The fixation on imaginary “perfect storms” critiqued in last
week’s post is only one expression of a habit of thinking that pervades
contemporary American culture and, to a lesser extent, most other industrial
societies. I’ve referred to this habit
in a couple of posts in this series already, but it deserves closer attention,
if only to help make sense of the way that individuals, institutions, and whole
societies so often get blindsided these days by utterly predictable events.
Like several of the other themes already explored in this sequence, the habit of thinking I have in mind was explored by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West. His way of discussing it, though, relies on turns of phrase that don’t translate well into English, and philosophical concepts that were familiar to every reader in 1918 Germany and completely opaque to most readers in 2013 America. To make sense of it, I’ll need to reframe the discussion by way of an excursion into deep time, so we can talk about the difference between what can happen and what does happen.
Unlike the Marcellus shale, the Barnett shale, and some of
its other distant geological cousins, the Burgess shale doesn’t contain any
appreciable amounts of oil or natural gas. What it does contain is a vast
number of delicate fossils from the Cambrian period. It’s been argued that your
ancestors and mine are there in the Burgess shale, in the form of a tiny,
wriggling whatsit called Pikaia with a little strip of
cartilage running down its back, the first very rough draft of what eventually
turned into your backbone. There are plenty of other critters there that are
unlike anything else since that time, and it’s perfectly plausible to imagine
that they, rather than Pikaia, might have left descendants
who evolved into the readers of this blog, but that’s not what happened. Intelligent beings descended from five-eyed,
single-tentacled Opabinia were possible; they could have
happened, but they didn’t, and once that was settled, a whole world of
possibilities went away forever. There was no rational reason for that
exclusion; it just happened that way.
Let’s take a closer look at Pikaia,
though. Study it closely, and you can
just about see the fish that its distant descendants will become. The strip of
cartilage runs along the upper edge of its body, where fish and all other
vertebrates have their backbones. It didn’t have to be there; if
Pikaia happened to have cartilage along its lower edge, then
fish and all the other vertebrates to come would have done just as well with a
bellybone in place of a backbone, and you and I would have the knobbly bumps of
vertebrae running up our abdomens and chests. Once Pikaia came
out ahead in the struggle for survival, that possibility went wherever
might-have-beens spend their time. There’s no logical reason why we don’t have
bellybones; it simply turned out that way, and the consequences of that event
still constrain us today.
Fast forward 200 million years or so, and a few of
Pikaia’s putative descendants were learning to deal with the
challenges and possibilities of muddy Devonian swamps by wriggling up out of
the water, and gulping air into their swim bladders to give them a bit of extra
oxygen. It so happens that these fish
had four large fins toward the underside of their bodies. Many other fish at
the time had other fin patterns instead, and if the successful proto-lungfish
had happened to come from a lineage with six fins underneath, then amphibians,
reptiles, birds, and mammals would have six limbs today instead of four. A six-limbed body plan is perfectly
viable—ask any insect—but the vertebrates that ventured onto land had four, and
once that happened, the question was settled.
Nothing makes six-legged mammals impossible, but there aren’t any and
never will be. In an abstract sense,
they can happen, but in the real world, they don’t, and it’s only history that
explains why.
Today, another 400 million years later, most of the possible
variables shaping life in this planet’s biosphere are very tightly constrained
by an intricate network of ecological pressures rooted in the long history of
the planet. Those constraints, among other things, drive convergent
evolution—the process by which living things from completely different
evolutionary lineages end up looking and behaving like each other. 100 million years ago, when the Earth had its
normal hothouse climate and reptiles were the dominant vertebrates, the
icthyosaurs, a large and successful family of seagoing reptiles, evolved what
we now think of as the basic dolphin look; when they went extinct and a cooling
planet gave mammals the edge, seagoing mammals competing for the same
ecological niche gave us today’s dolphins and porpoises. Their ancestors, by
the way, looked like furry crocodiles, and for good reason; if you’re going to
fill a crocodile’s niche, as the protocetaceans did, the pressures that the
rest of the biosphere brings to bear on that niche pretty much require you to
look and act like a crocodile.
The lesson to be drawn from these examples, and countless
others, is that evolution isn’t free to do everything that, in some abstract
sense, it could possibly do. Between the limits imposed by the genetics of the
organism struggling to adapt, and the even stronger limits imposed by the
pressures of the environment within which that struggle is taking place, there
are only so many options available, and on a planet that’s had living things
evolving on it for two billion years or so, most of those options will have
already been tried out at least once. Even when something new emerges, as
happens from time to time, that doesn’t mean that all bets are off; it simply
means that familiar genetic and environmental constraints are going to apply in
slightly different ways. That means that there are plenty of things that
theoretically could happen that never will happen, because the constraints
pressing on living things don’t have room for them.
That much is uncontroversial, at least among students of
evolutionary ecology. Apply the same point of view to human history, though,
and you can count on a firestorm of protest.
Nonetheless, that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do in this blog
over the last seven years—to point out that historical change is subject to
limits imposed by the historical trajectories of societies struggling to adapt,
and the even stronger limits imposed by the pressures of the environment within
which that struggle is taking place; worse still, to point out that societies
have an equivalent of convergent evolution, which can be studied by putting
different societies side by side and comparing their historical trajectories,
and that this reveals otherwise untraceable constraints and thus allows meaningful
predictions to be made about the future of our own civilization. Each of those
proposals offends several of the most basic assumptions with which most people
nowadays approach the future; put them all together—well, let’s just say that
it’s no surprise that each weekly post here can count on fielding its quota of
spit-slinging denunciations.
As regular readers of this blog know, a great many of these
quarrels arrange themselves around the distinction I’ve just drawn. Whether
we’re talking about 2012 or near-term human extinction or the latest claim that
some piece of other of energy-related vaporware will solve the world’s
increasingly intractable energy and resource shortages, my critics say, “It
could happen!” and I reply, “But it won’t.”
They proceed to come up with elaborate scenarios and arguments showing
that, in fact, whatever it is could possibly happen, and get the imperturbable
answer, “Yes, I know all that, but it still won’t happen.” Then it doesn’t
happen, and the normal human irritation at being wrong gets thrown in the
blender with a powerful sense of the unfairness of things—after all, that
arrogant so-and-so of an archdruid didn’t offer a single solitary reason why
whatever it was couldn’t possibly happen!—to make a cocktail that’s uncommonly
hard to swallow.
There’s a reason, though, why these days the purveyors of
repeatedly disproved predictions, from economists through fusion-power
proponents to believers in the current end of the world du jour, so constantly
use arguments about what can happen and so consistently ignore what does
happen. It’s a historical reason, and it brings us a big step closer to the
heart of this sequence of posts.
When Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God to a mostly
uninterested 19th century, as I mentioned in an
earlier post in this sequence, he was convinced that he was doing
something utterly unprecedented—and he was wrong. If he’d been a little more
careful about checking his claims against what he’d learned as a classical
philologist, he would have remembered that the gods also died in ancient Greece
in the fourth century BCE, and that the rationalist revolt against established
religion in the Greek world followed the same general course as its equivalent
in western Europe and the European diaspora two millennia or so later. Put the materialist philosophers of the Greek
Enlightenment side by side with the corresponding figures in its European
equivalent, or line up the skeptical barbs aimed at Homer’s portrayal of the
gods and goddesses of Greece with those shot at the Bible’s portrayal of the
god of Christianity—by Nietzsche among others!—and the similarities are hard to
miss.
What’s more, the same thing has happened elsewhere. India went through its rationalist period
beginning in the sixth century BCE, giving rise to full-blown atomist and
materialist philosophies as well as an important school of logic, the Nyaya;
it’s indicative of the tone of that period that the two great religious
movements founded then, Buddhism and Jainism, in their earliest documented
forms were wholly uninterested in gods. The equivalent period in ancient China
began about a century later, with its own achievements in logic and natural
science and its own dismissal of formal religion—sacrifices and rites are
important for social reasons, Confucius argues, but to busy oneself excessively
with them shows that one is ignorant and unreasonable.
It’s a standard element of the trajectory of literate
civilizations through time. Every human society comes out of the shadows of its
origins well equipped with a set of beliefs about what does happen. Since most
human societies in their early phases are either wholly innocent of writing, or
have lost most of a former tradition of literacy in the collapse of some
previous civilization, those beliefs are normally passed down by way of the
oldest and most thoroughly proven system of information storage and transfer
our species has invented—that is to say, mythology: a collection of vivid, colorful stories,
usually in verse, that can be learned starting in early childhood and
remembered letter-perfect into advanced old age. Since the information storage capacity of
myths is large but not limitless, each myth in a mature mythology is meant to
be understood and interpreted on several levels, and learning how to unpack the
stories is an essential part of education as an adult in these societies.
For human societies that rely on hunter-gatherer, nomadic
pastoral, or village horticultural economies, mythology is amply suited to
their information storage and transfer needs, and it’s rare for these to go
looking for other options. Those societies that take to field agriculture and
build urban centers, though, need detailed records, and that usually means
writing or some close equivalent, such as the knotted cords of the old
Incas. Widespread public literacy seems
to be the trigger that sets off the collapse of mythic thinking. Where literacy remains the specialty of a
priesthood jealous of its privileges, among the ancient Maya or in Egypt before
the New Kingdom, writing is simply a tool for recordkeeping and ceremonial
proclamations, but once it gets into general circulation, rationalism of one
kind or another follows in short order; an age of faith gives way to an age of
reason.
That transformation has many dimensions, but one of the more
important is a refocusing from what does happen to what can happen. At the
time, that refocusing is a very good thing. Literacy in an age of faith tends
to drive what might be called the rationalization of religion; myths get
written down, scribes quarrel over which versions are authentic and what
interpretations are valid, until what had been a fluid and flexible oral
tradition stiffens into scripture, while folk religion—for the time being, we
can define that messy category “religion” in purely functional terms as the
collection of customary rites and beliefs that go with a particular set of
mythic narratives—goes through a similar hardening into an organized religion
with its own creed and commandments.
That process of rigidification robs oral tradition of the flexibility
and openness to reinterpretation that gives it much of its strength, and helps
feed the building pressures that will eventually tear the traditional religion
to shreds.
It’s the rise of rational philosophy that allows people in a
literate civilization to get out from under the weight of a mummified version
of what does happen and start exploring alternative ideas about what can
happen. That’s liberating, and it’s also
a source of major practical advantages, as life in a maturing urban
civilization rarely fits a set of mythic narratives assembled in an older and,
usually, much simpler time. It becomes
possible to ask new questions and speculate about the answers, and to explore a
giddy range of previously unexamined options.
That much of the story is hardwired into the historical
vision of contemporary Western culture. It’s the next part of the story,
though, that leads to our present predicament. The wild freedom of the early
days of the rationalist rebellion never lasts for long. Some of the new ideas that unfold from that
rebellion turn out to be more popular and more enduring than others, and become
the foundations on which later rationalists build their own ideas. With the collapse of traditional religions,
in turn, people commonly turn to civil
religions as a source of values and meaning, and popular civil
religions that embrace some form of rationalist thought, as most do, end up
imbuing it with their own aura of secondhand holiness. The end result of the rationalist rebellion
is thus a society as heavily committed to the supposed truth of some set of
secular dogmas as the religion it replaced was to its theological dogmas.
You know that this point has arrived when the rebellion
starts running in reverse, and people who want to think ideas outside the box
start phrasing them, not in terms of rational philosophy, but in terms of some
new or revived religion. The rebellion
of rationalism thus eventually gives rise to a rebellion against rationalism,
and this latter rebellion packs a great deal more punch than its predecessor,
because the rationalist pursuit of what can happen has a potent downside: it
can’t make accurate predictions of the phenomena that matter most to human
beings, because it fixates on what can happen rather than paying attention to
what does happen.
It’s only in the fantasies of extreme rationalists, after
all, that the human capacity for reason has no hard limits. The human brain did
not evolve for the purpose of understanding the universe and everything in it;
it evolved to handle the considerably less demanding tasks of finding food,
finding mates, managing relations with fellow hominids, and driving off the
occasional leopard. We’ve done some remarkable things with a brain adapted for
those very simple purposes, to be sure, but the limits imposed by our ancestry
are still very much in place.
Those limits show most clearly when we attempt to understand
processes at work in the world. There are some processes in the world that are
simple enough, and sufficiently insulated from confounding variables, that a
mathematical model that can be understood by the human mind is a close enough
fit to allow the outcome of the process to be predicted. That’s what physics is about, and chemistry,
and the other “hard” sciences: the construction of models that copy, more or
less, the behavior of parts of the world that are simple enough for us to
understand. The fact that some processes
in the world lend themselves to that kind of modeling is what gives rationalism
its appeal.
The difficulty creeps in, though, when those same approaches
are used to try to predict the behavior of phenomena that are too complex to
conform to any such model. You can make such predictions with fairly good
results if you pay attention to history, because history is the product of the
full range of causes at work in comparable situations, and if A leads to B over
and over again in a sufficiently broad range of contexts, it’s usually safe to
assume that if A shows up again, B won’t be far behind. Ignore history, though,
and you throw away your one useful source of relevant data; ignore history,
come up with a mental model that says that A will be followed by Z, and insist
that since this can happen it will happen, and you’re doomed.
Human behavior, individual as well as collective, is
sufficiently complex that it falls into the category of things that rational
models divorced from historical testing regularly fail to predict. So do many other things that are part of
everyday life, but it’s usually the failure of rational philosophies to provide
a useful understanding of human behavior that drives the revolt against
rationalism. Over and over again, rational philosophies have proclaimed the
arrival of a better world defined by some abstract model of how human beings ought
to behave, some notion or other of what can happen, and the actions people have
taken to achieve that better world have resulted in misery and disaster; the
appeal of rationalism is potent enough that it normally takes a few centuries
of repeated failures for the point to be made, but once it sinks in, the age of
reason is effectively over.
That doesn’t mean that the intellectual tools of rationalism
go away—quite the contrary; the rise of what Spengler called the Second
Religiosity involves sweeping transformations of religion and rational
philosophy alike. More precisely, it demands the abandonment of extreme claims
on both sides, and the recognition of what it is that each does better than the
other. What comes after the age of reason isn’t a new age of faith—not right
away, at least; that’s further down the road—but an age in which the claims of
both contenders are illuminated by the lessons of history: an age of memory.
That’s why, a few centuries after the rationalists of
Greece, India, and China had denounced or dismissed the gods, their heirs
quietly accepted a truce with the new religious movements of their time, and a
few centuries further on, the heirs of those heirs wove the values taught by
the accepted religion into their own philosophical systems. That’s also why,
over that same time, the major religions of those cultures quietly discarded
claimsthat couldn’t stand up to reasonable criticism. Where the Greeks of the Archaic period
believed in the literal truth of the Greek myths, and their descendants of the
time of Socrates and Plato were caught up in savage debates over whether the
old myths had any value at all, the Greeks of a later age accepted Symmachus’
neat summary—“Myths are things that never happened, but always are”—and saw no
conflict at all between pouring a libation to Zeus the Thunderer and taking in
a lecture on physics in which thunderbolts were explained by wholly physical
causes.
That state of mind is very far from the way that most people
in the contemporary industrial world, whether or not they consider themselves
to be religious, approach religious beliefs, narratives, and practices. The absurd lengths to which today’s Christian
fundamentalists take their insistence on the historical reality of the Noah’s
ark story, for example, in the face of conclusive geological evidence that
nothing of the sort happened in the time frame the Biblical narrative provides
for it, is equalled if not exceeded by the lengths to which their equal and
opposite numbers in the atheist camp take their insistence that all religions
everywhere can be reduced to these terms.
