by Richard Farr
A striking feature of Tok Pisin is that it has a very small underlying vocabulary, and makes up for this with long descriptive expressions. So for instance corridor is ples wokabaut insait long haus (literally: place to walk inside a building), and embassy is haus luluai bilong longwe ples (literally: house of a chief from a distant place).
Josef Kurtz
Some readers will suspect, correctly, that I stole the name from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Given the novel’s central theme—who are the “savages,” really?—it seemed appropriate.
“Upper Paleolithic”
These terms identify (in, unfortunately, a pretty inconsistent and confusing way) different periods of human and prehuman tool use. Paleolithic means “old stone age”—anything from the very beginnings to about ten thousand years ago. Within that range, Upper Paleolithic is most recent—from about forty thousand to ten thousand years ago. Stone tools showing more recent technology than that are either Mesolithic (from about twenty thousand to five thousand years ago) or Neolithic (ten thousand to two thousand years ago). The overlaps are partly due to inconsistency and partly because the relevant technologies developed at different rates in different regions.
Messier 33
French astronomer Charles Messier was a comet hunter. In the 1750s he began to make a list of annoying objects that were not comets but could easily be mistaken for them; his catalog of “nebulae” ended up listing more than one hundred of the most beautiful objects in the sky.
“A recovering fundamentalist”—and what Adam could have learned from Socrates
In Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam asks the archangel Raphael some probing questions about the way God has constructed the universe. He casts the questions as inquiries into astronomy: Does the earth move or stand still? Why are there so many stars, if all they do is decorate the earth’s sky? Why do six of them (all the known planets, in Milton’s time) wander back and forth among the fixed stars? But astronomy is really a placeholder for other things; it’s Milton’s way of expressing, obliquely, the fact that there are deeper questions begging to be asked, none of which Adam quite dares to voice. How does this whole creation thing work? Who is the mysterious “God” person, really? Where is heaven anyway? (As Raphael revealingly admits, God has placed heaven an immense distance from the earth partly to ensure His divine privacy.) And you can easily imagine that Adam is itching to ask one more really big one: Run this by me again, Raph. Can I call you Raph? Great. So take it slow, and tell me again: Why is it that I must obey this “God”?
Raphael’s response to Adam’s questions seems indulgent, at first; or, given what’s coming, we might say that his tone is greasily flattering. Naturally you are inquisitive, he says, for your divine origin means you’ve been touched with the intellectual gifts of God Himself! But Raphael quickly turns waspish, and our “first father” ends up getting a sharp slap on the wrist for asking the wrong questions:
Sollicit not thy thoughts with matters hid,
Leave them to God above, Him serve and feare . . .
. . . Heav’n is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowlie wise.
“Be lowlie wise”: ouch. It carries both the condescending, almost contemptuous meaning “Stay focused on the low, ordinary things that suit your low, ordinary nature” and also a more threatening one: “If you know what’s good for you, stop asking questions about what goes on in the executive suite.”
Unfortunately, Milton’s Adam is all too willing to play his “lowlie” part: after hearing God’s messenger put on a display of spectacularly bad reasoning about why Adam should be “lowlie wise,” he goes all weak at the knees, says he no longer wants to know a thing, and claims to be miraculously “cleerd of doubt.” He’s grateful, even: total obedience will mean not having “perplexing thoughts” that might “interrupt the sweet of life.” He even says, in a toe-curling display of meekness and surrender, “How fully hast thou satisfied me.”
It’s an embarrassing moment for the human race, and you might wonder how the exchange would have gone if, instead of Adam, Raphael had confronted someone with a better brain and a stiffer spine.
Socrates, for instance?
Wonder no more! Plato, in his dialogue Euthyphro, imagines Socrates having just this sort of discussion—though the pompous character with a thing about sticking to the rules is the eponymous Athenian passerby, not an archangel.
As Socrates points out to Euthyphro during a discussion about justice, many people think they should do X and not Y just because God approves of X and disapproves of Y. In other words, to know right and wrong, all we need to know is what God commands. That’s the position Raphael recommends to Adam.
There’s a large problem with this, which Adam really could have raised. Wait: Aren’t we missing a step? Why should I be confident that my understanding of what God approves is what He in fact approves? But let’s leave that aside for a minute. In what has become known as Euthyphro’s Dilemma, Socrates argues that there’s a deeper problem lurking here, even after we allow ourselves the staggeringly arrogant (and, alas, routine) assumption that we know what God wants. For, Socrates says, to say something is good just because God approves of it, and for no other reason, is to say that divine morality is arbitrary.
“So what?” you might reply: “God is God! He can be as arbitrary as He likes! He made the universe. So He gets to make up the rules!”
But, Socrates says, that can’t be what you really think. If it were, it would imply that whenever you say “God is good,” or “God’s judgments are good,” or “God is the ultimate good” (which, it seems, everyone does want to do), those judgments must be mistaken. Think about it again: if God’s judgments are arbitrary, then He just is what He is, and to insist in addition that the way God is “is good,” is to say “We judge/believe/accept that God is good.” But that implies what we just denied, which is that we can appeal to a standard for what’s good that’s independent of what God says about it.
Euthyphro’s Dilemma leads Socrates to a startling conclusion: even if people think they think “X is good just because God approves it,” what they must actually think is something radically different, namely, “If God approves of X, He does so because He judges that X is good.” But to say this is to say that God, just like us, appeals to moral reasoning about what’s good. And that means goodness is something that must exist independently of both our judgment and His.
With this rethinking of moral justification, Socrates opened the door to a powerfully subversive chain of ideas. Part of my exercise of free will is the freedom to base my actions on my own reasoning, including reasoning about what’s right and wrong. But that’s meaningless unless I can decide whether someone else’s alleged justification for controlling or guiding my actions is persuasive or not. And how can I possibly decide whether I should find God’s reasoning persuasive (for example, about staying away from the irresistibly yummy-looking fruit on that Tree of Knowledge) if Wing-Boy is cracking his knuckles and telling me it’s naughty and rude and inappropriate to even ask what God’s reasons are?
This is important stuff, because arguably our failure to understand Socrates’s argument—and our willingness to be bullied by Raphael’s—has shaped our entire civilization. The second-century Christian writer Tertullian was trying to mimic the “good,” meekly obedient Adam when he wrote that the Gospels contained all truth and that therefore, for the faithful, “curiosity is no longer necessary.” This infamous quotation is from The Prescription of Heretics, chapter 7. Some Christian commentators say it’s misunderstood, so in fairness a fuller version is worth giving:
Away with those who put forward a Stoic or Platonic or dialectic Christianity. For us, curiosity is no longer necessary after we have known Christ Jesus; nor of search for the Truth after we have known the Gospel. (Nobis curiositate opus non est post Christum Iesum nec inquisitione post euangelium.) When we become believers, we have no desire to believe anything else. The first ar
ticle of our belief is that there is nothing else we ought to believe.
The first sentence might suggest that you can defend Tertullian by arguing that he’s not so much saying “Thinking is no longer necessary” as “There’s no point going back to Greek authors, specifically, and trying to interpret them, because everything that matters in them is already incorporated into the Gospels.” But I don’t think this is a plausible way to defend Tertullian, for two reasons.
First: if that is what he’s saying, it’s hopelessly wrong. The idea that all Greek ethical thought of any value is incorporated into the Gospels may be traditional, and Christians may have been taught for centuries that they ought to believe it, but nobody ought to believe it, because (a) nothing about being a good Christian depends on believing it, and (b) it’s unmitigated hogwash.
Second: for reasons that the rest of the passage suggests, it really can’t be all Tertullian is saying. He’s very clear here that it’s not just the wisdom of particular pagan Greeks that we no longer need, but rather the very type of inquiry (call it science, or philosophy, or critical thinking) that they invented.
Why don’t we need critical thinking, according to Tertullian? Because the Gospels contain a complete and perfect source of moral truth. And it follows (?) that skeptical questions about the origin and veracity of that truth undermine the ability of the faithful to believe it. And therefore (?) skeptical questions are dangerous and should be condemned as heretical.
This kind of reasoning (a form of which, alas, Saint Augustine shared: see his Confessions, chapter 35) is one of history’s great intellectual and moral catastrophes. It infected early Christianity, quite unnecessarily, with the guiding principles common to all fundamentalism. Because of Christianity’s subsequent success, that fundamentalism went on to shape the viciously anti-pagan, anti-pluralist, anti-intellectual attitudes that dominated so much of the late-Roman and post-Roman world. Its results are illustrated in the fate that, over the next fifteen centuries or so, befell the Library of Alexandria, the entire literary civilization of the Maya (ten thousand codices were destroyed in the 1560s by a single individual, the Spanish bishop Diego de Landa, who thought they were the work of the devil—four of them survive), and a thousand pyres on which it was not mere words that were set alight.
Which brings us back to today’s headlines, and to that first large problem, set aside a few paragraphs ago. Fundamentalists think it’s arrogant and dangerous to question the will of God. But they are confused. It’s arrogant and dangerous to believe that you already know the will of God—and no one ever accuses someone of committing the first error without having already committed the second.
“Better rockets?”
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, born in 1857, was two or three generations ahead of his time: around 1900, he published a large number of papers covering such arcane matters as the minimum velocity needed to reach Earth orbit, how to design multistage rockets and space stations, the use of solid and liquid fuels, and what would be needed for planetary exploration. Unfortunately—so much for all the propaganda we keep hearing about how fast our technology is advancing!—not much has changed in the field of rocketry since Tsiolkovsky invented it. And it’s a humbling problem: relative to the scale of interstellar space, never mind intergalactic space, rockets are many thousands of times too expensive, inefficient, and slow to be much use. Exploring the stars is going to require a technology as different from rockets as rockets are from feet.
The Bretz Erratic
The Bretz Erratic doesn’t exist, but it seemed like a nice gesture to invent it. J. Harlen Bretz was the brilliant, visionary, stubborn geologist who endured decades of ridicule from his peers for insisting that the amazing geology and topography of Eastern Washington’s “channeled scablands” could be explained only by cataclysmic flooding. In an earlier era, no doubt he would have been praised for finding evidence of Noah’s flood; instead the experts said his ideas were preposterous—where could all that water have come from?
The answer wasn’t the wrath of God, but two-thousand-feet-deep Lake Missoula. Formed repeatedly by giant ice dams during a period roughly fifteen thousand years ago, it emptied every time the ice dams failed. These “Missoula Floods” happened about twenty times, at intervals of about forty years, sending ice-jammed floodwaters, hundreds of feet deep, racing west and south toward the Columbia River Gorge. Boulders embedded in remnants of the ice dams were carried hundreds of miles from the other side of the Bitterroot Range in present-day Idaho and Montana.
Brunhilde
Partridge has named his VW Kombi after Brynhildr, the Valkyrie or warrior goddess of Icelandic legend. She features in various adventures, most famously the Völsunga Saga, in which she angers the god Odin. Asked to decide a contest between two kings, she picks the “wrong” man; Odin punishes her by excluding her from Valhalla and making her live as a mortal.
“Unscientific is a bully word . . . evidence-free drivel”
Partridge could be thinking of the behaviorist John B. Watson. His immensely influential writings, from 1913 on, persuaded many psychologists and self-styled child development “experts” to be concerned about the alleged danger of too much parental affection. This must have seemed like an interesting hunch, but after so many decades, the shocking truth is still worth emphasizing. First, Watson and his school—while hypocritically vocal about the need for psychology to be rigorously scientific and therefore evidence-driven—had no evidence whatever for a causal connection between affectionate parenting and any particular psychological harm. Second, and more significantly, they seem to have been incapable of even entertaining the intrinsically more plausible “mirror” hypothesis: that if parents were to take such ideas seriously, and change their parenting style as a result of such advice, this itself might cause children terrible psychological harm.
Tragically, Watson produced his own body of evidence, treating his own children appallingly, by any normal humane standard. One committed suicide, one repeatedly tried to, and the other two seem to have been consistently unhappy.
Sigmund Freud’s follower and rival, Carl Jung, managed to arrive at a similar and similarly baseless and dangerous “scientific theory of parenting” from a different direction. He encouraged parents to worry that close affection would create what Freud had called an “Oedipal attachment” of child to mother. It has been suggested that Jung’s advice was partly responsible for the terrible upbringing of Michael Ventris, the ultimate decipherer of the Linear B script, since both his parents were “psychoanalyzed” by Jung, and it seems as though they became even colder and more distant from their son in response to their Swiss guru’s “expert” advice.
There are at least three distinct problems with that advice. First: many people have concluded that there’s simply “no there there”; on this view, “Oedipal attachment” is like the “black bile” referred to in medieval medical texts, in that it simply doesn’t exist. Second: even if it does exist, the people who believe in it have been unable to agree on whether it’s a natural and inevitable stage of childhood development or a dangerous perversion of that development. Third: even if it exists, and is a dangerous perversion of normal development, there is (at the risk of sounding repetitive) no evidence of any specific causal connections that would justify any advice aimed at improving the situation through a change in parenting style.
If you’re in the mood for a big dose of irony, at this point it’s worth looking up “refrigerator mother theory,” a campaign started in the late 1940s by Leo Kanner and championed endlessly by Bruno Bettelheim, in which mothers of autistic children were assured that their children’s problems had all been caused by their parenting not being warm enough. This turned out to be another case of bad science—lots of “expert” pronouncement, little or no underlying evidence, a complete unwillingness to take alternative hypotheses seriously, decades of largely unquestioned influence, a vast sea of unnecessary suffering.
For just one more example of psychoth
erapeutic overreach—allegedly expert, allegedly scientific, and with devastating effects on real families—see The Myth of Repressed Memory by Elizabeth Loftus or The Memory Wars by Frederick Crews. The “memory wars debate” of the 1990s illustrated particularly well a lamentably common theme in the history of psychiatry: abject failure to distinguish between potentially illuminating conjectures (ideas that we have essentially no evidence for yet but that it might one day be possible to confirm or refute) and well-established theories (general explanations that we have reason to believe are probably true, because they’ve survived rigorous testing against all plausible rivals in a context of related theories and bodies of evidence).
The problem with failing to make this distinction is profound. Suppose you inject your patients with a drug after representing it to them as an established method of treatment, when in reality it’s a dangerous experiment. This is about the grossest possible violation of medical ethics, short of setting out to murder people. In effect, though, this is what Watson, Jung, Bettelheim, and their many followers were doing to their thousands of victims, all under the phony guise of “my ideas have a scientific basis and yours don’t.”
Supernova
The ultimate stellar show ought to occur within our galaxy once every few decades, but not one has been observed since Tycho’s Star in 1572 and Kepler’s Star in 1604; both of these just barely predate the invention of the telescope. Still, if Antares blows, you won’t need a telescope: for a few days it will outshine the rest of the Milky Way, and will be visible as a bright dot even during daylight.