Inventing Chaos

Leave a comment April 29, 2023 Steve A. Wiggins

A recent (in my personal interaction with time) article from the New York Times recounts two bad inventions by Thomas Midgley Jr. Namely, leaded gasoline and the practical use for chlorofluorocarbons. Besides making me interested in Midgley, the article got me thinking about inventors and inventions. We never know, in real time, if innovations are good ideas or not. We have no crystal ball and what seems like a good idea now may prove to be a catastrophe. I’ve given a couple of talks on the Antikythera mechanism. If you’re not familiar, it is essentially an analogue computer invented in the first century. Experts suggest there were likely multiple such devices, but they never caught on and transformed society. Why? Nobody saw the practical benefits.

The Antikythera mechanism was made essentially to predict eclipses and track the movement of heavenly bodies. The fact that such a thing existed within a century of when Jesus of Nazareth lived and died is mind-blowing at first. Still, it makes a point. We never know when an invention will take off and change the world. And we never know if that change will ultimately be good or bad. There are many who suggest that the invention of agriculture was a mistake. We eat less healthily than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and they may have been much happier (in general) than we are. Still, agriculture (despite creating desk jobs) has its benefits. We live longer. We have medical science. And we can entertain ourselves with clever people on YouTube. While we sit around too much and eat things that really don’t benefit us, we seem to be doing okay. We’re living longer, at any rate.

The problem, it seems to me, is when capitalism takes an idea and blows it up into a huge money-making venture. People just can’t take their eyes off that shiny, shiny gold. And ideas, when they start making unreasonable demands (a new cellphone every other year? Really, is that necessary?) tend to lead to the same results as leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons. If they can be monetized, ideas will push themselves into this unbroken feedback loop we call economy. Often at the price of ecology. Inventors are both necessary and dangerous. Their efforts often make the world more comfortable, more convenient. They might, however, cause immense harm. Being a vegan, I’d have a difficult time surviving as a hunter-gatherer. Gathering is more my style, in any case. If only I had a way of tracking the movement of heavenly bodies, I might just be content.

Psychobabel

1 Comment September 11, 2015 Steve A. Wiggins

Evolution, we’re told, has one goal: survival. As an unthinking process of nature, evolution “programs” us all to desire survival for ourselves and our offspring. Even attributing that purpose too it is to suggest it’s more a willful agent than a blind process. People, on the other hand, are meaning-seeking creatures and so there’s bound to be some disappointment involved. I was just discussing with a friend how it seems that people just can’t agree on evolution mostly because of the strident claims on both sides. The New Atheists make claims beyond the evidence that survival to reproduce is the “only” role of evolution and we are “just” animals with too much gray matter, and that consciousness is “merely” electro-chemical activity in our brains. Creationists, for their part, say evolution couldn’t possibly account for structures as complex as we see in nature, and therefore a deity much be involved. The rancor grows until both sides end up despising the other. People who look for the middle ground are not newsworthy and fade into the scenery. I wonder if we’re evolved to ever get along.

My wife mentioned that it’s like the Tower of Babel story. Here is the tale of God making humans inevitably talk past one another. We can’t understand and so we argue and criticize and insult. A more scientific explanation might be that perhaps we’ve tipped the evolutionary balance with our species-specific success. We are by tar the most numerous species of any large animal. (At least that we know of.) Having put ourselves as lords and masters of the food chain our challenges have become mental and we turn ourselves to the question of who’s right instead of simple survival. Sacred books can’t guide the discussion, but reason alone. And reason, as we all know, has its limits.

The great irony in all of this is that, if we’re evolved to seek meaning, we’re not equipped to find the truth. As neuroscientists have pointed out, the brain’s function is survival, not truth finding. Our desire to know the truth is a human avocation abstracted from consciousness. We’ve not adequately defined consciousness, but since there aren’t many large predators hunting us down anymore, that brain-power has been diverted elsewhere. Despite all this, we don’t see world peace spontaneously breaking out. Even on a smaller scale we find prejudice and hatred and insane mass production of weaponry when our only predators are ourselves. Evolution, we’re told, has only the goal of survival. Being an unthinking principle, even ascribing it this much conscious decision-making is merely a matter of convenience. Does the Tower of Babel mean we must hate those who differ from us, or does it perhaps suggest that the real goal is better understanding?

To Thine Own Self

2 Comments April 25, 2014 Steve A. Wiggins

Among the books that I would rate very important, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s Sex at Dawn would need to be on top, or nearly so. As I’ve often stated on this blog, religion and sex are very closely related. Every religion, in some way or another, intimates itself into sexuality. Like religious belief, however, it is something about which we blush, look at our feet, and politely change the subject. Perhaps it would be helpful to shift focus, then, to the subtitle: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships. Well, not even that reaches the depths to which this book plumbs. Ryan and Jethá actually peer back deep into prehistory and look at the changes that agricultural life brought onto humanity. Comparing that information to conclusions drawn from evolutionary theory and serious biological study, they derive a picture of a much more equitable culture for which humans clearly evolved. Agriculture, and just plain culture, changed all that.

With culture, you see, comes the materialist idea of possession. Hunter-gatherers, even today, are the best sharers in the world. Their generosity isn’t noble, as Ryan and Jethá point out, but entirely practical. In addition, their lives are longer, healthier, and happier than those of the modern, stressed-out, perpetually frustrated, “cultured” individual. We are constantly trying to get ahead, and own more. Of course, we don’t want to mention or think about the fact that when we die, all that ownership will mean nothing. We invent complex laws that so only our biological (we think) offspring will carry on that legacy until the last bit is parceled out so fine that all that remains is a name that few will remember millennia down the road. For that we suffer nearly constant frustration. I’ve not read a book in decades that made me want to throw all of this off and head out to the woods, sharpened stick in hand. (Problematic, since I’m pretty solidly vegetarian.)

Some of the larger implications, however, that Sex at Dawn doesn’t address, are the roles that religion plays in problematizing what we’ve evolved to be. Of course, sex scandals in churches are referenced, since they are such crucial evidence. What is overlooked, for the purposes of the book, is that religions have always tried to define and control sexuality, at least since the dawn of agriculture. We don’t often consider that agriculture, in addition to making us fat, and lazy, also gave us organized religion. It may be that religion came first, but it only grew into a coercive social force with the temple culture of ancient Sumer, and it has been with us ever since, dictating who may love whom, when, and for what purpose. Sex at Dawn is not for those who are set in their ways, nor for those who take a one-size-fits-all attitude toward life. For the rest of humanity, however, there is hope that perhaps we can learn to be a little more true to what nature intended us to be, and to understand that nature may be many things, but it is seldom evil.