Trite, but that don’t mean it ain’t true.

I was in the mood for some scientific thought today, so I perused the Scientific American web site. I came across two articles of note.

First, this one about “Folk Science”. What is folk science? Is it anything like “polk salad”? (Remember that old song “Polk Salad Annie” by Tony Joe White? Well, never mind.) No, folk science is what the average person thinks about things. Frequently, the way that the average person thinks about things is scientifically correct. The process of evolution gave human beings proper senses for perceiving things of certain sizes; basically from the size of a grain of sand to the size of a mountain. These are things that we can see, things we can smell, things that we can get our hands on (or walk over, in the case of a mountain). We also have a pretty good notion of the kinds of energy reactions that affect these things, e.g. fire, freezing cold, sunlight, lightening, hand power and horse power.

But our senses weren’t designed to get a handle on the biggest and smallest things of the universe. Therefore, in the days before science, it seemed logical that the earth was flat, that lightening was caused by a god or gods, that disease was triggered by some kind of an “evil spirit”, that the sun popped up out of the flat earth in the morning and settled back down into it in the evening. That was and is what folk science is all about.

The point of the article is that even today, even with all of the progress that science has made and all it has done for humankind, there is still a deeply inbreed tendency within many people toward folk science. For example, some of us think that we can cure ourselves when we get sick based on a story of what worked for someone else (the scientific method says that you have to test something on a whole lot more than one person to conclude that it is an effective cure; and you have to ask if there is something different between you and the other person). Hey, admittedly, I’ve done this too.

But generally I believe in science and the scientific method. Most people who read Scientific American (or have at least heard of it) probably do so themselves. And yet, a writer in Scientific American sees fit to give us a lecture about the evils of folk science. What are we, the SciAm faithful, doing wrong? Well, a lot of reasonably intelligent people still believe in God, and still think that our consciousness and self-awareness is something more than a set of neurons in the brain responding to stimuli in a programmed fashion, much like a computer. That’s getting the Scientific American editorial board a bit miffed, I think (although the article doesn’t directly mention God). And on this frontier, I would have to warn Scientific American and the science establishment to “back off”.

Science knows a whole lot; it’s amazing what science understands or at least knows something about. But it seems to me that scientists do not fully appreciate the fact that they do NOT know everything. In fact, they don’t know all that much about the simplest and most basic questions that philosophers have pondered for centuries (e.g., why was the world divided into solids, liquids and gasses? Why not four or five kinds of stuff, or why not only two?). It seems to be more and more fashionable these days amidst scientists to herald themselves as atheists. To be taken seriously as a neuro-consciousness researcher, you pretty much have to profess your disbelief in any and every notion of a higher power. To me, that starts to sound like bias. I.e., answering the question before all of the empirical evidence is in.

Generally, “folk science” leads common folk to believe in God. But today’s scientists seem to be developing their own folk science, based on atheism. To me, that’s just as intellectually disingenuous as “the leap of faith”. No, actually more so. The leapers at least admit that they’re leaping. The scientists seem to be above that. I’d have a whole lot more respect for the SciAm crowd if they ‘fessed up to their similarly irrational “leap of disbelief”.

For those of you (those few of you) who have regularly read my ruminations, you know that I generally err on the side of faith, although not without some wavering. But I still have much regard for science. To me, science is still a vision of the good, an instance of humankind responding to something bigger than itself. Each of us has maybe four or five things that really “move us”. Scientific and mathematical thought is certainly on my list.

So, I was taken by another article about a scientist named Alain Conne who is using complex mathematical theories regarding geometry to come up with a potential “theory of everything”, one that rivals the elegance and power of string theory. Yea, geometry and topology — the theory of shapes and surfaces — is a very understated area of math and science. I’m looking for a good popular-level book on it.

Years ago, when I was a teenager, I remember reading how useful the study of shapes and surfaces is for science. But I didn’t take it seriously. Now, 35 years later, I’ve lost track of the times that I’ve read about how science is using shape analogies to gain an understanding of some really important theoretical stuff. Einstein’s relativity theories about gravity are now taught in terms of “the heavy ball on the rubber surface”. This ain’t merely to show what gravity does to time-space; it’s meant to show what gravity and time-space ARE, or at least are like. Non-Euclidian geometry (where you get beyond the basic geometry of straight lines and right angles that we are used to, i.e. the geometry of “folk science”) allows inquiries to be made about worlds with 7 dimensions where time can run backward and forward. And about the quantum world, which is even weirder.

So it’s pretty cool to read about how geometry is being used to help test and answer some of the hairiest problems about the “Standard Model” of sub-atomic particles. But as a “man of possible faith”, I do need to leave you with a bit of Pythagoras and his “music of the spheres”. Pythagoras sought ways to blend the “mystery of the divine” with common-sense rational thought, including much mathematical thought about space and shapes. He was actually pretty nutty, despite the good solid math ideas that he left behind. But I still hold out hope that we will someday hear the “song of God” — yes, the real, industrial-strength God, the God of Christian, Islamic and Jewish folklore — in the midst of our non-Euclidian geometric equations. As Pythagoras would have liked.

We’re just coming out of a heat wave here on the East Coast, which has reduced my enthusiasm regarding just about everything, including this log. But I’ll give it a try. Let’s see, what’s on my mind right now: well, just a lamentation about all the war that’s going on in the world these days, especially in the Middle East. It’s too bad that everyone cannot grow up to think of themselves primarily as citizens of the planet Earth and members of the human race. We’re still hard-wired to pledge our loyalty to some relatively small sub-set, i.e. to a tribe. We’re still tribal, not global. Our primary loyalties are to the people of a particular area, or a particular race, or a particular set of beliefs. It still seems better to most everyone on this planet to identify their loyalties and their economic and political interests with some tribe. And that is so unfortunate.

(Once again, Marx is proved wrong. Old Karl said that our true nature is in our “species being”, in our final unity with people of all kinds. He didn’t get out too much, did he.)

The basic frame of mind for human beings is one of tribal competition, not global cooperation. Any half-witted mathematician who understands game theory could easily prove to you that there would be more to share if everyone adopted the cooperation viewpoint. Fighting for land and wealth and privileges appears to maximize each family’s well-being, in the short term. But in the end, cooperation and trust would cause the pie to be bigger; thus there would be more to share. Unfortunately, we live in a short-term world. So the Jews and the Palestinians keep on fighting, the Jews and the Shiites are going at it in Lebanon, the Shiites and the Sunnis are having a donnybrook in Iraq; and men keep teaching their young sons and daughters that this is the way it all has to be. If only science could find a way to change the human brain, toward cooperation and away from aggression.

The free-market people might argue that aggression spurs innovation and economic growth, which causes the economic pie to grow faster, which should cause everyone to be more satisfied and thus more willing to let bygones be bygones. Yea, well — the Middle East has been, and will continue to be, the true test for that sort of thinking. Lockheed and Boeing are making all sorts of $$$ from these wars, based on hi-tech capitalistic innovations. But I don’t hear of much “trickle down” benefit from their prosperity reaching the masses in Ramallah and Tyre. The only thing that seems to trickle down in those places is their laser-guided munitions.

A NEW JESUS FOR ISLAM?: Here’s a line for a short story. This is pure fiction, but here goes. Somewhere in the Middle East, there arises a charismatic apocalyptic preacher brought up by a Sunni Moslem father and a Shia mother (or vice versa), who wanders about the poor villages of Pakistan and Egypt and the West Bank. Let’s suppose that this prophet gathers a following by performing “great works of faith” and preaching that Allah would soon arrive in person to give the poor of the world their due. What if this prophet was a man or woman of great wisdom, who told the poor what they wanted to hear, but told most everyone else what they didn’t? Next, imagine that this prophet claimed to somehow be of blood lineage to Mohammed (and people actually believed it). What if this prophet told the jihadists to put their swords and guns away, stop trying to be little Mohammeds (really little Napoleons), and trust that Allah could put all things right without their help? What if he or she insisted that the US and Israel would get their due, but only in Allah’s good time?

Well, you know that this New Prophet wouldn’t be long for the world. But he or she might get a few good years in before someone got him. Who would finally do the dirty work? It could be most anyone involved in the Middle East. Could be the Saudi government, or the Syrians, or the Israelis, or the CIA, or Al Qaeda . . . . . or some unholy alliance of several such players.

Let’s take the story even further. Suppose that the New Prophet was attacked by an assassin, was seen being taken away lifeless in a van, and was thoroughly mourned by his group of loving followers. Let’s also say that this Prophet somehow cheated death, but was held by some militant group that may or may not have need for his existence. And somehow, during the confusing days and weeks following the New Prophet’s death scene, a handful of followers actually did manage to see the Prophet, perhaps even got a wave from him from a distance. It was all quite hazy. But the witnesses swore to the faithful that the New Son of Muhammad was still alive, praise Allah.

Then more and more ironies follow. His captors finally decide him to be of no more use, and a quick shot to the head ends the matter. No one ever finds out what really happened. But a small band of faithful Muslims decide to risk their own lives by betraying their imams and mullahs and asserting that the New Prophet lives and will come back soon to announce the arrival of Allah’s Kingdom. Until then, they pledged to lead righteous lives of peaceful martyrdom. For each one executed in town squares by the Sunni and Shia establishment, ten new followers were found. After a few decades, this fervent movement somehow made its way to the cities and universities, which co-opted it as a relief from the intellectual and cultural oppression of fundamentalist Islam. There would still be many decades of blood and suffering, and no help or support from Israel or the west; but somehow this strange Muslim parallel to what Christianity did to Judaism and the Roman Empire would not be stopped.

Yea, it’s just a day dream. But history does repeat itself sometimes. Would this be a better form of Islam? In some ways yes, in some ways no. Right now, Islam, despite being a relatively young religion, is very much an “old” religion, an eye-for-an-eye religion close to the deserts and teeming ghettos of the world, a religion about secular survival in arid conditions — just as Judaism was in Jesus’ time. Although the trend for most religions over time is toward increased secularization, sometimes they experience a spontaneous “re-spiritualization”, a sudden return to other-worldly (metaphysical) values. It might be good for Islam to go through such a process right about now. But it would be just as good for Christianity and Judaism to look unto the heavens themselves. We could all use a bit more divine inspiration these days.

MY BROTHER THE PRIEST? My brother has been in touch with a middle aged guy who was recently ordained as a Roman Catholic priest. He knew this guy back in his youth, when they were both altar boys at the local parish. Despite being quite a lady’s man in his early adulthood, my brother has long pondered whether he might be called to the priesthood himself. Over the past 6 years he’s devoted a whole lot of time and energy to taking care of my mother, and has been singularly unimpressed by the unwillingness of women he has dated during this time to support him (and not expect too much from him given my mother’s need). I guess he just hasn’t met the right one. And if he doesn’t meet her soon, he might well start talking with the monsignors and assistant bishops who oversee the “priestly formation” process in the local Archdiocese.

I think he could make a good priest, if he falls into the right situation (but given the state of the Catholic Church these days, that’s a dicey proposition). He has a relatively simple and robust faith in God and in the basic myths of Roman Christianity. He’d like to see the Church pull out of it’s 40 year drift toward conservatism following that bright, brief moment in the early 1960’s defined by Bishop Roncelli (Pope John the 23rd) and the Vatican Council. My brother likes people and can charm them. He would be a good youth minister, as he’s still in good shape and has a flair for grooming that would get the attention of high schoolers and college kids (who generally accept substance only if it is presented with style). He would have to watch the alcohol temptation that brings down so many good clerics during their times of doubt and stress. However, most neurotic priests and nuns drink alone, while my brother wants a group around him when he gets smashed. If he could just find the right company and comradeship, he might not need to have another drink in the morning, as the true alcoholics do.

I’m taking a “wait and see” attitude about his current aspirations. It’s not a great time to be a progressive minister in the Big Roman Church. In electing Cardinal Ratzinger as the successor to John Paul 2, the cardinals of the world seemed to sense the need for the Church to “round up the wagons”. They smell something in the winds, something of a danger to the world; i.e. that science, political freedom, economic liberalism and the spirit of the Enlightenment is failing. Despite the great wealth and incredible progress experienced in the west over the past 200 years, they seem dubious as to whether this trend can be replicated in the three-fifths of the world still shackled in poverty. Sure, India and China are making progress; look at the miracles in Japan and Korea. Still, so many other places are going nowhere, even backwards; and in those places, another conservative religion, Islam, is growing rapidly. The Roman Church, admittedly, has a long institutional memory. Its leadership maintains an awareness of the fall of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages that followed. They know that history repeats itself.

After Benedict VI, the Seat of Peter may well go to a brown-skinned man from the underdeveloped world. But that will not bode well for those like my brother who want to see the Church focus once again on modern concerns like personal fulfillment. The Church may well continue its militarization trend. Forget about “finding God on your own path” and “accommodating individuality”; it will be “onward Christian soldiers” instead. The world is growing cold, the lights are going out, and we will all have to fall in line and listen to our leaders if the human race is going to get thru this. Sorry if that doesn’t sound too nice, but if you don’t want to listen to the Bishop of Rome, you’re going to have to listen to someone else; and the alternatives, you will find, will be so much worse.

If you’ve read my blog or my website, you might know my sentiments about religion. I’ve gone beyond liberal re-interpretation. I’d like to see the organized religions put it all on the table, every myth and doctrine, so as to challenge their relevance in an age of science and rationality. That certainly doesn’t mean that God’s existence would not be proclaimed; science clearly cannot prove that God does NOT exist, despite the doubts of many of its luminaries. However, we CAN say with a fair amount of certainty just where the Bible came from, what Jesus was about, how Mohammed’s writings evolved, what the Buddha assumed, and how the convoluted myths of Hinduism emerged over the centuries. I’d like to think that we can find ways of belief and spiritual fulfillment, complete with positive morals and ethics, which are fully consistent with the strange and beautiful revelations that modern science and critical thinking have brought forth. To me, THAT is the challenge for religion in the 21st Century.

But then again. In a recent blog, I said that the civilized world as we know it may be in big trouble over the next 100 years. We may be in a situation not that much different from what Rome encountered around 350 AD. Our civilization has had a few really great centuries when we accomplished all sorts of amazing things. Despite our mixed motivations, we developed all sorts of wonderful things for humankind, things like democracy, human rights, economic opportunity, art, modern medicine, science and critical thought. But despite all these good things, the rest of the world eventually came to resent us more than admire us. Instead of seeking to imitate us, they more and more wish to humiliate and plunder us. And when we look within, we see that maybe we deserve it. We talked a lot about virtue, but in the end we couldn’t find meaningful ways to share our accumulations of great wealth, not even with those in need within our own borders. We’ve taken our “cruel to be kind” economic doctrine just a bit too far, and now those on the other end of that equation are ready to reverse it on us by force.

If that is the way that our world is going, then I can understand why perhaps the cardinals are right. The Church got the western world thru the Dark Ages, and may be needed to do it again. An age of science and enlightenment and individuality may again give way to an age of pandemic and militarism and crude survival. If it came down to a choice of following a Roman Catholic dictator, a secular political dictator, or a trans-national corporation dictator in the midst of a Great World Depression, I’d certainly choose the Catholic one, on a “least of evils” basis.

I wish my brother the best if he does enter the seminary, and I know that he will do the Church much good. He may not formally join the Franciscans, but he certainly has a Franciscan spirit within him. Let’s hope that the Church can preserve something of that spirit if the winds of change for civilization are indeed starting to blow cold.

ONE MORE SUV: There’s a young guy who lives upstairs from me, a handsome dude who is in good shape. He seems like a true outdoorsman; you often see him heading out with his skis in the winter and with his mountain bike in the summer. He would be quite a fine catch for a young lady. And in fact, about a year ago he was frequently seen with a fine young lady. I would see her car parked in our backyard lot in the mornings. She must have been interested in the great outdoors too, judging by the stickers attached to her vehicle (e.g., Sierra Club). She also had her environmental sentiments, given the little “One Less SUV” sticker on her bumper. Before long, there was a similar sticker on the bumper of my neighbor’s Mazda 3. Ah yes, love was in the air.

But after a while, I saw neither her car nor her anymore. Oh well, romance is often a fleeting thing. But the anti-SUV sticker remained on my neighbor’s bumper. I had a quick chat with him not long ago, and he casually mentioned that he was selling his car. A few days later, the Mazda 3 was gone, replaced by a used Nissan Pathfinder (a fairly large-sized SUV; he probably got a great deal, with the price of gas now over $3). I guess this guy needs a woman who is willing to experience the great outdoors without worrying about fuel efficiency and global warming.

In my neighbor’s defense, the former owner of the Pathfinder may well have replaced it with a more fuel efficient vehicle; but his erstwhile girlfriend would probably say that by buying it he just kept a fuel hog on the road longer. It should have gone to the junkyard. Well, what can I say except that I hope he enjoys paying $50 a week for gas. And I wish him better luck with love next time.

WHY WORRY? There’s an interesting debate going on about the world’s future. On the one side are those who say that the world, or at least civilization as we know it, is in big trouble and may not survive the next 100 years. In 1972, a think tank called “The Club Of Rome” published a book called “Limits To Growth” which predicted that the world would be in really bad shape by the mid-1990s. Obviously, it didn’t happen. The pessimists say that we got some lucky breaks, but the trends are still in place for a big collapse, akin to what happened to the western Roman Empire in the 5th and 6th Centuries.

On the other hand are the optimists, the intellectuals who say that the Club of Rome / Collapse of Rome scenario ain’t gonna happen at all, period. They say that technology and other corrective forces are in place and are working appropriately. So, they argue, instead of getting upset about global warming and peak oil, we should use whatever extra money and resources are available so as to deal with immediate needs in the undeveloped world, e.g. health care, nutrition, water and sanitation, and education.

One of the pretty-boys of the optimistic crowd is Bjorn Lomborg. (Check out his web site to see why I call him a “pretty boy”; arg, looks like he could have toured with Abba!) There have been various articles about Dr. Lomborg in The Economist, almost all positive. The latest article is about how UN Ambassador John Bolton became a Lomborg acolyte, and is now using his theories to deflect world-wide attention from global warming to things like AIDS, starvation and underdevelopment in Africa. I.e., now that global warming is an undeniable fact, the Bush administration has found a new tactic to divert attention from it, thanks to Dr. Lomborg.

I’ve read some articles explaining Lomborg’s position. When you read his logic, it sounds pretty good. He takes the issues apart piece-by-piece. Natural resources running out? Most commodities (nickel, iron, copper, concrete, foods) are cheaper now than they were 25 years ago. Even oil and gas are mostly a problem of politics; there’s still plenty of oil and gas, they’re just in unstable places (e.g. Venezuela, Iran, Niger, etc.). But once those places settle down, things should be just fine.

Next problem — population growth. Yes, the world’s population is growing. But the UN seems to decrease its estimate of the population growth rate every five years. If things go OK, we shouldn’t go over 9 billion in this century, and at worst will top out at 10 billion in the 22nd century. Next — species becoming extinct, fisheries collapsing, forests disappearing. Yes, some of this is happening, but much more slowly than previously thought; furthermore, these resources often snap right back after a while. Next — pollution and climate change. Well, the facts show that air and water quality overall have improved quite a bit in the past 100 years. And global warming, although undeniable, is still mostly a future problem, and it may not be as bad as some people predict. And anyway, the ways to deal with it are incredibly expensive.

Before I take this on, let me agree with Dr. Lomborg on one important concept. Our world only has so much money and so many resources available to make things better. We can’t assume that there’s enough economic power to fix all problems (unless all the nations of the world would give up their military forces; oh, right, this is planet Earth, not Utopia). So we do have to make careful decisions on how to use what is available in foreign aid and such. If we put everything on global warming, then we won’t be able to do much about the AIDS crisis in Africa, or setting up tsunami warning systems, or building schools in Latin America. But if we totally disregard the long-term problems . . .

Here’s why I think that we actually do need to spend more on the macro problems like global warming, population control and alternate energy. Lomborg looks at the big problems one-by-one, and finds enough to belittle each one. But he doesn’t look at the overall picture. He doesn’t ask whether these trends interact with each other in ways that might make the overall situation much more dangerous. I think that they do. Here is what I’m wary of:

1.) Population Growth: Even if the number of people on the planet isn’t growing as fast as previously thought, it is still growing — and almost all of that growth is happening in the least developed, most impoverished places. UN stats show that population in the “high standard of living” zones (America, Western Europe, Japan) has and will remain fixed at around 1.2 billion. The world has the capacity to support more people, but not to give them relatively secure and prosperous lives, as I enjoy. Most people remain on the edge of starvation, disease and disaster, and their numbers are growing.

2.) Technology Side-Effects: One side-effect of cheap technology is that even in the poorest slums or the most remote farming villages, someone has a radio or TV or video player. And since America and Europe dominate the entertainment media throughout the world, that means that the poor are very aware these days that some people are living much better than they are. Years ago, families in the Andes Mountains or along the lower Nile had no idea of what life in America was like. Now they do. So the possibility for resentment is there and may well be growing.

3.) Peak Oil and Gas: A lot of reasonable analysts are saying that worldwide oil and gas production will peak around 2030. Alternative sources of energy, such as hydrogen and biomass, may take several more decades to become economically viable and available in sufficient quantities; engineering and infrastructure doesn’t happen overnight. So, the price of oil and gas will continue to march upward, creating increased pressure to burn coal. (In China, they’re already burning more and more of it with little regard for environmental effects).

4.) Global Warming: As energy prices increase, there will be enormous political pressure from the business sector to allow coal to be burned, as to avoid a major economic depression. Unfortunately, that’s the worst thing that could happen with regard to global warming. We now know that global warming is real, and that it is going to eventually flood coastlands (where almost 50% of the world’s population reside) and change where crops can be grown. But with the help of people like Lomborg, and with some vague promises about how technology will soon solve the coal-emissions problem, the energy interests will probably get away with burning cheaper, dirtier fuels as oil and gas become increasingly scarce (hydrogen probably won’t be ready yet, and nuclear power will remain expensive and problematic).

5.) Back to Population Growth: The population is growing in the areas that are going to be hit first and eventually be hit hardest by global warming. There’s going to be a lot of angst in poor nations as arable land turns to desert, and waters rise in coastal cities. There will be huge flows of refugees crossing borders, searching for dry land and food. That’s going to create a lot of political tension in a lot of different places (French President Chirac just made a speech about how Africa will “flood the world” with refugees if it continues to collapse economically; he wasn’t even considering the potential effects of global warming).

6.) Back to Technology: Another side-effect of technology is that nuclear weapons are becoming widely available. Despite the commendable efforts of the USA and Western Europe to avoid nuclear proliferation, we can’t put the genie back in the bottle, as A. Q. Khan from Pakistan has proven. By 2030, just about every nation, and many “pan-national” interest groups (patterned after al Qaeda), will have access to crude nuclear weapons at reasonable prices.

7.) So What? Well, if these trends collide, we
could have a whole lot of disgruntled and desperate nations with huge masses of people facing very major changes regarding issues such as where to find food and shelter, forget about jobs and commerce. A confluence of bad luck could push things to a “tipping point”; there may not be enough time to set up new farmlands and new cities with all the new infrastructure needed to support them. People are known to do desperate things under such circumstances. And these people may well have nukes. They’re going to be mad at each other as they struggle for what resources remain available, and they’re going to be mad at the USA and Europe for being rich enough to ride out all the changes. We could see a decade or two of low-intensity / slow-motion nuclear war, with a few bursts from a local war here, a few bursts set off by terrorists in major Western cities there . . .

I can’t help but wonder if 9-11 and the present crisis along the US-Mexican border are just the opening songs in a great tragic opera that will unfold throughout the world over the next 50 to 100 years. Humankind would certainly not come to an end. But as to whether civilization will continue to advance, or will it take a nuclear setback that will require four or five centuries to make up for (akin to the Dark Ages), that is an awfully good question. One that Mr. Lomborg and Mr. Bolton would do well to ponder.