Side Effects

Fans of beards, being alive,  the Republican Party, and short posts will enjoy this.  And it's only three minutes long.  

Lucky

In one of David Attenborough's many nature documentaries, he showed a fungus which entered the brain of an ant, took control of its motor functions, forced it to climb to the top of a plant, paralysed it, consumed its body, and then exploded out of the back of its head to scatter spores onwards to reproduction of the fungus, and presumably the demise of more ants.  It was utterly terrifying - a zombie creature struggling against the thing controlling it, aware that it is no longer in charge of matters.  I felt real sympathy for the poor ant, which was surprising given the number of both old fashioned and chemically advanced ways I have successfully murdered ants and their offspring in the past.  

The Lancet Fluke described by Daniel Dennett in this talk is a different creature, but has a similar M.O.  Control the ant in order to reproduce.  Dennett's talk is fascinating, although a bit rushed as he realises he's running out of time, but let's be kind and say that this is the mark of an expansive and wide-ranging intelligence. 

Dennett makes an interesting comparison between the Lancet Fluke and memes.  On this account, like flukes, memes get into our heads and control what we think and do.  If this is right, then it's reassuring that we don't notice it happening and don't feel like we're being controlled by something 'other' than ourselves (assuming that there is a self to be controlled).  I particularly like the idea of unawareness, as it makes me feel less sorry for the ant, and therefore allows me to carry on pouring kettlesful of boiling water into their nests.  

Dennett has I think explored this theme to a certain extent in his books (memes and their effect on us, rather than pest control), but it's where he takes the idea of memes next that's the most interesting, and the most frustrating because it's so rushed.   Noting that it was germs, not bullets, that truly conquered the new world and destroyed indigenous cultures, he compares memes to germs.  Our memes (freedom of speech, equality of sex and sexuality, all the things we associate with western civilisation*) are fantastic replicators and are successfully taking the place of other memes in other cultures.  This is destroying other cultures, and, he hints, reducing the cultural biodiversity of the world.  Like blankets infected with smallpox, television, the internet, movies, all our cultural products, are spreading our ideas into the minds of others.  

Is this a good or bad thing?  Dennett offers no view, other than we need to be aware of this happening, and be less surprised when cultures react against ours and our memes, sometimes violently.  

On the one hand, we must believe that our memes are the right ones.  Liberty, tolerance, respect - these are good things.  We should try and spread these ideas around the world, we should consider them better than the alternatives, especially as we at least try to base them on reason rather than superstition.  Yes we should exercise care, think about the ways that people react to fundamental change in their culture, and not try and drop democracy out of  plane, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to shed light on the world.  

On the other hand, as Dennett hints at, this could just be our memes talking (or causing us to talk), and maybe we're not so different from the ant after all.    So we need to be vigilant, rigorous, and (to steal Dennett's joke) try to ensure that what we think is not just a fluke.  

Falls to Climb

The quote at the top of this blog is from "Ferocious Minds - Polymathy and the new Enlightenment" by Damien Broderick.  

Broderick is a science fiction and popular science writer, editor of sci-fi journals, and is described in lots of places as a genius.  I've no real way of telling whether this is true or not, but I've enjoyed everything I've read by him, which I admit is not a huge amount.  If you want to know more, you can see an unofficial website (link should be over there > ), or ask Wikipedia the all-knowing.

Ferocious Minds is a really interesting book.  It starts off with a description of what Broderick thinks we are experiencing - a revived enlightenment, better poised to deliver on the hopes of the original version.  Broderick is unashamedly a fan, a believer in progress and the benefits that reason can bring, and the first section of the book is a rallying cry for those already signed up:

  

"I will argue that today's reviving enlightenment, despite such fashionable rumours to the contrary [refers to a quoted dismissal of progress by the Chapman brothers], is no recuperative sham, let alone a path to doom and ruin.  To the contrary: it is our single, best highway to deliverance from a future of accidental or malign oppression." 

For that rhetoric, the book is surprisingly thin on justification for this belief.  I don't think that's because such a justification can't be made, it's rather that Broderick's enthusiasm for the writers, scientists and thinkers he discusses overtakes him very early in the book, and it turns instead into a race through the best of popular science (and more technical, less popular science).   We run through evolutionary biology, evolutionary linguistics, evolutionary everything, AI, nanotech, ufo abductions, sci-fi, feminism, the paranormal, stem-cell research and much much more in around 200 pages packed with citations, quotes and links to academic essays available online.  

The book is a primer, a new Enlightenment 101 containing lots of signposts for the would-be polymath (or, as Steve Jones has it, the civilized person) to follow, wherever their curiosity takes them.  It's a catalogue of wonderful, exciting and energising topics and minds, gingerbread trails disappearing off in myriad directions through the whole forest, and it's really well written and worth reading.  

It also raises an interesting question about the definition of a polymath, and the status of expertise.  True polymaths are rare, and it's much more likely that people are experts in one field or another.  It is a popular concern that we have so much knowledge now that it is impossible for people to know everything, and that we will have to defer to expert A and expert B for answers on their specialist subjects.  The tyranny of the expert beckons, a true technocracy.  This topic deserves, and will get, more attention here, so for now I simply raise the point that there ought to be a way through, for people to have wide-ranging knowledge and enjoy a diverse intellectual life, and be able to make assessments of views of experts without themselves being expert.  If the best science writers can make complex theories and the history of the development of those theories intelligible to the lay reader, then I think there is reason enough to believe that the polymath can continue to flourish and have fun in the process.  Don't stay up too late watching it though.  

Begin the Begin

In his 1991 essay, 'The Third Culture', the writer and publisher John Brockman discusses what he sees as a shift in public discourse, away from the traditional literary intellectual towards the scientific and empiric . He writes:

"The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are."

For Brockman, the really important questions about life are unlikely to have their answers in the pages of the New York Review of Books, the LRB, or similar learned publications. He has little time for literary intellectuals, arguing that a "1950s education in Freud, Marx and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s". Traditional intellectuals are often ignorant of the most important intellectual achievements of the last 100 years, and sometimes even proud of it.  

This sort of intellectualism is, Brockman says, "chiefly characterised by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost."  While that may be an ironic quotation to post on a blog, where I hope to get comments aplenty, it is surely right.   Intellectual discussion in the traditional sense is a kind of dance, to display that you understand how theories interrelate and run together, that you know who critiqued who, and to show that your selected beliefs fall within the acceptable boundaries of polite discussion (or for extra frisson, just outside!).  Like a complicated parlour game where the object is to guess the rule, it is a world that sets up complex barriers to entry to the discussion, intimidating aspirants into believing that they too must be able to hold their own on Lyotard, Foucault and Kristeva if they are to be considered intelligent.  You might well be able to explain quantum theory, but have you read Sappho in the original?  

This kind of writing and thinking often tends towards the pessimistic.   Brockman's excellent website, www.edge.org, sends an annual question to a huge list of interesting and intelligent people, mostly scientists.  The 2007 question was 'what are you optimistic about?' and the responses are informative, surprising, and above all uplifting.  Inspired by this, Prospect magazine in the UK tried a similar exercise with a host of public intellectuals and academics, and received contributions that for the most part could easily pass for suicide notes.  Doom and gloom were foreseen everywhere, the world on the road to ruin, technology, science and progress the drivers toward destruction.  

This isn't a criticism of Prospect, but of the majority of the contributers who have criticism as the main weapon in their mental arsenal.  For some of them, criticism is their sole weapon.

 

Instead of a curiosity about the world, and a desire to understand it and possibly improve it, all they can do is criticise it, analyse it for faults, point out its failings.  It's the kind of writing that tends towards what Dave Krieger calls 'disasturbation' - idly fantasising about disasters without properly assessing their likelihood or attempting to do anything to prevent them.  

The second effect of the traditional intellectual world is that it can intimidate people away from art.  Plenty of literary theory, for example, is complete rot, but it can easily trick people into believing that they have come up short in some way in trying to understand art.  The assumption is always that if you don't like James Joyce, there must be something wrong with you.  Perhaps you don't fully understand his significance.  Maybe if you'd read the Odyssey (in the original), then you would.  Never is the suggestion made that the author may have failed, and a snobbish disdain prevails for authors who work hard to make themselves clear and understood.   As for critics who don't go in for the hardcore world of literary criticism, such as  John Sutherland or Nick Hornby (and, heaven forfend, McSweeney's or the Believer) are treated like embarrassing relatives, the lunatics in the attic. 

It is a real shame, but people are put off from experiencing and enjoying art by a sense of not fully understanding it, whereas in fact what they  actually don't understand is the industry of theory that has formed around art like mould between tiles.  And why should they understand it?  It's utterly inexplicable.  

There is, however,  a danger that in dismissing the kind of intellectual that he does, Brockman could be read as dismissing art as well.  The term 'the third culture' was inspired by an book called 'The Two Cultures' by the physicist and novelist C.P. Snow.  Snow talks in similar terms about the differences between scientists and literary intellectuals, but hoped that a third culture could emerge where the two groups would overcome the communication gap between them.  Brockman explicitly rejects this conception of the third culture, instead arguing that, having given the literary intellectuals a chance to join in, and seen it spurned, the scientists have simply bypassed them, and taken over the playing field: "the achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: they will affect the lives of everyone on the planet."  Science has won, it seeks the truth and has had astounding success. The literary intellectuals have failed, and public discourse must be about science if it is not to be irrelevant.  Brockman's essay is a polemic, and he takes on his opponents robustly.  He obviously feels that there is a balance to be redressed.  Nevertheless, despite the force of his argument, I don't think that he intends to exclude art and literature along with the literary intellectuals (a number of the contributors to Edge are artists, writers, musicians, and even actors) .  

If Brockman does want to dismiss art, I think he makes a mistake.  While it is true that a world in which the potential of science and technology to rapidly redefine what it means to be human leaves discussions like this looking elitist and pointless, art and literature do have something to say about life and what it means to be human, and they can (and arguably should) be informed by the best understanding of the world that science provides.  While science may have the best explanations, it doesn't have all the answers - ought does not follow is, and there remains a space for art to engage in the third culture, as the best art surely does.  

I think that the third culture is the best one we can aspire to, but I also think it should be the one that Snow hoped for.  I love art and literature, and I'm also fascinated by science.  And I agree with Brockman that "third culture activity is evidence that many people have a great intellectual hunger for new and important ideas and are willing to make the effort to educate themselves."  

This blog is part of my ongoing effort to educate myself, and it is a modest attempt to contribute to the third culture.  Talking about the third culture, the biologist Steve Jones says "If you aren't someone who can talk in general terms about scientific as well as nonscientific issues, you aren't civilized."  I aspire to being civilised, and you'll find on this blog discussions of science written by someone who is not an expert, but is not scientifically illiterate either, and discussion of art and literature by someone who is glad not to be an expert in these fields. There'll occasionally be stuff about cycling too.  

I hope you enjoy all of it.