Of Wind and Drought and History

“The air is harsh in its dryness, gentle in its movement — most of the time. Naturally, high winds that trigger dust storms are the exception. Most mornings, however, the air is quite still, a gentle breeze developing as the sun rises higher in the sky and dying away with sunset.”

No sooner do I compose such lines, fondly believing I have captured an important regional truth, than the wind kicks up in the morning, maddeningly putting me in my place. “You presume to think you know me?” the high desert seems to say. “We have only begun to get acquainted, and already you have forgotten the extremes of which I am capable!” If the winter sun of the Southwest is drying (as indeed it is), the sun’s drying quality is nothing compared to that of the wind. Winter, moreover, already the dry season, is also the windy season, making for a dangerous situation, particularly in a drought year. The wind is so strong that the Saturday “swap meet” (what in Michigan we would call a flea market) falls apart almost as soon as it gets underway, vendors packing up and going home before noon.

In the overgrazed grasslands, and across the ancient dry lakebed known as the Willcox Playa, wind also means dust, and the dust gets into everything, which is point #2 against the wind. Point #3 is the noise, the constant rattling of blinds and any loose metal anywhere. When the wind blows all night, it seems as if it would lift the roof clean off the cabin and open our living space to the stars. The wind chases away sleep.

The stars, however, regardless of what poets and songwriters say, do not blow around in the wind and neither do the mountains give way. Is that where unchanging truth lies? Hardly.

This land has been covered by ocean and uncovered and then covered and uncovered again. I lose track of how many “transgressions” and “regressions” of the sea have taken place in geologic time. Just now the landforms seem stable, but that is stability as seen by the human eye, in the context of a human lifetime. Presumably, erosion of the mountains continues, albeit at a rate slower than the movement of glaciers. Change, I remember from the first day of my freshman high school earth science class, is the one geographic and geologic constant, though from one day to the next we cannot mark its transformations.

Harsh in its dryness, in stirring up dust, in the nonstop and enervating noise it makes, the wind bears us no ill will. It is impersonal, not malicious or vindictive. We watch the clouds and hope for rain.

*****

My reading so far this year, beginning with the upheaval of packing up our Michigan life, followed by a week on the road accompanied by a wretched cold, and continuing with our days of settling in here for the winter, has had a flighty quality, to say the least. I pick up a book and read a few chapters — sometimes, with even less discipline, turn pages in a constant search for who-knows-what, looking for something to stay my mind. Beginning a novel on the Columbia River, I find it is not what I expected and for several evenings pick it up only reluctantly, making slow progress. I find a book on Arizona geology at the library but am vexed by the multitude of examples drawn from the Grand Canyon (so far from my ghost town cabin home), a complete absence of reference to “sky islands” in general and Chiricahua in particular, and the inexcusable lack of an index. One of Chiang Lee’s delightful “Silent Traveler” books comes to my hand at the Friendly Bookstore in Willcox, and I purchase it happily but then find it difficult to lose myself in the traveler’s gentle prose and reflections from the mid-twentieth century. 

My mind is too full of urgent questions! How were these mountains formed? When will the drought end? What is a reasonable solution to the maintenance of national borders? How did we, as individuals and as groups of people, come to be where we are now? I need to find a book that sets my hair on fire!

William H. McNeill’s The Global Condition: Conquerors, Catastrophes, & Community may turn out to be the book. It's off to a fiery start! 

The underlying question in all McNeil’s researches and speculations is not simply “what happened” at any given time but “what really matters in human history,” and his way of trying to get at an answer is to look carefully at purposes and processes. Human beings, as individuals and as groups up to the level of nations, have purposes and act to achieve them. We are intentional beings. And yet again and again, not only do our diverse purposes clash with those of others, but larger processes — biological, cultural, economic  evolutionary, meteorological, etc. — interact and distort and often completely derail the plans of mice and men. In terms of our judgments, we assign praise and blame within the context of purposes, conveniently (for the purposes of our judgments!) ignoring larger global processes within individuals and nations are caught up and tossed around like playthings of the gods. — I am mixing my own concerns and observations here with exposition of McNeill’s lectures, so do not judge his work by this paragraph, please....

Thus far I have read only the few pages of preface to a collection of five lectures McNeill gave over the course of seven years. In the lectures he explores the question of how historians should address the relationship of purposes and processes and how they can decide “what really matters” in clarifying this relationship and the course of human events. He says in his preface,

History as a course of study cannot be exhaustive: too much is knowable. What should be left out to make the past intelligible?

He argues for history to be expanded beyond national borders, for the study of world history, and the development of a global consciousness, because only that larger perspective can take account of the processes that work upon our lives. He also insists that “history” must include physico-chemical, biological, and semiotic systems, noting that the more skillful human beings become in carrying out their purposes on earth, “the greater the potential for tragedy.” He does a quick sketch of the history of his purposes-and-processes question as it was treated from Ancient Greece down to the present, and it is in coming to the end of the twentieth century that he finds “scientific” national histories — a notable nineteenth-century achievement — inadequate. Remarks on a “global economy” have become commonplace in the transition to the twenty-first century, but McNeill goes further.

In particular, I have become far more aware since 1963, when my major effort at a history of the world was first published, that what happens among humankind is embedded within events affecting  the biosphere as a whole. 

Finally, he admits the enormity and impossibility of the task he sets for himself.

No one is ever likely to put all knowledge together in a way that will command the assent of all reasonable persons, yet trying to understand is irresistible. 

The historical question of purposes and processes reminds me of the philosophical question of the one and the many that crops all over the place. How can many birds, for example, all be the same thing, ‘bird’, and how can a collection of individuals become one polity, act as one person, e pluribus unum? The great philosophical systematizers sought to explain the whole dizzying plurality and diversity of existence in terms of a single system, each one criticizing and rejecting the system preceding his own and being critiized and rejected in turn. But I digress....

I will never know all there is to know. I will never put together enough to see more than a vague, very likely mistaken, whole. And long before I can even begin to satisfy my craving for understanding, my time on earth will be over, while impersonal processes continue and human purposes intelligent and ignorant, collaborative and conflicting, go on being enacted. In short, the party will go on, and I will never see what happens next, let alone how it all turns out. 

But I am here now, and just as I take my primary task in the world to be paying attention, I also feel a corollary duty in the search for understanding, and it wouldn’t matter to me if the entire rest of the world were to see (were they to look at) my self-assigned work as a ridiculous waste of time. These are the purposes I set myself.

So I am quite pleased and very excited at having fallen serendipitously on this little book by an author whose name is entirely new to me. The richness of the nine pages of McNeill's preface have admirably prepared my appetite for the lectures to come, and I predict I will stick to the last page. 

*****

Will I finally finish an entire book? Will rain come to the high desert at last? Such are the ephemeral concerns of Books in Northport today. According to the Sunday morning weather forecast, there is a possibility of rain by the end of the coming week, and while another week's end seems very far off, I know it will arrive quickly. For now, we can only hope the rain will come with it. 

Why Don't All Americans Trust Science?

The end of a robin's life -- why?

What Is Science?

The scare quotes around “science” are intentional, because – think about it – it’s such a vague term, isn’t it? What’s behind it, or, to use a different image, under its umbrella? I thought I’d start by doing a search for “what is science” and see what popped up, and this is the first site my search yielded: “Understanding How Science Really Works.”

The first screen begins with a broad statement: “Science is both a body of knowledge and a process.” Okay, good beginning. Facts and a way of gathering them? The site goes on to say that science is “exciting,” “useful,” “ongoing,” and “a global human endeavor,” but we could say that about many human activities, couldn’t we? We have to click to get to other screens and more specific answers to the original question. Pursuing the question, then, we are told that scientists seek explanations of phenomena in the natural world by means of observation, analysis of evidence, and the testing of hypotheses.

I appreciate the way this site lays out the limits of science, acknowledging that science cannot make moral or aesthetic judgments, cannot deal with the “supernatural” (not a big concern of mine), nor can it tell human beings how scientific knowledge should be used. The first and third limitations are ones I take very seriously. As philosophers say, “’Should’ implies ‘can,’ but ‘can’ does not imply ‘should.’” I.e., we are not obligated beyond what is possible for us; at the same time, a possible course of action isn’t necessarily one that’s good for us to follow. And while we may look to science for certain relevant facts, we can’t turn to it for decisions about how we should live.

For a shorter definition of science, look here. What do you think of the definition? Did you read what is included under “methodology”? I’ll come back to this shortly, but first there is the question of public fear and mistrust of science.

So What’s the Problem?

Is it only ignorance and superstition that explain so many people these days backing away from science like nervous, trailer-shy horses? Many scientific issues are so complex, it’s true, that only the most advanced practitioners in their very narrow fields even understand the questions posed. I once worked in an office that had a “Science for Citizens” program among its many projects, but there is a limit to how far such a program can go.

Does human irrationality come into the picture? Doubtless, on some issues it does. Give me statistics until the cows come home about how much safer I am in an airplane than in a car, and I’ll continue to approach commercial flight with trepidation that rarely assails me on the road.

The way we’ve always done things, what we’re used to, what we learned back in school, etc.—all these can get in the way of our accepting new scientific knowledge. But I can’t help thinking there’s a lot more than that going on and that “science” and its would-be defenders have made some very serious public relations problems for themselves. Claiming intellectual superiority over the whole world is not a way to win hearts and minds.

For some people, “science” has become a religion. Again I use scare quotes intentionally, because if there’s anything science should never be, it’s religion. When “science” is used to cut short inquiry rather than to respond to it respectfuly, it isn’t science at all. It’s dogma.

Science gives provisional truths, not eternal verities. Received scientific knowledge must always be open to question. But all too often doubts and arguments are dismissed if and when  they contradict “scientific research.” Please, tell me more! Who funded the research? Over what length of time was it conducted? Has it been replicated? What long-term consequences might we expect? People for whom “science” is a religion have a tendency to speak and behave as if anything coming out of a laboratory is above and beyond question. I repeat: this is not a scientific attitude.

And yet, the science-as-religion crowd (and they would never label themselves as such) take themselves to be defending rationality against ignorance and superstition. How’s that for a conversation stopper?

I want to go back now and pick up the Science Council’s definition of science, for which I only gave the link above. For those who didn’t follow the link, here's the definition:

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

Further down the screen, the first item included in scientific methodology is objective observation. Repetition, verification, testing, peer review and assessment are also included. (Follow the link for the entire list.)

It is no secret any longer that conflicts of interest rage in academic and medical circles and infect much that is published in the most respected journals. This is not trivial. Read about it if you haven’t already.

Conflicts of interest, fueled by financial considerations or career advancement or both, easily lead to bad “research.”  How can a researcher be objective if his or her income or career hangs in the balance? For example, what kind of studies would be necessary to demonstrate safety for human beings of a given drug (or herbicide or hormone or industrial process)? One corporate-funded study? Six weeks of unaffected health in a couple hundred mice?

Here’s something else that has become common knowledge: all human beings are prone to a host of irrational biases. Note that uneducated lay people are not the only human beings to be so afflicted. Scientists are human, too. Go down the list of biases and see how many might affect scientific research, not forgetting for a minute that big money is usually involved, too. Once you get started, it’s pretty easy to see where problems can arise. 

A surgeon naturally looks for surgical solutions. A researcher funded by a pharmaceutical company is going to see big benefits in prescription drugs, probably the ones the funding company makes. Engineers seek to solve problems within their realm of expertise; they don't look to other fields. Confirmation bias assures each expert of the superiority of her or his professional approach; ingroup bias strengthens that conviction; etc., etc.

When an established researcher writes a paper on how published research findings are more likely to be false than true, is it any wonder the public doubts the latest pronouncements of scientific truth?

Science in a World Where Everything Is For Sale

Oddly, perhaps, it was a book on economics that put the question of scientific objectivity in my head again this morning--that and (here I digress briefly) the fact that I posted a link on Facebook and got jumped on because not because of the information given (at least not directly) but because of the source of the information. The criticism was legitimate and prompted me to seek out better sources (which are easily found), but once again the question that emerged, for me, was: Who gets to wear the mantle of “science,” and who doesn’t? And the corollary question: How much respect should the mantle confer?

Joseph Schumpeter’s thesis back in 1942 was that capitalism was not headed for failure but that its very successes would be the death of it. I’m only about a third of the way through Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy but find it fascinating. Here, for instance, is a very strong, unqualified statement:

I have no hesitation in saying that all logic is derived from the pattern of the economic decision or, to use a pet phrase of mine, that the economic pattern is the matrix of logic.

Economic logic, he goes, beats magic in being both definite and quantitative, and due to its successes it readily spreads,

...spreads under the pedagogic influence of favorable experiences to other spheres and there also opens eyes to that amazing thing, the Fact.

Human beings were self-interested, even greedy, before capitalism, Schumpeter says, but capitalism exalted the unit of money, leading the way to cost-profit calculations (what we know as cost/benefit analysis), and that attitude, or method—well, let him tell you in his own words—

...this type of logic or attitude or method then starts upon its conqueror’s career, subjugating—rationalizing—man’s tools and philosophies, his medical practice, his picture of the cosmos, his outlook on life, everything in fact including his concepts of beauty and justice and his spiritual ambitions.

[Facts! I am reminded of the Gradgrinds in the novel by Charles Dickens, Hard Times. Wealth and poverty feature in most, if not all, of the Dickens oeuvre, but in Hard Times, Schumpeter’s “matrix of logic” really comes to the foreground.]

Schumpeter thinks capitalism destroys its own support system. As capitalism “chases away” metaphysical beliefs and all kinds of mystic and romantic ideas, and as the capitalist world becomes more and more depersonalized and automated (what would he say in 2017!), and nothing is any longer sacred, everything can be questioned and held up for criticism, including capitalism itself. Rationalism, then, capitalism's motive force, is also its undoing.

If he is right—and his argument stretches over 400-plus closely argued pages, to which I have by no means even begun to do justice—then science too, as a natural outgrowth of capitalistic logic, is a self-cannibalizing proposition. Teach people to reject undemonstrated truths, and they will have no truck with your new shibboleths. Tell them to question authority, and they will question yours. Start down this road, and there is no turning back. But it was--and here's the paradox--the only road along which science could develop!

What about the money that built the road? When the project of “science” seems to have become primarily, in far too many cases, only another avenue for seeking profit at the expense of truth, when it comes to be seen, along with politics, as simply a tool to deliver increased wealth to those at the top by denying self-determination* to those at the bottom, is it any wonder there is growing public mistrust? Science, like politics, has sold out too many times to expect universal unquestioning admiration.

[* "For mankind is not free to choose. ... Things economic and social move by their own momentum and the ensuing situations compel individuals and groups to behave in certain ways whatever they may wish to do—not indeed by destroying their freedom of choice but by shaping the choosing mentalities and by narrowing the list of possibilities from which to choose."]

Here I would close with the old saw, “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas,” except that I consider it a terrible libel on the nature of dogs. Also, I probably need to say straight out that I am not taking an anti-science stance, nor am I opposing rationality. It's simply that I don’t regard scientists as gods, nor do I trust blindly in “scientific” pronouncements that come from behind locked doors of corporate secrecy. If you do, you are being neither “scientific” nor “rational.”

Returning to earth

The New Golden Calf

With all the digital technology and digitized information at our fingertips these days, it’s getting harder and harder to tell who knows what. Is he smart, or is it just his phone? In some cases, both human and phone can be called smart, but you see my point, and perhaps an important distinction is lost when we apply the same word to a person and an appliance – or application – or app.

Early in the European occupation of America, indigenous peoples’ opinions on the value of the written word divided into two camps. To some it was little short of magic, while others, when they understood what was going on with reading and writing, saw the written word as compensation for the white race’s poor memory, a kind of interpersonal and historical crutch. Maybe it is a crutch. After all, no single person can hold in her head all the knowledge, all the science, history, poetry, and drama of the world’s books.

Yet as far as I know, humans have never attributed intelligence to the objects we call books. We see clearly and accurately that the written word is a means of storage and conveyance, dependant on writers and thinkers and researchers and creators at points of origin and on receptive, discerning, comprehending, critical minds at the other end. Without the critical function of intelligence in reading, readers would be nothing but “smart,” preening parrots.

Oh-oh. I see a long road unfurling before me here, the first steps taken in the paragraphs above, but I’m a couple days into a winter cold and not feeling energetic enough for a long journey. No one will mind, I’m sure, if I simply share a couple of anecdotes?

In my first year of graduate study in philosophy, a post-doctoral fellow said of someone she’d been in school with, “At first I thought he was really smart, and then I realized he was just counterexample smart.” Counterexample smart! That phrase captured so much! The counterexample smart student never saw the virtues of another’s position, never contributed to building its strength or complexity, but neither did he ever fault the position in a thoughtful way, and never did he remain a silent listener, leaving the argument to others. No, he always leapt into the fray, and his refutations invariably took the form of coming up with a counterexample, no matter how outlandish or obscure. It was the only arrow he ever had in his quiver. A counterexample can be an important, serious objection to an argument, and strengthening an argument often has to do with making it impervious to counterexamples. But there is so much more to thinking and arguing and philosophy!

My other anecdote concerns a small event that took place in my bookstore, part of a conversation I was having with a very smart, very educated friend, who is also a strong supporter of my bookstore, i.e., he buys books from me on a regular basis. All this I say to make clear that the improvised contest that popped up between us one day had nothing in it but curiosity and good nature.

We were recalling one of Ogden Nash’s silly poems, “Very Like a Whale,” and talking of metaphor and simile in general, when it suddenly became very important to me to remember the name of the poet Nash was lampooning. “The Assyrian... purple and gold.” Who was it?

My friend snapped his fingers. “Just a minute! I can tell you!”

He pulled out his cell phone, telling me that he had recently downloaded a new app that would answer the question. While his fingers repeatedly swiped the tiny screen, I went to the poetry section of my bookstore and pulled an anthology from the shelves. 

The race was on!

The chronology of the first anthology ended too soon. I pulled down a second book, which had an index of first lines. Excellent! But oh, no! Whoever alphabetized the list had included the initial words “A,” “An,” and “The” in the list! My friend’s fingers were still swiping, as mine scrolled, so to speak, down the page, through all first lines beginning with “The.” There it was! With a page number! I flipped to the page, and voilà!

“Lord Byron!” I called out in triumph. Then, joyously, I added, “Book beats app! Book beats app!” 

My best-beloved technology, the printed word bound into books, had been challenged and had met the test. My friend remained good-natured in the face of the book’s victory. If by chance he reads this, I’ll bet he even laughs out loud.

Okay, in general, most of the time, the app (how I hate that word!) would probably be faster – provided, that is, the answer to the questioned posed has somewhere, somehow, by someone, been uploaded to the world-wide web. There’s an awful lot “out there,” but it’s not true that “Everything is out there.” For example, one year I was interviewed by Fine Books and Collections magazine, and the interview appeared in print, but it is nowhere online. There is a lot of genealogy and local history online -- and there’s a lot that isn’t there, too.

More and more I feel like a character in a fantasy novel (an old, eccentric character in an odd, hidden-away corner of the world) as I think of all the “knowledge” stored in “clouds” and wonder what would happen if these clouds were to be dispersed – or censored – or if for any reason clicking and swiping stopped bringing the desired effect. Is that scenario so hard to imagine? Is it apocalyptic thinking? Paranoia?

Then again, on another level, I simply enjoy the search for answers. And in conversation, cooperative thought and figuring things out together with friends can be entertaining as well as informative. “Saving time” with instant answers can be, in fact, a conversational deal-breaker, turning what started out as conversation into a technology-worship session. Have you ever had an experience like this? Instead of the instant answer returning the group to its original conversation, the person with the “smart” phone engages in hijacking: “And look what else it can do! And I can do this! And this....” At that point, unless you’re the one with the phone, your role is reduced to ooh-ing and ah-ing.

After “book beat app” in the incident I’ve described, my friend pocketed his cell phone, I returned my book to the shelf, and we continued our enjoyable, congenial discussion of metaphor and poetry. We were happy to be surrounded by books but felt under no obligation to worship or attribute intelligence to them.