worship a concept of fashion, or the idea of beauty contests. Instead of giving things up to Belial, we worship a concept of modernity, or the idea of reductionism. We give service to ideas, and they become our reasonable worship.

Sometimes, it takes the analysis of a less-used word to bring out ideas that we forget to think about. Sometimes, it is good to think about whether a set of ideas has become an ideology, and whether ideology has become ideolatry.

The Paradox of Elite Education on a Small Island (Part II)

Let us take the same island, all five million souls. Think about what an elite is: it is that group of individual people who are 'the best', the aristocracy (how ever defined) of the population.

The problem is that if you want to control everything that is useful to an artificially sustained environment, you need a lot of controllers. That's because in a natural environment with natural buffers, a lot of natural feedback loops exist. Couple that with the problem of having a small environment (and hence less buffer space and room for error) and you have to have a lot of 'elite' in various grades.

That is why an education programme designed to develop the gifted elite of the island must be extended from the top 0.1% to the top 0.5% to the top 1% and so on to the top 5-10%. This is the only way to cast your net wide enough to pull in the necessary 'elite'. Of course, now that your 'elite' are taken from the top 10% of population, they are only 'elite' in a very (ahem) broad sense.

Think about it; if you are graduating 50,000 secondary school students a year (aged 16 or so) — or to make your net smaller, say 35,000 high school/junior college students a year — your elite will be drawn from somewhere between 3,500 and 5,000 promising young people every year. In 40 years (say from 1969 to 2009), allowing for different populations and programmes and rates of loss each year, you must have extracted at least 50,000 people (1% of present population) to be the elite of the nation.

The true elite number about 250 (0.5% of that 1%, or the top 0.005%). But at this point, they are fairly homogeneous, having been selected more or less by the same set of filters and criteria and encouraged to stay in the same social circles (and bond, and get married, and be fruitful and multiply). It is the tip of the pyramid, so to speak. It is a very narrow tip, almost a tipping point.

And you know what? Everyone in that group receives (broadly speaking) the same briefings. They all believe the same things and will say (or not say) the same things. They also believe that they are broad-minded enough to not say (or not not say) the same things, because they are all the same kind of people.

In some ways, this is a refutation of the idea that education broadens the mind. In fact, it is possible that by having elite education on a small island, you are actually neutralizing the effects that education is supposed to produce.

Outsourcing doesn't help, because the 'elitely educated' go to the same overseas institutions for further polishing. They all smirk the same way, if you catch them on video. It is a bit like watching an Asian post-colonial version of the British government, but with an overlay of pseudo-Confucian superiority.

How do I know all this? It's by watching too many of them, people that I know, go down the same road. Some, to their credit, are able to remain unshackled. Most bind themselves in contracts of the mind as powerful as the one that dragged Faustus to his doom. And as their minds contract, so too does the future reality of a small island.

The Other Invisible Hand

Everyone knows about Adam Smith's 'invisible hand', one of the seminal metaphors in economics. To be more exact, it is the idea that the forces of competition, self-interest, and supply/demand will work together to produce the most efficient allocation of resources. This is the basis of the 'free market'.

But if that is the right hand of human social impulses, the left hand is Robert Michels' hand of the bureaucratic impulse, the idea that keeping things tightly controlled is a good thing. This is the basis of the 'market square', the framework in which and through which the 'free market' is forced to operate.

John Taylor Gatto, in his book Weapons of Mass Instruction, mentions what sounds awfully like the other invisible hand in the context of education. He says:

...men and women who staff institutional schooling are very like those in other complex institutions — if they exercise significant free will they will become outlaws who must be sanctioned, and things which improve performance are hardly more welcome than things which impair it. Deviations from a steady state jeopardize the 'system mission'... innovation was powerfully resisted; independent practitioners were sanctioned — ostracized if they persisted

This sounds so much like the old place. Essentially, teaching the way I did was considered 'bad teaching'. Ironically, when I did the boring stuff, I was praised for it. When I did the interesting stuff, a few enlightened people in distant powerful places thought it was good, but the immediate hierarchy squirmed. And because I was one of the 'interesting people' (of which there were really quite a few; I wasn't the only one), whenever something suspicious happened, I was immediately on the shortlist of people to blame.

I realise now that essentially old men running bureaucracies always want to hold on to power. It is a deep-seated impulse which is perfectly natural, since to lose their grip (or to appear to) is to admit uselessness and impotence. Sometimes it is also for very good reasons; these people perceive that they are the best persons for the job and cannot imagine anyone would be as good at being them. In that sense, they are right — nobody is so alike them that replacement would be exact.

Robert Michels said that the key function of bureaucracies is never their publicly-stated primary mission, but the protection and maintenance of the bureaucracy itself. In that light, it is quite obvious why most innovation is a sham, a shoving around of things designed to look like advancement and progress, but masking the truth.

In an educational context, this truth is that students are not smarter than before, not wiser, not more capable; they are just as good as ever, except that schools take credit for their work and subtly persuade them that without school, they would not be as successful. Instead of empowering them and setting them free, as schools claim, they are actually applying invisible shackles with an invisible hand, so that the majority of students never grow up to become the insurrectionists that society really needs for true progress.

One of those shackles is called 'debt to society', which over the last few decades has overtaken the perfectly legitimate debt to parents. In this era, parents often feel incompetent to educate their own children, a feeling enhanced and intensified by constantly changing syllabi which in some cases teach less than those parents learnt when they were in school. That is why students can imagine that their debt to society is greater than their debt to parents; society provides schools that provide grades and certificates and jobs based on those, and money beside.

When Smith's invisible hand meets Michels' invisible hand, students are flattened in between and become two-dimensional. The combination of 'free market' and 'controlling framework' leads to dominance by those capable of brachiating through the social jungle, the monkeys best able to follow monkey rules. Those who would change those rules or make their own rules are few because many think they would fail.

Yet even supposedly conservative texts like the Bible say things like, "Do not be conformed to the system of the world." The Biblical Jesus paid tribute to the Law, but he said that the fulfillment of the Law was beyond the Law itself. He was the independent insurrectionist of his time: the Sabbath was made for Man, and not Man for the Sabbath — the Laws were made because of the hardness of men's hearts. But it is Man who is more important than Law.

We who live in the framework should be aware of both invisible hands. It is Michels' bureaucratic hand that is more pernicious, more deadly. It preserves a population pyramid in which craftsmanship is denied a proper place, and administrative power is king. I suspect that if even 10% of the teachers of the nation were to aim beyond the framework, at least 50% of their students would be lifted beyond the limits of their current horizons.

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Note: I think the major difference between Smith's hand and Michels' hand is that Smith thought the invisible economic hand was a good thing in general, whereas Michels thought the invisible bureaucratic hand was an evil thing.

Old Thoughts

Donne's famous Meditation XVII tends to eclipse his other works in the mind of modern man, perhaps because the phrase 'For Whom The Bell Tolls' was etched by Hemingway on the modern literary consciousness. But Donne wrote profusely and entertainingly, and what he wrote is good basis material for people professing to know anything about 'Knowledge and Inquiry', as some in Atlantis do these days.

For example, in Meditation XX, he writes:

The arts and sciences are most properly referred to the head; that is their proper element and sphere; but yet the art of proving, Logic, and the art of persuading, Rhetoric, are deduced to the hand, and that expressed by a hand contracted into a fist, and this by a hand enlarged, and expanded; and evermore the power of man, and the power of God himself is expressed so, 'All things are in his hand'. Neither is God so often presented to us, by names that carry our consideration upon counsel, as upon execution of counsel; he is oftener called the Lord of Hosts, than by all other names, that may be referred to the other signification.

Such thoughts are interesting. They dig deep into the heart of language and the hidden assumptions we make in the use of metaphor and image. It would be valuable even for those who care nothing for Christianity and its range of cultures and cultural history, to undertake the equivalent exercise into their own ideas, models, tropes and schemata.

Seldon Crises

I typed out the title of this post. Then it occurred to me that it looked like a typo. Shortly thereafter, it looked like the name of a character from a book by Terry Pratchett or Jasper fforde (whose last name also looks like a typo anyway). The title of this post is self-referential, it seems; it has an existential crisis from within as well as without.

What is a 'Seldon Crisis'? Fans of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy (begun in 1951) and its sequels will immediately identify the term as one belonging to Asimov's invented field of psychohistory. A Seldon crisis, according to Asimov, is an event predicted by the psychohistorian Hari Seldon which is a pivotal moment in history. Normally, there is an external threat as well as an internal one; both of these threats are also likely to be fatal if not neutralised. Fortunately, both threats can be resolved by a single action, sometimes by setting these threats against one another, sometimes by conjuring up a previously unseen perspective.

Why are Seldon crises important to us six decades after Foundation? That's a harder question, but one to which some of the many answers must already begin to be obvious.

For a start, the paradigms of the modern world tend to be based on 'systems'. Ever since Newton's time, the idea that the world could be apprehended and then comprehended in terms of interlocking systems, or even a single overarching system, has been a persuasive one. Humans like to believe that everything is causally interlinked, and that nothing is purely random and beyond reason. Even random events can be bound by statistical distributions, and all things have their causes. This is the root of the 'systems thinking' approach, which leads then to 'systems engineering' — the idea that you can therefore cause anything you want if you know the right processes to engage. (The Atlantean educational system, so often pilloried in this blog, is an example of this.)

More chilling though is that this kind of psychohistorical reasoning is at the root of many influential programmes that spring from minds we would think are vastly different and whose impact on ordinary people seems distant to many of us. US economist and Nobel winner Paul Krugman, with a little embarrassment, admitted in 2008 that Asimov's Foundation trilogy "in which the social scientists who understand the true dynamics save civilization" was the trigger for his interest in economics. At the same time, Al-Qaeda, an organization with a name that can be translated as 'The Foundation', seems to be following the apocalyptic parts of Asimov's script too.

The problem is that systems engineering is a problematic field. Joseph Kasser, speaking in Atlantis in 2009, had a few interesting points to make about this. In slide 7 of his presentation, his first few points read as follows:

• Systems engineering is poorly practiced (in general)
• Systems engineering is poorly taught (in general)
• No universally accepted definition and body of knowledge
• No universal agreement on role of systems engineer
• Systems engineering has failed to meet its promises of the 50s and 60s

The consequent problem of this problematic status is that many of the processes begun in the 50s and 60s, such as the Atlantean education system, were 'engineered' based on this problematic field which doesn't quite seem to exist as a coherent area of knowledge. (By the way, although Kasser's presentation is a little technical in parts, I strongly recommend at least one quick viewing.)

The world is now officially in what would in the past have been called a science-fictional situation. Arthur Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey was a prediction of what 2001 might have been; more chilling to me is that his sequel was called 2010: Odyssey Two, and so far neither looks like a successful prediction of much. Rather, the world has gone behind as well as ahead of all predictions — we have incredible access to information (which most of us don't think is sufficient) and yet are as deliberately ignorant as ever.

My personal experiences (and the experiences of others) seem to provide examples of this. It seems that very few people are adept at using search engines to track down information, let alone to correlate that information and synthesize it into a coherent whole. Even in the area of presenting their findings, they don't know how to use simple tools like Microsoft's PowerPoint — most of them don't know there is a 'presenter view' and they have this annoying habit of using excess text and text modifiers. Some don't bother with checking information sources by triangulation and/or logic either. In general, the surfeit of information has been occluded and eclipsed by the even greater surfeit of entertainment and non-information.

If this is the grist that the already shaky 'systems engineering' mill has to work with, we are in deeper trouble than anyone thinks. No matter how much work is done, if the premises are bad, the output is junk. In the Foundation trilogy, nothing is more chilling than when Hari Seldon gets it wrong and his successors have to figure out what should be done instead — based on what they think he thought.

Unnatural Things (Part II)

In a previous post, I talked about some ideas of 'natural' and 'unnatural'. It struck me that if you defined 'natural' as 'found in nature', it still isn't a complete definition for some purposes.

For example, if you said, "That's natural behaviour," when watching young people at play, you would actually implicitly be saying, "... for young human beings in that particular cultural context." What's natural in one context is not necessarily natural in another, because it would not normally occur in that context.

Which brings me to the next point. Should we define 'natural' as 'occurs in nature, given a specific context', or as 'is the modal occurrence for that situation', or as 'is within the normal distribution of behaviours, to n standard deviations'? Or should we use yet another definition?

The problem is that etymology's main clue constrains our choice somewhat; 'natural' comes from the Latin and implies 'inborn' — something that proceeds from the course of events in the natural world without human intelligence intervening. It is natural that some people are born with genes which predispose one towards alcoholism; it is not natural that alcoholics should exist, because it is rare to find ethanol in large quantities in nature — there is no common natural process that could create large numbers of alcoholics.

Some might argue (as I have, playfully, in the past) that mankind is a fact of nature, and that therefore everything (cable TV, skyscrapers, space telescopes, iPhones, Gucci handbags etc) that we create is part of nature. Well, in that case, we should throw out the idea of artifice, of organic growth, of natural methods of doing anything and just accept that our sad lot is to defeat the rest of nature before we get round to understanding it.

But that's just dodging the argument. Why shouldn't we think of Man as part of nature? And why shouldn't we then think that any activity we indulge in, for which a sufficiently large number of us exist, is also a natural thing? Take the relatively innocuous cultural behaviour of wearing earrings so large that they distort the earlobes. This can be found in primitive (technology-wise) tribes as well as on the streets of New York or Singapore. Is this therefore a natural thing?

Is it natural to indulge in bodily mutilation by surgical removal of unsightly body parts? We do it with nails and hair, which regenerate; we do it with skin, which sometimes doesn't quite regenerate the same way. We do it with parts that don't regenerate, sometimes out of philanthropy and sometimes as some odd aesthetic or religious practice.

Think about circumcision, for example — some people say it is a healthy thing to do, some people say not, and it's impossible to say under what circumstances it is optimally healthy. Personally, I'd have the shuddering heebie-jeebies if anyone told me they were going to chop off the tip of one of my extremities. My fingers and toes cringe, that is.

So many questions, and so many answers. Sigh.

Unnatural Things (Part I)

Sometimes when you look at the news or read the latest polemics, you hear people talking about things as 'natural' or 'unnatural'. This is something interesting to me. What constitutes 'natural' or 'unnatural'?

To me, 'natural' connotes lack of human artifice. Human technology is somehow less natural than, say, termite archaeology or the coconut tool use of certain octopi. We make tools not only by directed physical action, but by directed chemical action 'with malice aforethought', so to speak.

But there's another way of looking at things that I find fascinating. This is the statistically natural approach — somewhat akin to the rule of the majority or the rule of large numbers. By this approach, if something is a) found to occur in real life, b) found to occur in real life in large numbers (relatively speaking) or c) found to occur in real life in a majority of cases, then that something is considered natural. It's like the way some people look at giraffe behaviour.

For example, male giraffes are known to indulge in blatant, common, and majority homosexual behaviour. This is a point in favour, some say, of such things being natural. Well, they also sleep an average of 1.9 hours a day, have very long necks, and use their heads as flails. Are some behaviours natural and the others not?

The answer is an obvious one. All are natural for giraffes but not necessarily at all for humans. In fact, I suspect none of these things is natural for humans except under unnatural (perhaps giraffe-like?) conditions.

So what is 'natural'? Yes, I'll handle that soon...

Discrimination Rules

The modern humanist world often paints discrimination as a bad thing. I don't think it is. Discrimination is the basis of all our senses, of all our decisions insofar as we are confident that some neurological process underpins them all. Institutions shouldn't be bullied into allowing equal access, equal rights, equal mindlessness.

There are limits to fairness, just as there are to equality; all humans are NOT born equal, although in some abstract ways (such as the right to be alive) they might be. The idea that they are is hogwash, or perhaps bullshit, or some other animal-related thing. You will never find two people with exactly the same characteristics; why might you find two people with exactly the same balance of rights and responsibilities?

A person certified at a specific level of low mental function is treated specially in both positive and negative ways; a person with one arm is in theory (and often in practice) less able to do certain things. Women are different from men; men are different from men as much as women are different from women. The whole idea of equal rights is a shifting, unstable chimera simply because a close inspection of any rights you might care to bestow shows that they cannot be equally bestowed in a way that makes the effect just.

That's because justice (the exact balance of rights and responsibilities) is not the same as fairness (the idea that either a sense of subjective equity or a fact of objective equality should prevail). God is not fair, but He is always just. The problem is that our perceptions are fairness-biased because we have no objective way to determine our position on a universal scale. All this just makes our laws (more recriminatory or just criminalizing, hardly undiscriminating) the locally objective socioculturally-subjective codification of some general principles of jurisprudence.

Discrimination is a fact of the human condition. There is no warm fuzzy 'it need not be so' business about it. Indeed, it must be so, or there would be no basis on which to stand when making choices. While some bases might seem fairer than others, there is actually no choice that would be fair except by subjective agreement. The division of a circular pie might be mathematically fair, but the division of a real budget into actual domains of expenditure will never please everyone.

After running a few years of tests on my own perceptions, I have come to realise that I discriminate against people with darker skin, people with fairer skin, people of a different gender (however defined), people of a different age, people who drive a different car, people who drive the same car. I discriminate on every level and in every dimension that I can. I realise, in fact, that I discriminate against every person who is not me; I also have realised that if I had to live with someone exactly like me, I'd have to discriminate against him just to remain sane.

To those people out there who would have me believe that I should espouse some people's agenda, and call it 'acting against discrimination', all I can say is, "What? You want me to support some bunch of people so that they have the same rights as another bunch of people despite not being the same bunch of people? First prove to me that they have not the same rights, then prove to me that they should have the same rights, then prove to me that I should care."

It's the last part that gets most people. You can only care about this sort of thing if you have an empathic stake in it. You have to feel that one group is discriminated against to the point at which you yourself would feel uncomfortable. And you can only feel that way if you have an uncanny level (or an undiscriminating level) of empathy. That is why Jesus said you ought to love your neighbour as yourself, and not more than yourself; it's not possible in a real sense to have more empathy for others than you have for yourself because by definition, empathy for self is 100%.

That's not to say that I don't believe people should in general and in abstract be treated as equals. I think it's a laudable idea. I just don't think it will, or should, ever happen in a literal sense.

Anathem

Some time ago, somebody said I should gather my entries from all my blogs and the places where I submit poetry, edit it a bit, structure the mass, and make it into a book. Occasionally, I think it might work, and I toy with that idea a bit.

Once in a while, I shelve the idea semipermanently because somebody's writing has impressed me so much that it rubs my face into the inferiority of my writing. This has happened so far with both Iain Banks (see official site) and Neil Gaiman (official site here).

However, with Neal Stephenson, what gets to me is the sheer baroque exuberance and depth of construction that he is able to muster. His writing is sometimes too dense, too full of half-ideas and full-ideas. Of late, however, I've been digesting his latest book, Anathem.

I think that it's a beautiful ideas book. Any student of epistemology or of ideas about knowledge, in general, should read this book very carefully. Go to the website and explore the links. It's not easy work, but if you can digest this book, it becomes a lot easier to understand the ideas people have come up with about reality.

I don't think I've ever recommended a work of fiction as a textbook for anything except literature. This is one rare exception; I think all serious students of mathematics (as opposed to those who do math just because they have to) should read this book. In fact students of philosophy, history, and the natural sciences would also benefit a lot.

Well, at this point you'll notice I haven't actually said anything about the plot or the characters. I think that if you're not going to read the book, it won't matter; if you do, it's best you find everything out for yourself. Or go to Stephenson's site and explore, before you decide to take the plunge.

The Mechanical East

About two weeks ago, I think I made a bad mistake. I was reading Cyril Aydon's A Brief History of Mankind and I looked at his comments about how the Industrial Revolution never came to China, and I said that it sounded right to me. That's what I posted, because that's what I thought.

But as my readers know, I've never been one to leave stuff like that alone. Something didn't seem right, because I knew that China had all the ingredients for an Industrial Revolution, and in fact had invented all those things centuries before the western barbarian tribes could even think of such things as non-magical.

So I dug around, dutifully and assiduously, for old books and newer ones. I found Arthur Cotterell's Western Power in Asia: Its Slow Rise and Swift Fall (1415-1999), Simon Winchester's Bomb, Book and Compass: Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China, and John M Hobson's The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, among others. After digesting about a dozen books on related material, and re-reading what Fernand Braudel and Felipe Fernandez-Armesto had to say about it (often in contrast with other scholars such as J M Roberts) I came to a new conclusion.

The past is a world too tangled to be disentangled. But the same methodology that tells us who King Arthur must have been also tells us that China's influence on the past of the world is a lot more significant than most historians (especially those of the Anglo-American sphere) would have us believe. The artifacts and the documents, the weight of commercial and technological history, all point us to the fact that the Chinese were innovators, that the world's first major industrial revolution was that of the Song Dynasty, and that the Chinese fell upon hard times through terrible mismanagement on the part of the Manchus.

The view in 1975 was already turning against the colonial views of the preceding century. Documents from that time, such as this one, point out (although in Western terms) the things which led to China's debasement and which were leading to its resurrection.

(It's also interesting to see what they had to say about a certain 'Prime Minister Yew' of a tiny city-state further south. Spiro Agnew found in Singapore "one of the most advanced societies on earth," and John Connolly called the city-state "the best-run country in the world." Prime Minister Yew's formula was simple: "Nothing is free.")

As China completes its rise to great power, perhaps the words of John Hay, US Secretary of State in 1899, will be remembered: "The storm center of the world has gradually shifted to China... whoever understands that mighty Empire... has a key to world politics for the next five hundred years."

Science vs Reality

Recently, I had the opportunity to engage in a fascinating discussion with two ironically-named gentlemen (who I will leave unnamed here in case irony overcomes my readers). Both are eminently reasonable, but Gentleman #1 took issue with my definition of 'reasonable' and Gentlemen #2 took issue with my view of science.

According to Gentleman #1, it is better to define 'reasonable' as 'just; fair; agreeable to reason' than to use the 'argument of popularity'. Actually, in the context of what a reasonable belief is, it is perfectly normal to define 'reasonable' as 'something a majority of the population are in agreement with'. This is of course a legalistic position, akin to the idea of 'the man in the street' or 'the reasonable man'. But the problem with Gentleman #1's stand is that we as humans define 'just' as 'that which fits the common sensibility', 'fair' as 'that which seems balanced to the common sensibility', and 'agreeable' as 'that which most people agree with'.

According to Gentleman #2, reality is a the objective test of science. The problem is that this is a circular argument. In scientific circles, it is common to find the argument that reality is that which is verified by some form of the scientific method (as borrowed by Francis Bacon from the Islamic world). If this is true, that reality is verified by science, then how can reality be the objective test of science? The fact is that we can only trust our reason and our perception to the extent that it keeps producing exactly the same answer. This, of course, means that the inductive fallacy lies in wait.

My point is that a properly scientific skeptic would indeed be only provisionally certain, and even then only in the pragmatic sense, about any scientific claim to knowledge. If computers work because of applied science, that's great. Whether this is true or real, that's for the philosophers.

It is utterly possible to (as the humorist Terry Pratchett has done) postulate a science that works by little psychic beings of immaterial (and hence non-space limited) 'substance'. This would have the advantage of making the entities we call 'subatomic particles' and 'atoms' (and base much of our science on) explainable in terms of inherent intelligence; it would also explain action at a distance.

Unfortunately, it would also be unsatisfactory to scientists because the next question would be, "How do we understand the minds of these little psychic beings?" In fact, scientists dig until they hit 'fundament', and then they call what they've found 'fundamental' until they get better shovels. The problem is the 'better shovels' part.

What if you reach the point at which no better shovel is possible? This is apparently the case with the Planck constant, which describes the level of quantization of energy. Other physical constants (for example, the rest mass of the electron, Avogadro's number) depend on it to some extent; the fine-structure constant is interdependent with it in establishing the nature of our universe.

Well, having reaching that kind of fundament, I suppose the next question would be, "Why it is that value and not another value?" A true scientist would never accept the 'because it is, and that's all' explanation. But to me (and logically, anyone else), it is the explanation which must eventually suffice, and it would be unreasonable to think otherwise, simply because of the gap in orders of magnitude between our perceptions (and their proxies) and what lies beneath Planck's constant.

That would lead to the conclusion that true scientists are unreasonable, which must be irksome to them — if there were any such people at all. However, there is hope. As GBS once said (in Man and Superman, 1903), "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Perhaps that progress will (as it often has) redefine our concept of what is reasonable. It is now reasonable to believe in flying steel machines, as it might not have been five centuries ago. But flying steel machines operate at the same level of perceptual reality as we do, while quantum electrodynamics (and other such theories) don't.

Scientia: The Great Refusal (Introduction)

The word 'science', as used in the modern sense, is a very recent one. As a kind of methodology which seeks consistency in the definition of truth, it dates back to the 18th century; its origins lie perhaps a century earlier, in the writings of Sir Francis Bacon.

As a modern religion, however, it is even more recent. In discussions with many people over the last few years, I've come to realise that it is something that some people put their trust in without any understanding whatsoever. It is even worse when every young person in a country is made to study science, and this thus confers upon it great prestige and value in the mind, and yet the majority of these people don't know what it really is.

What science is, in essence, is a refusal to countenance anything which isn't science. It is a closer's game, as opposed to an opener's invitation. More about this later.

Western Religion

It has occurred to me, since my father first introduced me to the study of diverse religions at a tender age, that the only western religions that have ever existed were either corruptions of eastern religions or belief systems that did not last very long. About the only idea that came out of the western intellectual tradition and might conceivably be considered a major religion is the idea of explicit atheism that also denies the possibility of the supernatural and insists on logical positivism.

I've referred to this idea before, in this post. But the question still hanging in the air is, "How do you distinguish between East and West?" Or is this merely a political construct based on the phrase 'East of Suez'? Edward Said wrote about this 'orientalism' concept in a strongly negative sense, but looking back on the history of colonialism tends to buttress his stand.

Perhaps what distinguishes East from West is not just geography, but the whole idea of God. If 'the North is full of tangled things, and texts, and aching eyes' (Chesterton) or the 'Idea of South' is one of inversion and oddity, then the East is always about the supernatural—that which can never be known, and the West is about the frontier of imagination—that which may not yet be known but can definitely be known.

I wonder what differences there are between northern religions and southern ones...

Thin But Tough

Thin, but tough, is the holy grail of many areas of material substance. The point is obviously to have as little bulk as possible, but with as much of its usefulness as you can pack into that small volume. It's an idea that holds sway in things as diverse as microelectronics, bridge construction, and furniture laminates.

If you have refined your bulk material to 'thin but tough', you can build up any amount of resilience and flexibility. If you are stuck with 'tough and huge', you have a lot less flexibility, while if you have 'thin and fragile', you are similarly disadvantaged with respect to resilience.

In my long-running survey of education systems in Atlantis, I've come to realise that we don't have much choice. The talent density is insufficient for us to develop 'thin but tough' layers of intelligent education. We have to make do with composites that are non-ideal.

But that doesn't mean we have to aim for low or mediocre quality. We can still optimise for 'thin but tough' as far as possible, by ruthlessly examining our components for quality and reassigning the weak and strong points so that they are dispersed in a way that has maximum positive impact on the milieu.

Excursive

I remember looking at the list of books, and it had Siddhartha and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in it. I remember reading both as a child, and I was interested to see what the First would make of it (and the Second, as well). What these books have in common is the idea of a River.

I've always had this idle preoccupation for rivers; one of the first pieces of trivia I picked up was which rivers were the longest and biggest, and which civilisations depended on them. When books like PJF's The Magic Riverboat came along, I was greatly cheered. Every great city needs a proper river; the Thames is a small one relative to its great city of London — but as the lifeblood of that city, and with its many hidden tributaries and rivulets, it is one of great mythic power.

But as I read various riparian stories, I came to realise that in the end, Heraclitus the Ephesian was right when he said, "No man ever steps in the same river twice: for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man."

All the riparian tales are the same: a man (and sometimes his friends with him) proceeds down a river, and by the end, he is changed. If his is a classical hero's quest, he will return home, only to discover that home is no longer home and he has to 'sail beyond the sunset', as Tennyson wrote of Odysseus, in order to find his rest. This is as true of Huck Finn as it is of Odysseus, and it is true (in a metaphorical sense, of an allegorical character!) of Hesse's Siddhartha.

Life, it seems, is only an excursion down a river and back again. And like Bilbo Baggins in Tolkien's magnum opus, a person can try to go 'there and back again', but the sunset lands are everyone's last, true home.

Towards a Higher Quality Teaching Service

Let us suppose that you wanted to create a higher quality teaching service. What then would you decide to do?

The obvious thing, I would say, would be to develop the quality of teaching; that is, the ability of a teacher to teach — to make things easily understandable, to develop students' understanding of these things, and to develop student ability to understand any future material that they might have to understand. But this has not always been so obvious.

There is one very deep and profound approach that I've unearthed (from where it has been hiding in plain sight). You can start by picking people who can (by some proxy measure) be said to understand things better. They are therefore (this is the implicit argument) likely to be able to teach people; that is, make these things easily understandable (since they seem to have found them so), develop students' understanding of these things (because they themselves understand), and develop student ability to understand future material (which they themselves may or may not have encountered). Then you can pay them more.

Really? Yes; the evidence is here. About eleven and a half years ago, pay was explicitly raised for teachers in a certain city-state, but only if they had a good honours degree. This was supposed to create a higher quality teaching service.

It seems a dubious argument to me. It is a bit like saying, "Since you know so much about restaurant menus, you must be a good cook too."

Mulling

I don't know when I became one of those people who write peculiar treatises on the world as it is conceptualised by others. But I am quite sure it happened to me at some point within the last ten years. The other day I was looking at my notes:

Globalisation has been variously defined as ‘the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world’ (Stiglitz, 2003: 9), ‘the inexorable integration of markets, nation-states and technologies’ (Friedman, 2000: 9), and ‘the conviction that a plurality of cultures… could be accommodated on terms of equality in a single society’ (Fernández-Armesto, 2004: 391) – always driven by the lowering of barriers to transport and the free flow of goods and services through technology and legislation. The first definition is general, the second specific, and the third idealistic.

You see? But all this is what I've come to call 'the new globalisation'. It's a very American free-market sort of idea. To elaborate, Americans believe free trade is good unless they're making a loss; then free trade is called 'dumping' or something like that. If your workers are paid less than Americans, then your crime is 'human rights violations'. In other words, globalisation is now a one-way street (as far as possible) from the New World to the Old.

But it was not always so. At some point before the 19th century, globalisation was a matter of equally mysterious traditions. As cultures collided, they were wary and yet intrigued by other cultures. It wasn't until Darwin's bastard children decided that you could classify other races as inferior or underdeveloped that they felt they had the right to impose without nurturing whatever crops had already been planted in faraway lands.

Take for example the fates of the Maoris and the Australian aborigines. Since the former had established agriculture, a very obvious culture, large buildings and fermentation, they were considered to be more civilised. The Maoris got a treaty with the White Man, the aboriginal peoples of Australia got short shrift and lost everything.

Fortunately, this age sees the rise of China and India as counterweights to the West. You won't see a sudden change, but it will be faster than expected. Eventually, the world will become more multipolar, and then globalisation will become something richer than the rapid onslaught of America-friendly memes and their subsequent integration.

I'm not knocking the USA for some sort of amoral colonial approach, though. I'm saying that a richer memetic inheritance benefits us all. The chance of human survival as a race rises in proportion to its adaptability, and memetic variation is part of that. It is better to have a mixture that is mulled than a stagnant pool.

Pandemic

It's interesting, this new world we live in. It's not particularly brave, because bravura will get you dead more often than not. Rather, we have limits on everything while pretending we have limits on nothing. We think of air travel as essential (which it is), forgetting that it is sometimes the only reason for certain problems. Air travel, for one, is probably the largest source of radiation exposure (besides regular hospital diagnostic radiology) that most people receive in their lifetimes.

But the interesting thing is the 2009 strain of Influenza A-H1N1, tha odd hybrid of 25% human, 25% avian and 50% porcine strains. It has hit almost 40,000 victims so far; in fact, it has certainly surpassed that number even as I type this. China has produced a vaccine (which many say they won't risk taking, considering the reputation for chemical and biological contamination that China's products have gained in recent months), the West is trying to produce one too.

But one of the warlords of Atlantis has decreed that the alert status of the air-conditioned isle will never be raised again. When he said it, it was like God saying the world would not perish by flood again. Then too, the symbol of covenant was a spectrum of colours.

I wonder what will happen as the infection spreads. Will Atlantis stand firm in its belief that its sorcerous strength and walls of invisible defiance will repel the viral horde? Or will schools be closed even as June comes to an end? I'm sure that particular warlord will find some way to get his work done without raising alert levels. In Atlantis, any sign of weakness is tantamount to gross disrespect for the institution of the State and its governing powers.

I think that this whole idea of mockery being unacceptable is the sign of a terrible disease. If no one will mock the powerful, then when will the powerful learn that they are doing silly things? The idea in this neo-neo-Confucian state that the State of Atlantis now finds itself in by declaration and default is that the powerful are superior and should not be mocked lest confidence in them is reduced and the value of the State's assets plunges.

It is so pandemic that if you were to say, "I think the legal system here includes a few judges with cognitive problems," then you would be considered a mocker. In fact, it could be construed (whether true or not) as an attempt to diminish confidence in the State, and lower the value of its assets. This would in turn be considered traitorous, and you could be detained without trial for it.

Ah well, as someone said to me, "This whole thing arose because we weren't monitoring the swine carefully enough." Yes, this should be a lesson to us all. Wherever you suspect swinish influence, look out, be on your guard, keep watch. Don't let the swine get to you.