Thursday, March 29, 2012
History of Ideas - Part IEverything was darkness and light in the beginning. The universe shocked itself when a being somewhere made the first decision, the first deployment of reason to advance the pleasure or to curb the pain, to preserve and protect what felt good. This was the beginning of ideas.
In a jungle roof somewhere the early primates evolved: first the prosimians, then the simians. They had thumbs and fingernails which helped them clutch the branches which supported them. They had long tales which helped them keep their balance. They developed social orders based on power and charisma. Environmental pressure caused the simians to branch into a lineage of monkeys and a lineage of apes. The apes in turn branched into orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and humans. It is with the fourth group that the history of ideas really got going.
Millions of years passed, during which time the humans, guided by unprecedentedly active brains, organized themselves into villages with elaborate edifices which they had learned to build for themselves. They learned to grow and cook their food, to fashion tools first from rocks, then bronze, and eventually from hardened iron. They never lost their sense of social order, so even today they organize themselves around big, handsome, energetic men who use words to dazzle them. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
The early humans really struggled to find an appropriate outlet for their brains' excess potential. Human brains evolved because they make efficient use of the information around them, constantly packaging it and repackaging it into overlapping concepts and notions--a process that can be really confusing when there is no road-map, when you have to make up the rules as you go.
Not only do human brains make use of information, but they insist on conveying it in creative ways, imprinting it on the world outside the skulls which protect them. Human grunts became so nuanced that language evolved. Human scribbles became pictures that actually looked like real things. Grunts and scribbles circulated among human beings everywhere. "Aroogabooka!" Scribble of a mountain. "Wookanookadoo!" Scribble of something coming out of the mountain. "Junga hooka dooka nooka AROOGABOOKADOO!" Scribble of a stick-man being thrown into a hole at the top of the mountain. The zealous transmission of information often led to miserable ends.
By the middle of the sixth century BCE, human beings from all around the world had developed their communities so successfully that many did not have to work very hard at all. They had enough food and a relative degree of security, so they got bored. Human brains need to be exercised with purposeful work, or else they tend to short circuit (a tendency we call anxiety). They started asking questions that people before them might have conceived but never took the time to articulate with the full use of their brains. What makes wet stuff wet and dry stuff dry? Where does the wood go when you burn it? Is there a something from which all somethings are made? Why does one moment lead inevitably to another, rather than just eternally being? These levels of abstractions were intoxicating once the human brain found itself capable of producing them, and people had great fun playing with language and inventing impossibly abstruse questions. Today we wrestle with many of these primitive formulations without realizing how nonsensical they really are.
Our culture is most directly descended from the people living at that time around the Mediterranean Sea. Greek men like Thales and Anaximander in Miletus, then to a much greater extent Pythagoras in Croton, began to play around with numbers. Of course, numbers had been around for a very long time at this point, but they were always used as markers for things, for keeping records of how much of this or that was on hand, or how many times the sun would rise and set between harvest seasons. But the Greeks turned the numbers into abstract entities, and in doing so they led the human mind into uncharted territory.
Before I go on I should note that the Greeks were not the only people to make this conceptual leap. It happened in Asia too, as well as in the Americas. The fact that different cultures, which were virtually unaware of the others' existence, were still able to make, at roughly the same time, the same monumental cognitive leap underscores an important anthropological notion: mathematics is innate.
So what does all this mean? What did these Greeks (we are sticking with the Greeks for this story) do with numbers that was so incredible? Well Thales figured out how to judge the height of a thing by the length of its shadow. Anaximander made a map of the universe (which proved lacking). Pythagoras invented the theorem about right triangles that we all know from school. Where they succeeded in figuring out important information, that information got passed down to us; now we learn it all in school. We are taught this material at such a young age that we tend to be a bit cocky about it, wondering why Pythagoras was so special. We figured out his theorem. It is all so self-evident, is it not? Now, try to remember the last time you learned something new--really learned it. Learned it until it sunk deep into your brain. Better yet, take the time now to learn something. Find a picture of Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels and draw it over and over again until you can do it from memory.
You are back? Wonderful. Now imagine, having never seen the picture before, deciding one day to invent the pencil for the sole purpose of drawing an idea you had about some hairy looking thing with a cave house on top of a van. That is how incredible it all is. I am not saying they are smarter than you. In fact, I will be getting to the point where I say you are about as smart as they were. But the effort they put into doing really obscure work is absolutely breathtaking.
There was, however, a drawback. All this work with numbers made some people think that numbers were real things, with lives of their own. They became more real than the things they were being used to describe. Pythagoras famously said, "Everything is numbers." This is when the human species went crazy.
We had done really well up until then. We swung from trees, we built fires, we wrote on walls, we built cities. Yes, we also fought wars and ate the flesh of people we killed, but such resulted from stupidity, not insanity. Stupidity causes us to do things that our instinct tells us to do even when it is contrary to our better interests. Insanity is seeing things that do not exist. Full-blown insanity is seeing imaginary things everywhere you go, and in everything you look at, and coming up with profound and impeccable truths to back up your insight. So for instance, we know from geometry class that the circumference of a circle is pi multiplied by the circle's diameter. If you are like me, you asked your Jr. High math teacher what pi was and began to hate math when he could not give you a straight answer. If you believe pi is everywhere, then you are insane. Moreover, have you ever seen a perfect circle? No, you have not. Such a thing does not exist--never has, never will. It is an abstraction. An idea. A form.
Alfred North Whitehead is famous for writing, "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato." This is entirely true. But Plato was merely the great exponent of the Greek mathematician's ideology: if a perfect circle can be derived from the pure world of numbers, and if pi can be derived from the division of the circle's circumference divided by its diameter, and if the world we live in contains no pi and no perfect circles, then clearly, clearly, c l e a r l y it is our world that is imaginary and the number world that is real. What horrible millennia our species has lived through because of this batshit idea.
Sunday, March 4, 2012
I like to use the back of a matchstick to etch things into the dust on the stove's glass door, usually messages for Becky. This morning as I brushed away the ashes from the sill I saw that she had returned the gesture. It is funny because I think this morning I picked a fight concerning a mop head. Now she is at the grocery store, and I wish she were here.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Every child should have, by the time they reach school age, several years training in the art of mood management. Few adults know much of the practice, and I include myself in this group, so it is no wonder that one generation after another is born and reared in perpetual bondage. Moods are our everything, our bliss, and our chains. If I know very little about them, the chemistry that causes them or their impact on anthropology and art, I do know a few things from experience. They have helped me, these simple truisms, so here they are.
First: My anger is never caused by what I think it is caused by; not precisely, anyway. Sometimes an apparent cause seems so obviously beyond question. Maybe a teenage debutante cut me at the check-out isle, mindlessly talking on her cellular. That always gets me. Or maybe someone on Facebook made fun of something I like--Phil Collins' cover of True Colors, perhaps. Or maybe I've been driving behind a pickup truck with a NoBama sticker on the tailgate, the O inlaid with a hammer and cycle. Deep breath. 3,2,1... In each case it seems pretty obvious why my blood pressure is rising, but here's the thing: I have been in those exact scenarios many times before and appreciated them with an ironic detachment. Why do I get angry sometimes and not at other times? I won't bother going through the infinite possibilities of minor irritations that might have led up to the beauty queen cutting ahead at the Circle K, but. But.
It's tempting to think of lots of bad things that had happened throughout my day, things I repressed, and in those moments when I feel my face getting hot I go through the catalog looking for an explanation. Doing so I overlook the obvious fact that I was feeling very nice for several minutes, hours, maybe all day, and suddenly I was forced to make the decision to address a slight against me or to let it slip. One choice is laden with its consequences, the other choice, another set. The decision is too big for me to make, I start feeling stupid, and I get stuck in a dramatic soliloquy in my head that lasts the entire drive from Lewiston to Farmington. I explain the event to myself, tell myself why it is stupid to be angry, that there is no need to let a silly little event ruin my day. Nothing makes me feel better because I can't think calmly enough to identify that moment of indecision and subsequent self-doubt that caused my little breakdown.
Second: I can't think myself out of the downward spiral. Oh, this is a big problem for me. If I am a smart, college-educated man who reads popular nonfiction books about neural psychology and the Tao Te Ching, there should be no reason why I can't commandeer my prefrontal cortex and bring things to a slow halt. But as I have already noted, I can't even figure out what I am so upset about.
There are some Buddhist parables likening these moments to a battle between a warrior and a phantom. The warrior, no matter how hard he tries, can't destroy the phantom until he puts down his sword; then the phantom simply fades away. This always reminds me of the story (which as an adult I sadly learn is in remarkable bad taste) of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby.
Third: A better mood is never more than ten minutes away. Happiness takes an hour, serenity up to five. The trick is not to convince myself that I can't figure out why I am upset. That way lies paradox. I simply have to stare at something for as long as it takes in order for me to actually see it. I get discouraged easily, and sometimes I give up after a few fruitless minutes. I get fidgety and retreat back into my head. But if I can keep my eyes fixed on some object--a cup, raindrops on the window, birds at the feeder, the wood stove, a pencil, my keyboard, my coffee cup, my hand, a picture of Sparta, my soldering iron, dumbbells, a doorknob, or whatever--eventually I will actually start to see it. I'll notice a shadow, a texture, a blemish, or some other detail. Then I'll notice another one. Suddenly it takes on a character its own, no longer a type, whatever I'm looking at, however common it may be. Ten minutes, and my Dunkin Donuts cup is suddenly the most interesting thing in the world. That cardboard slip they put around it to keep my fingers from burning up, it's full of triangles, slashes, and backslashes, half of them convex and upright, the others concave and upside down. Wow. Someone had to think of that. I wonder who she was, or he. Gender. That's a funny concept, isn't it? Cups and gender: two funny concepts. When I keep this up for an hour, I get giddy.
When I have time I stretch this exercise a bit, either by picking up a 19th century novel and diagramming the sentences, or by playing a game where I remain perfectly still until I describe what my next movement will be, down to the minutest detail I can conceive. I am not very good at this game, but watching my hands defy my will, constantly reminding them to calm down, kind of makes me feel like a dad.
This may all be useless for your mood monitoring practice. Remaining mindful of these three points, though, keeps me outside of the terrible prison of my mind, free to pursue things that really are interesting to me, beautiful things. If you find yourself struggling, perhaps with compulsions like smoking (I recently quit) or drinking (in two years I've gone from a few cases a week to a few beers a week), maybe consider incorporating these points in your daily living. If you do, let me know how it goes.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
I have a proposal. Each of us should memorize a short poem which we feel might be used as a toast, reciting it whenever opportunity calls for it. I started last night with an Emily Dickinson poem which seems so perfect for the upcoming spring:
Forever honored be the TreeI had so much fun learning this poem that today, while trying to accomplish something useful, I gave up, and looking at my two cats on the porch wrote the following silly rhyme:
Whose Apple Winterwarn,
Enticed to Breakfast from the Sky
Two Gabriels Yestermorn.
They registered in Nature's Book
As Robins--sire and son--
But Angels have that modest way
To screen them from Renown.
'We are lions!' they thought as they roared in the sun.
And he pounced on a pigeon, and she said 'Well done!'
The Lord and the Lady, the Kitties of Strong
Feasted on feathery meat all morn long.
And then of a sudden from inside the house
Came the Queen in an apron and silky blue blouse
All a' whooping and shooing and swinging a broom
And the Lord and the Lady, their mouths stuffed with plume
Darted off to the river at the edge of the field
And from there they looked on to the queen as she kneeled,
And picked up the pieces of pigeon with care,
And to the Lord said the Lady, "Next time we'll share."