Wednesday, December 14, 2016

The Oil Power

The Political and Economic Forces in AnteBellum America that supported slavery were very powerful.  They encompassed all of Southern White Society from the Carolinas to Texas:  the plantation owners, the merchants, the politicians, as well as businessmen in the North who benefitted from the cotton and slave trades. The nineteenth century American Abolitionists called these political and economic forces: “The Slave Power”

During the 1850’s “the Slave Power”  gridlocked American government.  It ensured that only judges who favoured slavery were nominated to the Supreme Court.  The Court’s Dred Scott decision forced citizens from free states to assist in returning escaped slaves to their owners.

Now, let’s imagine that instead of the Civil War, the Slave Power had actually prevailed. Imagine that  Stephen Douglas defeated Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and slavery spread to the Western States, where it continues to this day.  

It is very difficult to believe that that could have happened;  not the election, elections can be very close; it is difficult to believe that slavery could have survived intact today, because it is hard to imagine living in the kind of morally degenerate universe that that would entail.   

It took a bloody Civil War to defeat “The Slave Power”.  A momentous moral change, like that of abolishing slavery is not something that can be fixed in one election, or through one government policy.  It takes a mass movement, like a war, a revolution, or a religious movement.   

Societies are relatively stable.  It is not an easy or simple thing to change  the moral direction.  First, people are used to custom and tradition as well as convenience.  We don’t like to change our ways.  Secondly, many people have a stake in keeping things the way they are.  These wealthy owners stand to lose valuable capital if the system changes.    Even if one can make a good case for a moral change, people who have a strong financial interest in the status quo, such as the slave owners, will fight back hard to keep their privileges.

Seven years ago there was another momentous American election.  That election went off like an atomic bomb.  We bid goodbye to Barack Obama, the first Black President, and shield our eyes from the brilliance of Donald Trump, the billionaire with the brightest orange hair imaginable.  

Why did I keep thinking about 1860 and the difference that that election would have made if the outcome had been reversed?  It is because of the power of fossil fuels, that I see this connection.   The Slave Power had a stranglehold on the American government, and only Lincoln’s election made it possible for America to break free of the chains of slavery.

Trump famously stated that Global Warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese. You may recall that Trump's first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson was a former CEO of Exxon, one of a number of oil companies that  have spent hundreds of millions of dollars funding fake grass-roots organizations attacking climate science.  Fake scientists have even been  borrowed from the tobacco industry.  These fossil fuel front organizations have been largely funded by Exxon and the Koch brothers, billionaire owners of the largest privately owned oil company in the world.  

Deceptive PR, creating a fake scientific controversy by financing climate skeptics and paying internet trolls to harass and intimidate legitimate climate scientists has been  and continues to be a clandestine oil industry tactic.  

When you think about it, Putin’s Russia and the Big Oil companies have all been using similar propaganda tactics to pollute the internet and create an atmosphere of chaos and confusion for decades now.   What is it they have in common besides making their money from oil?  They both want to be able to do their dirty-work out of the public eye.  

Why not make a deal with Putin.  America needs Oil, and Russia has got it.  Oil is more important than freedom, it is more important than Science, it is more important than the Truth, it has the most money behind it and it can do the most good for our economies.  It is worth it to sacrifice Scientific Knowledge, a liveable Climate, and our collective health for bigger and faster cars and more military weapons.   We need to show the rest of the world that we are boss as long as we are able.

This is the sociopathic logic of The Oil Industry.  Money tells us to drill and frack to get more oil, it doesn’t tell us to save the planet.  The job of the Oil Industry is to plunder, rape, and pillage the earth, until everything is stained with its foul and toxic essence.  This is the Power that has taken over half the earth and yearns for the rest.   This is the Oil Power.  






Wednesday, October 19, 2016

The Garden and The Cave Part I

                                  The Garden and the Cave


The story of the “Garden of Eden” in the book of Genesis and Plato’s story of the Cave are my choices for the two foundational myths of Western Civilization.  One story is written anonymously, and comes from the Hebrew Bible, the other is the work of a man considered by many to be the greatest Philosopher in history.  


Here’s how the story of the “Garden of Eden” would sound if it were written by an anonymous twenty-first century philosopher:  


“Assume a garden, let’s call it “Eden”, and let Eden be our stand-in for the “state of nature”.  There are four players in the garden: God, a snake, a man and a woman.  Assume the snake is always rational but assume nothing about whether God or the humans are rational."


"There is only one rule and it only applies to the two humans.  If the humans obey this rule they  stay in the garden. If they disobey, they must leave the garden and never return."


(According to the original story the snake misleads the humans by telling them how much they could benefit from disobeying God’s rule;  but what the snake doesn’t tell the humans is that those benefits come with a steep cost. Thus we have at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible one of the first  written records of a successful  sales pitch.)
"So. in light of this,  our well-funded Philosophy department ran a series of game-theoretic computer simulations. We kept certain parameters fixed and varied others. We listed the costs and benefits  of each viable strategy and we discovered that when you lay it all out in purely logical formal terms it doesn’t really add up.  This world doesn’t amount to anything more than a  hill of beans."  


Like my philosophical rendition of the garden of Eden, Plato’s allegory of “The Cave” from Plato’s extended dialogue, “The Republic”,   is ugly, awkward, convoluted, and preposterous, but unlike my modern version of the Garden, the Allegory of the Cave may be the single most  influential piece of philosophy there is.


 It’s not a pleasant picture - Down underground there’s a dark smokey cave, where a group of prisoners are spending their entire lives chained together with their backs to a fire. But these are not totally evil jailers because, oddly enough, they spend much of their time making shadow puppet plays for the entertainment of the prisoners, who can feel the heat of the fire, but can  never see it because they only  see the shadows that are cast on the wall.  


One day, one of the prisoners miraculously escapes, managing to climb up outside the cave and is immediately blinded by the bright sunlight.  Gradually he becomes used to the bright light and then he is astonished to see the source of this light - the sun, although, of course, he cannot look directly at the sun, he has to quickly glance at it or shade his eyes.  


The escaped prisoner realizes that he has to go back and rescue his companions.  They have no knowledge of the outside;   they think that the source of all light is the fire in the cave;  they think that reality is the shadows on the wall.


So our hero climbs back down into the cave to save his friends, only to be blinded and disoriented by the darkness.  When he tries to tell his chain-gang buddies that he has seen the light they just scoff at him.  “What a stumble-bum!  Can’t even make his way in this well-lit cave. Raving about some source of “white light”  called the “Sun”.  All light comes from the fire, you idiot, can’t you feel it burning behind you?”


We leave our hero, desperate to save his compatriots, but unable to convince them that they should get out of the darkness of the cave and into the daylight….  


Ugly, but effective.   This story “sticks”.  It is so effective that it has shaped philosophy for two and a half millennia. I can posit four reasons for the “stickiness”  of this story.  First, it’s odd and it sticks out;  it is so awkward and bizarre that it is difficult to forget once you hear it.  Second, it is an easy-to-remember summary of Plato’s “Ideas”  in the form of a dramatic story.  


  Third, it introduces some major metaphors that we use even today to understand the concepts of knowledge, truth, and reality. Darkness = Ignorance.  Light = Knowledge.  Confinement = Inability to understand reality, and Freedom = access to reality.  This imagery is very powerful because it affects us unconsciously.  That is why it has had such a profound influence on Western Philosophy.


  Plato pointed to our common realization that much of our experience is fallible and we are prone to false opinion and deception.  According to Plato, just as the prisoners in the cave were physically prevented from looking at the fire or escaping outside to see the real light, we are held back by the faults and imperfections of our sensing bodies from understanding the real truth.


What does it mean to see the light?   To escape from the confines of a dark cave, and suddenly have to adjust to overwhelming brilliance?  To try and communicate that experience, perhaps somewhat ineptly and be mocked and rejected by those who have no understanding?  You can see this as a continuing theme in Western Civilization, starting from Socrates and Jeremiah, then later Jesus, Mohammad, and many others.  In the nineteenth century Baha’u’llah, Joseph Smith, and Karl Marx.  In the twentieth century too many to count.  


The fourth  reason for the “stickiness”  is that the allegory of the cave is reinforcing a story of the trial and death of Socrates that Plato had told before in his four famous dialogues  Euthyphro, Crito, Apology, and Phaedo.  Socrates searched for knowledge by showing everyone else that they were actually ignorant about what they thought they knew a lot about.  He was a “gadfly” (his words)  that got under people’s skin.  Some of his followers, but not Socrates himself, seized political power and made a mess of things.  After that mess had settled down, the citizens of Athens used Socrates as a scapegoat for the mayhem.  They condemned him to die for impiety and corrupting the youth and he willingly accepted their judgement, even though the charges were unfair.  


In the allegory, Plato wants us to imagine that Socrates is that escaped prisoner, the one who has seen the light but is unsuccessful at getting anybody to follow him out of the cave.  Plato believes that Socrates is onto something because he can show, by skillful questioning,  how anybody who thinks they understand a subject doesn’t really know it at all.  The problem is that they don’t appreciate his doing this.  Nobody wants to be shown up as an ignoramus.   (So much for the dialectical method.) The fact is, Socrates sacrificed his life for the cause of philosophy; and this happened four hundred years before Jesus.


So, if Socrates was unsuccessful, what is the point of the Cave allegory?  Plato wants us to see that someone did escape from the cave, and he is passing on some of that illumination to his students and readers.  If you haven’t already guessed, the successful escapee is Plato himself.  He’s the one who started the first University, in 387 BCE, called the “Academy”, where we get the word “academic”.  Yes, we can blame Plato for being the first academic.  But not only did he invent the University, and write some of the most important works in the history of philosophy, he did it because Socrates was put to death for practicing Philosophy.


A very inspiring story, I’ll admit.  But the metaphor of objective knowledge as a bright light, so powerful that it blinds us, plays into the idea that learning anything important must come from a guru, an enlightened master who passes on his difficult doctrines to his faithful students.  


The concentration on light:  sunlight, artificial light, shadows, and darkness points to  a hierarchy of knowledge with an all knowing at the top and the majority in darkness and ignorance at the bottom.  The Hebrew story of the burning bush at the top of Mount Sinai is a reflection of the same imagery.


True knowledge, reality, morality, etc.  is like the sun, an authority over everything, shining over everyone. It is objective in relation to every point-of-view.  It determines and defines everything.   It is surely no coincidence that this period twenty-five hundred years ago, named the “Axial Age”  by the philosopher Karl Jaspers, corresponds to the time of Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, and Jeremiah, and to the development of Monotheism.    


It’s easy to imagine visual objects that appear to be permanent and unchanging.  The sun and the stars for instance. They can have a powerful effect on us, and yet we cannot reach them, touch them, or act on them.  


Plato’s imagery points to a perfect realm of “Ideas” or “Forms”  outside of sense experience.  It leads people to forget or even disparage the fact that we construct most of our understanding through social interaction, not by top-down transmission of objective knowledge.


Plato’s allegory does a hatchet job on  the other senses.  But those other senses serve us well in the darkness, and when we have to stand up, walk, and talk.   It is really the depreciation of the body and the other senses that leads to the exaltation of the abstract, the formal, and the spiritual over our common experience.


It is by focusing on seeing something permanent and unchanging that Plato sets the stage for "Dualism" - the belief that there are two different worlds.  One that is more real because it is unchanging, the other less real because it is constantly changing. This leads to an unbridgeable dichotomy between the world of “Mind”  or the “Soul”, which is supposedly not subject to physical decay, and the world of the “Body” which is subject to change and dissolution.


 Knowledge is not shaped by our interactions with others and with the physical world -  that is only fallible opinion, according to Plato.  Knowledge is only given to us from on high.  Knowledge can only be objective truth.  The evidence of the senses is suspect, because, as Heraclitus said, everything changes and nothing stays the same.  This dualism has infected Philosophy ever since, and it predates Descartes, the modern champion of dualism,  by more than two millennia.


But, what about that other foundation myth - The Garden?  We don’t normally think of it as philosophical, but if we did, we might find that it better serves as a place for discussing the origins of  metaphysics and morality.    Please don’t misunderstand me here.  I’m not advocating some form of Intelligent Design or Creationism. They are just stories, narratives that reflect our understanding of ourselves and the changing world around us.  But these two stories have had an outsized influence on Western Civilization.  And in my opinion the older story -  The Garden - is the deeper  more fruitful story for Philosophy.


One of the things that I love about the garden of Eden story is its childlike simplicity.   According to the story we humans are made in God’s image, and that means that God is kind of like an old uncle who walks around in his garden to enjoy the “coolness of the evening”  and needs a day of rest after a week of hard work.   


 But once Plato’s ideas started to pervade the ancient world the Genesis story seemed hopelessly out-of-fashion.  This started to bother some people in the ancient world, and by the time Jesus came along, four hundred years later, there was a whole group of people, called Gnostics, who believed that the resurrection was a big improvement over the God of the Old Testament.  They were plainly embarrassed by talk of a God who walks around in a garden, and is surprised and gets angry.  This Old Testament God is too down-to-earth, too human.  He doesn’t seem to initially have any spiritual qualities at all.


I believe that it is the influence of Plato and later, from him,  the Stoics, that leads to prioritizing the spiritual over the material, and to the Gnostic schools of Christianity.  


To get back to the Garden, the beauty of this story is in its appearance of naive simplicity.    It seems to be trying to understand how humans became differentiated from animals, and it points to morality as an answer. In fact, the simplicity is only apparent. The story has wonderful twists and turns so that it both uses the contrast between knowledge and ignorance and the contrast between obedience and disobedience to give us an imaginative guess at what could have been the way that humans first entered moral systems.    


In the story, Adam and Eve are in a double-bind:  if they decide to obey God they will not be able to learn about good and evil.  (The profession of teaching was a long way off when this story was written, it seems);  but, if they decide to disobey God and obtain knowledge they will get kicked out of the garden.  Is it a quibble to ask:  how could they have know it was wrong to disobey God, before they knew right from wrong?  To ignore this conundrum is called “begging the question” in Philosophy.  


The fact is that the story could not make sense if we did not assume morality from the very beginning.   In the interest of the dramatic narrative we have to assume morality in order to make sense of what the first humans are doing and in order to understand the consequences of their actions.


Although it is not stated explicitly, the story does suggest that our becoming moral beings has to do with growth and development.  Children are not ashamed of being naked because they have not yet mastered social norms.  At the same time, in some circumstances, they must be told what to do, and be expected to be obedient, even though they may have little or no understanding why.  The framework for morality can be seen as obedience to authority, because that forms the scaffolding for our learning right from wrong.  Our parents protect us from harm by imposing rules, and the rules afford us opportunities to learn.  Separation from nature can be seen as a maturation process where children safely assimilate social norms and acceptable reasons for them by the time they reach adulthood.  


But if that’s the case, then the story of the garden telescopes the whole developmental process into one short but sweet act of rebellion. Whereas with Plato’s allegory, knowledge is equated with light, with all that implies, in this story knowledge is contained in a fruit.  This fruit is forbidden in Eden, dare I say, because knowledge of good and evil differentiates us from animals.  


The image of knowledge as fruit is  truly inspired.  It suggests that knowledge is available to everyone if they are willing to receive it.  It equates knowledge with the body rather than with transcending the body so that it makes a metaphysics and morality based on our experience and human history possible.  Plato’s imagery of the transcendent sun outside the cave, leads to far too many years discussing  “essences”, “propositions”, “multiple worlds” and other disconnected abstractions.  


The tree of knowledge has roots that reach deep into the ground.  Knowledge has to come from somewhere, presumably it is the result of our activities and our interactions.  We share knowledge amongst ourselves, just as we share food with each other.  Food often grows from a seed, and knowledge grows from the seed of parenting and raising children, sharing the wealth of our experience from one generation to the next.  

The Garden is a very clever story for being able to picture the beginning of morality as a separation of humans from nature.  It points out some of the basics of morality:  if somebody commits a serious wrong, then they are likely to be punished or excluded from the community, sometimes permanently.  It gives the example of human sexuality as a common object of moral rules, and it points to the example of “shame” as a distinctly human emotion. On the other hand, the idea of eating forbidden fruit from the “tree of knowledge”  is so imaginative and evocative that it’s one of the things that forever after determines how we remember this story.

The Garden and The Cave Part II



I think most people see the "Garden of Eden" as a stand-in for nature. The story doesn’t really make sense if you don’t get this equivalence.   But, if as the nineteenth century intellectual Thomas Henry Huxley put it, there is all the difference between a well-tended garden and nature,  why do we see a garden as representing nature?


The fact is, sometimes we see a garden as representing nature, and sometimes we see it as representing civilization.  The reason the ancients saw the garden as representing nature is because they saw God in the image of man.  If humans have cows, sheep and goats, vegetables and fruits, then God just did the same thing on a grander scale.  Humans have farms and God creates eco-systems, so-to-speak.  We note that prefacing the story of the garden in Genesis there is a description of how God created both wild and domesticated animals.


Of course, today most educated people believe that humans domesticated animals, but the author of Genesis was writing his or her account long after certain animals were domesticated, so common knowledge that humans had done it initially from wild stock must have been forgotten.  At the same time there is a kind of unconscious projection onto God of the human quality of breeder and domesticator.  So nature was created - just like a human gardener creates a garden from scratch - or that’s how people must have imagined it.                                               


The author of Genesis imagines that before Adam and Eve have knowledge of morality they are like animals, in not being ashamed of their nakedness.  When they eat the forbidden fruit and come to understand good and evil they realize that it is wrong to be naked.  By wearing coverings of Fig leaves the two humans are also marking  themselves off as non-animals, and this is what God notices in the story.  The irony is they are trying to do good but they get in trouble for it. (I love this story.)


The expulsion from the garden is rightly depicted as a tragedy, or maybe a tragi-comedy, because Adam and Eve are trying to use the knowledge in order to be good, but that excuse doesn’t cut it with God.  But the real reason they are exiled has nothing to do with disobedience, it is because knowing good from evil, they are no longer like other animals.  They know they are naked, they are ashamed, and shame is a distinctly human emotion.


The Christian idea of original sin is a non-starter here.  You can’t assume what you set out to prove.  You can’t assume that a decision is wrong if it comes before knowledge of right and wrong.  What’s original here is morality, not sin.


 Jews do not hold a doctrine of original sin,  but they read the same version of Genesis as the Christians.  Basically Christian thinkers like Paul and Augustine front-loaded the idea of original sin to back up the idea of the Crucifixion and Resurrection.  Question:  Why did the son of God have to die?  Answer:  As a sacrifice for all of our sins, which originated in Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience.  Without the idea of the “Atonement”  the whole idea of original sin is superfluous. The solution  to this hermeneutic absurdity is to abandon the atonement, but for fundamentalists that is not an option, so they are stuck with original sin. The rest of us can carry on very well without it.     


If the garden is a kind of playful story, not so much a plausible explanation of the origin of morality, then where do we find a good explanation for the origin of morality?  Plato's famous allegory of the cave is of no help.  In fact it is an absolute hindrance, and his dualistic imagery really cripples our understanding of the nature and origin of morality.   The blinding light, the burning bush…  all models for an objective hierarchical moral system with no relation to living reality.  We basically have to wait until Charles Darwin before we can come up with a plausible scenario.  But Darwin’s explanation  quickly becomes problematic too, as we shall see.


In 1879, writing in  The Descent of Man, Darwin had proposed  that human morality could have evolved by group selection, reasoning that altruistic groups cohered better and would have outcompeted groups with more selfish individuals.


In 1893, a decade after Darwin’s death,  and two years before he himself died, Thomas Huxley, a famous popularizer of Darwin’s theory,  gave a lecture called “Evolution and Ethics”   which rejected the idea that human morality had evolved by Darwinian selection.  The lecture came as a shock to educated Victorian society.  Huxley was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”  for defending Darwin’s theory  against all comers.  


In the prologue to “Evolution and Ethics” Huxley compared human morality to a gardener, who does not allow a struggle for existence to determine which plants will survive but purposefully nurtures those plants which are useful and weeds out those which are not.


It is notable that Darwin got inspiration for his idea of natural selection from the analogy of domestication.  Farmers and herders had bred and selected particular characteristics in plants and animals.  Darwin reasoned that because living things produce many offspring, but most of those offspring do not survive, there could be a selective mechanism simply from the fact that certain characteristics help survival and others work against it. Characteristics of populations could change over time because the conditions of survival change with changes in climate and environment. Thus plants and animals could become better adapted to changes in the environment out of the sheer struggle for existence, without any help from an intelligent designer.   


But what Huxley was arguing in contradistinction,  was that in nature, vice and selfish behaviour are rewarded by enhanced survivability.  Weeds, because they are aggressive and grow quickly in many different environments tend to take over.  If they have no food value or other use to us, we want to select them out of our gardens in order to leave room for useful plants.  But this selection is done on purpose, it is not a natural process, but a planned conscious effort on the part of the gardener.  


How can morality be natural when it involves deliberately selecting and excluding certain kinds of  behaviour?  How can our standards of right and wrong have evolved when nature rewards strength and size, not goodness?  Might makes right is the law of the jungle.  The lion does not lie down with the lamb, he eats it.  Why would empathy and altruism be selected for, instead of bigger claws and teeth if bigger and stronger animals could take advantage of the weaker?  


Evolutionary theorists just don’t want to admit the possibility that such a basic system of  human behaviours as morality could have emerged on purpose, because a group decided to, rather than by chance or natural selection.  It has to be Darwin all the way down.   My question to them is did dogs evolve from wolves by natural selection? The process of domestication has to be different from natural selection because tameness was deliberately selected.                


In Darwin’s defence, I must say that his account of the origin of morality is thoroughly natural and non-dualistic, like the account in Genesis.  But lately there is no consensus, only a lot of contention about whether or not morality could originate from the building blocks of altruism.  As Evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins never fails to point out, natural selection favours selfishness.  In Neo-Darwinian terms, altruists are “suckers” who will lose out to "freeloaders", who benefit from the altruists without giving anything in return.  


Thomas Hobbes, the first great British philosopher, figured out four hundred years ago,that agreements between people would not be possible without the threat of force as an ultimate back-up and in my mind that means the threat of exclusion from society.  That’s why altruism cannot be a building block of morality.  Morality has to be a package deal that involves group judgement and enforcement.  The resulting stable environment affords trust, empathy, and altruism within the group, while often emphasizing hostility towards outsiders.  Morality isn’t built from altruism, instead a moral system creates a kind of niche that encourages sharing within a self-defined group. It is more likely that the first moral system was constructed out of a deliberate collective agreement, than by some chance adaptation.


The key to the origin of morality is domestication - the deliberate selection of tamer animals from a wild population. If humans learned how to domesticate plants and animals, why could they not have learned the same about themselves, then later forgot, just as the knowledge that domestic stocks were derived from wild stocks was lost to the author of Genesis?  


But just what was this method of self-domestication?  To domesticate an animal, you first select the desired characteristic of tameness as a basis for breeding and kill or leave the rest to the wild.  With humans it would have been getting rid of certain undesirables, most likely what we now call “psychopaths”.  Psychopaths are rare maybe 1% of the general population, but they make up about 25% of prison populations.  (Prisons are where we exclude people from the rest of society.)


Psychopathy could have been much more common two million years ago.  Psychopaths have no conscience.  They are only in it for themselves.  They use people to get what they want, and have no compunction about harming others.  Think of an alpha male gorilla or chimpanzee.  These creatures have no compunction about beating up or threatening to beat up anybody who gets in their way or who challenges their dominance.  


With chimpanzees or gorillas, the most dominant are also the most brutal, and they have to be because they are competing for sexual access to females. In human groups we are free to compete with each other over countless different matters without having to compete sexually at the same time.  We control sexual competition through a moral system that is enacted by the entire group.  This is one of the ways that we differ from the other great apes.


To me it is uncanny that the story of the garden highlights the prohibition of a sexual behaviour.  As I pointed out earlier, for reasons of dramatic narrative style, the story assumes morality from the start, even though it purports to show how morality came about.  Note that first humans are created as adults and as an adult couple.  So the story also assumes monogamy, almost from the very beginning.  What’s going on here?


A dominance hierarchy, with an alpha male on top, is logistically difficult to change into any other system.  As soon as one male is toppled, another male or coalition of males takes his place.  Only the collective action of the entire group can change the system, and in fact this is what has occurred with bonobos, one of our closest ape relatives.  Male bonobos are never allowed to dominate females, because in every instance, females collectively act to prevent it.  


Humans are largely monogamous like Adam and Eve.  But how did we become monogamous?  The story of the garden can’t tell us because it presupposes monogamy.  But we get a hint in the fact that our closest ape relatives are anything but monogamous. There is much evidence that suggests that humans are not at all naturally monogamous.  The existence of polygamy, the widespread incidence of adultery, and divorce, all point to urges that are far from faithful to monogamy.  


At the same time monogamy is prevalent in most societies, which might suggest that its presence as a norm helps human societies survive.  There is an even stronger case for morality being universal in all human societies.  What if, originally, in human society, monogamy and morality were the same thing?  The reason I make this suggestion is that they both require collective enforcement in order to work.  The fact that nowadays they are not at all considered the same thing could just be the natural result of a gradual divergence between them as human society became more complex and stratified over time.  


They both have to do with the regulation of sexual behaviour, but their effect is to separate sexual competition from other forms of competition.  Both moral and monogamous systems create affordances for the division of labour, the sharing of food, and the cooperative raising of children.  The presence of either or both could have facilitated the development of kinship relations, cooking, language, longer childhoods, bigger brains, and a more prolonged period of neural plasticity. 


Just as in the story of Adam and Eve, we take monogamy for granted and forget that it is not a simple system like a dominance hierarchy. Instead,  it requires collective action to enforce.  Some of us may be under the impression that long ago the rule was “anything goes”:  from single adults, to swingers, to polygamy.  This certainly isn’t the case with any other animal.  Even bonobos, which are the most promiscuous animals on earth, do not allow male domination, and do not practice monogamy.  


Before moral systems, the alpha male was nature’s way of regulating  violence, sex,  and food distribution in most anthropoid groups.  He beat up or intimidated everyone else,  he had priority, sometimes absolute, over females, he appropriated the choicest foods for himself and his favourites.  And this was rule by example.  He was the role model.  By establishing and maintaining a monogamous system, the first humans, in effect, set up a system that selectively eliminated those more likely to be alpha males for not being willing to play by the collective rules.   The Anthropologist, Christopher Boehm has written a book about this called “Moral Origins”.
                       


 In Genesis, the decision to disobey God results in Adam and Eve’s exclusion from the garden and the origin of our human identity as fallible creatures.  In Plato’s allegory of the Cave the individual breakout and experience of the light leads to the failed attempt of the enlightened one to free the rest from imprisonment and ignorance.  Plato is essentially giving up on our fallible worldly existence and betting everything on the heaven of objective certainty.  No room for errors there.


The expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden is depicted as a deep tragedy, leading to labour pains, and break-your-back farming.  The thing is that there is a subtext to this:  


The snake was right, there are big benefits from knowing good from evil.  The problem is that we are all fallible, so how do we determine who is right? In contrast to Plato, the author of Genesis leaves this question open.  We just have to muddle through, even though we may never know the ultimate truth.  


In starting the Academy Plato was being proactive.  He made the right response to the tragedy of Socrates death. All the millions of  University Professors and Students who have followed since owe him a deep sense of gratitude.   But his allegory, which is more persuasive, more memorable, and more effective, than any other thing he wrote, reflects his deep pessimism about the limitations of human nature.


This world killed Socrates, and so, for Plato there was nowhere  to go but upwards, away from human society towards the heavens and the untouchable realm of perfect  objective truth.  Ever since philosophers have been prone to talk about abstractions rather than about things and processes and this has been a mistake that to my mind reverberates in today’s analytic philosophy.

The story of the Garden is older, wiser, and deeper than Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.  It gives us humans who try, but always fall short of perfection.  In contrast, Plato’s Allegory rejects the human body and the human senses, and and looks for knowledge in all the wrong places.   I agree with Plato that we shouldn’t be living in caves.  But, as in the story of the garden I believe that human beings belong here on earth, always learning, always coping, and always improving.  

Thursday, August 4, 2016

Earth/House/System

I'm reading a book by Phillip Ball, called: Water, Matrix of Life. If you want to know more about water, it's fascinating and well written. I particularly like this quote of his: “Water is the agent of geological, environmental and global change. It confers fecundity on parched regions, while it's passing turns grasslands into deserts.”

Water does all this and more. But water is incredibly effective at what it does because water is a team player. Apparently there's water on the moon in the form of patches of ice, but it's inert, it doesn't do anything because it lacks the other team players. Let's introduce these other team members.

Water is a compound not an element although the Greeks and the Chinese thought it was one of the “four elements” - Earth, Air, Water and Fire. Let's run with this idea but let's assume that fire can mean all types of energy, especially the Sun. Let's use a bigger name for Air. We'll call it the Atmosphere. Let's say that “Earth” means the planet and not just a hunk of rock. Now let's add a fifth element, and call it “Life”.

Put these five elements together and they will interact spontaneously. And these interactions form the great geophysical systems of the Earth.

The Earth's surface has mountains and basins. It's lowest points are where most of the water is – in the oceans. The Earth's gravitational field is strong enough to hold all the gases: the oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water vapour that make up the atmosphere.

Think of Earth as a house without a switch because it runs itself. It's roof is the atmosphere. It lets vital energy from the Sun in and gives us a bit of insulation at night. Too much insulation is not good, as we see with the planet Venus, with its surface temperature of 460 *Celsius.

The Earth's got plumbing, heating, ventilation and power, mostly run by one system: the weather. But it's also got backup power from internal heat which causes plate tectonics to reconfigure the seas and continents every hundred million years or so.

It's not like a house that was designed and built, because it repairs itself. Tell me, what house that we have built repairs itself, or has lasted as long as Earth has?

As a plumbing and heating system and power system the weather is partly predictable and partly unpredictable. Sometimes we get too much water sometimes not enough. Sometimes it gets too hot, sometimes it's just right.

The weather operates under the usual physical laws. The Earth's spin causes winds to curve in the direction of rotation making cyclonic wind patterns counter-clockwise in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Sun's radiation heats water on Earth's surface and causes water molecules to change from liquid to gas. The water vapour can rise into the atmosphere because it contains heat from the sun.

Weather is partly predictable, we recognize the seasons, but also unpredictable, we don't know what the weather will be like a month from this day. The weather is a self-organizing system. Weather systems can last up to a week and travel thousands of kilometres.

Let's call a system: a group of parts that interact together to form a whole that is separated from the external world by a boundary.

Let's divide the world of systems into three: machines, institutions, and self-organizing systems.

Self organizing systems are systems of parts that interact via simple physical laws. The parts of the Solar system - the sun and the planets, interact by the laws of motion and gravity to form a balanced system that has maintained itself over time.

All machines are mechanical systems designed and built by humans for various goals. A house is a mechanical system that transfers heat and energy from outside and holds it inside. Houses and other machines have switches on them. When the switch is turned on, the machines start to work and when it's turned off they stop working.

What is a self-organizing system? Think of a flock of sandpipers flying low over the water – the precision and coherence of their flight. The flock swoops and glides as a unified whole as if it acts with one mind.

But each bird is acting on its own and the subtle alterations in flight that each bird makes in response to its neighbours creates an emergent unity.

Unlike machines, self-organizing systems are not deterministic. These systems have properties that emerge from the interaction of all the parts that cannot be predicted from the nature of the parts alone.


You cannot predict the weather beyond a week; Human behaviour is both predictable and unpredictable. Weather systems and large-scale human societies exhibit complex behaviour that is the hallmark of self-organizing systems.

How the "urge to merge" led to Language

                         

“We hold these truths to be self-evident:  That all men are created equal…”                     The U.S. Declaration of Independence

The idea that the structure of language, its syntax, and underlying rules are built-in to the human brain, perhaps initially  triggered by a chance mutation, sometime around one hundred thousand years ago, that created within us a disposition to combine words, called “Merge”, is famously postulated by the MIT linguist, Noam Chomsky.  

The motivation for this theory comes from the astounding difference between human language and any other form of animal communication.  If the apes are the animals that we have the closest genetic relation to, how could such an incredible system as language have developed from ape communication?  There is a vast discontinuity here that is very hard to bridge with any Darwinian step by step explanation.

 Humans are a type of primate, but the only primate that talks.  Monkeys, apes, and many other animals vocalize.  These are stereotypical calls that are emotional responses to dangers, conflicts and potential mates.   Vocalizations are often, but not always involuntary.  They are conditioned responses to stimuli.  Laughing and crying are human vocalizations, and they follow the same pattern as in animals;  They are often but not always involuntary.

Apes can communicate with gestures, and gestures, unlike vocalizations are entirely voluntary. Speech could have come from vocalizations, but it’s more likely it first came from hand gestures and then shifted to voluntary vocalizations. This would explain why we still like to use our hands when we talk, especially when we are emphasizing a point.

 All the areas of speech specialization are in the cerebral cortex, the more conscious part of the brain that controls the voluntary muscle movements.   The number of throat and tongue muscles involved in speaking is mind boggling and the degree of coordination between groups of muscles that is needed to be able to speak rapidly, defies the imagination.  We must have had a lot of time to develop this, five or six million years maybe.
 
By the way, no attempt by humans to teach apes to talk has succeeded or will ever succeed, because they lack the fine motor coordination of the human vocal apparatus.  On the other hand, there has been some success teaching apes sign language.

It seems likely that language developed from some form of voluntary intentional communication.  This would suggest that language is less instinctual and more of a learned habit or skill which uses a fair bit of real estate in the more conscious and voluntary parts of the brain.  This is also supported by the evidence of  the plasticity of infant brains, the prolonged human infancy, and the prolonged period of learning that it takes to master a language.

In my view we have neglected the importance of agreement, and rule formation in the question of how language originated.  All languages have vocabularies of words used to refer to objects, actions,  mental states and ideas.  When words are combined to form complex descriptions, narratives, and declarations, they are combined according to set rules.  The body of these rules are known as syntax or more commonly as grammar.

 Where do rules come from?   Many rules  come from agreements.   The act of agreement is often signified nonverbally,  by a handshake,  sometimes even a nod of the head.

 As the American Philosopher John Searle has described in his book, The Construction of Social Reality,  In our everyday existence we find ourselves already embedded in a world of human values, a world created and maintained by successive  collective agreements.  These agreements can be present right now, as in a signing ceremony, or they can remain implicit, and hidden, and often forgotten.

Rules and agreements, in order to be sustained over generations, need the basis of a “level playing field”  We expect those who enter this “field”  to follow the rules and we watch for rule-breaking,  and  “out them” if they do break the rules.  

  Rules are agreed to because they apply to everyone equally.  Rules, such as - “Do unto others…” ,  and “you cannot have more than one wife” -  only  work if people believe in them and expect that others will follow them also.

 If we speak correctly others understand what we are saying, because both the speaker and listener are mutually following the rules.  The interesting thing about our mastery of language is that we take it so much for granted that it is hard to imagine not following the rules of grammar, etc.

We can look to evidence from brain damaged individuals showing various incapacities to speak or to understand.  Evidently these individuals have become incapable of following certain rules, not out of choice, but because the brain circuits that they used each time they followed those rules have now been destroyed.

Rules and agreements are each foundations for further rules and agreements.    So that over a million years it is conceivable that evolution could carve out new grooves in our cerebral cortex  for the use of learning these rules, and that as we did so the older rules would be more forgotten because a superstructure of rules has been laid down on top of them.

Imagine teaching apes rules.  It would  not  be easy,  especially if your intention was to get them to use the rules spontaneously or for them to teach the rules to their fellow apes.  But learning and teaching rules is an easy task for a six year old human child.  In my opinion, apes don’t take to rules because they live in societies with an alpha male.  

There is no level playing field with an alpha male.  There is no concept of rules applying equally, because there is only one rule: “MIght Makes Right.”   When a new alpha topples the old alpha he may have different expectations and preferences from the previous alpha, but these will just be changed again when he loses to a future alpha,  and so, the one rule rules them all.

Chimpanzees, our closest relatives and Gorillas, our more distant relatives have dominance hierarchies ruled by alpha males.  They don’t have language.  Humans have dominance hierarchies, but they are rule-governed and we have language.

An interesting exception is the bonobo, an even closer relative of chimpanzees.  Bonobos are smaller, but look similar.  And they have very different social behaviour  from that of chimps.
 In most ape societies, when an alpha is eliminated he is soon replaced with another alpha, but that doesn’t happen in bonobo groups.  Unlike male chimps, bonobo males are prevented from using their superior physical strength to dominate  females, because bonobo females always gang up on individual males before they can get away with their bullying.   But bonobos don’t live monogamously  and they don’t have language either.

Note the element of collective intentionality that’s always present in the elimination of the alpha.  Bonobo females act together to overpower males and have managed to maintain this system for possibly millions of years.   Bonobos prefigure humans because the females control male dominance collectively.  Even though they don’t have words they have some rudimentary concept of right and wrong because they punish or threaten to punish males for their behaviour.

Most of the great apes live in tropical forests, with enough fruit and nut trees in one area to support a group of about thirty.  There is a role for the alpha to help rally and bolster the troops over boundary disputes and defense of territory.  But hominins, the ancestors of humans, were walking greater distances together and the idea of defending  this as “territory” probably stretches the role of alpha too far.

Three million years ago hominins were pursuing a different niche strategy outside the forest, due to the contingencies of severe climate change, as a series of brutal ice ages descended over the earth.   In order to survive over time, they needed to be able to migrate during seasonal or prolonged droughts.

In my opinion, alpha males would have been a distinct liability for migrating hominins.  Their presence would have discouraged the kind of cooperation and functional cohesion that aids survival when a group is on the move.

Alpha males would have been always replaced by another alpha, unless a collective decision was made by everyone else in the group to eliminate the alpha and suppress any new candidates.  Female bonobos have done this without the use of language. It’s interesting that the most advanced case of language ability in an ape is the bonobo, born in captivity,  named “Kanzi”  

When an individual chimpanzee or a coalition overpowers an alpha, a new alpha comes to power.   Only eliminating the alpha by a collective decision makes it possible to create and maintain a system where humans bond in pairs, and dominance is separated from other forms of competition.

We know that agreements are possible without language because we can observe animals hunting in packs and then sharing the kill, usually according to hierarchical status.  Lions can agree to hunt together and share the kill, but they can’t seem to agree to share things equally.  This seems to be related to the presence of an alpha male based hierarchy.  

Certainly there are all too numerous examples of humans sharing unequally, but if we narrow our examination  to include only  nomadic hunting and gathering societies,  then, according to the findings of Anthropologist Christopher Boehm, described in his book, Hierarchy in the Forest,  nomadic hunter-gatherers from the far corners of the earth, universally distribute shares of meat from large kills in a roughly equal fashion to all families in their group.

Not coincidentally, as Boehm notes,   hunter-gatherers are often obsessed with  suppressing greediness, boasting, and anger, They use social control through ridicule, gossip, and shunning.  they create a “moral community” that actively promotes egalitarianism.

Eliminating and  suppressing alpha-male behaviour has enhanced the survivability of hunting and gathering societies. One reason for this is that hunters are not always lucky, and if successful hunters don’t share in good times,  they risk starving when they hit a dry spell.

 By eliminating the alpha male, then establishing pair-bonds, human communities were first able to collectively regulate behaviour by community-enforced “rules”, although, before language they were not rules as we know them today, but more feelings and emotions.   The feeling of what is fair and what is not, can be shared amongst a group, and the desire to be with one’s beloved  and to facilitate the same for others does not  necessarily require words.

Monogamy could have been inspired through emotions, perhaps even love, before language or any form of reason existed.  But the collective creation and maintenance of monogamy  created a level playing field   in which those who excel at things other than dominance,  can contribute to the whole  community,  rather than taking over everything, as the alpha does.

According to  Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, all living things are descended from a single ancestor.  What I am proposing, is that all human collective decisions, including those that were used to create  language, are descended from that first collective decision to eliminate the alpha male and replace him with monogamous pair-bonds.  

By this collective act, a level playing field was created,  the idea of equality was born, and from this beginning language as a rule bound way of sharing information became possible.

Even though language wasn’t asking to be spoken, we collectively created it  by  first calling into being the conditions of its possibility -  monogamy and equitable sharing.   It was in this collective act that we created ourselves as human beings.

As the Declaration of Independence states, humankind was created equally, and the concept of equality comes from the human ability to maintain equality through collective action.