Musings on Origins (and Destinations)

I’ve just started a book called Brilliant Blunders, by Mario Livio.  He brings up a point that I thought I’d throw out there.  He says that “natural selection does not have any long-term ‘strategic plan’ or ultimate goal.  (It is not teleological.)”  Diagrams of species' ancestors and evolutionary journey is more like a bush than a ladder.  Whereas Gerald Schroeder argues that DNA gives parameters within which randomness can happen, Livio argues that “natural selection leaves quite a bit to be desired in terms of design.  (Wouldn’t a visual field covering all 360 degrees or having four hands be nice?...)  So even if certain characteristics confer a fitness advantage, as long as there is no heritable variation that achieves this result, natural selection could never produce such characteristics.  Imperfections are, in fact, natural selection’s unmistakable fingerprint.”  It’s like a failed ontological argument. 

1.  I can think of a ‘better’ body to have; a better design.  

2.  I can’t achieve this better body with my existing genes.

3.  We are either created by a poor designer, or have come to our existing bodies via a different path.

In other words, we’ve gotten this far because, by chance, our journey of survival has led us this far.  Other species, such as bacterias, Livio argues have been just as successful at existing.  He even points out that, genetically, humans have been outdone.  He gives the example of a water ameboid named Polychaos dubium that has 670 billion base pairs of DNA compared to our 3 billion or so. 

So is it wrong to think of life as having teleology?  I can definitely see Livio’s point.  However, don’t leaps up complexity (social/psychological/moral) imply a direction towards something—even if that something defies definition?  If we are evolving towards pre-intellectual reality of Quality laterally, might that not by definition mean we will evolve and approach ‘higher’ planes of existence non-linearly?

Re: Teddy

Nate wrote:

I'm on vacation this week so I have a little extra time for things like reading the Bhagavad-Gita and throwing these ideas back and forth. Sure do love that you found that Salinger excerpt. I forgot about that one. Which story was that?

I see what you're saying about the Structure/Improvisation relationship. And I do think that structure is just as teleologically driven (right word choice?) as Improvisation for the reasons we've stated. So in the age of empire, it makes sense to say Just Be. And, as you argue, there is surely a counter-current whereby one must also be eating of the Tree of Abstraction or else drift into anarchy. That said, I love the fact that the God of scripture seems to have a feeling of affection for Life that goes beyond a mere prescription for balance. Whether it's God's preference for Abel's sacrifice over Cain's; crazy Jacob over responsible Esau, or Jesus saying that children hold the key to the kingdom; when push comes to shove, God of scripture seems to prefer the Lord of the Flies to Towers of Babel; anarchy to civilization. But what if Love is not on one side or the other, but is, as Sam Lewis would say, Deep Magic? I get what you're saying about selfless love tending to be more abstracted than spleenish desire for babies and boobs, but maybe that doesn't have to be so? Maybe the difference between Krishna and Jesus is that Krishna says that we must free ourselves from attachment so that we can see clearly and thereby be humane to one another, while Jesus had an intrinsic (spleenish?) attachment to and empathy with the unattractive. In this light, Love would seem to humanize the spleen while at the same time subverting the empire.

If that's so, then the two trees really aren't enough. Life's better than Knowledge, but both are necessary, but neither are enough. Maybe love is the force behind the Big Bang.

********

Yeah...  Salinger's story is called Teddy.  Teleology is right on.  And I certainly gravitate towards the anti-institutional stories in Scripture.  They stand out, however, because the background is a litany of law and structures.  Jesus was a radical, obliterating the thrust of the OT.  That's what makes him so likable.  He not only smashed an old paradigm, but dynamically tried to establish a new one.

I like the idea that when push comes to shove, err on the side of anarchy rather than civilization.  I would venture to say, Love rather than Justice.  Kindness rather than Fairness.  I've used this illustration before, but I see a moral parallel to Newton vs. Quantum physics.  95% of the time, Newtons laws work just fine taking care of the vast majority of decisions and actions.  It's only in the margins usually the macro or micro that we need to use Quantum physics to make sense of things.  The parallel to morals is that the law works 95% of the time.  Don't steal.  Don't lie.  Don't murder.  Don't oppress.  All those things we learned in kindergarten also apply.  Put things back from where you got them.  Don't use more than you need.  Share.  Don't cut in line.  Don't fight.  But then there are all those times we find ourselves where the law just doesn't quite fit the reality.  We need to think in quantum morality.  Sin boldly.  When push comes to shove, choose Life. 

Pirsig came to a parallel complexity of how to fit Love in the system.  Like most religions and philosophies, some sort of trinity always rears its head.  For Pirsig, there was something behind the dynamic reality and static reality.  This was his Quality, the pre-intellectual Reality that is behind everything.  But he couldn’t help noticing the kinship dynamic had with quality and thus he would capitalize Dynamic quality.  I think because he believed the dynamic first comes from Quality, and then the static shapes and sustains it.  I believe this is directly related to the huge fight in the church centuries ago when there was disagreement whether the Spirit flowed from the Father and not the Son or from both. 

I think what this would bear on the discussion of Love, is that, depending on your semantics, Love could be the source of the Big Bang and everything else.  Pirsig’s Quality, in other words.  Life, then would have a ‘closer’ connection with love since it would ‘flow’ from Love and then ‘beget’ Knowledge. 

Oh, and I really like “spleenish attachment to and empathy with the unattractive.”  I need more of that.

Teddy

Talk about timing…  I just finished re-reading Salinger’s Nine Stories a couple days ago.  Here’s an excerpt from the last story.  It’s a 10 year old genius talking.

                “Okay,” Teddy said.  He was sitting back in his chair, but his head was turned toward Nicholson.  “You know that apple Adam ate in the Garden of Eden, referred to in the Bible?” He asked.  “You know what was in that apple?  Logic.  Logic and intellectual stuff.  That was all that was in it.  So—this is my point—what you have to do is vomit it up if you want to see things as they really are.  I mean if you vomit it up, then you won’t have any more trouble with blocks of wood and stuff.  You won’t see everything stopping off all the time.  And you’ll know what your arm really is, if you’re interested.  Do you know what I mean?  Do you follow me?”

                “I follow you,” Nicholson said, rather shortly.

                “The trouble is,” Teddy said, “most people don’t want to see things as the way they are.  They don’t even want to stop getting born and dying all the time.  They just want new bodies all the time, instead of stopping and staying with God, where it’s really nice.”  He reflected.  “I never saw such a bunch of apple-eaters,” he said.  He shook his head.

Let me also re-blog Nate’s comment:

If I may paraphrase where I think we're on the same page and then try and finesse my language a little to see if the differences may actually be less than they appear:

The Creation Story is not a systematic metaphysic. It is a rhetorical tool intended to help people live better. The message has a historical/sociological dimension as well as a psycho-spiritual dimension. The historical sociological dimension is cautionary of "civilization and progress" (see Edward T. Hall for a great explication of how this ties into the idea of abstraction). The psycho-spiritual dimension is cautionary of internal abstraction, whether conscious or unconscious.

I buy the argument that this is what was "intended" by the story "as it was written" which is so much more helpful to me than how I was raised, linking The Fall to disobedience, pride, or Original Sin.

You argued that even if that's the case, there is still another side to the story, not explored in the Creation narrative, which should be cautionary of the Tree of Life. You illustrated the danger of Life with the brutality of nature.

This point was triggered by a slip of my tongue when I said that civilization was associated with violence, as illustrated Biblically by Cain's murder of Abel. I should not have said violence. I should have said "power/coercion." Yes, your chickens peck and hump each other. But the more civilized farmer rips their heads off and makes them into a delicious meal. Hamas lobs a couple bottle rockets into some parking lots. The more "civilized" Israel sets their world on fire.

So far, no disagreement, but let me try one here: you associated Life with the dynamic and Knowledge with the static. I think you put love on the knowledge side of the ledger. I think both trees might both be propulsive (if not dynamic). I think of biological evolution as being driven by Life. I think of technology, power, language, etc. as being driven by Knowledge.

Back to agreement now: as you say the propulsion of both trees is chronically out of balance, leading to extreme dissonance. If that's so, then we must somehow recalibrate. The way Jesus recalibrated was to subvert empire by calling its bluff and letting it expose its own rot.

Here's a link to a song I wrote about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyV-XMOa16s

 ********

I like the power/coercion vs. violence distinction.  As a farmer, I may give a great deal less pain to the chicken than a predator does, but I have controlled all parameters of their life from day one to the day of their death.  If the chickens had some sort of free will, this would definitely be the more subtle but far more pervasive violence.  I think to extend this analogy to Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the real comparison is not just Israel’s ability to kill a thousand Arabs to their one casualty, but rather it’s their systematic coercion/power over the Palestinians’ daily life.  They’ve essentially (you might say poetically) embodied the Nazis’ spirit that continues to plague them, though maybe not as they expected.  They have made the Palestinians third rate citizens, stripped of them of basic rights from water to land to even movement.  The walls the Israeli’s have built around the Palestinian cage are far more violent than any chicken structure I’ve ever built. 

Here are my thoughts on love being on the abstract sign of the ledger.  This might be old school thought, but it still makes a lot of sense to me that love, (at least the kind that goes beyond hormonal, whether sexual attraction or maternal instinct—especially the more ‘un-natural’ love for the marginalized and the least of these),  is dependent on free will.  And when one exerts one’s will, I see that as on the abstraction side of the ledger.  Exerting will, for me is more than just following instinct or base desire without thought.  To exert will seems to involve abstracting what one desires and then manipulating one’s environment to accomplish whatever it is.  So when my wife and I are having a spat, I have to dig deeper than the immediate emotion and use my will to access what I abstract is the better tactic than lashing back like some cornered animal and hurting someone I love.  Clear as mud?

I still need to think more about both trees being propulsive.  My gut reaction is to refer back to my posts Sin Boldly and Gestalt.  I was trying to explain how I believe dynamic aesthetics drives scientific knowledge, particularly for the leaps into new paradigms.  Knowledge, it would seem, would run on that initial momentum of the leap, slowly and incrementally (and essential) filling out the structure of the new paradigm.  Chesterton’s madness is that logic locks us into whatever system we hold.  It is a force or power, you could say, but one for sustaining and building a lasting structure.  To use a concept I was just reading about in the New Yorker, the disruptive innovations, whether they are successful or not, are in contrast to companies that change incrementally.  And by definition, the innovations are not predictable by knowledge.  They are supposed to be inspired new technologies that change the playing field.  So language and technology, despite being a type of abstraction, could go in a vast number of different directions, but are propelled forward by certain aesthetics that crystalize and catch on.  However, 99 times out of 100 the innovation doesn’t latch on to anything sustaining and thus dissipates.  Sounds like evolution all over again. 

Power, however, makes me pause.  Especially power associated with coercion.  If the static does have a drive, or goal, transcending whatever paradigm it’s trying to sustain, it seems it would be coercion.  Systems, whether analytic, political, societal, religious, etc… are about control.  Somehow it seems maybe this drive for control is a static propulsion.  Certainly the message to let go and just be is as relevant in this context than it would ever be.

Am I pounding a dead horse yet?  Anybody else got another angle on the two trees?

And great song, Nate.

RE: Ignorance is Bliss

So Nate, at first your comment wasn’t showing and now it is, but I’m reblogging it here with some thoughts.

Wow. Just wrote a whole screed and then hit publish and then the computer timed out. I'll try again, but it sure won't be as good. Anyway, I seem to be at the point in this little dialectic where I repeat myself over and over again. Maybe another angle will emerge from this, but in the meantime, bear with me as I repeat my arguments again because it's fun!
So I'm not saying that people consciously bandy about ideas or invent languages and that's a big problem for our mental, spiritual, and societal health. And I'm not saying that Big Data analytics or computer modeling are by definition such terrible things.
But suppose I had just watched families turn into clans, tribes, nations and empires on the strength of violence, ambition, and networks--and that I wanted to write an Origins story that ran counter to the prevailing myths that glorified progress. I would think about what distinguished People from other animals. What is this thing that propels and sickens us? It's not intellect exactly. It's not disobedience. It's not pride. It's something to do with our capacity for abstraction (consciously or unconsciously). But it's hard to articulate, so the only way to get at it is to juxtapose it against something else (Tree of Life) and as a rhetorical devise to urge people to eschew this poisonous thing (Tree of Knowledge) in favor of it. The Genesis writers take the theme ever further. In the next chapter, God declares a preference for pastoralists (Abel) to the more civilized agriculteralists (Cain). Unsurprisingly, Cain kills Abel because civilization is associated with violence. Then there's the tower of Babel which speaks for itself. In a world like ours with communal, sectarian, and political fault lines (abstractions all); in a world where my own identity is an infinite regression of telescoping categories; God says STOP. Let go. Just be.
The story so deep though, because it's more than just about society and the history of civilization. It's also about intimacy, fear, and dislocation. So it becomes a very personal story as much as it is an allegory about history.
Do you see that I'm not saying that intellectuals are worse off than non-intellectuals? Non-intellectuals can be just as poisoned by abstraction (nationalism, pornography, etc.) as anyone else.

OK, so I’ve been writing this for a few days, typing out a few sentence here and there between a thousand other things.  My thoughts are very disjointed and I wanted to work on this to help it flow and relate better to itself, but I might never get around to posting this.  So think of this kind of like a collage of thoughts…

Great stuff, Nate.  I’ve tried to say similar things.  I think I’m also finding the nuances that I differ with.  But first I want to revisit exactly what abstraction is, which I think you are exactly right in distinguishing it from intellect primarily because it can be conscious or unconscious.  I think I was hitting on this theme in my posts Idol Making and Integrity.  Analytical idolatry was one phrase I used.  Persig calls analysis a knife, and while it can hack something like poetry to pieces, it also removes us, or cuts us off from life.  Let me throw out some more quotes…

                "While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality.  When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify.  This is our dilemma—either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste—or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it."  Lewis

This seems to be addressing a more conscious, intellectual abstraction.

I wrote an essay years ago about the dangers within the evangelical community that is in reaction to an immediate gratification society.  This reaction makes the Christian’s default position one of suspicion towards pleasure.  Couple that with the tendency to constantly ascertain whether one is living “Biblically”, or as some put it, the self-examined life, and you render an entire community very susceptible to affectation.  Needless to say, just about everyone I showed it to didn’t understand what I was getting at, and the few that sort of got the drift of what I was saying took offense. 

Affectation, opposed to integrity, is dependent on abstracting an ideal one wishes to embody without having the ability to pursue and enjoy that ideal for its own sake.   Let me requote Lewis from an earlier post:

                If we encourage others, or ourselves, to hear, see, or read great art on the ground that it is a cultured thing to do, we call into play precisely those elements in us which must be in abeyance before we can enjoy art at all.  We are calling up the desire for self-improvement, the desire for distinction, the desire to revolt (from one group) and to agree (with another), and a dozen busy passions which, whether good or bad in themselves, are, in relation to the arts, simply a blinding and paralysing distraction…Those who read poetry to improve their minds will never improve their minds by reading poetry.  For the true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.  [my emphasis]  The Muses will submit to no marriage of convenience.  The desirable habit of mind, if it is to come at all, must come as a by-product, unsought.

My essay essentially tweeked Lewis quote to say If we encourage others, or ourselves, to act, talk or live a “good” life on the ground that it is a Biblical or Godly thing to do…  Somehow, we need to learn to pursue good things for their own reward.

I think this the kind of abstraction that cuts us off from ‘Life’ while more often than not remains unconscious, or perhaps subconscious.  Maybe because such a habit has become one’s mode of ‘living’.  Following that train of thought, we would now see the value of a psychologist trying to analyze someone to help them.  In order to break a bad pattern or habit, you have to remove or abstract oneself in order to be aware of the problem.  Then one can consciously try and change.  Here’s another Lewis quote: 

                "The surest means of disarming an anger or a lust [is] to turn your attention from the girl or the insult and start examining the passion itself.  The surest way of spoiling a pleasure [is] to start examining your satisfaction."

            So now, back to your comment, Nate.  What hit me was when you said that civilization is associated with violence and the implication of its opposite.  When I associate ‘Life’ with Dynamic quality, I see it as the driving force; a force with so much power that it could drive an evolution of species into complex beings, in total defiance of the 2^nd Law of Thermodynamics.  But to me that doesn’t equate with nice or pleasant.  I grew up being told everyone could have a general knowledge of God’s glory by looking at Nature.  That’s a bit scary really.  When we look at the whole, we can be in awe of the complexity and interconnectedness.  There are even moments of inspiring visual beauty.  But the nitty gritty of everyday life within Nature is downright brutal.  There is a very dark side to God.  Animals are not humane.  Cat’s toy with mice for a long while before finally giving the death blow.  Turkeys peck the weak ones in a flock.  Once there’s blood, there’s usually not much hope left for the poor critter.  Not only do they peck it to death they hump it as it is dying.  Even once it’s dead, the toms make a show of humping the dead body as they fluff up their feathers and snoods.  Survival of the fittest, in the long run, is a very effective in keeping the whole healthy, but it is not a pleasant reality.  To just BE, without abstraction, would be to reenter this reality.  Gone would be the infinite regression of telescoping categories, but so would love.  Particularly love for the marginalized and the ‘least of these’. 

Another way of saying this is to take issue with the statement that what sickens us is abstraction.  We are already as sick and self-consumed as any other animal.  Abstraction is simply a powerful tool we use that is unavailable to the less intelligent animals.  I like to think in terms of addiction.  We are gluttons in many ways, including abstraction.  And civilization could be characterized as an addiction to abstraction as much as a society that lives much closer to nature and plain old survival could be considered brutal, heartless and hard because of its lack of abstraction.  I hear you when you say that even if both Life and Knowledge are important, but living in such an abstract culture, we need to hear the message to just be.  I think you’re right that even when we just try to be we will still abstract far too much.  But I still think it’s important to keep in mind that Life can be just as violent as Knowledge.

One day, though, I would hope we wouldn't be just playing a balancing game of stressing one because we are constantly bombarded by the other.  That strikes me as Lewis' pursuit of being cultured.  I think the way out is in pursuing things for their own reward and their own sake.  Again integrity would have to guide us on that razor thin edge of a path.  I want to be able to completely lose myself in both Life and Knowledge.