In a Glass Dome

So let us begin with a classic case of simplifying.

Ptolemy’s planets from the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1st Edition, 1771). Wikipedia

In this diagram of Ptolemy’s universe (developed ca. 150), planets revolve in epicycles around invisible points revolving around a stable earth. This explanation squared with the ancient belief that our earth was the center of the universe. 

Based on Nicolaus Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. Wikipedia

Move the sun to the center as Copernicus did in 1543, and the need for epicycles disappears. Natural philosophers had found Ptolemy’s explanation satisfactory for about 1200 years and resisted Copernicus’s. Beginning in 1609, however, Galileo began making observations with telescopes, producing a series of phenomena that made the geocentric model of the universe harder and harder to defend. However, even Copernicus, for whom the starry dome of the night sky overhead became the “immobile sphere of fixed stars,” did not get it all right.

The accuracy of the sun-centered explanation of the motion of the planets seems obvious to us now, since it is a so much simpler explanation. We often refer to Occam’s razor to explain the scientific preference for the simplest explanation, but William of Occam (1287-1347) was not the first one to formulate this idea; ironically, a much earlier statement of it, “We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible,” was made by Ptolemy. However, another formulation of Occam’s razor is more precise in its application of simplicity: “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected” (Wikipedia). 

The Ptolemaic model required many assumptions, some of which reached far beyond astronomy and were entangled with religious belief so that in the 16th Century, disassembling the world view based on the geocentric universe was hardly a simple act because the heliocentric view of the planets required a whole new view of the world.Religion functioned then as science does now: a universally accepted schema for explaining the world. For us, science predicts the future, tells us what to eat, heals us, speaks the obscure language of mathematics, explicates the stars and planets to us, and understands the mysteries of the invisible quanta, just as medieval Christianity did. If some discovery falsified crucial assumptions of the scientific process—the discovery that, for example, the earth is actually a computer simulation and the code has just been changed so that some conclusions already proven are no longer true—if such a proposition were itself proven, would we all embrace it immediately because it was a simple explanation for why some outcomes defied science? For the 16th Century, heliocentrism was not a simple solution.

Galileo’s proofs of the Copernican universe met with serious push-back, and he died while still in official disgrace, but later, when he was reburied in a place of greater honor, the middle finger of his right hand was removed from his body. Currently on display in a glass dome, it is suitably mounted in a vertical position, perhaps as a warning to those of us too invested in our assumptions to see the simple truth of our situation.

Natural Language Processing

I am writing this during allergy season, which many people associate with the appearance of goldenrod. However, goldenrod is not a problem for allergy suffers, because its flashy flowers mean it depends on attracting insects to spread its heavy pollen. If you are searching for a culprit, look among those plants who do not care whether anyone notices them, those with, say, green flowers, like ragweed, which blooms at the same time as goldenrod. Its nondescript flowers sticking straight up in the air depend on wind pollination, so they fill the air with their pollen that we then breathe in. How we understand the world influences how we see it.

Monarch Butterfly on Golden Rod

I have thought that perhaps I can help people find that richer relationship with the natural world through the power of metaphor, which charges the world with the electricity of imagination and enables us to see and feel the excitement inherent in the world that surrounds and includes us. Just look at the names of those two late summer plants: “golden rod” for the tall beautiful plant that entices insects to itself as part of its sexual reproduction and “rag weed” for the unattractive, low down plant that promiscuously spreads its pollen to unwelcome passages. The contrast in their natures is captured in the imagery of the popular name—riches and rags.

I call what I want to do “nature writing” rather than “environmental writing”, because environmental writing seems more journalistic and news/event driven and shifts focus as the news of the day shifts focus. Nature writing, in my lexicon, strives to be reflective and universal; I want my writing to be powered by our engagement with the nature where “lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” However, I am beginning to think that I can no longer write about nature without some environmental undertones or overtones. To deal with a real place is to deal with its ecology, and as McKibbon pointed out in 1989 (and is even more obvious today) there is no ecology that is unaffected by human decision making.

But even my dependence on explicit metaphor may be suspect. As George Lackoff and Mark Johnson pointed out in Metaphors We Live By, first published in 1987, even our everyday language is shot through with metaphor, and we use interconnected networks of metaphor to define and clarify our expression. For example, an idea is like a plant: it grows and spreads and can be nurtured and can die. Metaphors drawn from concrete experience of nature weave their way into our thinking, and those ideas then echo in our descriptions of nature, so that the ancient forest becomes majestic and inspiring like a grand idea. That relationship suggests that language is a good way into nature because language and nature interact in our experience, just as our abandoned fields of disturbed earth create an environment for ragweed, and ragweed creates an environment for us. And now I will go blow my nose.

Mystery Lessen

From Hans Jenny. The Soil Resource (1980, Reprinted 2012)

Rainwater falls randomly from the sky into a tree where the rain becomes organized into drip patterns defined by the shape of the leaves, branches, and bark of the tree until, dripping into the soil, the water becomes randomly organized once again. Wendell Berry, in a letter to Wes Jackson (reprinted in Home Economics, 3-5), critiques this description from a scientific book on soil by arguing that randomness is not “a verifiable condition,” but is “a limit of perception.” He asserts that “random” is a misleading word that assumes there is no possible pattern in what is observed; the more proper term is “mystery.” “Random” assumes that there is not possible pattern; “mystery” assumes we just can’t see it.

While Berry emphasizes practicality, he associates mystery with religion and there is danger in letting mystery come trailing that umbilical cord. The earliest uses are theological and often were associated with secret religious rites. The most common and comprehensive theological use of “mystery” today is probably based on this Oxford English Dictionary definition: “A religious truth known or understood only by divine revelation; esp. a doctrine of faith involving difficulties which human reason is incapable of solving.” Defined this way, “mystery” becomes as much of a dead end as “random,” shutting down further exploration with certainty. If we posit a god capable of creating unsolvable mysteries, in a sense the mysteries disappear into God, who embodies the solutions. Why do we die? God does not die. Why are there evil people? God is perfect and entirely good. Why do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people? It will all work out because God is perfectly just. God resolves all mysteries, but if we take God out of the picture, what remains are the mysteries for which there are no facile answers.

The most expansive non-theological use of the term “mystery” is related to the OED definition, “A hidden or secret thing; something inexplicable or beyond human comprehension; a person or thing evoking awe or wonder but not well known or understood; an enigma.” Despite the use of the word “inexplicable” in the definition, a Google search on “solve a mystery” or “solve the mystery” yields 8.6 M hits, so that for many of us a mystery is something to be solved; it is open-ended, and in that sense calling something a mystery in the non-theological sense is a beginning.

The popular genre of the murder mystery turns on the axis of logical analysis. A satisfying ending generally involves explaining motivations and events with proof that establishes guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, though such stories also allow for the operation of “justice” outside the law. Such an extra-legal conclusion would be unsatisfying, would become a crime in need of solution.

I have argued earlier that not all conflicting dualities can be resolved and that perhaps our best understanding is to accept both and see the world in 3-D. Maybe the better way to describe our response should be to say we can’t ignore dualities. They suggest enigmas, mysteries, in need of deeper exploration, though I suspect that we will discover deeper mysteries that allow us to understand our state more clearly; it will likely be mysteries all the way down.

Science should be done surrounded by mystery. Religion and science could both use more respect for mystery. Perhaps if religions treated God as more mysterious and thought twice before claiming to know what God wants and to speak in God’s behalf, the world might be a more peaceful place.

The Ambiguity of Humor: The Joke’s on You

From the King Trump Bible. Real Time with Bill Maher, 

September 18, 2015

This Bible parody from Bill Maher’s show is intended to be humorous. I think it is. It uses the wonderful camel/needle eye, rich man/heaven comparison, which appears in all three of the synoptic gospels, and uses it to satirize a man whose primary claim to fame is that he is a rich man as he tries to gain the support of Christians. It also throws in a shot at Trump’s exaggerated promises and his Mexican wall proposal. 

However, the humor depends on what the reader or viewer brings to the transaction.

Maher introduces the segment including this and other Trump Bible passages by referring to Trump’s ranking his The Art of the Deal as the second-greatest book of all time. Anyone’s response to this joke and the others will depend on what the reader/viewer thinks about Trump and the bible. A Trump supporter might see this as an attack on his values, an effort to ridicule his beliefs; he is unlikely to notice the point about the incongruity between the avaricious Trump and the poverty espoused by Jesus. A Christian Trump supporter may see this as mocking the inconsistency between the teachings of Christianity and the wealth in religion. Some people could see it as an insult to the bible. Humor is all about frame of reference. Part of what makes the Trump campaign so frightening for some people is that given their values, the Trump campaign is a joke; those people are terrified and astonished to realize that so many people actually have values that are so outlandish that Trump is a serious real option.

Let’s look at someone who is the opposite of Donald Trump: Henry David Thoreau. Here he is talking about taking a walk. After referring to the Crusades, Thoreau advises,

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man—then you are ready for a walk. “Walking” The Atlantic (June 1862).

He is exaggerating, using hyperbole, for humorous and rhetorical effect. I always smile at the end, when his list crescendos. For me, he is not making fun of taking walks seriously; he is pointing out that a walk in the natural landscape is an opportunity for adventure, and though he is exaggerating, his description endows the simple walk with an air of grandeur. Later in the essay he compares the landscape of Italy, rich in Roman ruins, to the landscape of the U.S. and concludes that we are actually living in the kind of golden age that those ruins commemorate.

 

Henry David Thoreau

By Benjamin D. Maxham 

active 1848 - 1858 

- National Portrait Gallery, 

Washington, Public Domain, 

There he is arguing seriously; in the case of the walk, he must overload the comparison using irony to make the point and not make the point at the same time.

Not everybody got Thoreau’s ironic humor. Based on Thoreau’s writing, in 1865 in the North American Review, James Russell Lowell concluded that, “Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he was a sorry logician” (338). Though Lowell did have some reputation as a humorist, as well as a poet and an essayist when he wrote that, he has little reputation left to speak of today.

Perhaps even Thoreau’s mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson may have not always gotten the joke:

The tendency to magnify the moment, to read all the laws of Nature in the one object or one combination under your eye, is of course comic to those who do not share the philosopher's perception of identity. To him there was no such thing as size. The pond was a small ocean; the Atlantic, a large Walden Pond. He referred every minute fact to cosmical laws. (Emerson’s Eulogy)

Many, more modern critics, including E. B. White, have found humor in his writing, but how can we tell whether Thoreau was serious about preparing for a walk by preparing for death? Surely if he was, he would be Lowell’s “sorry logician.”

We can’t know for sure, but Thoreau was a great admirer of Thomas Carlyle and of Carlyle’s brilliant and wierdly ironic Sartor Resartus. In his essay “Thomas Carlyle and His Works,” Thoreau observes,

Sartor Resartus is, perhaps, the sunniest and most philosophical, as it is the most autobiographical of his works, in which he drew most largely on the experience of his youth. But we miss everywhere a calm depth, like a lake, even stagnant, and must submit to rapidity and whirl, as on skates, with all kinds of skillful and antic motions, sculling, sliding, cutting punch-bowls and rings, forward and backward. The talent is very nearly equal to the genius. Sometimes it would be preferable to wade slowly through a Serbonian bog, and feel the juices of the meadow.

Here Thoreau uses ice skating images to describe the “antic motions” of the work. According to Sophia Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife, Thoreau was “an experienced skater” who executed “dithyrambic dances and Bacchic leaps on the ice.” Thoreau contrasts two extreme states—the swift, precise movement of the skater and the slow, deliberate movement of one wading through a bog—both of which his life and writing suggest he was capable of and capable of appreciating.

Whether a passage like his prescription for walking is humorous or not will depend on what each of us thinks of the context and the author. The difference between Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report version) and Bill O’Reilly was essentially the audience. Lowell thought Thoreau was a humorless mediocrity; I think Thoreau was brilliant. Although what the author intended to say does not determine the outcome (many who intend to be funny are not), in the case of humor, we would like to know whether we are laughing at or with the author. Sometimes we will never be sure, especially when authors sail close to the wind, the most exciting point of sail, but ultimately humor depends on an agreement, real or illusory, between an author and an audience.

  

The Metaphorist in the Metaphorest

[The last paragraph of the original version of this post has been revised: The last paragraph has been split in two, and some hard-to-follow leaps of thought have been clarified (he said, confidently)]

The same mental predisposition that attracts us to the satisfying uncertainty of open-ended questions may explain the essential power of metaphor as a tool for expressing the balance and tension that characterizes experience. In another place, in answering the question “Is the Self an Illusion?” I suggested that metaphors are a way to clarify irreducibly complex ideas because metaphors combine resolution and ambiguity.

Metaphor is normally introduced in school in contrast to simile, which is “a comparison using like or as.” Metaphor then becomes a comparison that does not use like or as. This approach is so unhelpful since it underestimates the complexity of the difference. For one thing a simile advertises that it is a comparison and makes clear that what is being compared maintain separate identities. T. S. Eliot begins his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofrock,”

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

And a little further on, he speaks of,

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

These comparisons (with their wonderful evocative language) make a clear distinction between the two things being compared and they communicate across the like. The sky and the patient share characteristics, perhaps a different one for each person: a sense of time suspended before some great event—night and an operation—a sense of blankness or clouds like the white hospital gown. The same is true of the image of the back streets and the tedious argument.

Later in the same poem are these lines:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

Purdue Cooperative Extension

Here is the comparison without like or as, and we are in the middle of the comparison before we even know it has started. Not until “sprawling on a pin” do we realize that we cannot take what is being said literally. Because there is no clear signal that a comparison is being made, the writer depends on the reader not only to interpret the comparison but even to know it is happening. So we can see the speaker as an insect, mounted and labeled in some collection, pinned in place while still alive, at the same as being subjected to the judgmental eyes of those attending a social gathering. The two parts of the comparison remain separate and blur together at the same time. The metaphor of the bug is then displaced by the metaphor of how talking at such an event involves people merely spitting out the conclusions they have drawn, a shift which brings us back to the social event. Each of the metaphors involved in the example requires at least two frames of reference present at the same time, frames of reference that must still coexist after the metaphor is deployed: the eyes fixing and the pin fixing.

This preservation of the frames of reference is the key to metaphor’s power. Deciding what to do within a frame of reference—which vegetable to plant first, which book to read next—involves comparing conventionally similar objects, but deciding whether to plant a vegetable or read a book requires a larger frame of reference so that planting and reading also become two instances of the same thing--two self-nurturing activities for example. Looking for a logical solution requires the platform of a single frame of reference. Because most complex and interesting problems do involve different frames of reference, that preliminary step means the subsequent solution is always simpler, flatter, than the formulation of the original problem.

Thus some complex problems will not be solvable in a single frame of reference. Thinking metaphorically may be the only way to understand such problems, since a metaphor creates a comparison in two frames of reference at once, a relationship that is both true and untrue at the same time: you are pinned to the wall and not pinned to the wall.