Too Hot To Handle

It's the height of summer in the Sacramento Valley, but this is not a record-setting year. It has barely cracked 100 degrees in this, usually the hottest week. I remember July 4, 1987, the day I moved my office to the 2^nd floor of 24^th & J. The building had no elevator, so everything had to be hand carried up the back stairs. Those were the days of telephone booth sized computers, hot black boxes and endless shelves of 3 ring binder manuals; weighty stuff in the 110 degree heat. At that younger age, I only had to stop now and then to cool off in air conditioned rooms before going back to work.

It is not at all like that now. As I write, I am directly under a cool spout of air, for which I am thankful and paying dearly (thanks to the California energy robbers). The alternative is going out there, which I can do for about 10 or 15 minutes before feeling very ill. About 10 years ago, I barely made it off the Causeway in my non-a/c truck before beginning to pass out.  So, summer reminds my body and me that times have changed. I will get some respite in a few days, when we go to the Coast. There, I can actually live in the open without any appliances. What a delightful change, not being trapped in a downstairs room all day; solitary except for the persistent telemarketing calls every 20 or 30 minutes.

When you’re young, you do not notice the Valley heat as much. Many older people like the heat, but most of these elderly heat-seekers move on to Arizona. (Aridzona, I call it.) For the rest of us, the summers here are like working in a blast furnace. Door knobs and steering wheels exposed to the sun become 2nd-degree burn hot in a few minutes. You have to plan how to sit in your car while starting it.

There’s another side to it, because the Valley is a great place for me to live except June through September, and sometimes January. I love the agricultural goings-on here: the tomatoes, corn, wheat, rice, cantaloupe, peaches, nectarines, figs, kiwi, almond, walnut, cherries, strawberries, grapes, wine and more wine. Farther up the Valley, they raise horses and cattle; on the Coast, sheep and fish. If someone eats it, it grows here. It’s hard to see how anyone could starve here.

As it is a lot cooler and greener in Napa, I especially enjoy our trips there.  During the last decade, Napa spilled eastward into Yolo, my county. Curiously, Napa’s vines still stop exactly at the Solano County line, our common neighbor to the southeast. For us, though, the winery country grows ever nearer, making one of my favorite hobbies - driving around the grape fields - that much easier.  I especially like the uncounted small wineries off the tourist track. It’s amazing how many places there are, just 2 miles from the WINE TRAIN. You’ve just got to live here to know them. Every so often you hear about one, when it explodes into wine journals and lists.

The best part is the city slickers don’t like it here,  more than a few miles away from the wine train. New York oriented San Franciscans often call Sacramento "cow town," and maybe it’s so. Sacramento metro has grown to around 2 million people; excepting that, the Valley is empty in most places. Our benefit of living here is the LA complaint: "too many people" down there.

Walter Waffles

Having once again confronted my mortality,  I feel compelled again to state what I've worked and hoped for in a lifetime.  In doing so,  I realize everyone will again be disappointed,  some outraged.

I discovered my difficulty in accomplishing anything while reading Smith & Novak's "Buddhism."  They lay out clearly the difference between the Theravada and Mahayana practices in a table.  Passing through the checklist,  I see I am inconsistently(?) mostly a Theravadin,  except when I agree with Mahayana precepts.  This happens to me a lot: I find myself simply unable to accept predefined categories and connections.  I'm always just an irregular rolling stone that doesn't fit any of the holes.

For example,  why must "wisdom" or "compassion" be the exclusive first priority;  why not both?  Something's wrong with a practice when the heart and brain are disconnected.  Living things usually die when that happens.

Here is Smith & Novak's table ("Buddhism" p. 71):

Smith & Novak comment:

"... there is an important sociopolitical difference between Theravada and Mahayana as well.  Theravada sought to incarnate a feature of the Buddha's teachings ... his vision of an entire society - a civilization - that was founded, like a tripod, on the monarchy, the monastic community, and the laity ..."  (P 72)

"Theravada remained faithful to its founder's vision of a Buddhist civilization, and Mahayana Buddhism became a "religion" that is part, only, of civilizations whose social foundations had already been laid."  (pp 72-73)

I highlighted the general ideas with which I agree.  I strongly disagree with the sociopolitical conclusions of both Buddhist schools.  I treat Buddhism as a worthy sectarian philosophy,  which can be included in one's general philosophy about societies and politics.  I feel Buddhist practices - "lifestyle" - are most amenable to maintaining peaceful, democratic and socialist societies.

The Ecological Principle

This is a central tenet of my philosophy,  and also - as I eventually found out - a very old Buddhist thought.  Essentially,  it's the idea that everything hangs together,  and exists only because it hangs together.  This is the sort of thinking underlying Quantum Mechanics and Chaos Theory.

It's difficult to understand how something comes from nothing;  nothing in our experience perhaps us for this notion.  Nonetheless,  I accept it as so.  It is a better explanation of what is than any other offered.  I take it as the default hypothesis against which all others should be measured.

A consequence of this view is that, finally weighed, the Universe comes to nothing.  For example, for every electron,  there is a corresponding anti-electron (a positron or other balance).  What this view cannot explain is how the Big Bang got started,  or whether the Universe will ever end.  I think it doesn't matter:  it is simply beyond our present science.  What does matter is that there is a balance of pluses and minuses in all things,  a grand total which comes to nothing in the end.

Of course,  personal preferences need to be considered.  I usually find metaphysical tracts uninteresting and tedious.  If nothing at all is "behind" the Universe,  the need for metaphysics is obviated.  If there's nothing to explain,  I can put aside those books I feel are boring.  It makes it easy for me to hang onto my simple materialism:  that the stuff of the Universe is all one kind of thing,  whatever that is, or nothing at all.  There are no Platonic eidos, universal forms (as in Julian Barbour, "The End of Time").  There is no dualism of mind (souls) and formless matter.  Everything is just what it is.

My view follows Heraclitus,  'no one touches a river twice.'  Everything is in motion, there is no "stability" or preferred status;  even time is illusory.  Someday,  I hope we'll have a much better insight into "time" than that given by Relativity.  Relativity makes clear time is inseparably mixed up with mass and gravity.  I think time somehow connects those things with quantum probabilities or "particles."  In any event, I believe no one knows (experiences) one's own birth or death,  or the birth and death of the all.  All of us only know what's in between, as it occurs to each of us.

We can always allege causes,  that something happens as a result of something else;  do this, get that.  But,  does one thing cause another,  or is it only that we have associated things we have seen many times?  Is there any way to know the difference?  If our experience is just what it is,  if it is extremely personal and never wholly communicable or transferable,  what mark (label) designates those which are "real" or antecedents and those which are mere phantoms or consequents?

I believe the simplest way to handle these traditional philosophical problems is taking the easy way out.  I'll just say you cannot find any "mark" of reality and that each person's experience is stand-alone; i.e., everything is subjective and relative.  It's hard to imagine how someone would disclaim one's own experiences to oneself,  at least in the moment they're being had.

I think the burden of proof lies on those who say otherwise,  for anyone can "prove" to oneself the truth of personal experience.  It remains for the Platonists, Naturalists, Idealists and all the other "ists" to show that anything is added or subtracted by their account of reality and knowledge.

On my view,  there is no natural reason to prefer one creature over another.  Nothing in nature appoints some people to be masters or slaves to others.  Maybe might makes right,  but what is "might" if a smart ape can elude the blows of the muscle-bound one?  So,  I start with the precept of the natural, ethical equality of all "beings" in nature,  even if some survive and others do not.

By the same token, there is no valuation that prefers one organization (society, civilization) over another,  even if some survive and others do not.  Following Hume,  we cannot conclude from the "is" of Darwinian evolution Spencer's "social Darwinism" or any other sort of "ought" regarding any species.  What we believe happened is just what happened;  it stands for itself.

As to what sort of society is best for homo sapiens,  no one knows.  The best we can do is study what has happened,  and make intelligent guesses about where it is going.  We can allege connections between, say, the advent of industrial societies and the decline of slavery.  Such connections might be "internally" true for the human species,  but ignore consideration of enslaved machines as an "externality."

When I think about any of the certitudes and platitudes on which I - and probably you, too - base my life,  they slip away from my grasp.  Everything evaporates;  the only thing that remains seemingly solid is the whole thing taken together.  It is like our Quantum atoms,  supposedly made of electrons, protons and neutrons,  more fundamentally quarks and gluons, which are never found anywhere even though we owe our existence to their being somewhere, everywhere.  Our brains aren't set up to understand and accept this properly,  and even our best computers cannot wrap themselves around all the infinite complexities.  But,  the computers don't fret,  they just calculate a "best" approximation.  We've used those results to produce some of the most astonishing technologies and experiences in human history; e.g., superconductors, h-bombs and even better computing chips.  It works,  even if we really don't know "why."  It is what it is.

Earth as Gaia

Here I note another controversial idea that I affirm.  I'm arrogant about this one,  for personal reasons.  In the early 1970s,  I worked in a lab studying mitochondria (a sub-cellular organelle in eukaryotes).  I learned of Dr Lynn Margulis' "symbiosis" hypothesis,  which immediately seemed correct to me.  People sneered at her at the time,  but symbiosis is the standard theory today.  Similarly,  the Alvarez family (father and son) was treated poorly when it suggested dinosaurs were destroyed by an asteroid 65 million years ago.  Their publications seemed right to me at the time, more than 20 years ago.  Now, anyone who watches the DISCOVERY channel or PBS' NOVA series knows about the KT boundary, the dinosaurs  and the rise of mammals.

I'm not perfect.  I will never forget Annie Chang,  a worker at Paul Berg's Stanford lab,  who explained her early results to a few of us in a Fall, 1973 Saturday morning get together.  She had succeeded in introducing bacterial genes into a frog,  which propagated the changed DNA.  Thus began the modern revolution in molecular biology, GENENTECH and all else derived from it,  good, bad and indifferent.

I was stunned by Ms Chang's proposition,  and the seemingly ironclad evidence.  It violated basic assumptions of biologists at the time,  that DNA could only evolve gradually and that the genes of living Kingdoms were really different and incompatible.  I recall asking her, stupidly, several times,  whether she was SURE she had transplanted a gene. It seemed very unlikely bacterial genes could survive in eukaryotic cells,  even if she showed they did.  I couldn't accept her results for several months,  even though my studies on mitochondria should have prepared me for her work.  I was just too stupid and rigid to accept what was obvious.  However,  that meeting loosened me up when I came across Dr Margulis' work a few months later.

I am sure Ms Chang selected our lab and a few others for pre-publication, hush-hush review of her results,  because we were known as crazy people;  people likely to be sympathetic to any crazy idea that came our way.  She was right in her choices,  because the initial reaction to the Berg lab's publications was utter, shocked disbelief and rejection.

I've often wondered just how hard it was for "establishment" scientists to swallow Annie's revolutionary results.  Of course, it got easier,  when GENENTECH was organized shortly thereafter, and the money flowed, and flowed and flowed. It still flows: GENENTECH investors DOUBLED their money during the last 3 months,  when new drug applications were approved by the FDA.  All the legacy of Dr Berg, Ms Chang and their colleagues.

So,  I've learned to be a crazy man with crazy ideas.  One of them is the Gaia Hypothesis- the notion that Earthly conditions are the result of billions of years of interactions between organic and inorganic things.  It's not my idea,  and maybe it is too general or not exact enough.  But,  Dr Lovins is on to something in Gaia,  even if many scientists sneer at him.

Unlike Dr Berg,  Dr Lovins is the odd man out.  Our giant multi-national oligopolies do not love these ideas.  Even if eventually someone will get rich on account of Gaia,  more immediately a lot of people will be made poorer.  The smug and comfortable don't want to think about disturbing truly ancient relationships,  or what happens if the disruption cannot be restored.  They just want their monthly allotments.  So, Gaia is reviled in many places.

Nonetheless,  weird bacteria keep being found at ever greater depths below the Earth's land and sea surfaces.  The most successful life forms on this planet are bacteria by almost every measure.  They seem to have adapted themselves to niches unimagined just a few years ago.  It is possible methane (natural gas) is generated from raw chemicals and heat by bacteria,  not just from ancient organic remains.

I don't think Gaia is a crazy idea,  even if others cast it beyond the pale.  The part of our planet to which we have access is indeed a living thing,  an ecological system.  The famous picture of Earth rising over the Moon tells the tale.  This should give anyone pause who proposes to make major changes,  or who would ignore the delicate balances.

Don't forget the 1970s TV ad:  "It's not nice to fool Mother Nature."

Social Equalities

Is there any reason to believe a democratic society is "better" than other kinds?  Based on the ecological principle,  the answer must be "No."  The same answer applies to all the other "perfect" or "perfectible" societies people have suggested.

Historical studies show that human societies rise and fall.  Millions of other animal and plant species have come and gone.  Some species have several different social structures which change according to local conditions.  In comparison, some animal societies have been stable for eons.  Ants and bees have triumphed over their environment for more than 100 hundred million years,  seemingly in the same way as they do now.  There is an interaction of the environment, social organization and individual biology which "stabilizes" some,  shuttles others back and forth,  and destroys still others.  Clearly, societies of homo sapiens have not yet achieved any permanent form,  because they keep rising, changing and falling.

Each species is in a social class by itself,  even if many species share some practices and if, in general,  the outlines of several societies are similar.

Ants were farmers long before the human invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago.  Ants grow fungus,  line their nests with reworked plant parts and play shepherd to aphids.  Ants are born into a rigid society,  divided by caste and class,  even though all individuals except the drones are genetically identical females.  This rigidity is accomplished entirely by chemicals, hormones and pheromones, acting on organisms uniquely prepared to respond to them.  It is noteworthy that,  despite the genetic and behavioral uniformity of ant colonies,  each colony knows its own members by a unique chemical signature.  Foreigners are mercilessly destroyed and driven away.

Many human societies, in outline, are very similar to ant colonies,  right down to the furious tribal behavior.  But humans are not ants or bees;  human societies are not directly programmed by chemical interactions.  The means of social co-ordination are quite different,  even if the overall structures are similar.

For the moment,  I draw your attention to that "overall structure,"  the result of social co-ordination.  Agricultural societies are necessarily different from hunter-gatherer and other societies,  because crops are grown in certain seasons in definite ways.  The farmer chains himself to the Earth and a given environment.  Maize and its remote descendant, corn, do not grow everywhere, anytime.  The plant requires fertilizer and water,  a certain level of sun and heat,  and freedom from many pests.  These requirements, and similar ones for other domesticates,  enforce themselves on the farmer on penalty of starvation, famine and even death.

In most cases,  the farmer does not have the option of returning to hunting and gathering during bad times because the environment has been completely changed by his prolonged efforts.  Agriculture drives out the ecological system that preceded it.  The agricultural system has its own stability, inputs and outputs.  When it fails,  the old system may or may not come back,  but reversion may take longer than the farmer's life cycle.  The same situation may even apply in stages of agricultural development;  e.g., once the "green revolution" is established,  it is impossible to go back to the status quo ante.  Change is often ratcheted,  and this fact can be the reason societies and species fail.

The notion I am putting forward is that adaptations can drive social structure.  An "adaptation" can be genetic or technical,  or merely the good fit of an organism to its present environment.  It doesn't matter whether the organism or the environment initiates change purposefully or accidentally.  It only matters that the organism arrives at a "good fit" for as long it lasts.  Of course, once this fit develops,  there is no "incentive" for the organism to develop further,  or there is only "incentive" to change along the lines the general environment changes.  The interaction of organism and environment enforces certain behaviors on the organism,  unless the organism (like homo sapiens, tropical forests and other groups) is sufficiently powerful to change the environment as well.  To the degree the organism is also social,  the behaviors must also allow individuals to fit together.  Gross cannibalism, for example, may prevent the growth of large and complex societies,  witness the Maine lobster.  Where individual behaviors fit together,  or at least don't obstruct each other,  those behaviors become the basis of social activity.  In most species,  this starts with sex,  the most primitive social activity.

The specifics of individual behavior define the particular society,  but the common elements define a type of society.  So we may have a hierarchy of societies,  classified in the same way as species, genus, family, etc;  a hierarchy which is not genetic and which does not depend on similar methods of social programming.  This hierarchy only depends on its formal structure,  because it is an abstraction from natural phenomena.  In this hierarchy, we can compare people, chimps, ants, birds and bees indifferently,  because we are most concerned to connect individual behavior and survival to social behavior and survival.  In studying such a classification,  we are looking for "survival of the fittest," whatever that means;  in the simplest sense,  that which survives longest in the most places among the most species.

It is impossible in advance to make any determination whether one social system is "better" than any other.  It is possible to find out what works and what doesn't,  and for how long.  Such studies define abstract notions,  such as species and genus,  but the only thing which "exists" as experienced phenomena are the concrete, actual acts of individuals.  If societies exist,  they do so in the same sense as atoms - compounds of fleeting appearances.  We can only  make society sensible as the interaction of the whole with its members,  but we will find it demonstrated nowhere.  Like "mind,"  society is inferred from observations to explain observations.  But the only mind and society I really know about is my own;  everything else is suspicion.

It doesn't follow we can determine the "best" or even "better" social systems from these studies.  Human society is interactive,  so what is good or bad depends entirely on the training of its members and their relations to other societies.  With appropriate training and behavioral patterns,  it is conceivable the NAZI THIRD REICH could have lasted the millennium predicted by Hitler.  Similarly brutal societies existed in ancient times - Persia and Rome come to mind - but they usually lasted several hundred years at most.  Maybe modern conditions make a thousand years of horror possible.

I have faith that democratic socialism is a superior form of human society, even if nothing so far supports that notion.

Is there something I've overlooked?

... to be continued

Last update: 11/02/2007

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