Saturday, July 31, 2021

Thoughts for the Day: Saturday 31 July 2021

 



John Horgan’s The End of Science (1996) was subtitled Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. In Grammars of Creation (2001), George Steiner, one of the last European cultural mandarins, laments that “We have no more beginnings” and concludes that there is “in the climate of spirit at the end of the twentieth century, a core tiredness.” “We are, or feel ourselves to be, latecomers.” And in From Dawn to Decadence (2001), an account of the last five hundred years, the historian Jacques Barzun—who died in 2012 at the age of 104—presents a picture of early twenty-first-century man undergoing what he calls the “Great Undoing,” the West’s self-immolation at the hands of chat shows, gangsta rap, and fashionable deconstructionism.

Authoritarianism, by contrast [to fascism], allows independent economic and social bodies, forms of limited representation, and a degree of freedom for religion. Its enemy is democratic participation. It also stifles opposition by violence and fear but stabilizes itself by relying on passive acquiescence in a trade-off of social quiet for loss of political role. The fascist is a nonconservative who takes anti-liberalism to extremes. The right-wing authoritarian is a conservative who takes fear of democracy to extremes.

In general, a researcher always has a choice of which studies to select and which to reject in working toward a hypothesis. In this process, it’s hard to overcome the essentially human instinct to select only those observations that conveniently support one’s own hypothesis while rejecting those that do not.

In our modern world, ritual is often thought to encourage a slavish conformity, but the Brahmin ritualists [at the beginning of the Axial Age of India] had used their science to liberate themselves from the external rites and the gods, and had created a wholly novel sense of the independent, autonomous self.

The coherence of Nixon’s own views has not generally been recognized, and for an important reason: this would involve the admission that American liberalism and the emulative ethic cohere—inhere, rather, in each other. All our liberal values track back to a mystique of the earner.

Detecting trustworthiness is a basic life skill in small groups which depend on sharing and reciprocity, and so people have developed good bullshit detectors. The best way around other people’s bullshit detectors is to believe what you say. If your social reputation and group identity depend upon believing something, then you will find a way to believe it. In fact, your brain will help you by readily accepting and recalling congenial information while working to bury and ignore uncongenial information.

“What was most important wasn't knowing the future—it was knowing how to react appropriately to the information available at each point in time.”

Friday, July 30, 2021

Thoughts for the Day: 30 July 2021

 


History, as I have argued, is (and was, and will be) more than the recorded past; but the remembered past, too, is variable and imperfect, smaller as it is than the entire past.

Americans need what Niebuhr described as “a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us for the resolution of [history’s] perplexities.”

You can have bipolarity without war. You can even have bipolarity without a cold war. That’s because the original Cold War was triggered by international tensions of a kind difficult to imagine today.

Ann-ping Chin, Trevor Ling, Joseph Needham, and Alan W. Watts—and Lao Tzu—show us the more ecological mode of thought prevalent in the East.

So self-betrayal —this act of violating my own sensibilities toward another person—causes me to see that person or persons differently, and not only them but myself and the world also. When I ignore a sense to apologize to my son, for example, I might start telling myself that he’s really the one who needs to apologize, or that he’s a pain in the backside, or that if I apologize, he’ll just take it as license to do what he wants.

Paul longed for his fellows to be “spiritual people,” to know of their union, to live from the mystery of their “twoness,” as the psychologist of religion, Jeffrey Kripal, calls it: there’s a conscious part of us that is “merely human” in space and time, living an individual life; and part of us of which we can become more conscious that is “spiritual,” outside of space and time, sharing in the mind of God.

While uncertainty can quite reasonably provoke fear— fear of the unknown— it can also give us grounds for hope, because it creates a mental space in which we can imagine positive possibilities.

What the Constitution of Knowledge does not allow is treating criticism, offense, or emotional impact as equivalent to physical violence, or protection from emotionally hurtful expression as a right.

Thursday, July 29, 2021

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 28 July 2021

 


You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

“Every feature that is added and every bug that is fixed,” Edward Tenner points out, “adds the possibility of some new and unexpected interaction between parts of the program.”

We tend to accept that centralized institutions can use their power to simplify complex problems and can hire the finest minds and best technologies to analyze and tame them—technologies like advanced statistical or computer models that will find optimal solutions. But institutional power doesn’t always produce simplification; large, centralized organizations tend to be bureaucratic, cumbersome, and inefficient.

Most opinion leaders in rich countries are drawn from this elite, and their exposure to the difficulties confronting the majority of the world’s population, which lives in poorer societies, is limited and extremely selective. So, not surprisingly, they often underestimate these societies’ requirements for ingenuity, misjudge the kind of ingenuity they need, and overestimate their ability to supply it. The super elite is also a largely self-enclosed and self-referential group—making it vulnerable to internally generated intellectual fads, which it then disseminates to the rest of the world’s population.

Heat. Everywhere there was heat. It surrounded and penetrated me. It defined the world around me. Sweat gushed out of my body, running in rivulets down my chest and the small of my back, gluing my shirt to my skin. Everything was tangibly hot: tables, chairs, and pens were weirdly warm to the touch, because everything outside my body was hotter than my body. The water in my bottle felt like soup on my tongue. Any movement of the air—a draft, a slight breeze—was a relief; while any movement of my body or mind was an effort. Physical action, thought, even consciousness itself seemed to take place in slow motion, weighed down and dulled by the relentless, inescapable heat.
N.B. Homer-Dixon is describing his experience in India, and having lived there for nearly two years, I can relate. But then given current trends, perhaps we're all headed there.

Like imagination and consciousness, language seems to be one of those things that Whitehead said were ‘incapable of analysis in terms of factors more far-reaching than themselves’.

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

Wednesday, July 28, 2021

Henry Adams & the Making of America by Garry Wills

 

Published in 2005; my second reading

It's my custom to pick a reading in American history to celebrate the Fourth of July each year. In browsing my bookshelf, which is amply stocked with Garry Wills, and my eye caught this title. I'd bought it and read it when it was published in 2005, so I thought I could dip into it to meet my quota of patriotic reading.

Wrong.

I can't "dip into" Garry Wills. There are few living authors of whom I've read--and re-read--so much. I was like a fish thinking I'd just take a nibble of that juicy worm and avoid the hook. No way with this expert angler of readers. And as I read and quickly realized that I wasn't going to read just a portion of this work, I also realized that I was really getting a twofer by doing so: extended quotes of Henry Adams along with a guided tour from Wills. Indeed, as Wills explains, the book serves as a mini-biography of Adams and a guided tour of Adams's great work, The History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison (1801-1817), originally published in 1889 and1891 and consisting of nine volumes. Is this long venture worth it? Wills describes Adams's work here as ""the greatest prose masterpiece of non-fiction in America in the 19th century." And as to Wills, I'll venture the opinion that he's one of the outstanding prose stylists of the later 20th and early 21st century America, as well as serving as one of our most astute contemporary political observers and historians (among other achievements). This is a perfect match.

The first main contention Wills argues is that History is misread (if read at all) and overshadowed by Adam's The Education of Henry Adams (written in 1906 although not published until 1918). Wills describes The Education as a"world-weary and pessimistic view of the nation and its politics." But the History was written by Adams when he was in his forties and reveals "a man optimistic, progressive, and nationalistic, instead of one detached, arch, and pessimistic [compared to the author of The Education]. Even the prose begins to look different, more energetic, flexible, and engaged, less mannered and self-conscious." Wills also shatters the contention, surprisingly wide-spread, that Adams was out to defend the honor of his great-grandfather John Adams and grandfather John Quincy Adams. Not so. Adams wasn't keen on his grandfather or his New England heritage, nor was he sour about Jefferson. Finally, historians who know better often read only the opening, which consists of a social history of the United States in 1800. While some may praise this part of the work as a pioneering effort of social history, they ignore the remainder. But such a limited reading, as Wills describes it, consists of "the chrysalis without the butterfly, the windup without the pitch." With these three misconceptions dispatched, Wills then walks the reader through Adams's History and related works (biographies of Albert Gallatin, John Randolph, and an unpublished biography of Aaron Burr). 

Early on Wills alerts the reader that because of Adams's ability as a stylist that he'd quote Adams at length and frequently. This allows the reader to appreciate the basis of Wills's assessment of Adams's skill as a stylist, and the reader also comes to appreciate Adams as a keen observer of politics (even remotely in time). Wills devotes as a chapter to each of the nine volumes of the History, thus providing a history lesson along with an assessment of what Adams accomplishes. But it is near the conclusion the book that Wills comes to reflect on the project as a whole the reader strikes the richest vein of observations and assessments. 

 As to the history itself, Wills agrees with Adams about the significance of the Jeffersonian reign (which includes Madison's two terms). He writes: 

ADAMS HAS TOLD a dramatic story in his nine volumes—how a nation stagnating at the end of Federalist rule shook itself awake and struck off boldly in new directions in the first sixteen years of the Jeffersonians' rule. In one way, this picture corresponds with accepted notions. Jefferson had, after all, promised a "second revolution." But his aim was initially a conservative one—to return to the original Revolution, which had been betrayed by the Federalists. He would draw back from the world, hobble federal power, let states and merchants conduct their own affairs. He promised to be even more wary of foreign entanglements than President Washington had been. He would recall embassies, put the navy to sleep, get rid of all taxes but customs duties, and give himself little to do. Adams agrees that there was, indeed, a second revolution—just not the one Jefferson thought he would be conducting. Yet he gives Jefferson the credit for aspiring to a new revolution, whatever its shape. Jefferson did not betray his principles in riding these new energies. It just proved impossible to return to the days of the first revolution, whether that was conceived in Federalist or Republican terms.
. . . . 

Politics had moved on. Old political alignments no longer applied when the New Englander John Quincy Adams was serving as secretary of state to the Virginia president James Monroe, and when a Connecticut Supreme Court justice like Joseph Story wrote opinions indistinguishable from those of the Virginia chief justice John Marshall.

Wills also describes the multiple feats of historical accomplishment and unique insights that Adams reveals in his work: 

What sets Adams's History apart, in its own time and in ours? There are a number of original features. It turns upside down the previous consensus on the period covered, so drastically that many have missed the point of the History entirely—which is not that Republicans became Federalists in office, but that they led a breakout from both ideologies. Adams brings to bear on his daring thesis many kinds of evidence, archival and cultural, that had not before been so deftly interwoven. The book also thinks internationally while telling a national tale. No other general account of the Jeffersonians' achievement tracks so carefully the international events that were affecting and being affected by what went on within the borders of the United States. Adams was bucking an American tendency of long standing—the sense that America's special destiny could be worked out without foreign aid or hindrance.

This last observation is expanded by Wills:

If one were to ask for the two leading figures in American history during the first sixteen years of the nineteenth century, the normal answer might be Jefferson and Madison. Adams, on the other hand, thinks they were Jefferson and Napoleon. Jefferson's actions were taken in the context of endless joustings with Bonaparte, or attempts to distance himself from him, or to escape the shadow of alleged collaboration with him. Even in electoral politics, he had always to cope with the charge of Francophile leanings toward Napoleon. The fate of Louisiana and the Floridas was dependent on Bonaparte. The War of 1812 was in large part prompted by his maneuverings to pit the Anglophone nations against each other. His power was continually felt or feared or flattered by the Jeffersonians. He, more than anyone or anything, forced Jefferson out of his original plan of disengagement from the world.

. . . .

To emphasize from the outset the importance of Napoleon to the Jeffersonian administrations, Adams introduces him in the History's first volume with a Miltonic flourish: "Most picturesque of all figures in modern history, Napoleon Bonaparte, like Milton's Satan on his throne of state, although surrounded by a group of figures little less striking than himself, sat unapproachable on his bad eminence; or, when he moved, the dusky air felt an unusual weight"  

Wills pivots from the importance of Napoleon to the American story to a comparison of Adams with his contemporary Leo Tolstoy, who also contends with Napoleon in his monumental War and Peace (although Wills notes, there is no evidence that Adams had read War and Peace). Wills writes:  

To say that Jefferson and Napoleon are the contending giants in Adams's History is not, oddly enough, to say that he is writing "great man" history. These two are like Napoleon and his Russian rival, General Kutuzov, in War and Peace, men doing they knew not what, borne along by their people, by their foes, by accident or by concatenating factors seen and unseen—so that they accomplish very often the exact opposite of what they intended. Napoleon abets or baffles Jefferson into policies that succeed despite Jefferson's will. But Napoleon, too, is baffled over and over while he acts with an illusion of control—in Egypt, in Saint Domingue, in Spain, in Russia, at the English Channel. Adams and Tolstoy—contemporaries who were writing about the same Napoleonic years—are the supreme ironists of their subject.

 While working on the History in 1883, Adams reflected on how his leading figures were being led:  

"In regard to them I am incessantly forced to devise excuses and apologies or to admit that no excuse will avail. I am at times almost sorry that I ever undertook to write their history, for they appear like mere grasshoppers, kicking and gesticulating in the middle of the Mississippi River. There is no possibility of reconciling their theories with their acts, or their extraordinary foreign policy with dignity ... My own conclusion is that history is simply social development along the lines of weakest resistance, and that in most cases the line of weakest resistance is found as unconsciously by society as by water. "

As Wills notes, there is an irony here with both Adams and Tolstoy, both focus on a "great man" (Napoleon) but seems him only a conduit. Wills elucidates: 

Why, with this view of things, do Adams and Tolstoy dwell on their respective leading figures? Tolstoy answers that some men are better fitted to be the instruments of "the unseen hand" of history. They are used because they are usable. Napoleon was a force field in which all the hopes and angers and fears of the French Revolution, and resistance to it, and its aftermath, played themselves out. Men followed or resisted him because the same electrical currents were running through them, not because he was giving them the energies they lent him. In the same way, Adams's Jefferson is the only vehicle for a national vision of any sort in America. He offered "the line of least resistance" to forces breaking out of the old ideologies, out of the material constraints and mental blinders of the past.

And while both Adams and Tolstoy see providence in events, each has his own source: Tolstoy in the traditional providence of God's will and Jefferson in the "the people" and "the future." Thus the Jefferson of the revolutionary era could change course so drastically as Jefferson the president. This comparison of Adams and Tolstoy and their respective accounts lead Wills to his own insightful observations about the course of events: 

But whatever one thinks of Adams's own views, anyone can learn from the construction of the History how to study the interplay of the many factors—national and international interests, personal and impersonal influences, planned and unplanned events—that go into a period of great social change. Why and how did the Jeffersonians make a nation? Because they had to. They could not make or maintain a government fitted to their time without doing so. Their own acts and those prompting or responding to their acts insensibly but irresistibly bore them along. That is why Adams is right to see continuity between the Jefferson and the Madison administrations, all of it the work of the Jeffersonians. Party-making (with patronage, the Twelfth Amendment, the war on the judiciary), war-making (with Tripoli or with England), the supplanting of state militias with a standing professional army, territorial expansion achieved or attempted (in Louisiana, Florida, or Canada), a vigorous campaign of internal improvements, a central financial system, intellectual and technological innovations, a religious tolerance across regional boundaries—all these worked together in nation-making.  
But literally uncountable agencies were also necessary to the unforeseen result. To identify many of these factors is not to know them all or have one binding explanation for the outcome. Tolstoy's novel moves on many levels, with a highly personal story to tell, but it reminds us that much will never be told because much will never be known:  
"The more deeply we search out the causes [of a war], the more of them we discover; and every cause, and even a whole class of causes taken separately, strikes us as being equally true in itself, and equally deceptive through its insignificance in comparison with the immensity of the result, and its inability to produce (without all the other causes that concurred with it) the effect that followed.8 This is the irony of history as Adams traces it. It tells us how the Jeffersonians wrought better than they knew while they thought they were doing something else. In the end, they made a nation." [War and Peace, 688.]  
This is the irony of history as Adams traces it. It tells us how the Jeffersonians wrought better than they knew while they thought they were doing something else. In the end, they made a nation.

After this mediation on history, Wills concludes with some pertinent observations on American politics. First, he describes the lingering desire to divide Americans into "Jeffersonians" and "Hamiltonians," although the History establishes that "the Jeffersonian era" described in the History effectively erased such this distinction.  Wills effectively mocks his contemporaries who still attempt to deploy this simple binary today. Second, and of special note, we have our infatuation with the Founders:

The Founders have the air of demigods. Such piety has, of course, prompted revisionist attempts to bring the idols back down to our level, but they float magically back up again. . . . [The approval of the Founders] is the seal of approval endlessly sought. We feel that we not only honor but need the Founding Fathers. Without them we become illegitimate children.

We are always seeking their approval (as if they could grant it from the grave). Thus we are fed ideas of "original meaning," "strict construction," and other such nostrums of contemporary conservatives. Wills uses no less a personage than James Madison--the single most important figure in the drafting of the Constitution and one of the authors of The Federalist--to take down this nonsense:

Madison, who drew up the rough draft of the document [the Constitution] but disagreed with key portions of its final promulgation, said that it was a first effort that should be "liquidated" (clarified) in practice. It was like a blueprint that should be a guide but not a prison to contractors working from it. In Federalist No. 37, he criticizes what we know as "fundamentalist" readings of the Bible to attack fundamentalist readings of the Constitution:    
"All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most mature deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications. Besides, the obscurity arising from the complexity of objects, and the imperfection of the human faculties, the medium through which the conceptions of men are conveyed to each other, adds a fresh embarrassment [obstacle]. The use of words is to express ideas. Perspecuity therefore requires not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriated to them. But no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many equivocally denoting different ideas. Hence it must happen that, however accurately objects may be discriminated in themselves, and however accurately the discrimination may be considered, the definition of them may be rendered inaccurate by the inaccuracy of the terms in which it is delivered. And its unavoidable inaccuracy must be greater or less, according to the complexity and novelty of the objects defined. When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful, by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated. Here then are three causes of vague and incorrect definitions: indistinctness of the object, imperfection of the organ of conception, inadequateness of the vehicle of ideas. Any one of these must produce a certain degree of obscurity. The convention, in delineating the boundary between the Federal and State jurisdictions, must have experienced the full effect of them all."

Thus, as Wills argues, what constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment" in 1790 (for instance) must be given a newer (and better) reading based on contemporary standards (and yes, our idea of what constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment" for crimes is better than theirs). That we can (and must) "misread" the Constitution was given its greatest model by Lincoln's "misreading" of the Declaration's statement that "all men are created equal." Jefferson never meant to include slaves or women by his statement, but the progress of the republic--a moral progress--demanded this "misreading." Wills concludes this portion of his argument:

This or that. Either-or. Adams says both-neither. History is far more complex than the interplay of two (or many) ideologies. Chance, mistakes, opportunism, progress, reassessments, forgetfulness—all of them and more concatenate something less neat than anyone envisaged.

. . . .

There was no going back to Jefferson's or Hamilton's "original intent." Jefferson's "agrarian virtue" was inextricably entangled in slavery. Hamilton's commercial elitism was at odds with the populist direction of the country. Some analogues or extensions of what they said can be found—just as broadening of constitutional meanings can—but constantly trying to revalidate what was time-bound as if it were eternal leads to quibbling and waste of intellectual energy. It diverts attention from what is really happening in the world. It constantly cycles back to childish illusions. Does this mean that the past has nothing to say to us? Certainly not. Lincoln learned from the Declaration without being slavish toward it. The founding achievement is rich with lessons, of problems overcome, of ways to address obstacles, or brave first attempts at what was insoluble in the Founders' time but not necessarily in ours.

Wills and Adams do agree that one Founder provides the soundest foundation for emulation--the founder who was the least intellectual: George Washington. Wills quotes historian Joseph Ellis about Washington's place: 

Whatever minor missteps he made along the way, his judgment on all the major political and military questions invariably proved prescient, as if he had known where history was headed; or, perhaps, as if the future had felt compelled to align itself with his choices. He was the rarest of men, a supremely realistic visionary, a prudent prophet. [Joseph Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), pp. 202–3.]*

Wills concludes with this thought: 

There is much to be learned from the past—but it is better learned from the pragmatists than from the ideologues. Washington would have been the least surprised or disoriented to see what the nation looked like after the Jeffersonians had made it. 

 Thus ends my nibble at the worm. But I'm delighted that I swallowed it (again) hook, line, and sinker. Two for the price of one--a real bargain for a gem. 

*I recently was at an art museum in San Francisco that included a portrait of Washington. The caption indicated that Washington was adulated as a Founding Father, but then it cautioned that he owned slaves for many years. True, and not inconsequential, but small, and insulting to me that I didn't know this already and the implication that I needed this moral correction. We don't honor those before us for their perfection--none have it--but for the worthy accomplishments. Heaven save us from small-minded, moralistic historians and pedants! Thus my enthusiasm for the likes of Adams (to his detriment, he essentially ignored slavery) and Wills. 

 






Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 28 July 2021

 

The best entryway into Ophuls work


Ecological scarcity is not a problem that can be solved within the old framework but a predicament or dilemma that can be resolved only by a new way of thinking. The ultimate outcome of this new philosophy will be a new political order.


What we complacently identify as a lack of political will is often, in reality, a lack of social will: we are all part of the problem, and our societies as a whole, not just our leaders, are ineffective in providing solutions to the challenges we face.

N.B. This was written about 20 years before COVID--and yet so pertinent.

Why am I so concerned about haze? To me, it signifies something more general than just pollution or atmospheric processes. As haze cuts us off from vivid skies and landscapes, it attenuates our ties to the wider, external reality in which we are embedded. It is just one of the many ways we are constructing—inside that wider reality—an artificial and self-referential world.
N.B. Is there anywhere in the U.S. not currently experiencing haze as a result of the great fires in the West. We have it here in Colorado, even without any great fires locally.


The main aspect of this conception is that the Idea, no longer recognized as an independent entity, finds its realization in the movement of history as such. Since then, all modern political theories which lead to totalitarianism present an immersion of an absolute principle into reality in the form of a historical movement; and it is this absoluteness, which they pretend to embody, which gives them their “right” of priority over the individual conscience. It is only logical that the rise and the functioning of all one-party systems follow the basic pattern of “movements.”

Biography’s limits are established by natural process. Thus, a biography must include events in its subject’s life some of which do not embody thought – sensations, desires, feelings – together with the ‘the accidents of animal existence’ referred to earlier, some of which do embody thought, but are included because they may entertain, instruct or divert the reader.
N.B. Collingwood effectively wrote his own biography in his Autobiography. And notwithstanding his critique, biographies have been and are being written about him. He does set a high bar for them.

The hard right is not fascist or, save on the fringes, protofascist. Fascism was nourished by the themes and anger of the unreconciled right in the 1880s and 1890s but was itself historically specific. Although of the right, fascism is not on the right, being outside the left-right spectrum of the liberal-democratic world. It sprang up in Italy in the 1920s, after a ruinous world war without European winners. It relied not only on a cult of the charismatic leader and a totalizing vision of society, but also on a unifying Bolshevik enemy and a single, mass party.



Tuesday, July 27, 2021

Thoughts for the Day: Tuesday 27 July 2021

 

A prophetic voice


Absent sophisticated and responsible gatekeepers, public discourse is subject to Gresham’s Law. Bad ideas and information drive out good; saner voices are drowned out by a digital mob of charlatans, schemers, extremists, and trolls disgorging misinformation, disinformation, and venom. Yes, “elite” gatekeepers have biases, blindspots, and axes to grind, but these can usually be kept in check by competing gatekeepers. To expect a good result from throwing the crooked timber of humanity together into one giant arena, instead of allowing the truest timbers to set standards and make rules, is a kind of madness.

If this necessary distance is midwife to the world of Machiavelli, it also delivers the world of Erasmus. The evolution of the frontal lobes prepares us at the same time to be exploiters of the world and of one another, and to be citizens one with another and guardians of the world. If it has made us the most powerful and destructive of animals, it has also turned us, famously, into the ‘social animal’, and into an animal with a spiritual dimension.

From the left hemisphere came the working out of the fruits of natural observation into useful predictions of behaviour of natural bodies, the codification of laws, the creation of maps, the development of some aspects of mathematics, the introduction of monetary currency, the further evolution of written language (at this point starting for the first time to be written, as now in the West only, from left to right), and in general the systematisation of knowledge.

Whether humanity can move up to a transcultural identity in which science and a new kind of post-religious spirituality can reintroduce the fully individuated consciousness of the individual to a multidimensional cosmos is the question of our time.

Until the invention of antibiotics in 1928, Western medicine couldn’t deliver much better results than indigenous medicine anywhere else in the world. In many cases, going to a shaman or witch doctor offered just about the same likelihood of recovery as seeing a Western doctor.

Descent takes a while. We grow down, and we need a long life to get on our feet.