Oh Humanity!
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Competition vs. Cooperation
They're a yin/yang pair,
flip sides of each other, each interleaved with the other. In a team sport
you cooperate with your teammates to compete with the other team. However,
the analogy of games to life can be taken too far. Ex-football coaches
become gurus who know how to win, a skill that they promote as universally
relevant. But in life neither the rules nor the teams are as well defined.
I am a cooperator; I like to work with others
to produce something that benefits all. Competitors treat life as a zero-sum
game — whatever they get is at the expense of someone else. It's
ironic that the most ruthless competitors, who use their abilities to
grab more than their share of life's material rewards, like to portray
themselves as cooperators: they deserve what they've got because they
produced it all themselves.
Cooperation came into
being, in the course of evolution, as a competitive strategy; competition
is essential to life in a way that cooperation is not. This is part of
the reason why it's difficult to achieve cooperation on a global scale.
Is it possible that the process of evolution could have evolved differently,
with cooperation as its basis instead of competition?
Simplifiers vs. Complicators
Simplifiers have an innate need
for security, so, like bulldogs, they clamp onto a few ideas and won't
be shaken from them. The world is simple because they force it into a
simple framework.
Complicators feel nervous about settling
on anything. They live in a fractal world, where each sort-of truth turns
out to be, on closer inspection, a spider web of complications and caveats.
I'm a third type, who always seeks the middle
ground, and tends to feel that it's the moral high ground. "Moderation
in everything, including moderation," said the head monk of Shangri-La,
leaving none of us with anywhere to stand.
The Paradox of Excellence and Mediocrity
There's much more mediocrity
in high places and excellence scattered everywhere else than would be
found in a well ordered world. There are those who must believe in a well
ordered world and will deny the evidence to keep on doing so, but our
current U.S. President, George W. Bush, is a good counterexample to the
notion of perfect correlation between excellence and position.
Mental and Spiritual Taxonomy
The organization of
Roget's Thesaurus (which simply means "Treaure" in Latinized
Greek) fascinates me because it's an attempt to map the space of human
concepts and feelings. The top-level categories, abstract relations, space,
physics, matter, sensation, intellect, volition and affections, are divided
into sub-categories and these into sub-sub-categories. The purpose is
to help the reader find particular words, but few readers, I suspect,
are aware of the grand structure of the whole.
I know of two other systems of mental and
siritual taxonomy: the ancient Chinese Yi Jing (or I Ching
or Book of Changes), and astrology. The Yi Jing, originally
a fortune-telling system, divides our mental and spiritual space into
64 situations, and then subdivides each one further depending on how it's
changing into another of the situations (hence the "Changes"
in the name). The text is obscure and difficult, with layer upon layer
of emendation and interpretation accreted during its 3,000-year history.
One gets a strong emotional picture of each situation (I've tried to represent
a few of them in music).
Western astrology is another fortune-telling
system, based on the positions of the sun and planets in relation to the
stars and to one another, at the current moment, and the moment of birth.
Where the Yi Jing uses a top-down system, where one of the 64 big-picture
situation is picked first, and then the details are added, astrology uses
a bottom-up system, summing the various influences to create the big picture.
The most significant is the sun – where is it in relation to the
fixed background of the stars? Then the planets are figured in one by
one, and then their relationships – are they across from each other
or in conjunction? Each house of the zodiac (a zone of the star background),
the sun, each planet, each possible relationship has a particular emotional,
mental or spirtual character, which is combined with the others to form
the horoscope.
Other large-scale non-scientific systems
that are rich sources of philosophy and metaphor to aid our general understanding
are the great world religions, alchemy, and the works of Freud and Jung.
Because of its focus
on the big picture, I find the Yi Jing's system the most compelling
and interesting. Roget's system is dry and intellectual, and provides
no way to combine elements. The horoscope does, but the combination is
laborious, and a waste of time if one is interested in these systems only
in the abstract. I certainly don't accept that they can predict the future,
or that my character is determined by my moment of birth.
Gaze
Isn't it amazing how
quickly and reliably we recognize the sex of another person, even at a
distance? And how accurately we track the gaze of another from far away?
A distant eyeball subtends such a small angle of vision, but we can tell,
with a little mental click, when it's looking back at us.
Kid Science
Einstein suggested that
children have a more flexible, potentially deeper awareness of the world,
before they're educated. I wonder if the same isn't true of human culture
— it's as easy for us to see foolishness in the science of "native"
Americans and ancient alchemists as in the science of children, but what
sorts of wisdom and imagination have we lost in suppressing their world
views?
The End of Race
It is inevitable that
the division of humanity into races will vanish. The division came from
local adaptation by large groups of people separated by the difficulty
of travel. Now that the difficulty is relaxed, intermarriage is gradually
mixing the races. I say "gradually," but that's our quick historical
time scale. It's extremely rapid when compared to the rate at which inter-racial
differences came into being. We'll all be brown some day. When will this
process be complete? In a hundred years? In a thousand years? How much
variance will there be in the human form once we've reached the end?
Idealization of Childhood
When I was a kid, my
parents told me to enjoy my childhood because it would be the best part
of my life. They were both intelligent, accomplished people, PhD college
professors, so I can't imagine where they got this idea. I don't think
it was true for them, and it certainly wasn't true for me. I spent my
childhood wanting to grow older so I could have some measure of control
over my life.
Why do we increasingly idealize childhood?
Why is the normative individual in our society getting younger and younger?
As Wynton Marsalis remarked, up until the 1960s, mainstream commercial
music was made for adults. Today it's made for teenagers, and the demographic
is getting younger each year. Ditto for movies. Is the rock-and-roll manic
adolescent excitement the only emotion anyone wants to feel? Was adolescence
the best part of everyone's life? Or is it an escapist idealization of
those times? Or is culture so much a consumer product that we become culturally
disenfranchised once we pass our peak music- and movie-consuming years?
Vicarious Overload
The print media are
forever decrying the amount of violence on television – that by the
age of 12 our children have seen tens of thousands of simulated acts of
violence.
What worries me more is the sheer quantity
of vicarious experience this portends. How many simulated years has the
average teenager lived, through TV and other forms of virtual (but hardly
virtuous, or even realistic) reality? Does the accumulation of vicarious
experience outweigh personal life experience?
This isn't confined to the young. A celebrity
is a person marketable as a commodity with whom many consumers have fantasy
relationships. The popular sitcoms are the nation's circles of friends.
How much of our friendship space is given over to these people who don't
know or care about us?
Men and Women
How much are men and women different? I'd
say about 15% – the other 85% is the same between the two sexes.
I suspect that many estimates of this would be higher, as is implied by
the existence of university women's studies programs. Of course, the inherent
differences can be culturally increased: Afghan men and women lead lives
more different from one another than do men and women in the U.S.
The same question can be asked about races
and nationalities, leading to the question of how much within us (this
is all that matters) is human nature and how much is determined by our
particular luck and circumstances.
This percentage measurement is very subjective.
We'd probably all seem alike if we had space aliens to compare with, especially
if they had three sexes instead of two.
Life 101
I have memories of my father teaching me
basic rules of life, such as "the hot water faucet is always on the
left." One reason I never wanted children of my own is that teaching
the basics – Life 101 – doesn't appeal to me. I'd rather teach
the more advanced course, if I can figure out the answers myself first.
Invincibility
The prime male fantasy is invincibility.
Though physical violence is rare in civilized lands, a primal fear still
lurks, and men, especially, whose biological role is to fight when necessary
like to fantasize about not being concerned about the outcome of physical
confrontation. Action movie heroes play to this fantasy – they are
so tough they can beat any number of men in a fight. The perfect male
virtual-reality game would be a world where one could beat any man and
have any woman. Neither should be too easy.
Misanthropy
My wife Benita is forever saying that "people
are stupid," and most of the time it seems to me that she's right.
Maybe she means that she and I are a little smarter than average, but
more likely she's deprecating human nature, a form of misanthropy.
Human evolution stopped as soon as we got
smart enough to take evolution to the next level and build societal organisms
with ourselves as cells, as animals are made out of smaller cells that
evolved to the point where they were capable of serving as good building
blocks. When we meet life from other planets, will we find this effect
to be universal, so that races evolving independently end up with the
same level of intelligence, the minimum required to form a complex society?
Or will we find a race that's way beyond
us? What would it be like for us to live side-by-side with a race as much
smarter than us as we are smarter than dogs? We would understand very
little of what they did or why, but their projects would usually produce
miraculous success. We would be their servants, companions, or pets, as
dogs are ours.
Would they be smart enough to avoid the
dopey things that we humans do, such as war? Would they be able to organize
themselves more equitably and efficiently so that none of them starved?
Is there any way they could have evolved to be fundamentally cooperative
instead of competitive?
So Many People
Sitting here in the Las Vegas airport watching
strangers stream by reminds me how astonishingly many people there are.
This is apparent here, as when I'm visiting new cities. I remind myself
that the million or so people I will have seen by the end of my life are
a tiny fraction – a six thousandth – of all the people alive
on this planet.
My own subjective world of thoughts and
feelings seems huge to me, so multiplying it by just the number of persons
I can see right now requires an intense act of imagination. Extending
this world-wide, to all the humans I will ever see, times six thousand,
I try to imagine an immense spiritual cacophony, a field around the earth.
Loving Thy Neighbor
When Jesus echoes the old testament, saying
"love thy neighbor as thyself," he's stating the plain human
truth that each of us has concentric circles of love and caring. We care
for ourselves, then our families, then friends, then those that live near
us and are like us, and then, last, those who are far away and different.
The Greek word for "neighbor" is "plesion," which
literally means "the near one." He didn't say, as he could have,
"love everyone..."
The Human Phenotype
How long would it take, if human breeding
could be selectively controlled, to develop "breeds" of human
beings as distinct in physical characteristics (phenotype) as dog breeds?
Probably just a few hundred years.
Human Nature
Though I am a secular humanist, I can't
see why everyone is so enamored of and focused on human nature, especially
when we don't really know what it is. "Man is the measure of all"
is narcissistic, a silly relic of the bygone age when humanity was at
the center of the universe.
When I hear the term "human nature,"
I mentally break it into two parts: the part that is universal to all
races of intelligent beings in the universe, and the part that is particular
to humanity. It's hard to distinguish the two in the absence of actual
examples of extra-terrestrial races.
In the same way that our idea of the range
of human nature is provided by the variance in individuals that we encounter,
and in the same way that we can calibrate the position of our own society
and culture within the space of other societies and cultures that we've
visited in our travels, we would have a much better definition of human
nature if we had a set of other intelligent races to compare with.
If we think of human nature as a multidimensional
space defined by the cloud of points for the characteristics of all human
beings, past and present, where is that space in the overall map showing
the natures of all intelligent beings? There is probably an extensive
overlap with the spaces of other extra-terrestrial races, but we won't
know until we meet them and see where we stand in relation. This is the
real answer to "what is human nature?"
Innocence
The word "innocence" comes from
the Latin nocere, which means "to harm," so the root
sense of the word is "not harming." I tend to think of innocence
as the opposite of experience, with the potential for harm going the other
way. Innocence, for me, is not so much a lack of experience as a failure
to have been harmed by it and, as this is difficult to sustain, innocence
later in life is a triumpth.
In a Tai Ji Quan game called Push
Hands you go round and round, back and forth pushing your opponent's arms
and being pushed in turn. The goal is to push your opponent off balance
so he or she is forced to take a step back. By being open and in close
contact you can feel what your opponent is going to do, and can react
in time to avoid being pushed straight through your center. All it takes
is a subtle deflection of the push to one side or the other. You don't
need to conceal who or where you are, you can open up to intimate contact,
you just need confidence in your ability to deflect an attack with minimal
violence. This is the innocence that comes only with experience.
Laissez Faire & the Zero-Sum Game
The competitors who make a million dollars
a year say their wealth comes from their productivity. They've earned
everything they've got and they deserve to be left alone to enjoy it.
Laissez faire! But their success is built on the fabric and facilities
provided by society for common use. Here's a thought experiment: would
we all make a million dollars a year if we had a society made up of nothing
but these winners? Of coursse not. Our productivity would probably rise
somewhat, but not enough so they could all keep their six-figure incomes.
The second component in acquiring wealth
is the zero-sum game. This term was coined by John Von Neumann to describe
situations where winnings of one player must be offset by losses for others
(so they add up to zero). Society's economic winners are better at playing
the money game (some might call this "scamming the system"),
so they end up with a larger share. Is this fair? Does an investment banker
really deserve to earn ten times as much as an engineer who designs bridges?
Their contributions are equally important to society, the level of training
and aptitude required about the same. The investment banker is better
at playing the money game, so he wins.
But the other extreme isn't any fairer:
"from each according to ability to each according to need."
This is the communist leveling thought experiment where everyone puts
his income in a big pot, which is then divided equally. It avoids the
inequities of the zero-sum game, but throws out the baby with the bathwater.
There's no economic incentive for productivity or innovation. The ideal
would be to reward productivity and innovation without rewarding gamingof
the system, but this is impossible in practice (and maybe even in theory).
So the best we can do is to redistribute wealth somewhat through progressive
taxation. We need to find the right balance point between too much laissez-faire,
which increases the economic pie, but slices it unfairly, and too much
socialistic leveling, which bakes a smaller pie but distributes it more
equitably.
Haves and Have-Nots
The have-nots are dangerous because they
have much less to lose and more to gain from disruption of the existing
order. The hungry are keener and take risks in order to win; when they
do they gradually get lazy and complacent, setting the stage for the cycle
to begin anew. This happened with Rome and the barbarians, and it's happening
now with America and China and the Muslims. The best time to live is the
time we're living in now: after the peak in the curve, when decay has
set in but the walls are still holding.
The Value of Human Life
With our usual hypocrisy we pretend that
the dollar value of human life is infinite. But we all know that trade-offs
are made. There are professionals who make a business of this:
- the Special Master who decides the compensation for victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack: he takes into account age, marital status & number of children, income and job potential, etc.
- the wrongful-death jury consultants, who advise lawyers on the likely amounts of jury awards (based on more subjective factors) so they can settle for less
My father used to point out that, whenever a big public-works project was undertaken, the result would be the deaths of some of the workmen. Air and water pollution lead to deaths that could be avoided by reducing the pollution. We are aware of these trade-offs but we don't reduce the pollution. We could reduce deaths in automobile accidents by lowering the speed limit, but this country already has low limits, compared with Europe. In the end, though we will never admit it to ourselves, we make the rational decision that it's worth killing a few people for most of us to save time.
Death
Death was obviously required for evolution
to get us where we are today but, given that we've all but ceased to evolve
biologically, is it of value now? A thought experiment: imagine a new
genetic treatment that would freeze our age permanently so we could pick
our peak. We'd quickly become a world of perpetual 30-year-olds, and we'd
have to restrict new births to match the rate of death from accident and
disease, to avoid Malthusian unpleasantnesses.
Would this be a better life, to have the
prospect of potentially infinite life, but (probably) no children? Would
we get tired of life like the ancient Sibyl? Would a 500-year-old become
wiser than a 50-year old? Maybe the treatment would be so expensive that
only the very richest could afford it. They could continue amassing wealth
for centuries instead of decades, and we'd have the equivalent of the
Medici competing with J.P. Morgan and Donald Trump. Death is starting
to sound pretty good.
Love
Love is multidimensional
in the same way that intelligence is. We rate intelligence with a number
called IQ, which implies a single dimension: low to high. But there are
many kinds of smartness and stupidity. One can be good at math, or with
words, or artistically intuitive, cunning with money, persuasive, deeply
understanding of others’ motives and feelings. Surely these are
all types of intelligence, and an individual can rate high on some of
the scales and low on others, in just about any combination.
So with love. The Greeks began the catalog
with eros and agape, the first sensual and sexual, the second the empathetic
fellowship of “love thy neighbor…” These are points
or planes in the space of love whose dimensions include sexuality, selfishness,
biological and cultural connection, degree of intimacy, intensity, and
more.
Parent Polarizations
There are psychic areas where your parents
have no sway, and others where their influence dominates. In those you
are variously polarized — you unconsciously assume their attitude
or rebel against it. This is an emotional meme.
Spiritual Biomass
How much pain does an ant feel? It must
be less than ours, but similar - both are chemical reactions in our brains.
The Buddhists ridiculously equate the souls of all living things. How
about plants or microbes, do they feel too? Homo sapiens is grossly outmatched
in biomass by ants and microbes. How about our spiritual mass? What percent
of the feeling on the planet belongs to the human species?
Chain of Being
There is a chain of life stretching from
the simplest organisms — single cells with no nuclei — up
to humans. We're the most complicated, and think and feel the most. There
is a gradation within each species as well. A newborn baby is lower on
this chain than a mature adult. How much ethical weight should we give
to differences in place on this chain? Should animals be treated like
simpler humans (not killing them or using them for human purposes) as
some animal-rights activists propose? Should we never boil water for fear
of killing microbes, as the Jainists would have us do?
My own answer
is that we must treat animals ethically. We shouldn't raise the animals
that we eventually eat in intolerably cruel conditions. But the ethical
weight of a creature is lower the lower it is on the chain.
Auchwitz
I visited Auchwitz today; it is an evil,
evil place. The lesson is not "how bad the Germans were" but
rather "human nature has a very evil dark corner where we have hidden
the capacity to commit atrocities."
The human race
is becoming racially assimilated. I ask myself, if we were assimilated
culturally as well, so there were no language or ethnic differences, would
that remove the possibility of another atrocity like the Holocaust? The
answer is no; we would divide ourselves arbitrarily into red and blue
teams and they would still want to kill each other sometimes. Competition
and contention are in our blood.
Writing "In
the Penal Colony" around the time that the first world war began,
Kafka brilliantly anticipated the human aspects of the Nazis' "final
solution to the Jewish problem." He depicts a technically brilliant
machine for executing prisoners by piercing their skin with thousands
of needles in the form of an admonition given as part of their death sentences:
"Be Just" or "Obey Your Superiors." The pride that
the officer in charge of this machine takes in its technical perfection
and in the design of the process of the prisoner's death, and his total
detachment from its cruelty and the unjust judicial process anticipate
the inhuman efficiencies of Auchwitz.
Exocosm
A refractive spiritual bubble around each
of us makes the outer world we perceive correspond to our inner world,
as a raindrop produces a tiny upside-down image of everything around it.
It's a two-way projection between the inner and outside worlds. I'm influenced
by what I see in the world, but I project what's in my self onto the world
I see. That world is an expression of who I am. For us to understand each
other these exocosms have to coincide, and they often don't.