|
Sunday, April 30, 2006Who doesn't believe in complex adaptive systems?What Lenin, Gore and Jeremy Rifkin have in common with Falwell, Buchanan and Bin Laden Though the book is old - 1994 - it was not until this evening that I picked up Murray Gell-man's The Quark and the Jaguar, or, for me, Le quark et le jaguar. I picked up a translated copy in a used book store to practice my French and dip into the musings of someone who came up in Feynman from time to time. The Quark and the Jaguar is about the simple, the complex and complex adaptive systems. In the preface, Gell-man promises to talk about how complex adaptive systems tend to ever greater complexity in part 2. He promises to discuss the need to protect diversity in part 3. It may make more sense when I get there, but what came first was a chortle and a reminder of a thought that amuses me no end whenever evolution comes up: Why is it that the environmental left is forever nattering about the need to protect this, preserve that and restore the other while simultaneosly insisting that Darwinian evolution be taught in our schools? How can you teach evolution while preventing it happening? How is it that the hard right, with notions of man's dominion over earth and animal, can simultaneously oppose environmentalism, social programs, etc, and the teaching of evolution and natural selection? How can you watch, nay favor, letting evolution happen around you while preventing it being taught? (And even more bizarrely, think at the same time that Congress and a President can undo other forms of social change?) I think it comes down to twin traces of arrogance and humility, contradictory characteristics that tend to pop up in anyone of sufficient personality to be worth talking about. The hard right is arrogant enough to appropriate to humanity anything humanity might desire, save coca and mary jane, of course. But it is also possessed of a humility that assumes that God's green earth will so remain, man's effects being insufficient to completely despoil it. This is wishful thinking - another characteristic that pops up in most people. The hard left is humble enough to worry that man does not in fact have the right to do whatever he wants with the earth. But it is possessed of an arrogance that in the process of trying to downplay man's importance actually inflates it. If we're insignificant, can we really destroy the earth? And does the earth really depend on us to save it? Who are we to think it's up to us? And who are we to think that the pristinity in which the planet must be preserved is the vision we have? What can be said with surety about the hard right and the hard left is that they're both nuts. The sane are free to mock Pat Buchanan's dreams of returning to an idealized 1950s America that never was. But the contrast between Pat Buchanan and the environmental left is not in intelligence or sanity, merely in which idealized world-that-never-was they wish to restore. Whatever your leanings, once you start leading people back to lost Eden it's safe for the rest of us to assume you're either nutters, dangerous or both. There is in this discussion, another elephant who has just started nosing his trunk into the room: Those who preach restoration of the lost Caliphate - Al Qaeda and recent incarnations of Saddam, to name two - take this stuff to a whole different level. Yet they are not totally at odds with those who took Rousseau's "Man is born free..." bit and gave us the Reign of Terror and its godson, the October Revolution in an effort to make things right. What we teach our children is important. This is brought home by the information control seen in communist and other totalitarian regimes. But we have it here too: What we fight hardest to teach or not teach them is especially important, marking out those places where our efforts to transmit civilization give way to efforts to redefine and transform it. When it comes to the teaching of evolution question, it isn't science against ignorance. It's competing ideologies, each trying to use the education establishment to transmit political notions about man's relation to the rest of the world. The creationists are ignorant about science, failing to notice that they're surrounded by six-foot tall people who live 70 and 80 years. The evolutionists, for their part, are ignorant about themselves, failing to see how passionately they cling to and construct a worldview on the little bits we do know and arrogantly assuming that the stuff that they don't understand about origins, the meaning of life and the why of the universe are non-existent questions since they lack the answers. There are, of course, people in the middle. Not that the TurkeyBlog is accustomed to being in the middle of anything, save the argument, I myself favor teaching evolution as a thing that is obviously happening around us while offering the caveat that understanding a mechanism is not the same thing as having the Truth with a capital T, and suggesting that the religion department and not the biology department is the place to discuss the implications of the obvious presence of an evolutionary mechanism in the world's unfolding. I think this is a fair position. I also think it's fair to argue about it. The people who are scary are those who know more than is at present humanly knowable and insist that others see the world in the same terms. The environmental left and hard right stand in fierce opposition to one another, no question. But we would do well to be as wary of both as we are of Al-Qaeda and to be careful to give our full support to neither, for both offer Edenic visions that cause even really smart people to lose their reason in as little as three carefully edited paragraphs. Like a Nobel Prize winning physicist who studies complex adaptive systems and their tendency toward greater complexity en route to suggesting human intervention to sustain diversity. It is therefore a hopeful thing, rather than discouraging, that most of us are either skeptical of, or, more often, ignorant and indifferent to all this discussion. It is one of many mechanisms that assure the continued functioning of that delightfully complex and adaptive system known as these United States of America. 
posted by gbarto at 11:44 PM |
Archives
|
Day By Day© by Chris Muir.Old TurkeyBlog here.
