Deep Ecology of the Self

I just spend a couple of days solo camping in the Finger Lakes National Forest (NY State rocks!). OK, so it was solo car camping. But still, you know, there might have been a bear or at least a really angry squirrel out there.

The time alone and the hikes got me thinking again about Walker Percy's "Lost in the Cosmos" and his cogent analysis of the dilemma of the self-conscious self. Just to recap from a couple of posts ago: Percy looks at the fundamental problem that all of have - bound in time as self aware beings for whom our own nature, our own core being, must remain forever opaque to ourselves. In response to this problem we have, over time, tried different strategies to deal with the dilemma. In various ways we have tried to create meaning, sense and a lived experience of connection with the world. There is a high feeling in us that reaches out to the Universe we find ourselves born into. From that core experience we have tried, with varying degrees of success, to find union with the world via religion, art and science. But for us "moderns" each approach alone has been found wanting. Each one has led to an inevitable sense of disappointment, both individually and for the culture as a whole.

In a discussion with the friend who led me to this book I began thinking about what might be possible now, at this fecund moment in history. In my book I was arguing for ways that science can reveal a sacred character of human experience. In light of Percy's unpacking of the problem, I think what might be needed, and possible, is an approach which might be called "Deep Ecology of the Self". Deep Ecology is a philosophical approach to setting humanity into its planetary context. It takes the idea that all life has inherent value and that, in light of this value, we must dramatically rethink our approach to human interactions with the rest of the global ecosystem. Links have been drawn between the stance of the Deep Ecology and the philosophy of the 17th century dutch thinker Spinoza with his identification of God with the natural world (that is a very coarse simplification). I include a link to the Wikipage on it Deep Ecology here.

One of the relevant principles of Deep Ecology is the tenet that:

"appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great."

How does this relate to the self and its dilemma? Our problem as moderns is that we are unmoored. Science has shown us the grand scale of the Cosmos and then, supposedly, told us that we don't matter for dog poo in it. Most traditional religions have been trotting behind science trying to understand where traditional scriptural-based beliefs can fit into the intricately woven natural world science uncovered. The self, each of us, falls between the cracks. We are desperate for meaning but denied recourse. Deep ecology tells us that life in its context has inherent value. Without debating the merits of this proposal (which I think we all intuitively feel) you can see how the self might find its proper home with the Universe this world-view recovers. Each one of us is not a master of the Cosmos given the world to do with as we wish (be fruitful and multiply, etc etc). Instead we are of-the-world. Embodied in salt-water tears and the sweet fragrance of our young children's' kisses. No different, no better, no worse than the rest of life.

This approach holds great promise to me even as the mere sketch I provide here. It can hold the truth of science's understanding from astrobiology to genetics to social dynamics. It can hold our deepest spiritual yearnings for connection, place and meaning. It echoes what Stuart Kauffman has written in the Reinvention of the Sacred and it stands alongside all that the movement towards sustainability asks of us.

We have a home. We have a place. We have just forgotten it. Now, as we face the challenges of climate change and resource depletion, we can remember and rebuild self and society to honor both.

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Thank you!

When Time Became Money

I am doing research for the new book and reading the most amazing material on the emergence of modern time consciousness in Europe of the Middle Ages. The key development was, of course, the distribution of public clocks. The beginning was the town square - the bell tower. Then, as the centuries progress, clocks make their way into manufacturing institutions and homes and finally onto our bodies in the form of pocket watches. The transition was slow but with it came a sweeping, radical and all encompassing re-imagining of time that has accelerated into the crazed life-in-15-minute-intervals human universe we inhabit today.

Perhaps the most important transition in all of this was the lifting of time from the natural cycles of daylight and human or animal work/exhaustion. In its place came an abstract time, the hour was a unit devoid of context and with this stripping of embodied duration came the ability to turn time into a commodity. Time could become money in a simple equation that equated two abstract de-contextualised units (duration and currency). So began wage slaving and the world, our world, has never been the same. Time economies emerged and with it a wave of "isms": Taylorism; Marxism; Existentialism (no, I don't think the last one is a stretch).

Now here comes the interesting point - that same abstracted time was the very lifeblood that allowed the new science of Newton, Laplace and others to recreate both heaven and Earth in the image of a powerful all-encompassing universal physics. The time of celestial mechanics and the time of the mill worker were the same - both new, both invented, both transformative.

Human invention and human discovery. Cultural artifacts and scientific truth. How do these overlap? Does one always lead the other or can they change places like horses on the track?

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Thank you.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Have

I have been traveling for a while; a book reading in Chicago; meeting with a former grad student in SF;a great drive up the west coast to Seattle. I never cease to be amazed how beautiful and varied the US is from one side to another. The trip gave me time to meet some great people, have some very far reaching conversations and read from some unexpected sources. There is one book in particular that I want to pass along.

Lost in the Cosmos by the novelist Walker Percy is a faux self-help book which is, actually, a highly insightful exploration of the problems of the self. Using a series of self-tests written with tongue firmly held in cheek Percy unpacks the fundamental dilemma of being conscious through the slippery and ever shifting nexus of "the self".

A couple of quote from Lost in Cosmos

As soon as the self becomes self-conscious - that is aware of its own unique unformulability in its world of signs - from that moment forward it can not escape the predicament of its own placement in the world.

The self in a world is rich or poor accordingly as it succeeds in identifying its otherwise unspeakable self, e.g., mythicaly, by identifying its otherwise unspeakable self with a world-sign, such as a totem; religiously, by identifying yourself as a creature of God.
But totemism doesn't work in a scientific age because no one believes, no matter how hard he tries, that he can become a tiger or a parakeet.
In a post-religious age the only resources of the self are self as transcendent and self as immanent.

You don't have to agree with all Percy says to see sharp point of his emphasis. Assuming we are the only species on the planet which has granted this evolutionary gift of self-consciousness and, acknowledging the precarious position our use of this gift has placed us in, Percy's insights are timely and useful.

My special thanks to Scott for pointing me to this book.

Sixty Symbols: Figures of Physics

The last post was very long so this one will be very short. My friend Robert Pincus (cloud physicist and gastronome) recently forwarded this site called Sixty Symbols to me and I think its wonderful. Produced by the University of Nottingham its an innovative attempt to take people through the world of symbols in physics and astronomy.

There are separate video clips for a range of physics' most important symbols. Things like

z: cosmological redshift
h: Planck's constant (quantum physics)
c: the speed of light

and lots of others which occur in fonts I don't have access to.

The symbols of physics carry a kind of compressed meaning which can reach an almost poetic level sometimes. I have always found equations profoundly beautiful because, like poems, there is an economy in which just a few short strokes of the pen embraces entire universes of dynamics, relation and potential. It is interesting to note in this regard that Wolfgang Pauli dreamt in the symbols of physics. In his 30 year long correspondence with Jung he came to believe that these symbols were like archetypes in their own way (the history of physics has yet to absorb this side of Pauli's life). Pauli saw the symbols as almost mythic in their ability to embrace the world. That might be going too far but if you think there is something unusual happening in poetry then one can argue the same characteristics of mind and the world happen in mathematical physics as well.

I hope you enjoy the site. I am slowly working my way through the videos. Some are better than others but the idea is a grand one indeed.

After the Race: Futures in Space Real and Imagined.

On December 19 1972 Apollo 17 lifted off the launch pad on a pillar of flame. As the crushing weight of acceleration pushed the three astronauts into their seats neither they nor anyone else could guess that this would be humanities last trip to the moon. Just two and half years after Neil Armstrong’s small but epoch making step onto the lunar surface, Apollo would be canceled for lack of interest. Three more missions had been planned. They were all sacked as Congress and the President contented with a failed war in Vietnam and domestic unrest at home. The times were changing.

In the three decades which followed Apollo, NASA continued to achieve stunning successes in the domain of robotic exploration. Jupiter and Saturn were explored from orbit. Mars was visited by a flotilla of spacecraft including robotic landers. The Hubble Space Telescope and other orbiting astronomical platforms opened unimagined windows onto the Cosmos. These were all tremendous and lasting achievements. They may, in fact, be our nation’s most important contributions to science. Still something seemed missing. For many observers, the conquest of space by robots, irregularly shaped boxes of electronics with solar panels, seemed less than what the great visionaries of the 20th century had in mind. In the decades since Apollo something seemed lost. The dreams of lunar colonies, Mars expeditions and a burgeoning interplanetary culture waiting just ahead of us were differed to a later date.

It was in the arena of manned space flight that the vision stalled. After Apollo, NASA and the other space agencies focused not on the conquest of space, but merely on the exploitation of Near Earth Orbit. NASA’s manned effort went into the Space Shuttle and International Space Station. Both these projects were ambitious technologically but lacked the clear focus and larger vision of Apollo. In the case of the Space Station it was hard for scientists and the public to understand what the expensive, decade long project was built for other than doing it “because we can” and because it gave contracts to aerospace corporations. A growing sense of drift enveloped the manned space program throughout the 1990s. When the Shuttle Columbia exploded on reentry in 2002 killing all on board it was on a mission whose scientific objectives including “mixing paint with urine in zero-gravity, observing ant farms, and other comparable activities—all done at a cost greater than the annual federal budgets for fusion energy research and pancreatic cancer research, combined.”

The loss of an ambitious vision for human space exploration can be seen as the loss of a greater myth for the future. It is no surprise that the cancellation of Apollo paralleled a change in the stories science fiction. At about the same time the manned space program stalled, our narratives of possibilities began to shift their emphasis. Science fiction always responded to the realities around it. Looking at its imaginings we can chart a similar arc from an ever expanding future to a diminishing sense of constraint in the midst of high technology.

The USS Enterprise of Star Trek and the giant Saturn V rockets of the Apollo program where born of the same mythic vision of who we were and what we might become. In its particular manifestation, Star Trek was a creation unique to the United States and to western civilization in it’s the long trek from the first Greek scientists to the dreams of Enlightenment rationalists. It doesn’t take a PhD in cultural studies to notice how closely Star Trek’s United Federation of Planets looks like a United States of the Universe. Still, its grand imagining of a united human future free of (internal) warfare and endless exploration was compelling. It captured the optimism embodied by the Apollo program. While the show was canceled after a few seasons it would go on to become iconic, the perfect representation of the grandest vision of what science might allow us to become.

Star Trek was, of course, not the only dream of a boundless future which awaited us as scientific advances opened the doors to the conquest of space. In fact it was a culmination of that dream. Throughout the 20th century science fiction books and movies charted the landscapes of imagination and many of its mappings showed us worlds of pure promise. In the wake of World War II and the stunning advance of science, the fiction in these science fiction stories began to seem less insular, less the domain of geeks, and more part of a collective cultural dream. The pervasiveness of its images in popular culture made it into a shared myth.

The classic “Foundation Trilogy” by Isaac Asimov was a good example of post-war optimism in what the human expansion of space would mean. Published in 1949 Asimov’s trilogy went on to sell millions of copies and spawn a continuing series of sequels and prequels. In Asimov’s future the Milky Way Galaxy has been entirely colonized by humanity. A billion inhabited worlds support a human population of 100 trillion souls. In was not a utopia. The cycles of civilization, with their rise and fall, operated even in galaxy spanning cultures. In spite of these “realities” Asimov had captured the essence of the myth of a boundless future by presenting readers with a vision of nearly infinite human expansion. We would continue forever.

What tied these fictional Universes together was their background of shiny omnipotent technology. The main characters lived on massive, powerful starships. Every ship had its crew of technicians standing before banks of blinking lights in perfect control of machines that could navigate the void or shape worlds. The Universe still contained dangers in these stories (often driven by our own inescapable flaws) but what mattered for the myth of the future was that humanity had left its nest. We had become something more, something greater.

Throughout the 1960’s a kind of standoff had been achieved between visions of a boundless space-faring future and the apocalyptic nightmares of nuclear war. Even with the grave and ever-present danger of nuclear conflict, the culture of post-WWII America and Kennedy had been one of hope. Apollo had been the most concrete manifestation of that optimism in where our future might take us. By the early 1970s that hope had begun to fade and with it new, more claustrophobic visions of the future began to emerge. In time these would come to dominate the science fiction landscape. Shiny utopias gave way to the dirty futures of dystopia.

The first earth day was held on April 1 1970. Eight years before that Rachael Carlson had published “Silent Spring” a warning that pollution and pesticides where damaging the natural world. The first visions of environmental degradation entered cultural consciousness just as Apollo was winding down. Other threads were then woven into a changing vision of the future. During the 1970s the United States experienced two oil shocks. For the first time people confronted the possibility that the fossil fuel party they had been attending for seven or eight decades might not continue indefinitely. The loss of US industrial prowess to Japan, Germany and others and the humiliation of the Iran hostage crisis drove hope into cynicism. In spite of renewed economic growth in the 1980s and 1990s concerns about environmental degradation continued with global warming beginning to impinge on popular consciousness. Even the engines of growth in 1980s and 90s drove fears that manifested themselves in science fictions’ vision. While globalization, biotechnology, and the rise of computer networks allowed some imagine new futures of unlimited frontiers, others saw something far more forbidding. In popular consciousness it seemed that something had turned. The most pervasive visions of the future seemed stuck in an ever descending spiral.

One particularly influential vision emerged in 1980s in a form called Cyberpunk . Beginning 1984 William Gibson, an American expatriate living in Vancouver, became the genre’s founder with a series of books both visionary and prophetic. It was Gibson who single-handedly invented key features of the terminology and imagery we take for granted in our real web-laden culture. “Cyberspace” was his term and his invention. The world he saw was a dirty future, a Darwinian high-tech nightmare overrun by global corporate elite wielding more power than nations. Below them moved the vast masses feeding at the bottom of an information economy that had morphed into a kind transcendent alternate reality. Gibson imagined a claustrophobic dystopia of human beings modifying their bodies in the service of technology and endless sprawling cities where decay mixed with hyper-tech innovation.

The universe of “Cyberpunk” was been given many forms by authors such as Bruce Sterling (considered as a co-founder of the genre with Gibson), John Shirley and others. Cyberpunk themes have also been explored by non-science fictions writers. Feminist author Marge Peircy’s 1991 book He She It combined themes of environmental destruction with the degradation of human life under a corporate dominated information economy. In film, cyberpunk ethos and vision become dominant including critically acclaimed smaller films as well as box office mega-hits. Blade Runner predated Gibson’s first book Neuromancer by two years but was later hailed as capturing the essential, dark vision of Cyberpunk. Most notable and noteworthy were the wildly successful “Matrix” series. In the universe of the Matrix human beings have lost a war with Artificial Intelligence, machines of our own creation. In the ultimate act of environmental destruction humans “scorch the sky” to deny machines solar power. In response, the victorious machines reduce humanity to a power source. Human beings become mere bio-batteries made docile through enforced connection to a virtual world that that recreates the late 20th century. The Matrix takes dystopia and the human/internet interface to extremes. The radical popularity of the Matrix films (the series took in more than 1 billion dollars) is testimony to the pervasive influence of the Cyberpunk vision. As a whole, the myth of the future had gone to the dark side.

It is worth noting that space travel is often not an essential part of the cyberpunk vision. Like the real world we live in, the conquest of space stalled in these stories. Space travel was confined to Near Earth Orbit or to outposts of industrial exploitation which seem hellish and far away. In some stories nations have completely given up on their space programs and it is either large corporations or smaller private groups which push forward. In cyberpunk the grand vision of exploration in space has been, for the most part, replaced with a darker vision of survival on Earth.

Of course science fiction forms a diverse set of voices. Some familiar with its forms could take issue with the sketch I have outlined here. Along with the darker vision of cyberpunk there were writers and directors exploring more optimistic and hopeful futures. Star Trek itself gained its popularity in mid 1970s, years after its cancellation. Still it is difficult to argue with the fact that that in the last 30 years of the 20th century the mood of our future visions has changed. That change paralleled a loss of the mythic narrative which accompanied the conquest of space. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century we find ourselves facing a very different world and a very different sense of the future. Those who oversaw the heady acceleration of science in the last century had reason to see the future as boundless. Now we face boundaries which can not be escaped. The change in the myth of the future is testimony to the greater change in our understanding of what science is as a cultural force. More importantly, the shift in our myths of the future allow us to see constraints which Science has created for that future.

(this essay is modified from The Constant Fire)

Vanishing Time

It is the essential mystery. Subject of a thousand books, ten thousand papers and an uncountable number of late night conversations among philosopher's, poets, priests and physicists (not to mention just about everyone else).

Time.

Since Time, Cosmology and cultural history are the subject of the new book I am working on I have been reading some really wonderful stuff on everything from the development of the modern mind to the history of night. One of the most fascinating arenas for thinking about how human beings' encounter with Time has changed is the history of the clock.

Mechanical clocks, those with escapement mechanisms, did not begin to make a public appearance in earnest until the 1300's. It was in that century that public clocks, often with bells for ringing the hours, began to appear on towers in public squares. The enormity of this change can not be underestimated as it encompasses every aspect of human being, every dimension of human consciousness.

What was the day like for most people before these machines with their resonant bells appeared? Was it guided solely by the natural rhythms of daybreak, mid-day hunger, the long shadows of late afternoon and the gathering stillness of dusk? If so, think of the change in experience, the vital movement through the day, that came with the ringing of the bells and spinning of the clock's hour hand (minute hands do not appear until later). The day is now shattered, broken into metered pieces that can be parsed and sold. The body, both personal and environmental, is exchanged for the machine in the most intimate experience of the flow of time. Before the clock you looked to inward and outward to experienced world to gauge the passing of time. After the clock you wait for the machines' signal to tell you where in the day you stood.

With this change the night also begins its transformation. This clockwork begins to become the dominant metaphor for the Universe entire. The wheel of the sky was, after all, the one place where metered time made sense for millennia even if it was only for an astronomical/priestly elite. The advent of public clocks made everyone's time as rational as the astronomers. And yet, in making this rational (and rationally managed) time the norm, astronomy, physics and eventually cosmology would be transformed. As the first giant clockworks are lifted into place in towers across Italy, the winds whisper Issac Newtons name.

Whose Time do we live now? Where did it come from? Who ordained its manner and its fashion? The character of even this most intimate of experiences is, in some very definite sense, socially constructed even as it reflects the deepest truths of physical law. Is there a tension between these two poles between which we might pull apart some new perspective on our embodied essence?

The Intersection of Thoughts and Things

Do our cosmologies, our fundemental physics, our grandest philosophical/scientific ideas reflect the rarefied domains of mind and pure reason or do they live through the very real, very dirty process of living, embodied, in the world? The best answer to this question, at least for the most famous example of relativity theory, comes directly from Galison's book "Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Map's". As Galison summarizes

When Einstein came to Bern patent office in 1902 he entered an institution in which the triumph of the electrical over the mechanical was already wired to reams of modernity. Here clock coordination was a practical problem (trains, troops, telegraphs) demanding workable, patentable solutions in exactly his area of greatest professional expertise: precision electromechanical instrumentation. The patent office was anything but the lonely deep-sea lightboat that the no-longer young Einstein had longed for as he spoke to the Albert Hall audience in the dark days of 1933. Reviewing one patent after another in the Bern Office, Einstein had a grandstand seat for the great march of modern technologies. And as coordinated clocks were paraded by they were not traveling alone. The network of electrical chrono-coordination provided political, cultural, and technical unity all at once. Einstein seized on this new, conventional, world-spanning simultaneity machine and installed it at the principled beginning of his new physics.

It was, in Galison's eyes, no accident that Einstein finds himself in the patent office which itself was no physics backwater. There was an intersection of thoughts and things, culture and creation, politics and philosophy swirling around the invention of relativity theory. As Galison says

Staring through the metaphorical we can find the literal, through the literal we can see the metaphorical.

I think this is not just true of the emergence of relativity but of all our grand discoveries. Our highest abstractions are woven through with the concrete of breath drawn upon breath and the clash of humans in the sweat and mire of daily life. This is the sacred as profane, the transformation of embodied life into distilled essence and back again. This is our wondrous gift in being human.