No Free Lunch

"Progress is our most important product."

            In the late 50's and early 60's, that slogan helped General Electric and its spokesman Ronald Reagan to sell countless washing machines, refrigerators, and light bulbs. 

   
            GE was on to something here, maybe more than it realized.  Its slogan embodied a deep-seated Western idea:  that "progress" is an autonomous propellant rocketing us through time toward a brighter (no pun intended) future.  This idea is firmly anchored in the conviction that history represents the unfolding of a divine plan, or the working out of natural laws toward specific ends.  That can be an ethereal heaven, an earthly utopia, or both, depending on one's personal proclivities.  Every day in every way, things will get better and better, so long as we act according to divine precepts or, in the secular version of things, natural laws. At least we hope(d) so.

          

But dial back about 10,000 years to history's most influential illustration of progress:  the food-producing revolution, when humans switched from hunting and gathering their food to producing it.  Any textbook on World History or Western Civilization will (and should) proclaim in celebratory detail what this revolution made possible:  food surpluses that supported all sorts of specialists--entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, mathematicians, healers, writers, priests, politicians, soldiers, artists, poets, philosophers, and musicians, and so forth. 
All of whom created "Civilization."   
Huzzah! 

            But here's where things get interesting.  Food production also entailed radical environmental changes and enormous collateral damage.  Like any revolution, say 1789 France, food production created its own version of The Terror.  It brought a poorer diet (from high-calorie/low nutrient foods) and chronic arthritis (from prepping fields).  It concentrated excrement where people lived.  Rodents infested food storage sites.  Waste from animals, relatives, friends, enemies, and neighbors permeated homes, streets, agricultural areas, and water supplies. It made possible our most highly contagious, terrifying diseases: domesticated animals transmitted smallpox, influenza, measles, tuberculosis and whooping cough.  It brought epidemics and massive die-offs to densely-populated communities with already compromised immune systems.  It brought trade, communication, warfare, empire building, and exploration, all of which exacerbated the damage.

Danse Macabre, M. Wolgemut, 1493

            This was Pathogen Party Time.

            And the Party flourished while Athenians democratized, Mozarts composed, da Vincis painted, Michangelos sculpted, Newtons and Einsteins calculated, and Kochs, Pasteurs and Flemings experimented (producing, by the way, even more massive environmental changes than the agricultural revolution). 

           In contrast, the Pathogen

San Hunter-Gatherers, Southern Africa

Party by-passed nomadic hunter-gatherers with their "poop-and-go" lifestyle.  They lived in smaller communities, had no domestic animals, ate a healthier diet, didn't suffer from arthritis, and had lots more leisure time than their "civilized" counterparts.   No wonder Jared Diamond published a 1987 essay on the food-producing revolution with this in-your-face title:  "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race." 
           
            In short, disease was the "inconvenient truth" of the revolution that gave us civilization.  Great progress meant great trouble, yet I doubt we'd give up the former to avoid the latter. In fact, it's civilization itself that provides the tools to even entertain such a notion.  Indeed, the food-producing revolution shows that humans adapt--often involuntarily and painfully, sometimes with foresight and ingenuity, sometimes with courage or cowardice, sometimes with all the above.

              Progress may well be our most important product, and pursuit of its benefits seems entrenched in our intellectual DNA.  But when viewed through history's wider lens, "Progress" as our most important product looks pretty spooky. Its creative and destructive elements are inseparable and interdependent. Welcome to one of history's profound ironies.

Creative Destruction

Are God and Nature then at strife,

That Nature lends such evil dreams?

So careful of the type she seems,

So careless of the single life;...

A. Lord Tennyson, "In Memoriam" v. 55

"The origins of Europe were hammered out on the anvil of war."

 R. A. Brown, The Origins of Modern Europe

Shiva
Left Hand:  Fire-Destruction
Right Hand: Drum-Creation

Hinduism, the world's oldest religion, has many deities. One of the most interesting is Shiva whose task is demolishing the universe to prepare for its rebirth.  Like a slash and burn farmer, he sets fire to existing worlds to nourish new ones--a "no pain, no gain" kind of deity.  

            Joseph Schumpeter, a 20th century American economist, took a similar tack. He coined the term "creative destruction" to describe cycles wherein entrepreneurs continually slash and burn less useful processes and products.  Think, for example, what the Model T did to the buggy whip industry, or what calculators did to slide rules. Lots of people lost jobs, but lots gained them.  The King is dead; long live the King.    

"Creative destruction" thus has an ancient and venerable pedigree. But it also has disturbing implications, and some are not so obvious.  Writ large, creative destruction has biological and political aspects that demand another look at just what it means to be human.  

Aztec Smallpox Victims, 16th cent.

First, the biological aspects.  Historians of disease like William McNeill have cataloged the consequences of epidemics in world history, chief among which was the creation of separate "disease pools" in different world regions.  Continual exposure to diseases that were specific to one pool allowed its survivors to prevail over populations in other pools.  For example, European diseases like smallpox wiped out 90% of the Aztecs and Incas in the century following Columbus's arrival in the Americas.  But…this is a very big "but"…the price of such immunological prowess was colossal: millennia of suffering and innumerable deaths from illnesses like smallpox, influenza, measles and tuberculosis.  

And consider the political implications.  Historians note that the strength of states in western Europe and North America, those whose democratic heritage we celebrate today, derives from their exposure to, and victory in, civil and interstate wars. For example, the havoc wrought by the Napoleonic wars prompted the victors to enforce the agreements of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, affirming the legitimacy of Europe's "enlightened" monarchs and immunizing them against the contagion of revolutionary violence.  These wars left the victors with stronger immune systems in the form of greater national unity and more powerful taxation and military structures.  Sociologist Charles Tilley put it this way:  "War makes states."  

Europe 1914

            Europe's political success was, of course, partial and temporary.  Post-1815, it remained free of major wars for nearly a century.  Yet revolutionary nationalism, like a virus on steroids, had its day, beginning with uprisings in 1830 and 1848.  Then from 1914-1945 alone, the continent clocked 60-80 million deaths.  And consider how often war changed Europe's borders from 1914 to now: countries just came and went.  

Europe 2005

            In contrast, look at sub-Saharan Africa where decrepit states like Congo, Chad, Zimbabwe, and Somalia persist, if only by grace of UN membership or big power patrons.  Borders, drawn by Europeans for European purposes, contain a hodgepodge of sectarian elements.  Yet states here have undergone almost no boundary changes since the 1960s (Eritrea and South Sudan are exceptions), and in reality since the imposition of colonial rule.  A similar case could be made for the Middle East after World War I.  The cost of statehood that is born in such a sterile context is an endemic civil mayhem analogous to the epidemics that ravaged Europe and the Americas.    

             Biological pathogens, like their political cousins, also had their day.  Influenza killed 40-50 million people in 1918; the 1980's AIDS pandemic stunned a medical establishment that had, just a few years before, announced the end of infectious diseases.  Today's antibiotic-resistant diseases like tuberculosis, MRSA, and SARS pop up and down like microbial terrorists. 

Africa, Colonial and Current Boundaries

So whatever the battlefield--microbial, economic, demographic, international--destruction engenders creation, and vice versa.  The elements in this dynamic are as inseparable as space and time: two sides of the same coin, yet tough to understand, tougher to reconcile.

The implications of all this are unsettling. We are beneficiaries of biological and political insults that created inconceivable misery over innumerable years for countless forbearers. And like them, we are fodder for the disease- and war-experienced evolution of our descendants.  This is a most unedifying take on our place in the universe.

            Tennyson's verse above reminds us that the sacredness of the individual, a principal pillar of western civilization, seems trumped by the good of the group in this process.  Death and rebirth narratives may give comfort in the present.  Yet human suffering appears to be a precondition for strengthening the bodies and bodies politic of groups who will come later--much, much later.  

            Perhaps we will find some alternative to war and disease as preconditions for creation.  For now though, however unpalatable, creative destruction remains an unsettling feature of our identity.  Shiva and Schumpeter were on to something here.

What's Inside? The Outside.

"God is ever a geometer."  Pythagorean motto

Ever watch the TV series "Numb3ers"?  The plot went like this:  someone commits a crime, and a brilliant mathematician solves it with equations.  This was "CSI" for math fans. 

"Numb3ers" embodied a 3,000 year-old notion: Numbers Rule.  Ancient Greeks believed that numbers—more precisely, ratio and proportion—saturated the fabric of the universe, from micro to macro, dirt to divinity.  

Pythagoras, that 6th century BC religious guru of triangle fame, was the original "Numb3rs" guy. He (or his followers) believed that planets moved around the earth with the same mathematical ratios found in harmonic intervals (octaves, 2:1; fourths, 4:3;fifths, 3:2,etc.), thus creating "the music of the spheres."

Doryphoros of Polykleitos, 450-400 BC: ideal  proportions

To classical Greeks, this idea of ratio and proportion as universal organizing principles was brain candy. They believed, for example, that healthy people contained the right proportions of earth, air, fire and water.  They also found the harmonics of celestial spheres was reflected in the proportions of human anatomy. Thus, the body’s interior was a sort of celestial atlas (and easier to study!). To know one was to know the other.  Either way, ratio—“reason”— and proportion were keys to decrypting the secrets of the big and the small. To investigate  this was to understand “order,” or, as the Greeks put it, “cosmos.” 

Parthenon

Brain candy became eye candy.  Greek sculptors and architects portrayed the human form and religious sites with symmetry and precision.  They reasoned, as we do still, by analogy.  Mathematics, art, anatomy, architecture, astronomy, music, even religion:  all are cut from the same bolt of cloth. (No academic silos here!)  The Parthenon is a prime example, not only for its mathematical and esthetic qualities, but also because it was synched with the stars.  What’s down here is what’s up there; what’s inside is what’s outside.  Above all, this meant the universe was orderly and  intelligible.  And that which could be known could also—perhaps—be controlled.  How cool is that?

1480s? Scanned from Trattato di architettura di Francesco di Giorgio Martini by Francesco di Giorgio http://leonardodavinci.stanford.edu/submissions/clabaugh/history/architecture.html

The Romans grabbed this idea and sprinted. Vitruvius, a 1^st century BC engineer and architect, understood the conjunction of anatomy and architecture, between what’s inside and what’s outside, between the micro and the macro.  In designing public spaces such as temples and other buildings, he made concrete the “cosmos” of the Roman empire.  Such structures weren't just buildings; they embodied the order Rome would bring to the world.  Taking a cue from Greek painters, sculptors and architects, Vitruvius described man's  ideal anatomical proportions in his Ten Books on Architecture.  These proportions, in turn, became the blueprints for Rome’s “living buildings”—and Rome's imperial vision. Vitruvius's designs thus legitimated imperial rule and, not incidentally, the divinity of Augustus, Rome's first emperor. 

da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, c. 1490

Fast forward to the 15^th century, when Leonardo da Vinci  read Vitruvius's Ten Books.  Da Vinci (preceded by others) sketched the ideal human as his own Vitruvian Man—a perfectly proportioned human form, his navel is centered exactly in a circle (symbol of the perfection of the universe) and a square (the earth)…in sum, an artistic, mathematical, cosmological expression of the Divine Geometrician’s creation, and man’s place in it.   Micro and macro, inside and outside, what’s up there and what’s down here:  Vitruvian Man embodied this “cosmos.”  

Fast forward again to the present, where environmental and biodiversity programs offer interesting parallels to all of this.  Take, for example, the Human Microbiome Project. One of the Project’s goals is to investigate the proportions of microbes on our skin and in our guts. If the proportion of these various communities gets out of whack, bad things happen.  But not to worry:  re-establishing the “intestinal cosmos” is possible (cue the medical procedure:  fecal transplants!).  One just needs the right proportions.

Neuron--NY State Dept of Health

Take another example.  Scientists know that atoms in supernova are identical to those in our brains—the organs that make external phenomena intelligible.  Even more, the correct ratios of such cosmic bits in our mental space make the external world explicable—by discovering or inventing order, or both, therein.

Supernova Remnant --NASA Hubble

   
Either way, the notion that our "internal" architecture is inextricably linked to the "outside" world reflects the fuzziness of such boundaries, and how much we are a part of the universe. Whether this inside-outside notion survives the advent of quantum physics is an interesting question.  For now, though, it’s like being in a hall of mirrors where inside and outside interact in countless recursive loops, ones that have captivated humans for millennia. 

Some ideas just won’t go away.  

Mindquakes

"Nature and Nature's Laws lay hid in Night
God said, "Let Newton be! and all was light." 

                          Alexander Pope, c. 1727

“It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles in the physical      sciences have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought  chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.”

                                     Catalog, University of Chicago, 1893

"It could not last; the Devil shouting "Ho!
Let Einstein be!" restored the status quo."

                             Sir John Squire, c. 1926 

 

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My latest read is William McNeill's Keeping Together in Time:  Dance and Drill in Human History.  McNeill is a favorite historian of mine, chiefly for his breath of vision.  His superbly documented works cover world history, disease and history, environmental history, military history, historiography, and western civilization.  But a history of dance?  Who knew?

 The book's thesis is that rhythmically moving muscles produces and enhances group solidarity by altering our feelings.  He traces this notion from hunter-gather days to the present, and in areas as diverse as physiology, psychology, human evolution (he thinks we couldn't have become fully "human" without rhythmic movements), religion, politics, and war.  The clarity of writing is superb, and footnotes can be just as interesting as the text.  And he does all this in 156 pages.  Amazing.

More to the point:  this book got me thinking again about the mental spontaneous combustion that occurs when disciplines converge (cue the Renaissance).    How such combustion happens seems chaotic and unintelligible; but, like the inexplicable quantum world, it gets results (e.g., computer chips). 

We should carefully attend to this "spontaneous combustion" because it prompts new questions and new ways of thinking.  For example, take the paradigm shifts of the late 19th-early 20th century, when people in so many different fields (Poincaré and Godel, Freud, Einstein, Picasso, Stravinsky, Modigliani, Heisenberg, Yeats, etc., etc.) up-ended, more or less independently, the Newtonian world view. Or at least they modified it so drastically as to prompt questions about whether we can know anything at all.  (In retrospect, there is an exquisite beauty to their findings; I'm not sure their contemporaries saw it as such.) 

This anxiety didn't affect just the upper crust.  This was also the age when the Titanic's plunge undermined popular faith in the technology’s reliability; when a witch’s brew of nationalism, new weaponry and strategic irrationality produced World War I; when the 1918 influenza epidemic appeared as the epitome of randomness; and when the Bolshevik Revolution and Fascism's rise pushed Europe deeper into the circles of hell.  The concatenation of these events drove history's trajectory from faith in progress to chronicles of disaster.

What to make of all this?   

For me, the 19th/20th century mindquakes demonstrate the imperative for McNeillean ventures down unknown paths (even while we've got to be well informed about at least one).  It pays to stroll beyond our intellectual comfort zones.

Second, scientific and technological advances can, like nature, be "red in tooth and claw." Hence the need to seek out the implications of such advances (in nano-science, for example), not just for their social, economic, ethical, political, or other implications, but for their degree of "truthfulness” (read esthetic beauty).   

And third, we must be well versed in the very nature of own disciplines:  their interconnections with other areas of life, which is to say their philosophies, histories, and impacts on the human arena.  In sum, we've got to take a cue from the McNeill’s breath of vision if we are to understand our own identities, and shape, let alone cope with, the future. 

Mindquakes--they happen!