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!