Building The Great Great Wall

"We will soon begin construction of a Great Great Wall along our southern border." - President Trump, inaugural address to Congress.

When I think of serious walls, two walls come to mind: The Great Wall of China, and the Berlin Wall. President Trump says that he is building a “Great Great Wall”.   This could lead to another diplomatic incident, inadvertently clashing with China's "One Great Wall" Policy. The Chinese will not take kindly to their Great Wall downgraded to something less Big.

Nevertheless, these two historical examples  are instructive.  One wall was built to keep people out.  The other wall was built to keep people in.  Both were truly audacious projects, but in the end, neither worked out as planned.

The Chinese definitely win the prize for hubris for the sheer scale of their enterprise, in fact it is the largest man made object in the history of the world.  No doubt their wall cost a lot of money, but it employed a lot of people and helped their economy grow, didn’t it?  And it employed lots of workers for hundreds of years.   And the people it kept out:  we’re talking pillagers and rapists, we’re talking bad hombres.

The problem only came hundreds of years later when the worst pillager and rapist of them all -  Ghengis Khan - circumvented the  wall and conquered China and all of Asia Central,  and, this is documented, there is evidence in our DNA, this bad hombre sired more children than any other individual in history.

 So much for building a very big wall to protect your country.  China has been there, done that.  Now it’s their biggest tourist attraction.  This shows that with sufficient time, you too can recover from bad hombres running your country.

In 1961 the East Germans, a client state of the now defunct Soviet Union, built a wall that followed the dividing line between East and West Germany through the city of Berlin.  They built this wall, topped with barbed wire and manned with machine guns, in order to stop East Germans from leaving the Communist East to go to the Democratic West.

Then in 1989 the Soviet Economy collapsed, probably because of chronically low oil prices, and very soon after that people tore down the Berlin wall, brick by brick, and within a few years Germany re-united.

Now, in 2017 the new Wall-Builder-In-Chief has officially  passed the baton of "the leader of the free world" on to Angela Merkl;  and this shows that you can recover and heal your nation after a particular ugly wall has been built, and even become the leader of the free world.  

 If you want to know why Trump wants to build The Great Great Wall, you can get a hint from Christian Evangelist David Barton, who runs an internet Website called "wallbuilders.com.    “WallBuilders is an organization dedicated to presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built – a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined.”   So says David Barton, who calls himself - “America’s Premier Historian.”

 You see: “In the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, the nation of Israel rallied together in a grassroots movement to help rebuild the walls of Jerusalem…”  On this point I beg to differ with “America’s Premier Historian.”   If memory serves me well, the rebuilding of Jerusalem’s walls was no grassroots event.  It was overseen and funded by the Persian Empire.  It even says so, right there in the Bible. The Persian Empire was the new kid on the block at that time, and unlike the Babylonians and Assyrians before them, they actively supported subject peoples’ keeping their ethnic religious systems intact.

The new Nehemiah is going to build a Wall.  A “Great Great Wall” that will protect all the faithful against “Them”  -  the Coloured, the Muslims, the “Extremist Islamic Terrorists.”  

Nor will the Great Great Wall that is to come  be a grassroots movement,  because the Great Great Wall also requires a great military buildup, and a great new partnership between Industry and Government. That’s OK with Evangelical Christian, David Barton, because he sees Donald Trump’s new administration and I quote him: “I’m loving what I am seeing.”

To build a Great Great Wall  it was necessary  to pass the baton of "the leader of the free world" from America,  to the leader of the nation that managed to break down the last big wall.  This will be a point of interest to future Historians, if there are any.

The New Wizard of Oz

To paraphrase a great American work on the subject of American Politics:  "Toto, we're not in Kansas anymore."  

In my opinion, the most appropriate guide to what is going on today, south of the border is The Wizard of Oz.  Toto, Dorothy's little dog, had the right impulse - to pull back the curtain on this spectacle.  We are getting so distracted by a train of spectacle, but all along the important stuff is happening behind the curtain.  

Rwanda isn't the U.S., but for weeks before the Rwandan Genocide, the radio in Rwanda broadcast a message in code over and over again.  The message amounted to the dehumanisation of one ethnic group,  calling them"cockroaches" and calling for their elimination.  In the United States we are seeing a dangerous polarization between Trump supporters and everyone else.  Trump, "The Great and Powerful Oz”  is creating spectacle after spectacle;  His followers are listening to him, not to the real press who are now "enemies of the state".

Trump started his campaign with the Birther Lie, then Mexicans, then Muslims.  He's building a "Wall" , but it is like the Wizard’s curtain, one that hides one reality from another.   The more this wall is internalized the more effective the dehumanization becomes.

Meanwhile, behind the curtain, America is being deconstructed - democracy, the social safety net, education, and scientific knowledge are being jackhammered out of existence by extremist Republicans.  

The Human System

                                                              

I have an ongoing joke with my wife Candace about my “system”.  It’s the way I like to heat the rooms of our little  house in the winter, and it involves turning in-room heaters on or off and opening or closing certain doors at various strategic times. Candace smiles at the arcaneness of my “system”.  Here, where I am  referring to my “system,”  I mean “a persistent way of doing things”.

We can call the local weather a system in another way.  It is certainly a regular way of doing things, but, unlike my opening and closing doors,  it is not a goal-directed process.  It is a natural, self-organized, physical process that begins in the Pacific Ocean and sweeps across parts of North America, eventually dissipating over the Atlantic.  

There are many other regional weather systems around the Earth, and these together make up an evolving Global Climate System that is presently warming, but that  last wrapped most of the Northern Hemisphere in ice sixty thousand years ago and then melted away over tens of thousands of years. The global Climate System has profound effects on Earth’s surface geology, and on the evolution of living ecosystems.

Here’s how I see things:  The Universe is a system, and it’s  a hierarchy of systems all the way down to the finest detail.  Here on Earth we are a part of the Solar System, which is, of course, a ridiculously tiny part of the Universe.  But we are in an orbit around the Sun that has afforded the Earth a temperature range that has kept most of its water in a liquid state for four billion years, and this is what has made the continued existence of life possible.

We humans are part of the Earth’s biosphere, or Life-system.  

Living systems are different from non-living physical systems because living systems purposively maintain themselves and reproduce, spreading until they reach every corner of our planet.  Since life took over it has been the determining factor in furnishing Earth’s global atmosphere of oxygen, carbon-dioxide, and nitrogen, it has, through preserving the oceans, kept the Earth itself alive and volcanically active over billions of years.  How is this possible?

Living things are so coupled to the Earth that ecosystems have changed both the atmosphere and the climate over aeons.  Indeed, the presence of life itself is also part of the reason that life has had almost four billion years to evolve from bacteria to humans.  Our very oceans have existed for this long time because photosynthetic bacteria and green algae have produced enough oxygen that it has, in the form of high-altitude ozone,  shielded the oceans from too much of the Sun’s ultraviolet light.  Without ozone, over billions of years, the excess ultraviolet would have split enough water molecules to empty the Earth’s oceans.

If you find this hard to believe, consider Mars:  Mars does not have a Life System, and so far, we see no evidence of there ever being one.  There is no water there now, not even a puddle, and very little atmosphere, but they say, that there used to be water there...  Life cannot maintain itself without water;  Water cannot maintain itself without life.  

The Universe is systems all the way down.  Life is a planet-wide system.  Humans are biological organisms, which means that each individual human is a single biological system made of skin, bones, muscles, specialized organs and consciousness.  All biological organisms, including humans, are systems entirely made of cells, and each cell is a tiny system of molecules, membranes, and organelles, containing a genetic blueprint that can direct the building of any cell in the body from scratch.    

The very long, from our perspective, timeline of natural systems, such as the Earth’s global climate, demonstrates this rule of thumb:  the bigger the system,  the longer the time frame that’s involved in that system.  Human systems occupy a middle ground, between microscopic systems that grow and die in minutes or days, and planetary, star, and galaxy systems that grow and die in the space of billions of years.

But here's an exception to my rule - hydrogen atoms. In relation to humans they are submicroscopic systems. And as for age they are the oldest of all, the same age as the Universe. Our bodies are made up of molecular systems that contain a significant proportion of hydrogen atoms in relation to other elements. And wait - there's more! Just about every atom in the Universe is either Hydrogen or it was made from Hydrogen by nuclear reactions deep inside of countless stars. They make up the most plentiful thing in the Universe and they just happen to be the oldest systems around.

Each one of those tiny systems is the basic building block for all other systems. Each hydrogen atom is directly connected by origin to the birth of the Universe. This is what it means, in systems theory, to say that everything is connected.

Let's go back to my rule of thumb: The bigger the system the longer the time-frame. I keep saying that humans occupy the middle ground. The reason is because it took the universe fourteen billion years to produce us. We are young, we are infants compared to almost everything else but our own artefacts.  Some say humans evolved one half million years ago.  I mark the dividing line at two million years, with the first evidence of Homo Erectus.  

Homo Erectus is more than just an ape man.  Hominins - that’s our evolutionary precursors - start to look more like modern humans with homo erectus.  And in the time space of one and a half million years after Erectus appears in the fossil record, humans evolved bigger brains, longer childhoods - thus greater potential for learning - and the abilities to cook, to make stone tools, to control fire, and to migrate out of Africa.

Should we claim for human systems the possibilities inherent in billions of years when we have only been around for scarce two million? Can we grow as big or bigger than the Earth’s life-system? I believe that these two  questions are really  the same question.

The fact that the human race is only two million years old, and it took  four billion years for the Earth’s Life-system to  reach that point, indicates nothing robust about humans.  We are delicate, precarious, particular beings.  We couldn’t have evolved eight million years ago, let alone four billion years ago.  Imagine a world without flowers, which evolved 160 million years ago, or mammals, who celebrate their 250 millionth birthday today.   We are contained in the Earth’s biosphere and cannot escape it because we utterly depend on it for our survival.  

What is the human system, that we believe that it could surpass the Earth’s Life-system?  Is it our technological systems that would make this possible?  The evidence of the last three hundred years decisively contradicts this hope.  We are now in the midst of an Extinction -Event, something that happens about once every hundred million years.  Scientists call this latest event The Anthropocene age, for the unmistakable fact that humans are causing this latest collapse in biodiversity.  And we are causing it because our advanced technologies give us access to fossil fuels.

When it comes to systems, size matters.  Large systems can  utilize more energy and have more powerful effects.  The Pacific Ocean has a greater effect on the Earth’s weather patterns than the Atlantic Ocean.  The Earth’s plate tectonic system has an even  greater effect through its access to the tremendous heat in Earth’s Core and Mantle, changing the shape of the continents and the seas over a time frame of hundreds of millions of years.

The human system cannot grow beyond the bounds of Earth’s Life-system.  We cannot grow bigger than a system that we totally depend on  without fatally undermining ourselves in the process. In point of  fact, one could ask, how is it even possible to do this?  How can humans, who must derive their nourishment from the biosphere, surpass the biosphere?

The human system has tapped into The Earth’s tectonic system to extract energy from fossilised carbon.  We have grown in numbers and power as a result.  We are using up the energy that was stored in the Earth for hundreds of millions of years in the space of only three hundred years.

It is because we have tapped into an ancient form of accumulated energy from the Earth that we humans have been able to build  global systems in the past three hundred years: systems of transportation, economic systems, communication systems,  legal systems, administrative systems.    When we start decreasing our use of fossil fuels our systems will have to get smaller too.  With less access to energy what the system can do will be less.

The best scenario I see is to gradually stop the extraction of fossil carbon and replace it with a more decentralized system of renewables.  Society will then have to run on a smaller scale because we will lack the concentrated energy of fossil fuels.

Or we can opt out of a future for humanity altogether.   We can continue to burn more and more fossil fuels and allow our systems to grow bigger and bigger, until the entire  human system, in all its power and glory, smashes into the wall and breaks apart into countless shards.

  Global Warming is a sign that we have already grown too big and gone too far, but why not push the envelope that much further, and risk our very future for the sake of greater financial rewards and bigger and faster cars?  

Size matters.  The Earth cannot sustain a population size of six billion humans or larger.  We have reached this size by using fossil fuels.  This increased usage of energy  is changing the Earth’s Climate System.  Remember, this system usually works on a time scale of tens of thousands of years or more.  Human civilization is less than ten thousand years old.  The use and extraction of fossil fuels only started in earnest about three hundred years ago.  The Climate is warming in the space of one hundred years. Each new year brings  more and bigger  Floods, Forest Fires, Droughts, Hurricanes;  it is like something out of the Bible.

With energy comes power, and power allows us to do more things. Having more power means having a bigger effect on other systems.  Eventually the effect of this power will alter the behaviour of the larger system in a way that undermines our survival as a species, because we cannot escape being dependent on the larger system.  When the Global Climate System works against us our human systems can quickly become overwhelmed.  When we have grown big enough to effect this system, we cannot escape the effects of altering it.  These effects will not be benign.  

Humans have been living in ignorance of these larger systems for  two million  years, with differing consequences.  When the Climate cooled, as it did a hundred thousand years ago, human systems shrunk dramatically.  When the Climate has been favorable, as it has been for the last ten thousand years, humans have prospered and human systems have grown exponentially.

Each system has an optimum size.  Too small and it loses too much access to energy.  Too large, and it undermines its own existence.  A star that grows too large destroys itself in a massive supernova.  A Galaxy that is too large becomes full of black holes.   A living population of organisms that grows too large, runs out of food and drowns in its own waste.

Our Solar system is four and a half billion years old, roughly a quarter of the age of the Universe.  The Earth’s Life-system is somewhat younger, at roughly four billion years old.   

At approximately two million years old humans are a young species.  Many species have been around longer than us - most species of birds and insects, for instance. The human system is young.  But it has the distinction of being  the first system that can identify and understand  all  or almost all other systems.

 Some human systems are very young. The internet is less than half a century old.  Writing, as a communication system is about three thousand years old.  Printing, in the West, is about five hundred years old.   Language as a general system of communication could be anywhere from one hundred thousand years to five hundred thousand years old.

On a smaller scale,  human systems, such as particular languages, nations,  and cities, have lasted for hundreds, up to thousands of years, whereas nuclear families last only one generation.  Economic systems grow and die over the space of hundreds of years.  Some  institutions  like marriage, have lasted thousands of years.   All these human systems grow and die, change and evolve, competing and sharing with other human systems.

 

Most non-human systems that we can observe are far older than any human system.  The geographic features that we live in can be anywhere from tens of thousands to tens of millions of years old or more.  

In the area that I live in, Northwestern BC, the geography was mostly the result of an ice-cap that covered the northern half of North America for most of the last hundred thousand years.  And for the first eighty thousand of those years, there were no human footprints here.  

The scale of many natural systems dwarfs the scale of human systems.  The only place that this is not true is in our imaginative systems.  We imagine that we are important because that’s how imagination works.  It always starts with our own experiences and generalizes from that.  

Our imaginations are self-contained.  They have their own rules, they run by their own logic.  But most natural and human systems are open to the influence of the environment.

One knows a system by observing its behaviour and its boundaries. In order to better understand the Human System, we ought to know as much as possible about when it began and how it began.  Then we can better distinguish it from other  kinds of living systems.  

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.  

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 that all players are rational actors.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. The rule is, you can eat any fruit of any tree except the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Eating the fruit of that particular tree is absolutely prohibited."

(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' heat”

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 Truth with a capital "T".

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 practising 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 kind of 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

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 the main or only 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.