by Richard Farr
Ghostly ancestors and first contact
The last truly uncontacted New Guineans were Highlanders who encountered early Australian prospectors in the 1930s. They had been cut off from the outside world for millennia, and had invented farming at roughly the same time as it arose in Mesopotamia.
There are remarkable photos and film clips online of what happened when these dark-skinned Melanesians first encountered bizarre white-skinned beings with knee socks and rifles—particularly from Dan Leahy’s first expeditions. The appearance of the Caucasians was terrifying, partly because pale skin fit right into their existing stories: many of them believed that the dead retained their bodies but that their skin turned white. One historic (and disturbing) clip shows Leahy shooting a tethered pig to convince the villagers of his power; see http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/first-contact. In her book about New Guinea, Four Corners, travel writer Kira Salak describes seeing this clip:
“It is like the fall of Eden in that moment, recorded for posterity on grainy black and white. When I first saw it, I was riveted. It is actually possible to sit down and watch on a television screen an abbreviated version of foreign encroachment and destruction, a chilling glimpse of what has happened to nearly every native group “discovered” in the world. It is almost as if I were watching the arrival of Judgment Day. Thirty years later in the western half of New Guinea, the Indonesians would already have their foothold and begin the massive deforestation and genocide of the tribes. Thirty years from beginning to the arrival of the end.”
For more on Indonesia and “the arrival of the end,” see the note “Giant mines (and a short polemic on the relationship between wealth, government, colonialism, racism, and terrorism).”
“Paint their bodies with clay . . . a tribe near Goroka does that”
Morag’s referring to the “Asaro mudmen.” It’s the masks that are really wild—look them up!
“Homer was a blind storyteller . . .”
There are many legends about Homer, but we know virtually nothing about him for sure. He may or may not have been blind, and may or may not have been illiterate; he probably lived on the coast of Asia Minor (modern Turkey) around 750 BCE, or up to a couple of centuries earlier. But it’s also possible that he’s just a legend, and that the great epics under his name were the work of many people.
“Five miles high on peyote”
Peyote, a cactus native to Mexico, contains powerful psychoactive alkaloids, including mescaline. The spiritual significance of their effects is nicely captured in the descriptive noun entheogen, which was invented for these substances in the 1970s to replace the earlier hallucinogen and psychedelic. Entheogenic literally means “producing a sense of the divine.”
Nuxalk, and what Raven did
The Pacific Northwest is one of the world’s five top hot spots for language extinction, with over two hundred critically endangered languages, including Nuxalk, Kutenai, Klallam, Yakama, Snohomish, Spokane, Quileute, Siletz Dee-ni, and Straits Salish. (The other four major hot spots are Central and South America; Northern Australia, especially the Cape York Peninsula; the American Southwest; and East Siberia.) Nuxalk is spoken only in one village at the mouth of the Bella Coola River in British Columbia. Its strange phonemes, and its distaste for vowels, make it especially difficult for anyone who starts out with a European language. You can hear it spoken here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jkk-8Ti057U.
Here I have altered slightly the version of the Raven story I found at firstvoices.com—a great site for learning about Native American language and culture.
Physicists . . . three big theories . . . junk
The attempt to reconcile general relativity and quantum mechanics into a coherent theory of quantum gravity has already sucked up many whole careers with no end in sight; string theory, which many thought would elegantly solve the impasse, can’t offer any testable predictions at all, according to its critics, and seems to come in up to 10500 equally plausible versions, which is a few too many.
“A thousand years of human habitation”
Scientists disagree about when Polynesians from the southwest first arrived in the Hawaiian Islands; around 1000 CE is probable.
Gilgamesh and the lion
To see the original, search “Louvre Gilgamesh.”
“A trapdoor function . . . even our best computers will gag on it”
Modern cryptography (and therefore the entire Internet, the world banking system, and a whole lot else) depends on trapdoor functions, mathematical operations that are intrinsically harder to compute in one direction than another. Even simple addition is a sort of trapdoor function: you can solve “123 + 789 = x” quicker than “123 + x = 912.” But some functions are (or they become, when the numbers are large) much much much harder one way than the other.
The key example is prime factors. “What’s 13 × 17?” is easy: 221. But “Here’s a number, 221; what are its two prime factors?” is significantly harder. What if, instead of two-digit primes, I start with a pair of two-hundred-digit primes? Your computer can still multiply them together in a flash. But the reverse process, finding the primes with nothing but the result to go on, isn’t merely more difficult: it’s practically impossible, even with all the computing power in the world.
This fact makes it possible to use systems in which you publish a “public key” that anyone can use to encode a message to you; only you own, and never need to transmit, the “private key” capable of decoding those messages.
The idea of public keys based on trapdoor functions was the biggest advance in cryptography since hiding things under rocks, and goes back to publications by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in 1976.
Archimedes
See my note on him in The Fire Seekers. The newest research makes a good case that the Antikythera Mechanism was manufactured in about 205 BCE, which makes it slightly too recent for Archimedes—he had his terminal encounter with a Roman soldier during the sacking of Syracuse in 211 BCE—but it could have been based on his design.
Socrates and knowing how ignorant you are
The point was also made by the great Chinese sage Lao-tzu, or Laozi. Speaking of ignorance, I’ve always thought it fascinating that Socrates and Lao had so many things in common, and were near contemporaries, but had no idea that each other’s entire civilizations existed.
The Voynich Manuscript
The Voynich is easily the oddest and most beautiful of all the great “mystery” texts, in my opinion—take a look at the many pages reproduced online. It is, contrary to my fictional history, still in the Beinecke Library at Yale. “Solutions” to the mystery are legion; good luck.
“Let there be light”: What’s involved in creating a universe?
If you don’t know it, listen to the first part of Joseph Haydn’s oratorio Die Schöpfung (The Creation), with the volume turned way, way up. The C-major chord on the word light is a real spine tingler. In the English version, the crucial words are “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light”—which suggests to me a chain of three events: He decided that light would be a good idea, He reached for the switch, and the light came on as a result of His action. The German text seems to do a better job of hinting at a less ordinary, more appropriate idea. “Und Gott sprach: ‘Es werde Licht!’ Und es ward Licht”: literally, “And God said it would be light—and that was the light.” On this view, more broadly, God doesn’t cause the universe to exist, because His idea of the universe is the universe. So we exist in the mind of God. (I’m grateful to Henry Newell for introducing me to both the oratorio and this insight about the text many years ago.)
See the note on Hegel—and, if you’re interested in a grand intellectual detour, look up “the simulation argument,” a more recent and perhaps rather creepier take on the idea that we, and the universe, might be nothing more that someone else’s idea.
Religion, immortality, and equating consciousness with the soul that survives death
Balakris
hnan is giving a very simplified view here, and one that sounds much more like Christianity (or perhaps Islam) than religion in general. The Greeks seem to have a very ambivalent view of whether or in what sense the dead survive; so does Judaism; Buddhism and Hinduism perhaps even more so, since they think of survival after death in term of reincarnation—and they think of reincarnation as something to be escaped.
Einstein . . . “the theory has to be right”
Though Einstein’s two great theories were published in 1905 and 1915, it was in 1919 that he became world famous. That was when Arthur Eddington used a total solar eclipse to show that the sun’s gravity “bends” starlight just as general relativity predicts. Einstein joked that it would have been a pity if the experiment had gone the other way—not because that would have disproved his theory, but because it was “correct anyway.” That’s not arrogance; it expresses the perfectly sound idea that even a new theory needs more than one contrary “fact” to defeat it, especially if it’s profoundly convincing in other ways. Science works through a balance of evidence about what to believe overall, and theories guide what it makes sense to believe just as much as facts do.
Descartes’s ghost
The great French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes outlined his version of mind-body dualism in The Passions of the Soul, 1649. According to his view (or, arguably, an unfair simplification of it), the body is analogous to a mechanical device—a robot, we might say—controlled or piloted by an immaterial and immortal substance that resides within it. Descartes believed the world was made up of two fundamentally different kinds of stuff, matter and thought. (Or three, really: matter, thought, and God.) Matter is res extensa—“extended stuff,” or, literally, stuff that takes up space. Thinking stuff, res cogitans, has no extension in space. But we human beings are uniquely dual: physical objects that think.
The big problem for dualism—closely related to Bill Calder’s skepticism about the very idea of “the supernatural”—seems to be this: How can we make sense of the idea that the mind/soul and matter interact? There has never been a good answer to that question, and in The Concept of Mind (published exactly three centuries after The Passions of the Soul, in 1949), English philosopher Gilbert Ryle dismissed “Cartesian dualism” as the “ghost in the machine” theory.
Ryle’s work ushered in an era in which few philosophers took dualism seriously; instead, various forms of physicalism or naturalism or materialism, which might collectively be called “all machine, no ghost” theories, reigned supreme. They still do, despite the fact that purely materialist theories are also beset by deep problems. In particular: If matter is all there is, as Bill Calder and Mayo both think, how can we make sense of the idea that mind or soul or consciousness (the reality of which we experience directly every moment of our waking lives) even exists? The question has driven some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, to propose in all seriousness the apparently self-contradictory “eliminative materialist” doctrine that consciousness itself is an illusion. By way of illustrating how deep the trouble is, another philosopher, Galen Strawson, has memorably described this as “the silliest view that anyone has held in the whole history of humanity.”
See also the note on Turing, and on “Our biology is a barrier to our nature, because matter is evolving into mind.”
Of course, there may be another option. Patience, grasshopper.
Haole . . . buried him at sea
The word haole implies pale-skinned, and it’s now used in the sense of a white person from the mainland, but that’s not what it originally meant. Probably (no one seems sure) it meant “without breath,” and this had to do with Europeans not following Hawaiian customs involving breathing. One theory is that Hawaiians traditionally greeted one another by touching noses and in effect intermingling their breaths, and Europeans failed to do that.
Middle Eastern street . . . hijabs . . . abayas
A burqa is the fullest garment: it covers the whole body, with a mesh screen for the eyes. Chadors and abayas are full-body hooded cloaks, worn over other clothes. A niqab is a veil for the face only, usually with a slit for the eyes. A hijab is basically a scarf that covers the hair but not the face, and is often worn with what is otherwise Western-style clothing. Morag is guilty of cliché, as she suspects: Jordan is one of the most liberal Islamic countries, and many women there, especially in the cities, wear either the hijab or no head covering at all.
PART IV: GHOSTS
Giant mines (and a short polemic on the relationship between wealth, government, colonialism, racism, and terrorism)
The island of New Guinea is rich in minerals; the open-pit mines at Ok Tedi and Porgera in Papua New Guinea, and the Freeport mine at Grasberg on the Indonesian side of the border, are among the largest man-made holes on Earth. (Use Google Earth to look up Puncak Jaya, the tallest peak in New Guinea. The Grasberg mine is the set of concentric rings clearly visible just to the west of it.) It’s a classic example of what economists call the “resource curse,” in which poor, vulnerable people have their lives made immeasurably worse, rather than better, by the discovery of mineral wealth on their own land. Almost none of the vast profits from these mines have gone to indigenous groups, mine tailings have poisoned once-pristine major rivers like the Strickland and Fly, and violence has blossomed in the jungles like a big new crop.
Unfortunately for the people of Papua New Guinea and West Papua, the biggest problem isn’t even foreign mining (and logging) corporations, but corrupt governments that find those corporations to be an irresistible sources of cash. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Angus Deaton has pointed out, one of the biggest factors separating the most fortunate people in the world from the least fortunate is the matter of living under relatively stable, transparent, competent, corruption-free governments—and those of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea rank a miserable 107th and 145th out of 175 on Transparency International’s global corruption index.
Around the world, governments at this level are a lot like the bully in the school corridor: reliably stupid, but also reliably strong, selfish, pitiless, and violent. For all its failings, at least the government of Papua New Guinea is indigenous. The government of West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), on the contrary, is one of the most brutal, most ruthless, most overtly racist exercises in colonial domination in history, comparable to the worst excesses of the European powers in Africa in the nineteenth century.
The former Dutch territory was forcibly annexed by Indonesia during a drive for independence from 1961 to 1969. As zoologist Tim Flannery drily remarked (writing in 1998, shortly after the area had been renamed “Irian Jaya” by the Indonesian government):
“Surely it is a perverse twist of fate that has put a nation of mostly Muslim, mostly Javanese, people in control of a place like Irian Jaya. You could not imagine, even if you tried, two more antipathetic cultures. Muslims abhor pigs, while to a Highland Irianese they are the most highly esteemed of possessions. Javanese have a highly developed sense of modesty . . . for most Irianese, near-nudity is the universally respectable state . . . Javanese fear the forest and are happiest in towns . . . Irianese treat the forest as their home.”
This is a short quote from a long list of opposites, and bad things could have been predicted to flow from them. But alas, bad is far too weak a word, as it is not really even the Indonesian government that rules West Papua, but the Indonesian military—which, after enjoying decades of generous support, supplies, training, and diplomatic shielding by the United States, Australia, and even the United Nations, has one of the worst human-rights records of any entity on earth. In the fifty years since the brutally violent annexation, many tens of thousands of West Papuans (over five hundred thousand, according to the group International Parliamentarians for West Papua) have been murdered by Indonesian forces, with thousands more imprisoned, raped, tortured, and “disappeared,” in a campaign of terror that arguably amounts to genocide.
About that word terror. We’re encouraged
to think that terrorism is a very big deal, but what is it? The US State Department recognizes more than sixty terrorist organizations around the world. It would appear that what unites the listed organizations is their willingness to pursue political goals by using violence to intimidate and kill innocent people—and they are doing so at an unprecedented rate, mainly in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria. Currently the world’s worst example is Nigeria’s Boko Haram, an especially bloodthirsty Islamic extremist group affiliated with ISIS/ISIL. It’s on the list and in the news for murdering 6,664 people in 2014, more even than the rest of ISIS/ISIL worldwide. (Figures are from the Institute for Economics and Peace, 2015 Global Terrorism Index.) But since 1963 the Indonesian military has murdered up to seventy times that many people in Irian Jaya/West Papua alone, out of a population of just 4.5 million. It continues to imprison, torture, and murder West Papuans today, making something of a specialty of pro-democracy activists, otherwise known as “rebels” (look up, for example, the cases of Yawan Wayeni and Danny Kogoya), and farmers and children (see, but be warned of very disturbing images at, freewestpapua.blogspot.com). Yet Indonesia’s army doesn’t even make it onto the State Department’s terrorist list.
Possibly this is evidence that the United States government is a fan not only of our “ally,” Indonesia, but also of Lewis Carroll. For, as Humpty Dumpty famously tells Alice, “When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
You can find out more about what’s going on in West Papua in this article from the Diplomat, http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/the-human-tragedy-of-west-papua, and at the websites of Human Rights Watch, International Parliamentarians for West Papua, Cultural Survival, Survival International, and Amnesty International.