Death of a Neighborhood
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
(c) July 2005
"You look like you're lost, sir," said a stout female security officer,
as she left her vehicle with the large letters ADM on the vehicle's door.
"No, I'm not lost. I'm observing how you have destroyed the neighborhood
of my birth."
In an officious manner, obviously feeling duty bound to fulfill her
appointed role, she replied, "I'm sorry to tell you, sir, but you are now on
private property."
"That is sad," I said as I put my car in reverse, hesitating to touch the
button to automatically roll up my window. Turning her back to me as she
returned to her vehicle, I could hear her say, almost to herself, Yes, it is,
isn't.
My old neighborhood is South Clinton in Clinton, Iowa. It once was a
vibrant, down-to-earth working class neighborhood of people of German, Irish,
Native American, Norwegian, Swedish, and Italian heritage, hard working folks,
many of whom were not far removed from the old country of their parents' or
grandparents' birthplace. Yet, South Clinton often suffered the social
distinction of being seen as a people, or as those "below the tracks" people by the more
gentrified citizens of the community.
Indeed, South Clinton is bounded by the railroad tracks on two sides, the
mighty Mississippi River on a third, and this imposing plant on its most
southern side.
Bread winners in South Clinton worked at Curtis Wood, the Chicago & North
Western shops, Swift Poultry, DuPont, Collis, the garment factory, among many
other manufacturing facilities once thriving in the area, and of course, ADM,
which has had more different names and employers associated with it than a
house of orphans.
In my time, it was known as the Sugar Refinery, Clinton Foods, Clinton
Corn, Standard Brands, and now Archer Daniel Midland, or ADM.
To this operation's credit, it survived the worse days of the Great
Depression of 1929, and has operated uninterruptedly over the course of nearly a
century. With each iteration of owners, it has ridden the back of science to
develop ever more imaginative products from the processing of Iowa corn into
syrup, sugar, lactic acid, hops, starch, gluten, feed for stock, ethanol as a
supplement to petroleum, to name only a handful of its contributions.
At the same time, where a century ago this community turned logs floated
down the Mississippi River from Minnesota and Wisconsin into gold dust, it now
turns Iowa's rich loam soil of planted corn into pure industrial gold to an
alchemist's delight. I say this because ADM is the only surviving and
prospering company of those many mentioned above in this new century, and thus the
dilemma.
South Clinton people worked hard to become homeowners, to be people of
property, and to experience a glimmer of the American Dream. They paid their
taxes, kept their clapboard houses up as well as could be expected with the
constant rain of soot, ash, wood dust, burnt corn debris, and spent gases from
these industrial outlets. Sometimes it seemed as if the sun could not break
through the industrial fog or that the aroma of cut grass could be scented through
the heavy odors of burnt corn, wood shearing, or blast furnaces of burning
coal and oil.
People didn't complain. They were too busy working and living to notice.
It was outsiders who would always remind them of the fact. They sent their
children to school at Irving, or to Chancy on the hill, or if Catholic, to St.
Mary's also on the hill. The one desire they had was for their children to
do better than they had done. So, they perpetuated the American Dream.
The mighty Mississippi River flowed by the neighborhood, and its banks
belonged to them. It provided a vista of nature with its assorted islands and
sloughs. Beaver Island, the largest in the area, provided homes for many
residents. The Mississippi was rich in carp, bass, and catfish, and provided
excellent blinds for duck hunting in the fall, as well as ice skating and ice
fishing in the winter. Nearly every family had some kind of boat from canoe on up.
The river was a virtual paradise and they owned it, that is, until now! It
has been sheared away from them as surely as hope can be sheared away from
courage.
My family left South Clinton when I was two, but the heart of the family,
especially that of my mother, remained there forever. She kept in touch with
family and friends who remained there for several generations, many in the
same homes, feeling a sense of identity and security with the unalienable rights
to know as property owners their rights of ownership were inviolable.
What they failed to recognize is that progress is America's most
important product, and nothing must stand in the way of progress. Nothing! Progress
is an insatiable animal with an appetite always for more. Progress devours
dreams and neutralizes passions with the implacable swiftness of a robotic
knife.
Friends had told me to take a look at my old neighborhood for myself
during this brief trip back to Clinton for a book signing and a visit with
friends, and my sister, Pat Waddell, and her extended family. I was sure they had
exaggerated the impact of ADM's expansion into the neighborhood. Instead, I was
shocked beyond my senses. They had killed it and carried off its corpse,
leaving only debris as memory of its passing.
I drove slowly down a makeshift dirt road as I witnessed giant earth
movers crushing the final bones of concrete streets and sidewalks into manageable
chunks awaiting the hungry mouths of machines to lift them into huge trucks to
haul them off to unconsecrated dumps. Fortunately, all the houses had
already been erased from the neighborhood and I didn't have to see them crushed and
to hear their screams of anguish and pain and their walls collapsed. Not a
blade of grass could be seen anywhere as bulldozers rushed about to turn the
earth into level plains.
Where the McDermotts and Hydes, Eklands and Kings had lived were gone as
were the homes of many other families I once remembered living there.
Instead, the acronym ADM is on the security van, fences, trucks, smoke stakes,
everywhere. It reinforces with defiance, "Face it! This is ours, no longer yours!"
And it is, bought with honest money and agreed upon terms. It is reality.
Talking to a friend, who is still a holdout, and a third generation
resident of the same house, I sense the defeat in her words. "They paid people a
good price for their places," she confessed, then adding, "They haven't come as
far as my property, but I'd sell in a minute to them if they did. My fear is
that the city will impose Eminent Domain and give me nothing for this place."
She then shared with me what had happened to homeowners in other places
across America in the recent past. I listened knowing how true, and yet how
helpless her words were. I had read the same stories with concern, remembering
when I came to Tampa from South Africa in the late 1960s. Much of the Cuban
community of Ybor City outside Tampa's city proper was erased by government
fealty. It was called "urban redevelopment," but the land laid vacant for years,
only today to become a sprawling but poor imitation of the French Quarters of
New Orleans.
"Do you think there is any hope?" she asked me.
"No, I don't think so," I answered, sharing with her the fact that the
Supreme Court most recently had ruled in favor of corporations being allowed to
negotiate with local governments to erase neighborhoods to improve the tax
base of such communities. The homeowners had little recourse but to accept their
lot.
Two sets of ironies come to mind in the "Death of a Neighborhood." One
is that a disproportionate number of my friends who grew up in South Clinton
have either died early in life, or have suffered or are suffering from incurable
diseases. It causes me to wonder if the climate of the community was a
factor. If so, they would be better off living and growing up elsewhere. My
friend in this instance is suffering from cancer, and has fought valiantly to deal
with it without complaint or projection of the blame on the location of her
home.
The final irony is that were it not for the Clinton Corn Processing
Company, then the name of the company, I would not have had a chance for a college
education. I worked for five summers at Clinton Corn while acquiring two
degrees. It so happens that Clinton Corn, now Standard Brands, Inc., was my first
employer as a chemist in research and development in the technical service
department under Dr. Newton. I would not have been able to enjoy the
professional life I have experienced were it not for this place of summer employment.
In my day, more than one hundred college students were hired each summer
by Clinton Corn, and paid at the same scale as other entry level employees.
As a result, we have in this country many doctors, lawyers, scientists,
engineers, teachers, politicians, ministers and priests, authors and scholars,
administrators, managers and executives, as well as business creators and
entrepreneurs, who owe the opportunity of a college education to this
company-of-many-names.
Now, ADM is a major employer of the community. Were it to leave, its
void would be hard to fell. That said, something is wrong with this picture.
When a community becomes hostage to an employer or a set of employers, it has
lost its identity as an independent entity if not its well to survive.
Clinton, Iowa has had many iterations in its 150 years of adaptation,
assimilation, growth and development, and survival with an industrial-driven
community being only one.
I am writing this as I've just returned from visiting many places, among
them Hannibal, Missouri, where the legend and wonder of Samuel Clemens as Mark
Twain is preserved as a tourist attraction. Clinton has a rich history of
great personages such as Lillian Russell, Marquis Childs, Duke Slater, Hank
Dihlmann, Bob Dalrymple, Bobby Witt, Gussie Witt, Jack Dunmore, Dick Tharp, Dick
Crider, Ray Gilbert, Lefty Ward, Warren Mason, Ward Markley, Kenny Ploen, Chuck
Vogt, Jack Schuster, Jim Lesher, Leroy Watts, Dean Burridge, Dick Price, T.
Petersen, Dean Piper, Howard Boegel, and the "Fire Wagon Five," Max Lynn, Felix
Adler, Dick Farwell, St. Mary's 1954 State Basketball Champions, and on and
on. It has had the Itens, Youngs, Lambs, Joyces, Van Allens, and many others
who were the shapers of the Clinton community of the past.
The Clinton Historical Society has preserved this history, and Kathy
Flippo has written rich and poignant books about the area and the river. My
references here are off the top of my head. I'm remembered primarily as a jock and
my references reflect that.
Meaning to cast no aspersions on today, I think it was electric and
imaginative the way The Clinton Herald created the "Fire Wagon Five" of the 1945
Clinton High basketball team, or the way it presented "Golden Glove Boxing" of
that period. It was vibrant, imaginative, energetic, and captured with words
and pictures a sense of place. That is missing today, no doubt because of the
competition and all the distracting alternatives to people's attention.
In a word, I see Clinton as an a potential entertainment and tourist's
Mecca, not the place I saw where it celebrated its 150th birthday without
banters on every pole, and without bold banters across every intersection. I am
told the community is tired, that net income of families are down, that most go
to Davenport to do their shopping, that the Catholic population continues to
dwindle as less and less baptized Catholics attend mass on Sunday, and even less
contribute to the collection box. On the other hand, I see the streets in
the best shape I've ever seen them. I see businesses punching through the
blight to boldly establish new optimism on fifth avenue and elsewhere. I see the
waterfront decorated in its best, and the best ballpark in the low minors in
splendid condition. So, while in the film "Field of Dreams" the message was,
"build it and they will come," my sense is the same for Clinton, "believe it and
it will happen."
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com
blog: peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Friday, April 21, 2006
SCIENTISTS & GOD IN THE INFORMATION AGE!
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Welcome all who have reached this blog through the new domain connections. The blog is designed to stimulate thought based upon the reader's own experience and wondering, and is no way meant to be doctrinaire.
ABSTRACT
Body and soul are not two different things, according to Einstein, but only two different ways of perceiving the same thing. I think he is correct.
Similarly, he claims physics and psychology are only different attempts to link experience together by way of systematic thought. Again, I agree as I went from a chemist to a psychologist in a career spanning over forty years.
The American Indian treated Nature and the spirit as two aspects of the same thing. He had a reverence for Nature and came to live in harmony with it feeling no need to conquer it. Similarly, science and religion look at the knowable, but from different vantage points. Science looks at it from the point of reason, religion from the point of revelations.
We are in the Age of Science. Man has drifted from the idea of God to knowing, or from the spirit to the mind, failing to see they are connected, as matter and energy are the same.
The drift has not only created a breach between man and God, and contributed to environment pollution, but to emotional pollution as well. Man has drifted toward self-estrangement. Science using reason has taught us the limits of energy with the Laws of Thermodynamics, particularly its second law, entropy.
Even so, science would allow the utopian idea to persist that man’s excesses can always be pardoned with miraculous discoveries. We know entropy operates in a “closed system,” meaning energy can be changed from usable (low entropy) to unusable (high entropy), but cannot be created or destroyed.
Complicating matters further, life is an “open system.” Life struggles to do work and maintain order (low entropy) while available energy for work declines and chaos mounts (high entropy), as everything is moving to maximum entropy and stasis.
The earth and, indeed, the universe are in a state of entropy. It is the nature of things. Now, in the Information Age, when we need to see things most clearly and be the best informed, appreciating and being guided by our limitations, we find instead our arrogance and hubris has produced “Nowhere Man,” who dreams of utopia (which literally means “nowhere”) where there are no consequences only a zest for more. It is the reason for this work.
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put off;
The Sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it
‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone
John Doone (1572 – 1631)
Nature and Nature’s law lay hid in night;
God said, “Let Newton be,” and all was light.
Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744)
For men to learn to love one another, it is not enough that they should know themselves to be members of one and the same thing; in ‘planetising’ themselves they must acquire the consciousness, without losing themselves, of becoming one and the same person.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955)
Robert Wright opens his “Three Scientists and Their Gods” (1988) with a note to his readers that the book is not about religion, but about the concept of information. He claims the concept is about meaning and purpose in both the mundane and cosmic sense. Information has become omnipotent, omniscient and ubiquitous from which one might infer that information has become a surrogate for God in cyberspace.
Many contemporary scientists, certainly not all, vary from edgy to ambivalent about God, taking comfort in declaring themselves agnostics. Not so Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955). A geologist and paleontologist, he became a Jesuit priest and philosopher, lectured in pure science at the Jesuit College in Cairo and then became professor of geology at the Institut Catholique in Paris.
Later, he went on paleontologist expeditions in China and Central Asia, but his unorthodox ideas led to a ban on his teaching and publishing. Nevertheless, his work became known and was awarded academic distinctions. His major work “The Phenomenon of Humanity” (written 1938 – 1940) was posthumously published. Based on his scientific thinking, it argues that humanity is in a continuous process of evolution towards a perfect spiritual state. For most scientists, however, God is not a comfortable idea in this the Information Age.
Words and ideas have left their moorings thrown into cyberspace and circulated with the speed of light with terms becoming snuggled into nefarious conclusions. Indeed, beliefs and actions now countermand certainty, order and continuity. We are in a new day.
Physicists speak of light, mass, energy, velocity, gravity, motion, measurement, and time, while politicians constantly harp on about freedom, equality, innocence, and justice. As a consequence, science has become psychobabble, and political speak more spin than bite. Meanwhile, the clergy speak of God, eternity, salvation, and damnation, evil and good as if nothing has changed, least of all Psychological Man. It would appear few are aware, and even fewer are listening.
What exactly does information mean when words and ideas are randomly received and divisively perceived; when complexity boggles the mind and people dance to their own catatonic beat; when there is nothing unknowable to believe or cling to?
Isaiah Berlin (1909 – 1997) sees a distinction between what it takes to believe, and what it means to believe. Most people, he fears, use words as if words are the actual act. The words, “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” (WMDs) turned the world on its head, and led to the preemptive War in Iraq. WMD is a toxic acronym, not a word, but elicits dreadful imagery. Now, Iran has joined the saber rattling with menacing words designed to taunt the world with the status of its nuclear research program. When words are treated as acts, they provoke hysteria and drive people into the dark abyss of paranoia.
Isaiah Berlin finds most people stumble in the dark, even scientists when it comes to words. He finds it exceedingly rare for scientists to be good at analyzing the concepts they use routinely. They assume legitimacy much like the rest of us do. Albert Einstein, Berlin notes, knew the difference between words about words and words about things, or between concepts and the data of experience. That is how he escaped the intimidating shroud of Isaac Newton. Moreover, he understood that no problem could be solved with the same consciousness that had created it.
As a rule, even the most gifted scientists tend to be too deeply absorbed in the activity, in their consciousness, to be able to stand back and examine the assumptions upon which their work and beliefs are based. New information becomes a narcotic inducing them to muddle forward unconscious of the dangers it might set in motion. Such was the case with J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 – 1967), who directed the Los Alamos Laboratory in the creation of the atomic bomb (1943 – 1945), only to lose his security clearance when he opposed additional development of the hydrogen bomb.
THREE SCIENTISTS
Robert Wright profiles three scientists that display these most human inclinations. Brilliance often works to cover ambivalence. Scientists, as high priests of The Information Age, would prefer to avoid the muddy waters of the divine, as they cause self-conscious embarrassment. Perhaps the divine lies outside the purview of science.
The three scientists profiled are Edward Fredkin, the artificial intelligence and computer prophet, Edward O. Wilson, the entomologist and creator of sociobiology, and Kenneth Boulding, the unconventional economist and systems thinker.
EDWARD FREDKIN
Ed Fredkin (ne’ 1934) is a self-made millionaire and lives on his own island. He is a scientist who startled his colleagues at MIT with his theory that reality consists ultimately not of mass or energy, but of information. He sees the universe as a computer. Somewhere “out there,” he believes is a machine-like thing that actually keeps our individual bits of space abiding by the rules of universal cellular automaton.
There are three philosophical questions he considers fundamental: what is life; what are consciousness, thinking, and memory; and how does the universe work? He answers that DNA, the material of heredity, is a good example of digitally encoded information that determines whether life will be a creature or a plant. A computer-like process takes that DNA information and transforms it into the creature or the plant like moving a mouse across a universal information processor.
He has never encounter a problem that didn’t have a perfectly logical solution, and therefore believes strongly that artificial intelligence (AI) can be mechanized without limit. Fredkin is not the first to insist that DNA consists of information, or that organic growth depends on intricate communication among cells. That said, he argues the computer as an information processor provides one more avenue of modeling reality to cover his three philosophical mysteries, thus completing the picture.
From Fredkin’s earliest memory, he considered himself the smartest kid in his class, and used his friends to prove him wrong challenging them to get a higher grade on a test. He remembers in fifth grade his teacher misunderstood some concept, and the questions she was asking embodied her misunderstanding. His dilemma was: should he give her the answers she expected, which were wrong, or embarrass her with the right answers? He chose to write the correct answers, and then felt compelled to enlighten his teacher. She resisted at first, but finally relented. He got the top grade.
At an early age, his sister, Joan, introduced Fredkin to the Big Questions, such as the possibility that they, and everyone else on earth, were not “real,” but part of a very long dream that God was having, an idea bizarre as it may sound, is close to Fredkin’s present thinking on the subject. They pondered together the paradox posed by two seemingly self-evident propositions: the universe must have an end, like everything else, but it would be impossible for nothing to exist.
In his maturity, Fredkin concluded he existed in a finely mottled universe with the prime mover of everything, the single principle that governs the universe, lying somewhere within a class of computer programs known as cellular automata.
The word “cellular” is not meant biologically when used in this context. It refers to adjacent spaces – cells – that together form a pattern. These cells typically appear on a computer screen. His theory is complex and involves metaphysics as well as physics. When the two are disentangled, Fredkin’s metaphysics leads to a kind of high-tech theology, that is, to speculation about supreme beings and the purpose of life.
The short answer to the question of what Fredkin’s universe is ultimately made of is this: “I’ve come to the conclusion,” he says, “that the most concrete thing in the world is information.”
As with Einstein, Fredkin believes that everything that happens, including all human behavior, is inevitable (fate?); that the future could in principle be precisely predicted, given the present state of the universe and the laws that govern it.
This represents the difference between “determinism” and “indeterminism.”
Isaac Newton (1642 –1727), advocate of determinism, believed if you knew everything in the present, every particle no matter how many, you could predict the future.
Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962) disagreed and came up with his theory of quantum mechanics and indeterminism, and led to chaos theory, the idea that differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output, the so-called Butterfly Effect – the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York. This idea of indeterminacy, which once frightened scientists, is now taken seriously introducing a totally new way of thinking about very small objects.
To illustrate, if we toss a ball into the air, we can follow its precise projection with classical mechanics. This predicts the position and velocity of the ball at every instant during its flight. Not so microscopic matter such as electrons. If an electron were only an exceptionally small ball, its motion would be on a path predicted by classical mechanics, but that is not the case.
Quantum theory has been extremely successful in explaining a wide range of indeterminacy such as how electrons move in materials, like those that travel through the chips in a personal computer. Quantum mechanics is used to understand superconductivity, the decay of nuclei, and how lasers work, among many other things.
Fredkin sees his computer theory on the one hand as a shortcut to using traditional mathematics. He claims you can predict a future state of a system without figuring out what states it will occupy between now and then. In the case of a cellular automaton, however, he admits you must go through all the intermediate states to get to the end, stating: “There is no way to predict the future except to watch it unfold.” This suggests that even if human behavior is entirely determined and entirely predictable, there may be some room for “pseudo-free will” in a completely mechanized world.
This is his take on a Supreme Being: even if there is an all-powerful God, and He is thinking of creating this universe, He can have various ways of doing it, but He has to do every single step with every bit He has, or He won’t get the right answer. Fredkin won’t even allow God to take shortcuts. With this belief, he crosses the line between physics and metaphysics, a distinction that might seem puzzling, but to him obvious. It is a kind of arrogance that has served him well.
EDWARD O. WILSON
More than most scientists, E. O. Wilson (ne’ 1929) thinks about science, about its rules, social implications and where it resides in the human conscience. He looks at the structure of science and its disciplines the way one might view a pyramid. This has led him into the controversial waters of reductionism, and to his theory of “sociobiology.”
For more than a half century, Wilson has been a diligent entomologist, but with sociobiology he ventures into another arena, which he explains with his pyramid of social evolution.
The pyramid commences with invertebrates, such as coral, which occupy the “first pinnacle” of social evolution. These societies of coral demonstrate such a high degree of cohesion to be called an organism.
Ants, along with bees, occupy the “second pinnacle,” which is much less socially perfect. Altruism is common, and the societies are closely knit, but insects nonetheless are distinct beings. They have an identity independent of the colony.
In the “third pinnacle” are the vertebrates, except people. Division of labor is seldom apparent; selfishness is the rule between members; acts of altruism are infrequent; and no one appears to be having a very good time.
The trend from corals through ants to baboons is from less social to more selfish behavior. Wilson extrapolated from this that when individuals are genetically identical, as in the case of corals, they display almost unlimited cooperation and altruism. When related by a degree of three fourths, as with ants, they display cooperation and altruism. But they also display independence and selfishness. When they are related merely by one half, as in the case of baboons, they display much independence and little cooperation or altruism.
Human beings, who have carried complexity to such a level, form the “fourth pinnacle.” They break all the old vertebrate restraints, not by reducing selfishness but rather by acquiring the intelligence to consult the past and to plan the future. Human societies, then, approach the insect societies in cooperation and far exceed them in powers of communication, reversing the downward trend in social evolution of Wilson’s pyramid.
The controversy with sociobiology is centered on the suggestion that since humans are products of natural selection (evolution), evolutionary biologist could shed light on the nature of things, such as aggression, ethics, aesthetics, romance, and religion, clearly inferring genes play a prominent role in the “fourth pinnacle.” Mainstream sociologists have long ignored the possibilities that the genes significantly influenced human behavior preferring to see it as culture and learned behavior. Wilson writes in “Sociology” (1975):
The members of human societies sometimes cooperated closely in insectan fashion, but more frequently they compete for the limited resources allocated to their role-sector. The best and most entrepreneurial of role-actors usually gain a disproportionate share of the rewards, while the least successful are displaced to other, less desirable positions.
Far from being rare, Wilson sees deception and hypocrisy as very human devices for people in conducting the complex business of everyday life. His critics see this as biological determinism. They claim he exonerates society from responsibility for its social problems. Yet, ardent capitalists want it both ways, professing belief in equal native potential of all people, on the one hand, while insisting the blame for poverty is based on the free choice and to be due to indolence on the other. The jury is still out on sociobiology, but it is as indelibly associated with Wilson’s name as relativity is to Einstein’s.
What apparently convinced Wilson of the explanatory power of sociobiology was his internal struggle between religion and science. “I don’t mean I was tempted to return to a fundamentalist view or even an essentially Christian view of the world,” he confesses, “but neither was I ready to accept the view that the religious experience was nothing more than an excited mental state.”
In his youth, he had felt the depth of its appeal, and was certain that religion had biological roots. This convinced him that at some point religion had been good for the genes. The question he could not answer was how. He speculates that religion congeals the identity of the adolescent and instills a sense of purpose that pays off genetically, fueling ambition and channeling it toward investment in the future. He believes the adaptive value of the religious impulse, through selection at the level of the individual, and kin, and even the group level, has earned it a place in our collective genetic heritage.
This is consistent with his placing the social sciences at the top of his pyramidal structure of science, below the social sciences, the biological sciences; below biology, chemistry; and below chemistry, physics. He sees each level of inquiry to rest on the level beneath it in a fairly literal sense, that is, its laws will follow from the laws below. For example, he points out that many of the laws of chemistry have been reduced to the laws of physics. This fails to sit well with many chemists. He cites the case of mathematicians through knowledge of physics can now do some of the work chemists once did with test tubes.
It is in the higher regions of the pyramid of science that reductionism becomes disputable. If biology literally rest on chemistry, could the behavior of, say, a kidney be predicted with much precision from a knowledge of the molecular structures involved? How about the brain? Could laws describing a chimpanzee’s or a person’s behavior be deduced from the laws of organic chemistry? These questions, in addition to being difficult, are loaded with philosophical consequences, and therefore moral considerations, for example, stem cell research.
At the higher levels of organization, reductionism is allied to determinism. This holds that free will is a myth. As previously mentioned, determinism insists that the rest of human history will unfold as inevitably as a cellular automaton, however powerful our illusions to the contrary with our choices. Our inability to predict this predetermined future, or even to predict one person’s behavior on a day-to-day basis, reflects, according to determinists, only incomplete data, and our ignorance of the principles involved.
As bizarre as this may sound, consider the words of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), who visualizes this concept in a truly literal sense. He points out that when we reach an advanced age and look back over our lifetime, we can see a consistent order and plan, as though a novelist composed our life. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little real moment turned out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So, he asks, who composed this plot? He suggests that just as an aspect of ourselves of which our consciousness is unaware composes our dreams, so, too, our whole life is composed by the deterministic will within us.
Wilson sees a selective connection between human genes and human culture, between the information that shapes us and the information we shape. The thing to remember is that he extrapolates all his hypotheses and theories from the study of insects, ants in particular. In “Genes, Mind, and Culture” (1981), this universe is bridged to explain the human community, a diagnosis that defines plausibility in terms of Ockham’s Razor as it looks for the simplest explanation of how complexity came about without a creator.
One wonders if such a unified explanation is grounded in a detached appraisal, or if some people are born with Ockham epiphany in their brains, that is, being able to see through complexity to the simplest and truest answer. Surely, Fredkin felt deeply the unifying power of a cellular automaton, something visceral that led him to such an epiphany. Perhaps it is more common than we think. Wilson, who seems to believe this, is more modest in his reductionism, but no less certain.
KENNETH BOULDING
Kenneth Boulding (ne’ 1911), devout Quaker, unconventional economist, examines the societal changes wrought by information technology but without the certainty of his colleagues. He sees information processing, not as a god or a deterrent to religious conviction, but as a manifestation of information processing that commenced billions of years ago. Boulding concludes that only in understanding information processing at many levels can we truly grasp the meaning of the Information Age.
Displaying little of the self-assurance of Fredkin and Wilson, while clearly waffling with some of his dictums, he appears an obliging and agreeable man driven by humility. With Quakers, there are no altars, no clergy, and no laity, only people with equal access to God. When the Quaker meeting begins, silence envelopes the room, a silence as impressive as the finest speech. It is home in the spirit without definition, and displays a humility that once was the common climate of emerging scientists in the Age of Faith.
Sometimes Boulding stutters, which makes him less intimidating and more likeable in his erudition. Beneath his crazy quilt of insights and opaque quips is a reasonably coherent body of thought. To one not familiar with his writing, there appears no real purpose to his rambling. The fact is that Boulding has always been a disconcertingly discursive thinker. You can go back and read things he has written thirty or forty years ago – as I did with his book “The Image” (1966) – and you’ll find the same exasperating pattern. You follow a thought for a page or two, and then, just as you are getting a feel for it, it is lost in another thought that will soon suffer the same fate.
It seems, sometimes, as if everything is an aside to him. They range from grand: “Wealth creates power, and power destroys wealth,” to frivolous metaphor: “Hitler and Stalin were pimples on the changing countenance of time.”
It doesn’t help that he dictates his books – he admits as much in the Preface to “The Image” – usually without an outline and seldom with much revision. He doesn’t like to edit his own work. His writing, like his thinking, is notable more for its boldness and intermittent brilliance than for its organization and consistent correctness. His motto is “Don’t get it right, get it written.” This is apparent as he has published more than forty books and hundreds of articles to learned journals across the globe.
Another penchant, which is a product of the architecture of his mind, is to wander freely from one discipline to another and to think on several levels of organization at once. He was first trained as a chemist at Oxford, but had a passion from the beginning for the humanities, which I can understand from my perspective, as it was true of me as well.
It was this passion that led him from the laboratory into economics where he felt the discipline more akin to his passion in studying and reflecting on human behavior. The consequence of this interdisciplinary perspective is that he feels no hesitation in applying physical laws to people: “Ohm’s Law exhibited in its purest form in the study of electricity is also applicable to the flow of money,” or from inanimate to the animal: “The automobile’s a species just like the horse; it just has a more complicated sex life.”
There is playfulness to Boulding’s madness. Free-floating and fragmented thought grows out of a natural quest for unity. This has resulted in something called “general system theory,” of which he is one of its founders.
System theory is not in vogue now, but in the middle of the twentieth century, it was popular with most organizational thinkers. It harbors, as one of its ideals the unification of the sciences, blurring the line between disciplines in both the physical and social sciences. It is not to be confused with Wilson’s reductionism or Fredkin’s determinism. The methodologies differ as well the big issue of determinism versus free will.
Boulding prefers to “go with the flow,” as his spirituality is in his science. He has felt no need to separate science from religion, or God from the complex universe. What amazes Boulding is that the universe’s awareness of itself grows out of randomness.
He points out that random genetic mutations led one-cell organisms to process meaningful information. These random mutations then led these cells to share information so intimately among them, as to constitute multicellular organisms. Random mutations next led the descendents of these organisms, such as ants and primates, to share information also, and thus to carry the processing of information to the social level. Then man came along and one day invented an elaborate artificial information processing and transmitting system, which is now further integrating the most impressive system of information processing ever to appear on this planet.
Boulding finds an intelligence that could create the human species out of thin air less remarkable than an intelligence that could create a universe that would give birth to a process of natural selection, a process that a few self-replicating molecules (bacteria) and a few billion years would lead to a theory of itself. He concludes, “I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity, to believe that He created primal forms . . . as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He himself had made.”
You sense there is a level of tolerance here (“going with the flow”) that is not apparent in Fredkin and Wilson. He finds the idea of the creator much more complex and a much more subtle process, and therefore beyond comprehension.
Science, for him, need not compete with or try to explain away God, but should be able to live with the idea of God, to treat God as a verb, not as a word, but in acts of faith. He sees the core of religious experience in human potential, and the world as a totality with an important level of variety.
“I’ve often said,” he reflects, “I think of the Catholic Church rather as I do of the blue whale. I’m not a Catholic, and I’m not a blue whale, but I’d feel diminished if either of them became extinct.”
Boulding is able to stand back and examine the assumptions upon which his work and faith are based and not be conflicted.
His unconventional approach to scholarship has generated such questions as: is Kenneth Boulding a charlatan; is he a mush-minded do-gooder who has finessed his way into the academic limelight with his wit and British charm; is all this stuff about the integrative system just so much palaver? I wonder if that caused him to write “The Image” because he addresses the problem with deft skill at both the human and animate level seeing purposeful behavior as a hallmark of living systems.
His hierarchical categorization of reality ranges from static structures, such as rocks, to clockwork structures, such as the planets, which revolve mindlessly with no apparent feedback, no need for information, to things that do process information, such as thermostats, to things such as cells, which process both information and raw matter and energy, to plants, to animals, to human beings, to social systems, and then at the very top, to transcendental systems that are unknowable and beyond comprehension.
This is his hierarchy of evolution. It is directed toward greater complexity, more enriched process information, and more elaborately pursued purpose to where we are now. In the beginning, he muses, complex molecules formed cells, then cells formed organisms, then organisms formed societies, and now under the influence of information technologies, human societies are approaching the intricacy of an organism. Wilson’s ant reductionism has much in common with Boulding’s cultural evolution. He believes everything ultimately points to an integrative system.
He notes the organization revolution grew out of the industrial revolution, and became global after World War II. Many small companies made connection with foreign markets to become multinational corporations. On a personal note, Nalco Chemical Company had gross sales of $50 million and was largely a domestic company in the 1960s. Today sales exceed $4 billion annually. Thanks to the computer revolution Nalco is now networked across the globe, as companies and countries become increasingly integrated.
Boulding wonders, however, at what price? He sees personal freedom, once taken for granted, reduced to nostalgic air. Computers, he reminds us, are making it more difficult to flout the law, eroding societal entropy, whose flip side is liberty.
His point is well taken. The question we are facing is how much order we are willing to sacrifice for liberty, or liberty for order? This concern may seem extreme, but consider the science of surveillance and control in the twenty-first century world, especially since 9/11. It has already outstripped George Orwell’s imagination.
Most corporate workers today work in cubicles tied to computers. These computers are capable of monitoring their productivity, the accuracy and efficiency of their work, the number of times they escape the task at hand to venture unto the Internet, how many emails they send and receive, the content and relevance of these to their work, and how this all compares to their colleagues in the same activity. Performance appraisal has become redundant, an anachronism replaced by the ubiquitous electronic eye.
Boulding finds no reason to be alarmed about personal intrusion into individual privacy. He sees we can have it both ways. Individuality and aggregation are not only compatible but also inseparable. They may come at some loss of privacy but promise improved communications and therefore enhanced community. He sees moving out of the telephone age, continuing through many breakthroughs in information technology, including the microcomputer, to the corporation, and by extension, society as an organism has given man more validity than any other hundred-year period.
This segueing into a collective order requires incremental surrendering of autonomy to bring communities, companies and countries into a realization it is in their mutual interest to sacrifice self-interests for group accord. He sees the process a logical unfolding over the past several centuries: from the Industrial Revolution to the Organizational Revolution to the Control (Information) Revolution. A deeply religious man, he is confident man will find the transcendental wisdom to embrace the challenges and choose the high ground, as another technological revolution will inevitably follow.
ENTROPY
These scientists view religion (The word came from the Latin ligare: “to bind together.”) through the lens of evolution, paying particular attention to its most recent iteration, the Information Age. That finds them also in accord on the value of another explanatory model, the second law of thermodynamics, known as “entropy.”
Entropy states that, generally, structures decompose, matter disintegrates, and gases dissipate; that everything is moving from order to disorder and on to chaos. It is happening to the stars, the earth, and everything on and in everything else.
Evolution follows a similar sequence. As the amount of usable energy declines, and becomes unusable, entropy increases and order is reduced to chaos. This is difficult to grasp, so I hope you will bear with me. Everything is related from the turbulence of weather to the complicated rhythms of the human heart, from the design of snowflakes to the whorls of windswept desert sands. Things change but the amount of matter, energy, and water always remains precisely the same only in a different forms.
Low entropy and high order is a state of activity when an abundance of useful energy is available to do work. Imagine a balloon is heated with helium gas. The helium is able to do work as it is heated expanding to spontaneously spread up and out inflating and lifting the balloon. Once all the spreading out is done, there is nothing left to harness. All the useful energy is working to keep the balloon in flight. A condition of low entropy and high order exists, but this, too, is changing as the helium gas eventually dissipates. When the helium is released to the environment, and the balloon descends, there is a state of high entropy and low order.
The entropy of a system may be crudely defined as a measure of the disorder, or randomness of the system. The amount of entropy in the universe – the randomness and disorder – never decreases, and so just about every time anything happens, entropy increases, as everything is wearing out. It may take billions of years, but the earth is a star that will eventually disintegrate as if it never existed. This is because of entropy.
A common misconception about entropy is that evolution violates it. Life, the flawed argument begins, not only preserves structure, but multiplies it, giving rise to ever more elaborately ordered organisms, from bacteria through earthworms all the way up to people, who in turn produce structures. Since entropy generally erodes structured things, it must, in the realm of life, be suffering at least a temporary setback.
The problem with this logic is that entropy applies only to isolated “closed systems.” The system of life is an “open system.” Life receives its energy from external sources -- the sun, food and other low-entropy sources -- and is free to expel high-entropy waste products into other open systems, such as sewers.
While it is true a growing person is coherently developing structured organs, this gain is more than outweighed by the disorder the person discharges into the environment. It is that disorder – that chaos – that eventually may turn the earth into an ever expanding cosmic dumpster.
It would appear we are all unwitting accomplices to high entropy. Like people sinking into quicksand, we doom ourselves more surely as we struggle to pursue the mesmerizing appeal of progress, polluting the air, and poisoning the land and rivers with our fascination for the products of technology.
Matter is finite; it can neither be created nor destroyed, but only changed. Whatever our view on global warming, it is a fact that Nature is a limited resource.
ENTROPY IN THE INFORMATION AGE
Twentieth century scientists had a solid understanding of entropy. They knew it represented disorder and chaos. They could see the diminishing of useful energy, and they knew entropy was gaining on us. Then an amazing thing happened: precise mathematics intersected with the study of information to introduce us to another surprising phenomenon.
In the middle of the twentieth century, Claude Shannon, a Bell Laboratories engineer, published a paper that introduced the Information Age, intersecting thermodynamics with information. Shannon pondered how he could “encode” information so that it would resist erosion by the “white noise” encountered in telephone lines. Such analysis called for the formulation of a general law of information transmission, and so he invented one.
The odd thing about this formulation is that it was identical to the definition of entropy.
Shannon’s definition stated that the more uncertainty there is about the contents (high entropy) of the message that is about to be received the more information the message contains (disorder and randomness). He was not talking about “meaning,” but about the symbols in which the meaning was encoded.
Consider a glass of pure water. There is little uncertainty as to what any region of the content of the liquid is other than the symbol for it, H2O. Consequently, the content is highly ordered in a low-entropy system.
Now, collect a glass of suspended solids from an industrial plant waste discharge. The content will include some H2O, but also a random assortment of other molecules and compounds. The content would be uncertain, and difficult to verify. As a system, then, this would be high in entropy because of the uncertainty of its exact content and low in unusable energy: you couldn’t drink it. Yet, some enterprising companies have taken the innovative step to convert such waste into usable fuel (auxiliary heat) and thus reduced its entropy.
Given the centrality of uncertainty in the definition of information and entropy, the mathematical resemblance between the two should not be surprising. Entropy is experienced in communication in every day life. For example, presidential politics in the 2004 campaign came down to two sentences varying widely in certainty and entropy:
Senator Kerry: "I actually voted for the $87 billion (to fund the War in Iraq) before I voted against it."
President Bush: "You may not always agree with me, but you’ll always know where I stand."
Undoubtedly Senator Kerry meant to come across sincere, but left the deep uncertainty of not being able to make up his mind, and thus the chaos that might result from his leadership. This is high or positive (+) entropy. On the other hand, President Bush admitted that we might differ with him on occasion, which is a certainty, but that we can trust where he stands, reinforcing this belief, and thus reducing entropy to practically nil. This is low or negative (-) entropy.
So, information can be equated with positive entropy (high), or negative entropy (low). It is a matter of personal preference and how information is presented and perceived. The important point is that regardless of whether a negative or positive sign is attached to the string of symbols representing the information, it is identical to the string representing entropy, because both are quantities of uncertainty.
Norbert Wiener (1894 – 1964) in his book “Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” (1982) wrote: “Just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization; and the one is simply the negative of the other.”
The entropy metaphor has gained ground in popular and scholarly books and articles on self-development, information theory and cybernetic where information is equated with order, certainty, and by extension, with reference to structure and form.
Maxwell Maltz book “Psycho Cybernetics” (1989) deals with improved personal effectiveness by reducing uncertainty and chaos (entropy) through self-image psychology. Personal confidence and effectiveness are accomplished by a series of image exercises to control one’s action and thus preserve useful energy to grow and prosper.
Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn write of “negentropy,” or negative entropy in their book “Social Psychology of Organizations” (1966). They point out that an open system such as an organization in order to survive must import more energy than it returns to the environment as product. The reason is obvious. Energy input into an organization is in part invested directly as organizational output. Some of the input is absorbed by the organization (entropy) in the chaos and uncertainty of worker performance.
There is inevitable energy loss between input and output. Human organizations take in energy in two forms: people as energy sources, and materials as energy investments. People energy is both direct (making the product) and indirect (designing, organizing, controlling, distributing, and marketing the product). Negentropy (desired negative entropy) represents a surplus of people energy, control of material and production costs, producing quality products, and generating a healthy profit and share of the market.
HAS IT EVER BEEN OTHERWISE?
From this perspective, you can see entropy has always existed in man’s experience if not consciousness. In another sense, man’s perspective has changed from a “God-centered” to “man-centered” universe; from modest men of science to scientists who feel uncomfortable with the idea of God or the trappings of religion, feeling a need to liberate themselves from the irrational and the superstitious. If only, it was that simple.
Enter the existentialists. They reject the idea of a rationally ordered reality, and embrace the idea of subjectively irrational human existence, where decisions, choices, and behavior are executed independently of reason.
Subjective Man, they claim, is motivated, according to the philosophy of irrationalism with feeling, anxiety and irrational impulses overriding whatever rational forces can rally. Existence is not rational, but permeated with an intense sense of being forlorn, abandon and in despair, or the only criteria for knowing truth. They cling to entropy as if it were a meteor soaring them to “Nowhere Land”
Man, no longer with the certainty of a Supreme Being, echoes the words of despair of Albert Camus: “I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the Last Judgment, it takes place every day.”
To the existentialist, the mind of man is incapable of discovering truth through reason, since truth is found only in paradox. From the vantage point of God, truth is rational; from the midst of subjectivity, truth is contradictory, a paradox.
If nothing else were said about the idea of God, this should reaffirm that the pursuit of knowing, which is science, and the pursuit of spiritual knowing, which is the Church, make science and religion inseparable. They may often disagree but the synergy between them provides the context for order and certainty in a climate of chaos and uncertainty. Einstein puts it simply: “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”
The Church in modern times has faltered and even appears to have lost its way. Max Weber (1864 – 1920) points out, however, that bureaucracies of long standing, such as the Church, ride the vicissitudes of time on their cumulative negative entropy. Despite the disorder and chaos in the Church, Weber reminds us there is a surplus of useful energy that allows it to carry on. Whatever the criticism, the Church remains relevant in a climate of eroding structures, disenchanted believers, mounting scandals, and escalating uncertainties.
ARRIVAL OF “NOWHERE MAN”
As man has moved increasingly away from the idea of God in the confines of the previous certainty of his Church, he has moved, paradoxically, away from himself. In a strange way, environmental pollution, which is a product of man’s excesses in the name of progress, has been accompanied by emotional pollution in the name of denial of accountability retreating into lifestyle recklessness.
Hedonism, then, is a form of entropy. Nonetheless, it has become highly attractive in a climate of disorder and uncertainty. Sensual excess represents the great escape from self-knowing into self-indulgence. The evidence is overwhelming. Most modern diseases are lifestyle diseases. These addictions can compromise the immune system, shrink the liver, clog the arteries, upset the insulin balance, devour the lungs, and consume the digestive tract, leading to death, which is maximum entropy.
People look for science to be the new God, and to bail them out of their predicament with miraculous drugs. This disabuses them from being interested in putting new vigor into their moral compass. It goes beyond this.
If a person is involved in a single-car accident, then it’s the car’s fault or the road’s fault. If we get fat or suffer harden arteries, it’s the “Fast Food Nation’s” fault. If we become drug addicts, it’s the drug dealer’s fault. If we get lung cancer, it’s the tobacco company’s fault. If we hit a bad patch in life, and have no savings to fall back on, it’s society’s fault. Accountability and frugality are words out of favor today with an entropy driven society because if they weren’t we would have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Twenty-first century man has become “Nowhere Man” in “Nowhere Land,” filled with the hubris and arrogance of utopian (“nowhere”) dreams: living without limits, living out-of-control, and living without moral constraints. It is a high entropy hedonistic bomb.
“Nowhere Man” has forgotten that his mind and spirit are no less critical to his physical well being than his heart and lungs are. True, severe damage can result from the foul air we breathe, but equally true the foul information we process can do comparable damage to our minds. We are not only what eat and breathe, but what we think and dream as well.
Science and God are partners in this enterprise. Science can issue warnings on pollution, but it is the Church that should take measure of our moral and cultural pollution. Instead, it too often takes the stance of the apologist. This is equally true of the intellectual.
Novelist Milan Kundera has produced a novel with an expression that has come to identify our culture and mindset, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1988). This phase defines what life is like when the burdens of responsibility and consequence are lifted from the protagonists of the novel. These burdens may be unbearable but it is the lightness of experience that cast them off. A society that has lost its moral compass or sense of accountability is rushing toward entropy.
A CASE OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
The war between science and religion took a strange direction in the nineteenth century when Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) claimed the descent of man from apes. Then the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) added an exclamation point to this by proclaiming: “God is dead!” Nietzsche welcomed the death of God as a necessary precondition to the Industrial Revolution where human greatness would finally unfold. The Russian novelist Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881) in “The Brothers Karamazov” (1880) has Ivan Karamazov saying, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” Western culture would make his words prophetic from the counterculture of the 1960s to the “me” generation of 1980s to the present climate of today.
Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) claimed “modest man” found his mind in science, but I would suggest he lost his head to Nietzsche’s superman. Bacon was describing the scientist of his day. The scientist admitted to the limits of human reason, and felt science would lay bare the true wonder of God’s creation, and ultimately lead to a greater worship of Him. Bacon even saw the Church as the rudder to steer a course to God, as the small vessel of human reason required such s guidance system to the divine.
Incidentally, Bacon is the man who perfected the inductive method (i.e., reasoning from the particular to the general) and set the stage for science to take off. Since his day an endless series of breathtaking accomplishments in science through the use of reason have occurred, only to be reduced to a host of unintended consequences.
Science has made everything appear as possible! Reason in the form of science has eclipsed the divine and now presses forward without reserve. Through discovery of new "Toys of the Mind," science has inadvertently created a new entity, “Nowhere Man.”
Man as a specimen has become a thing to study like an insect, and in work, to manage, label, classify, collate, and program as a dumb beast, which increasingly he resembles.
Whereas the “death of God” led Dostoyevsky to see everything evil was now permitted, the new worshipers of reason believed from the dawn of science that everything good was now possible. Dostoyevsky proved a better prophet than utopian rationalists, while their legacy is personified in “Nowhere Man.”
The grisly horrors of twentieth century wars, African genocide in the twenty-first century, the perpetuation of totalitarian systems of ubiquitous terrorism across the globe, along with the doublespeak of Western democracies, it is apparent “Nowhere Man” has found a home in self-indulgent "Nowhere Land.” As progress embraces South East Asia, China and India, it is clear that “Nowhere Land” is no longer limited to the West.
As the nineteenth rushed into the twentieth century, sociologists and political scientists no longer saw “modest man,” but instead visualized depersonalized man reduced to pie charts and statistical grids. Man became part of random numbers of specialists with reality reduced to "game theory." History, economics, sociology, psychology, and anthropology split off developing complex trees of scores of subsequent disciplines within each branch, with scores of people then working on mundane problems with findings often equally self-evident and mundane.
It is easy to forget that Communism and Nazism were both products of social engineering with dialectical scientific foundations. Nazism preached the eugenics of culture cleansing after the crushing and humiliating German defeat of WWI . The Communists of the Russian Revolution (1917) saw themselves as scientific socialists. The hidden history of Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) was implemented by Lenin (1870 – 1924) and then solidified by Joseph Stalin (1879 – 1953).
What was the mission? To create the utopian “new Soviet man,” eradicate God and capitalism, and spread the doctrine to working people across the planet. Unfortunately, idealism turned to a new kind of totalitarianism with the USSR falling on its own petard of entropy in 1989. When the spirit is denied, whatever the process, Nowhere Man is not far away. Somewhere is where the soul lives, and where the soul lives, life blossoms.
Many well-meaning intellectuals supported communism, which had aptly been described as “the religion of science.” Likewise, Nazi advocates saw its principles as being a science beyond religion. The failure of both was blamed by their respective supporters on the atavistic influence of religion and the forces of irrationality and superstition, not on their self-generating chaos and uncertainty and waste of human capital. Science for these ideologues was to be the panacea to human nirvana.
Men have stepped forward to show the folly in such thinking. Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947) entertained deep reservations about the idea of science as the exclusive account of reality. He wrote, “Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 – 1967), who supervised the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos (1943 – 1945), took to agonizing over what science had wrought with the bomb. He became beset with doubts about the role of science in the Nuclear Age. This found him against the making of the hydrogen bomb. For criticizing the program, he endured professional rebuke and public scorn, which resulted in his loss of security clearance (1954). Critical of this new god of war, he regressed to being a recluse, a victim of the news media, as it became the new Spanish Inquisition of the modern age.
RETROFITING PAST IMPERFECT/PRESENT RIDICULOUS INTO FUTURE PERFECT
The arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) in the Age of Faith, once thought dead and irrelevant, are being resurrected in light of today’s problems in the Age of Science. Aquinas believed every human being regardless of his or her faith shared in a common humanity through the possession and use of faith. He maintained that reason is the essential quality of humanity:
“It is that without which man cannot be man.”
Aquinas insisted truths of reason did not refute or negate the truths of religion. He argued that philosophy examined the supernatural order in the light of reason, and theology examined it in the light of revelation. Although reason was used in theology, revelation did not fall into the province of philosophy. He concluded philosophy could not contradict theology because truth could not contradict truth. For Aquinas, then, faith and knowledge were not mutually exclusive, insisting that belief took over where knowledge ended.
Within the realm of science, there is a sense of a return to the “modest man” of Bacon. In his book “God and the Astronomers” (1992), Robert Jastrow writes:
“It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation.”
With biogenetics and stem cell research notwithstanding, Jastrow is even more emphatic in the last sentence of his book:
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Jastrow is not suggesting, nor is it being suggested here that the elegance of empirical science should be curtailed. The quest to know is a beautiful pursuit. It is suggested only that a vast intelligence that could create such a being as man, who is driven to understand the ways nature works, only to discover, once he does, that it was obvious. This led Einstein to reflect: “When the solution is simple, God is answering.”
THE SUMMING UP
Man presses on, not as a god, but imbued with the modesty of knowing. He was subject to a principle, a physical law long before organic laws existed, which we know as entropy, “the second law of thermodynamics.” This law humbles man.
Robert Wright says: “It is entropy that punishes with extinction strands of DNA that fail to surround themselves with walls against entropy.” This provoked Martin Heidegger (1886 – 1976) to say, “As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.” To survive we must be on a lifelong quest to generate negative entropy, to reinvent, reconstitute, and renew ourselves as our structures deteriorate, and chaos and uncertainty threaten our being. “Body and soul are not two different things,” notes Einstein, “but only two different ways of perceiving the same thing. Similarly, physics and psychology are only different attempts to link our experiences together by way of systematic thought."
Nothing is static. Everything in nature is in a state of dying, to be reborn, live, and then die again. Complexity and simplicity, order and chaos are constant dynamics to life whether we are conscious of them or not. Consequently, when nature is out of balance, so are we.
We are in an Information Age. This information, under the metaphysical laws governing the universe, seems to bring conscious experience to an ultimate synthesis where we are learning “to go with the flow” (as Native American Indians first taught us), while at the same time resisting this flow as if we could. Nature has its own codes as E. O. Wilson has uncovered in his study of ants, which operate in similar complexity to that of man. James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA, the information code to our genetics, which has led to new information technology regarding life itself. Einstein expressed the scientist’s quest this way: “I want to know God’s thoughts, all the rest are details.” Einstein also claimed no special gift other than curiosity, and a capacity to stick longer than most others to problems.
As marvelous as scientific discoveries are, Nature is always waiting silently to be discovered, making all the notable discoveries to date shallow by comparison. While we operate in ignorance, the mind of nature continues its will. Kenneth Boulding seems comfortable with this, advocating, “Go with the flow.” The flow he sees as directional and complex, operating on several levels simultaneously with parts being integrated into wholes, and wholes being fragmented into parts.
The American Indians did not see nature and the spirit as two different things but two different ways to perceive the same thing. For Indians, Nature was not protected by systematic thought but systematic action. The Mind of Nature spoke to them. They listened because they understood its language. What can it tell us?
That God and science are not adversaries but partners as man is not separate from nature but part of it, that man’s lot is as much a reflection of the second law of thermodynamics as are the mountains and the valleys, the rivers and the seas, and all life within and about. Theologians on the top of that mountain described by Jastrow are waiting for us all.
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This is taken from Dr. Fisher’s new book TECHNOLOGY THE NEW RELIGION OF “NOWHERE MAN.”
Welcome all who have reached this blog through the new domain connections. The blog is designed to stimulate thought based upon the reader's own experience and wondering, and is no way meant to be doctrinaire.
SCIENTISTS & GOD
In the
INFORMATION AGE
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 21, 2006
ABSTRACT
Body and soul are not two different things, according to Einstein, but only two different ways of perceiving the same thing. I think he is correct.
Similarly, he claims physics and psychology are only different attempts to link experience together by way of systematic thought. Again, I agree as I went from a chemist to a psychologist in a career spanning over forty years.
The American Indian treated Nature and the spirit as two aspects of the same thing. He had a reverence for Nature and came to live in harmony with it feeling no need to conquer it. Similarly, science and religion look at the knowable, but from different vantage points. Science looks at it from the point of reason, religion from the point of revelations.
We are in the Age of Science. Man has drifted from the idea of God to knowing, or from the spirit to the mind, failing to see they are connected, as matter and energy are the same.
The drift has not only created a breach between man and God, and contributed to environment pollution, but to emotional pollution as well. Man has drifted toward self-estrangement. Science using reason has taught us the limits of energy with the Laws of Thermodynamics, particularly its second law, entropy.
Even so, science would allow the utopian idea to persist that man’s excesses can always be pardoned with miraculous discoveries. We know entropy operates in a “closed system,” meaning energy can be changed from usable (low entropy) to unusable (high entropy), but cannot be created or destroyed.
Complicating matters further, life is an “open system.” Life struggles to do work and maintain order (low entropy) while available energy for work declines and chaos mounts (high entropy), as everything is moving to maximum entropy and stasis.
The earth and, indeed, the universe are in a state of entropy. It is the nature of things. Now, in the Information Age, when we need to see things most clearly and be the best informed, appreciating and being guided by our limitations, we find instead our arrogance and hubris has produced “Nowhere Man,” who dreams of utopia (which literally means “nowhere”) where there are no consequences only a zest for more. It is the reason for this work.
And new philosophy calls all in doubt,
The element of fire is quite put off;
The Sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look for it
‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone
John Doone (1572 – 1631)
Nature and Nature’s law lay hid in night;
God said, “Let Newton be,” and all was light.
Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744)
For men to learn to love one another, it is not enough that they should know themselves to be members of one and the same thing; in ‘planetising’ themselves they must acquire the consciousness, without losing themselves, of becoming one and the same person.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955)
Robert Wright opens his “Three Scientists and Their Gods” (1988) with a note to his readers that the book is not about religion, but about the concept of information. He claims the concept is about meaning and purpose in both the mundane and cosmic sense. Information has become omnipotent, omniscient and ubiquitous from which one might infer that information has become a surrogate for God in cyberspace.
Many contemporary scientists, certainly not all, vary from edgy to ambivalent about God, taking comfort in declaring themselves agnostics. Not so Teilhard de Chardin (1881 – 1955). A geologist and paleontologist, he became a Jesuit priest and philosopher, lectured in pure science at the Jesuit College in Cairo and then became professor of geology at the Institut Catholique in Paris.
Later, he went on paleontologist expeditions in China and Central Asia, but his unorthodox ideas led to a ban on his teaching and publishing. Nevertheless, his work became known and was awarded academic distinctions. His major work “The Phenomenon of Humanity” (written 1938 – 1940) was posthumously published. Based on his scientific thinking, it argues that humanity is in a continuous process of evolution towards a perfect spiritual state. For most scientists, however, God is not a comfortable idea in this the Information Age.
Words and ideas have left their moorings thrown into cyberspace and circulated with the speed of light with terms becoming snuggled into nefarious conclusions. Indeed, beliefs and actions now countermand certainty, order and continuity. We are in a new day.
Physicists speak of light, mass, energy, velocity, gravity, motion, measurement, and time, while politicians constantly harp on about freedom, equality, innocence, and justice. As a consequence, science has become psychobabble, and political speak more spin than bite. Meanwhile, the clergy speak of God, eternity, salvation, and damnation, evil and good as if nothing has changed, least of all Psychological Man. It would appear few are aware, and even fewer are listening.
What exactly does information mean when words and ideas are randomly received and divisively perceived; when complexity boggles the mind and people dance to their own catatonic beat; when there is nothing unknowable to believe or cling to?
Isaiah Berlin (1909 – 1997) sees a distinction between what it takes to believe, and what it means to believe. Most people, he fears, use words as if words are the actual act. The words, “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” (WMDs) turned the world on its head, and led to the preemptive War in Iraq. WMD is a toxic acronym, not a word, but elicits dreadful imagery. Now, Iran has joined the saber rattling with menacing words designed to taunt the world with the status of its nuclear research program. When words are treated as acts, they provoke hysteria and drive people into the dark abyss of paranoia.
Isaiah Berlin finds most people stumble in the dark, even scientists when it comes to words. He finds it exceedingly rare for scientists to be good at analyzing the concepts they use routinely. They assume legitimacy much like the rest of us do. Albert Einstein, Berlin notes, knew the difference between words about words and words about things, or between concepts and the data of experience. That is how he escaped the intimidating shroud of Isaac Newton. Moreover, he understood that no problem could be solved with the same consciousness that had created it.
As a rule, even the most gifted scientists tend to be too deeply absorbed in the activity, in their consciousness, to be able to stand back and examine the assumptions upon which their work and beliefs are based. New information becomes a narcotic inducing them to muddle forward unconscious of the dangers it might set in motion. Such was the case with J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 – 1967), who directed the Los Alamos Laboratory in the creation of the atomic bomb (1943 – 1945), only to lose his security clearance when he opposed additional development of the hydrogen bomb.
THREE SCIENTISTS
Robert Wright profiles three scientists that display these most human inclinations. Brilliance often works to cover ambivalence. Scientists, as high priests of The Information Age, would prefer to avoid the muddy waters of the divine, as they cause self-conscious embarrassment. Perhaps the divine lies outside the purview of science.
The three scientists profiled are Edward Fredkin, the artificial intelligence and computer prophet, Edward O. Wilson, the entomologist and creator of sociobiology, and Kenneth Boulding, the unconventional economist and systems thinker.
EDWARD FREDKIN
Ed Fredkin (ne’ 1934) is a self-made millionaire and lives on his own island. He is a scientist who startled his colleagues at MIT with his theory that reality consists ultimately not of mass or energy, but of information. He sees the universe as a computer. Somewhere “out there,” he believes is a machine-like thing that actually keeps our individual bits of space abiding by the rules of universal cellular automaton.
There are three philosophical questions he considers fundamental: what is life; what are consciousness, thinking, and memory; and how does the universe work? He answers that DNA, the material of heredity, is a good example of digitally encoded information that determines whether life will be a creature or a plant. A computer-like process takes that DNA information and transforms it into the creature or the plant like moving a mouse across a universal information processor.
He has never encounter a problem that didn’t have a perfectly logical solution, and therefore believes strongly that artificial intelligence (AI) can be mechanized without limit. Fredkin is not the first to insist that DNA consists of information, or that organic growth depends on intricate communication among cells. That said, he argues the computer as an information processor provides one more avenue of modeling reality to cover his three philosophical mysteries, thus completing the picture.
From Fredkin’s earliest memory, he considered himself the smartest kid in his class, and used his friends to prove him wrong challenging them to get a higher grade on a test. He remembers in fifth grade his teacher misunderstood some concept, and the questions she was asking embodied her misunderstanding. His dilemma was: should he give her the answers she expected, which were wrong, or embarrass her with the right answers? He chose to write the correct answers, and then felt compelled to enlighten his teacher. She resisted at first, but finally relented. He got the top grade.
At an early age, his sister, Joan, introduced Fredkin to the Big Questions, such as the possibility that they, and everyone else on earth, were not “real,” but part of a very long dream that God was having, an idea bizarre as it may sound, is close to Fredkin’s present thinking on the subject. They pondered together the paradox posed by two seemingly self-evident propositions: the universe must have an end, like everything else, but it would be impossible for nothing to exist.
In his maturity, Fredkin concluded he existed in a finely mottled universe with the prime mover of everything, the single principle that governs the universe, lying somewhere within a class of computer programs known as cellular automata.
The word “cellular” is not meant biologically when used in this context. It refers to adjacent spaces – cells – that together form a pattern. These cells typically appear on a computer screen. His theory is complex and involves metaphysics as well as physics. When the two are disentangled, Fredkin’s metaphysics leads to a kind of high-tech theology, that is, to speculation about supreme beings and the purpose of life.
The short answer to the question of what Fredkin’s universe is ultimately made of is this: “I’ve come to the conclusion,” he says, “that the most concrete thing in the world is information.”
As with Einstein, Fredkin believes that everything that happens, including all human behavior, is inevitable (fate?); that the future could in principle be precisely predicted, given the present state of the universe and the laws that govern it.
This represents the difference between “determinism” and “indeterminism.”
Isaac Newton (1642 –1727), advocate of determinism, believed if you knew everything in the present, every particle no matter how many, you could predict the future.
Niels Bohr (1885 – 1962) disagreed and came up with his theory of quantum mechanics and indeterminism, and led to chaos theory, the idea that differences in input could quickly become overwhelming differences in output, the so-called Butterfly Effect – the notion that a butterfly stirring the air today in Peking can transform storm systems next month in New York. This idea of indeterminacy, which once frightened scientists, is now taken seriously introducing a totally new way of thinking about very small objects.
To illustrate, if we toss a ball into the air, we can follow its precise projection with classical mechanics. This predicts the position and velocity of the ball at every instant during its flight. Not so microscopic matter such as electrons. If an electron were only an exceptionally small ball, its motion would be on a path predicted by classical mechanics, but that is not the case.
Quantum theory has been extremely successful in explaining a wide range of indeterminacy such as how electrons move in materials, like those that travel through the chips in a personal computer. Quantum mechanics is used to understand superconductivity, the decay of nuclei, and how lasers work, among many other things.
Fredkin sees his computer theory on the one hand as a shortcut to using traditional mathematics. He claims you can predict a future state of a system without figuring out what states it will occupy between now and then. In the case of a cellular automaton, however, he admits you must go through all the intermediate states to get to the end, stating: “There is no way to predict the future except to watch it unfold.” This suggests that even if human behavior is entirely determined and entirely predictable, there may be some room for “pseudo-free will” in a completely mechanized world.
This is his take on a Supreme Being: even if there is an all-powerful God, and He is thinking of creating this universe, He can have various ways of doing it, but He has to do every single step with every bit He has, or He won’t get the right answer. Fredkin won’t even allow God to take shortcuts. With this belief, he crosses the line between physics and metaphysics, a distinction that might seem puzzling, but to him obvious. It is a kind of arrogance that has served him well.
EDWARD O. WILSON
More than most scientists, E. O. Wilson (ne’ 1929) thinks about science, about its rules, social implications and where it resides in the human conscience. He looks at the structure of science and its disciplines the way one might view a pyramid. This has led him into the controversial waters of reductionism, and to his theory of “sociobiology.”
For more than a half century, Wilson has been a diligent entomologist, but with sociobiology he ventures into another arena, which he explains with his pyramid of social evolution.
The pyramid commences with invertebrates, such as coral, which occupy the “first pinnacle” of social evolution. These societies of coral demonstrate such a high degree of cohesion to be called an organism.
Ants, along with bees, occupy the “second pinnacle,” which is much less socially perfect. Altruism is common, and the societies are closely knit, but insects nonetheless are distinct beings. They have an identity independent of the colony.
In the “third pinnacle” are the vertebrates, except people. Division of labor is seldom apparent; selfishness is the rule between members; acts of altruism are infrequent; and no one appears to be having a very good time.
The trend from corals through ants to baboons is from less social to more selfish behavior. Wilson extrapolated from this that when individuals are genetically identical, as in the case of corals, they display almost unlimited cooperation and altruism. When related by a degree of three fourths, as with ants, they display cooperation and altruism. But they also display independence and selfishness. When they are related merely by one half, as in the case of baboons, they display much independence and little cooperation or altruism.
Human beings, who have carried complexity to such a level, form the “fourth pinnacle.” They break all the old vertebrate restraints, not by reducing selfishness but rather by acquiring the intelligence to consult the past and to plan the future. Human societies, then, approach the insect societies in cooperation and far exceed them in powers of communication, reversing the downward trend in social evolution of Wilson’s pyramid.
The controversy with sociobiology is centered on the suggestion that since humans are products of natural selection (evolution), evolutionary biologist could shed light on the nature of things, such as aggression, ethics, aesthetics, romance, and religion, clearly inferring genes play a prominent role in the “fourth pinnacle.” Mainstream sociologists have long ignored the possibilities that the genes significantly influenced human behavior preferring to see it as culture and learned behavior. Wilson writes in “Sociology” (1975):
The members of human societies sometimes cooperated closely in insectan fashion, but more frequently they compete for the limited resources allocated to their role-sector. The best and most entrepreneurial of role-actors usually gain a disproportionate share of the rewards, while the least successful are displaced to other, less desirable positions.
Far from being rare, Wilson sees deception and hypocrisy as very human devices for people in conducting the complex business of everyday life. His critics see this as biological determinism. They claim he exonerates society from responsibility for its social problems. Yet, ardent capitalists want it both ways, professing belief in equal native potential of all people, on the one hand, while insisting the blame for poverty is based on the free choice and to be due to indolence on the other. The jury is still out on sociobiology, but it is as indelibly associated with Wilson’s name as relativity is to Einstein’s.
What apparently convinced Wilson of the explanatory power of sociobiology was his internal struggle between religion and science. “I don’t mean I was tempted to return to a fundamentalist view or even an essentially Christian view of the world,” he confesses, “but neither was I ready to accept the view that the religious experience was nothing more than an excited mental state.”
In his youth, he had felt the depth of its appeal, and was certain that religion had biological roots. This convinced him that at some point religion had been good for the genes. The question he could not answer was how. He speculates that religion congeals the identity of the adolescent and instills a sense of purpose that pays off genetically, fueling ambition and channeling it toward investment in the future. He believes the adaptive value of the religious impulse, through selection at the level of the individual, and kin, and even the group level, has earned it a place in our collective genetic heritage.
This is consistent with his placing the social sciences at the top of his pyramidal structure of science, below the social sciences, the biological sciences; below biology, chemistry; and below chemistry, physics. He sees each level of inquiry to rest on the level beneath it in a fairly literal sense, that is, its laws will follow from the laws below. For example, he points out that many of the laws of chemistry have been reduced to the laws of physics. This fails to sit well with many chemists. He cites the case of mathematicians through knowledge of physics can now do some of the work chemists once did with test tubes.
It is in the higher regions of the pyramid of science that reductionism becomes disputable. If biology literally rest on chemistry, could the behavior of, say, a kidney be predicted with much precision from a knowledge of the molecular structures involved? How about the brain? Could laws describing a chimpanzee’s or a person’s behavior be deduced from the laws of organic chemistry? These questions, in addition to being difficult, are loaded with philosophical consequences, and therefore moral considerations, for example, stem cell research.
At the higher levels of organization, reductionism is allied to determinism. This holds that free will is a myth. As previously mentioned, determinism insists that the rest of human history will unfold as inevitably as a cellular automaton, however powerful our illusions to the contrary with our choices. Our inability to predict this predetermined future, or even to predict one person’s behavior on a day-to-day basis, reflects, according to determinists, only incomplete data, and our ignorance of the principles involved.
As bizarre as this may sound, consider the words of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), who visualizes this concept in a truly literal sense. He points out that when we reach an advanced age and look back over our lifetime, we can see a consistent order and plan, as though a novelist composed our life. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little real moment turned out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So, he asks, who composed this plot? He suggests that just as an aspect of ourselves of which our consciousness is unaware composes our dreams, so, too, our whole life is composed by the deterministic will within us.
Wilson sees a selective connection between human genes and human culture, between the information that shapes us and the information we shape. The thing to remember is that he extrapolates all his hypotheses and theories from the study of insects, ants in particular. In “Genes, Mind, and Culture” (1981), this universe is bridged to explain the human community, a diagnosis that defines plausibility in terms of Ockham’s Razor as it looks for the simplest explanation of how complexity came about without a creator.
One wonders if such a unified explanation is grounded in a detached appraisal, or if some people are born with Ockham epiphany in their brains, that is, being able to see through complexity to the simplest and truest answer. Surely, Fredkin felt deeply the unifying power of a cellular automaton, something visceral that led him to such an epiphany. Perhaps it is more common than we think. Wilson, who seems to believe this, is more modest in his reductionism, but no less certain.
KENNETH BOULDING
Kenneth Boulding (ne’ 1911), devout Quaker, unconventional economist, examines the societal changes wrought by information technology but without the certainty of his colleagues. He sees information processing, not as a god or a deterrent to religious conviction, but as a manifestation of information processing that commenced billions of years ago. Boulding concludes that only in understanding information processing at many levels can we truly grasp the meaning of the Information Age.
Displaying little of the self-assurance of Fredkin and Wilson, while clearly waffling with some of his dictums, he appears an obliging and agreeable man driven by humility. With Quakers, there are no altars, no clergy, and no laity, only people with equal access to God. When the Quaker meeting begins, silence envelopes the room, a silence as impressive as the finest speech. It is home in the spirit without definition, and displays a humility that once was the common climate of emerging scientists in the Age of Faith.
Sometimes Boulding stutters, which makes him less intimidating and more likeable in his erudition. Beneath his crazy quilt of insights and opaque quips is a reasonably coherent body of thought. To one not familiar with his writing, there appears no real purpose to his rambling. The fact is that Boulding has always been a disconcertingly discursive thinker. You can go back and read things he has written thirty or forty years ago – as I did with his book “The Image” (1966) – and you’ll find the same exasperating pattern. You follow a thought for a page or two, and then, just as you are getting a feel for it, it is lost in another thought that will soon suffer the same fate.
It seems, sometimes, as if everything is an aside to him. They range from grand: “Wealth creates power, and power destroys wealth,” to frivolous metaphor: “Hitler and Stalin were pimples on the changing countenance of time.”
It doesn’t help that he dictates his books – he admits as much in the Preface to “The Image” – usually without an outline and seldom with much revision. He doesn’t like to edit his own work. His writing, like his thinking, is notable more for its boldness and intermittent brilliance than for its organization and consistent correctness. His motto is “Don’t get it right, get it written.” This is apparent as he has published more than forty books and hundreds of articles to learned journals across the globe.
Another penchant, which is a product of the architecture of his mind, is to wander freely from one discipline to another and to think on several levels of organization at once. He was first trained as a chemist at Oxford, but had a passion from the beginning for the humanities, which I can understand from my perspective, as it was true of me as well.
It was this passion that led him from the laboratory into economics where he felt the discipline more akin to his passion in studying and reflecting on human behavior. The consequence of this interdisciplinary perspective is that he feels no hesitation in applying physical laws to people: “Ohm’s Law exhibited in its purest form in the study of electricity is also applicable to the flow of money,” or from inanimate to the animal: “The automobile’s a species just like the horse; it just has a more complicated sex life.”
There is playfulness to Boulding’s madness. Free-floating and fragmented thought grows out of a natural quest for unity. This has resulted in something called “general system theory,” of which he is one of its founders.
System theory is not in vogue now, but in the middle of the twentieth century, it was popular with most organizational thinkers. It harbors, as one of its ideals the unification of the sciences, blurring the line between disciplines in both the physical and social sciences. It is not to be confused with Wilson’s reductionism or Fredkin’s determinism. The methodologies differ as well the big issue of determinism versus free will.
Boulding prefers to “go with the flow,” as his spirituality is in his science. He has felt no need to separate science from religion, or God from the complex universe. What amazes Boulding is that the universe’s awareness of itself grows out of randomness.
He points out that random genetic mutations led one-cell organisms to process meaningful information. These random mutations then led these cells to share information so intimately among them, as to constitute multicellular organisms. Random mutations next led the descendents of these organisms, such as ants and primates, to share information also, and thus to carry the processing of information to the social level. Then man came along and one day invented an elaborate artificial information processing and transmitting system, which is now further integrating the most impressive system of information processing ever to appear on this planet.
Boulding finds an intelligence that could create the human species out of thin air less remarkable than an intelligence that could create a universe that would give birth to a process of natural selection, a process that a few self-replicating molecules (bacteria) and a few billion years would lead to a theory of itself. He concludes, “I have gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity, to believe that He created primal forms . . . as to believe that He required a fresh act of intervention to supply the lacunas which He himself had made.”
You sense there is a level of tolerance here (“going with the flow”) that is not apparent in Fredkin and Wilson. He finds the idea of the creator much more complex and a much more subtle process, and therefore beyond comprehension.
Science, for him, need not compete with or try to explain away God, but should be able to live with the idea of God, to treat God as a verb, not as a word, but in acts of faith. He sees the core of religious experience in human potential, and the world as a totality with an important level of variety.
“I’ve often said,” he reflects, “I think of the Catholic Church rather as I do of the blue whale. I’m not a Catholic, and I’m not a blue whale, but I’d feel diminished if either of them became extinct.”
Boulding is able to stand back and examine the assumptions upon which his work and faith are based and not be conflicted.
His unconventional approach to scholarship has generated such questions as: is Kenneth Boulding a charlatan; is he a mush-minded do-gooder who has finessed his way into the academic limelight with his wit and British charm; is all this stuff about the integrative system just so much palaver? I wonder if that caused him to write “The Image” because he addresses the problem with deft skill at both the human and animate level seeing purposeful behavior as a hallmark of living systems.
His hierarchical categorization of reality ranges from static structures, such as rocks, to clockwork structures, such as the planets, which revolve mindlessly with no apparent feedback, no need for information, to things that do process information, such as thermostats, to things such as cells, which process both information and raw matter and energy, to plants, to animals, to human beings, to social systems, and then at the very top, to transcendental systems that are unknowable and beyond comprehension.
This is his hierarchy of evolution. It is directed toward greater complexity, more enriched process information, and more elaborately pursued purpose to where we are now. In the beginning, he muses, complex molecules formed cells, then cells formed organisms, then organisms formed societies, and now under the influence of information technologies, human societies are approaching the intricacy of an organism. Wilson’s ant reductionism has much in common with Boulding’s cultural evolution. He believes everything ultimately points to an integrative system.
He notes the organization revolution grew out of the industrial revolution, and became global after World War II. Many small companies made connection with foreign markets to become multinational corporations. On a personal note, Nalco Chemical Company had gross sales of $50 million and was largely a domestic company in the 1960s. Today sales exceed $4 billion annually. Thanks to the computer revolution Nalco is now networked across the globe, as companies and countries become increasingly integrated.
Boulding wonders, however, at what price? He sees personal freedom, once taken for granted, reduced to nostalgic air. Computers, he reminds us, are making it more difficult to flout the law, eroding societal entropy, whose flip side is liberty.
His point is well taken. The question we are facing is how much order we are willing to sacrifice for liberty, or liberty for order? This concern may seem extreme, but consider the science of surveillance and control in the twenty-first century world, especially since 9/11. It has already outstripped George Orwell’s imagination.
Most corporate workers today work in cubicles tied to computers. These computers are capable of monitoring their productivity, the accuracy and efficiency of their work, the number of times they escape the task at hand to venture unto the Internet, how many emails they send and receive, the content and relevance of these to their work, and how this all compares to their colleagues in the same activity. Performance appraisal has become redundant, an anachronism replaced by the ubiquitous electronic eye.
Boulding finds no reason to be alarmed about personal intrusion into individual privacy. He sees we can have it both ways. Individuality and aggregation are not only compatible but also inseparable. They may come at some loss of privacy but promise improved communications and therefore enhanced community. He sees moving out of the telephone age, continuing through many breakthroughs in information technology, including the microcomputer, to the corporation, and by extension, society as an organism has given man more validity than any other hundred-year period.
This segueing into a collective order requires incremental surrendering of autonomy to bring communities, companies and countries into a realization it is in their mutual interest to sacrifice self-interests for group accord. He sees the process a logical unfolding over the past several centuries: from the Industrial Revolution to the Organizational Revolution to the Control (Information) Revolution. A deeply religious man, he is confident man will find the transcendental wisdom to embrace the challenges and choose the high ground, as another technological revolution will inevitably follow.
ENTROPY
These scientists view religion (The word came from the Latin ligare: “to bind together.”) through the lens of evolution, paying particular attention to its most recent iteration, the Information Age. That finds them also in accord on the value of another explanatory model, the second law of thermodynamics, known as “entropy.”
Entropy states that, generally, structures decompose, matter disintegrates, and gases dissipate; that everything is moving from order to disorder and on to chaos. It is happening to the stars, the earth, and everything on and in everything else.
Evolution follows a similar sequence. As the amount of usable energy declines, and becomes unusable, entropy increases and order is reduced to chaos. This is difficult to grasp, so I hope you will bear with me. Everything is related from the turbulence of weather to the complicated rhythms of the human heart, from the design of snowflakes to the whorls of windswept desert sands. Things change but the amount of matter, energy, and water always remains precisely the same only in a different forms.
Low entropy and high order is a state of activity when an abundance of useful energy is available to do work. Imagine a balloon is heated with helium gas. The helium is able to do work as it is heated expanding to spontaneously spread up and out inflating and lifting the balloon. Once all the spreading out is done, there is nothing left to harness. All the useful energy is working to keep the balloon in flight. A condition of low entropy and high order exists, but this, too, is changing as the helium gas eventually dissipates. When the helium is released to the environment, and the balloon descends, there is a state of high entropy and low order.
The entropy of a system may be crudely defined as a measure of the disorder, or randomness of the system. The amount of entropy in the universe – the randomness and disorder – never decreases, and so just about every time anything happens, entropy increases, as everything is wearing out. It may take billions of years, but the earth is a star that will eventually disintegrate as if it never existed. This is because of entropy.
A common misconception about entropy is that evolution violates it. Life, the flawed argument begins, not only preserves structure, but multiplies it, giving rise to ever more elaborately ordered organisms, from bacteria through earthworms all the way up to people, who in turn produce structures. Since entropy generally erodes structured things, it must, in the realm of life, be suffering at least a temporary setback.
The problem with this logic is that entropy applies only to isolated “closed systems.” The system of life is an “open system.” Life receives its energy from external sources -- the sun, food and other low-entropy sources -- and is free to expel high-entropy waste products into other open systems, such as sewers.
While it is true a growing person is coherently developing structured organs, this gain is more than outweighed by the disorder the person discharges into the environment. It is that disorder – that chaos – that eventually may turn the earth into an ever expanding cosmic dumpster.
It would appear we are all unwitting accomplices to high entropy. Like people sinking into quicksand, we doom ourselves more surely as we struggle to pursue the mesmerizing appeal of progress, polluting the air, and poisoning the land and rivers with our fascination for the products of technology.
Matter is finite; it can neither be created nor destroyed, but only changed. Whatever our view on global warming, it is a fact that Nature is a limited resource.
ENTROPY IN THE INFORMATION AGE
Twentieth century scientists had a solid understanding of entropy. They knew it represented disorder and chaos. They could see the diminishing of useful energy, and they knew entropy was gaining on us. Then an amazing thing happened: precise mathematics intersected with the study of information to introduce us to another surprising phenomenon.
In the middle of the twentieth century, Claude Shannon, a Bell Laboratories engineer, published a paper that introduced the Information Age, intersecting thermodynamics with information. Shannon pondered how he could “encode” information so that it would resist erosion by the “white noise” encountered in telephone lines. Such analysis called for the formulation of a general law of information transmission, and so he invented one.
The odd thing about this formulation is that it was identical to the definition of entropy.
Shannon’s definition stated that the more uncertainty there is about the contents (high entropy) of the message that is about to be received the more information the message contains (disorder and randomness). He was not talking about “meaning,” but about the symbols in which the meaning was encoded.
Consider a glass of pure water. There is little uncertainty as to what any region of the content of the liquid is other than the symbol for it, H2O. Consequently, the content is highly ordered in a low-entropy system.
Now, collect a glass of suspended solids from an industrial plant waste discharge. The content will include some H2O, but also a random assortment of other molecules and compounds. The content would be uncertain, and difficult to verify. As a system, then, this would be high in entropy because of the uncertainty of its exact content and low in unusable energy: you couldn’t drink it. Yet, some enterprising companies have taken the innovative step to convert such waste into usable fuel (auxiliary heat) and thus reduced its entropy.
Given the centrality of uncertainty in the definition of information and entropy, the mathematical resemblance between the two should not be surprising. Entropy is experienced in communication in every day life. For example, presidential politics in the 2004 campaign came down to two sentences varying widely in certainty and entropy:
Senator Kerry: "I actually voted for the $87 billion (to fund the War in Iraq) before I voted against it."
President Bush: "You may not always agree with me, but you’ll always know where I stand."
Undoubtedly Senator Kerry meant to come across sincere, but left the deep uncertainty of not being able to make up his mind, and thus the chaos that might result from his leadership. This is high or positive (+) entropy. On the other hand, President Bush admitted that we might differ with him on occasion, which is a certainty, but that we can trust where he stands, reinforcing this belief, and thus reducing entropy to practically nil. This is low or negative (-) entropy.
So, information can be equated with positive entropy (high), or negative entropy (low). It is a matter of personal preference and how information is presented and perceived. The important point is that regardless of whether a negative or positive sign is attached to the string of symbols representing the information, it is identical to the string representing entropy, because both are quantities of uncertainty.
Norbert Wiener (1894 – 1964) in his book “Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” (1982) wrote: “Just as the amount of information in a system is a measure of its degree of organization, so the entropy of a system is a measure of its degree of disorganization; and the one is simply the negative of the other.”
The entropy metaphor has gained ground in popular and scholarly books and articles on self-development, information theory and cybernetic where information is equated with order, certainty, and by extension, with reference to structure and form.
Maxwell Maltz book “Psycho Cybernetics” (1989) deals with improved personal effectiveness by reducing uncertainty and chaos (entropy) through self-image psychology. Personal confidence and effectiveness are accomplished by a series of image exercises to control one’s action and thus preserve useful energy to grow and prosper.
Daniel Katz and Robert Kahn write of “negentropy,” or negative entropy in their book “Social Psychology of Organizations” (1966). They point out that an open system such as an organization in order to survive must import more energy than it returns to the environment as product. The reason is obvious. Energy input into an organization is in part invested directly as organizational output. Some of the input is absorbed by the organization (entropy) in the chaos and uncertainty of worker performance.
There is inevitable energy loss between input and output. Human organizations take in energy in two forms: people as energy sources, and materials as energy investments. People energy is both direct (making the product) and indirect (designing, organizing, controlling, distributing, and marketing the product). Negentropy (desired negative entropy) represents a surplus of people energy, control of material and production costs, producing quality products, and generating a healthy profit and share of the market.
HAS IT EVER BEEN OTHERWISE?
From this perspective, you can see entropy has always existed in man’s experience if not consciousness. In another sense, man’s perspective has changed from a “God-centered” to “man-centered” universe; from modest men of science to scientists who feel uncomfortable with the idea of God or the trappings of religion, feeling a need to liberate themselves from the irrational and the superstitious. If only, it was that simple.
Enter the existentialists. They reject the idea of a rationally ordered reality, and embrace the idea of subjectively irrational human existence, where decisions, choices, and behavior are executed independently of reason.
Subjective Man, they claim, is motivated, according to the philosophy of irrationalism with feeling, anxiety and irrational impulses overriding whatever rational forces can rally. Existence is not rational, but permeated with an intense sense of being forlorn, abandon and in despair, or the only criteria for knowing truth. They cling to entropy as if it were a meteor soaring them to “Nowhere Land”
Man, no longer with the certainty of a Supreme Being, echoes the words of despair of Albert Camus: “I shall tell you a great secret, my friend. Do not wait for the Last Judgment, it takes place every day.”
To the existentialist, the mind of man is incapable of discovering truth through reason, since truth is found only in paradox. From the vantage point of God, truth is rational; from the midst of subjectivity, truth is contradictory, a paradox.
If nothing else were said about the idea of God, this should reaffirm that the pursuit of knowing, which is science, and the pursuit of spiritual knowing, which is the Church, make science and religion inseparable. They may often disagree but the synergy between them provides the context for order and certainty in a climate of chaos and uncertainty. Einstein puts it simply: “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”
The Church in modern times has faltered and even appears to have lost its way. Max Weber (1864 – 1920) points out, however, that bureaucracies of long standing, such as the Church, ride the vicissitudes of time on their cumulative negative entropy. Despite the disorder and chaos in the Church, Weber reminds us there is a surplus of useful energy that allows it to carry on. Whatever the criticism, the Church remains relevant in a climate of eroding structures, disenchanted believers, mounting scandals, and escalating uncertainties.
ARRIVAL OF “NOWHERE MAN”
As man has moved increasingly away from the idea of God in the confines of the previous certainty of his Church, he has moved, paradoxically, away from himself. In a strange way, environmental pollution, which is a product of man’s excesses in the name of progress, has been accompanied by emotional pollution in the name of denial of accountability retreating into lifestyle recklessness.
Hedonism, then, is a form of entropy. Nonetheless, it has become highly attractive in a climate of disorder and uncertainty. Sensual excess represents the great escape from self-knowing into self-indulgence. The evidence is overwhelming. Most modern diseases are lifestyle diseases. These addictions can compromise the immune system, shrink the liver, clog the arteries, upset the insulin balance, devour the lungs, and consume the digestive tract, leading to death, which is maximum entropy.
People look for science to be the new God, and to bail them out of their predicament with miraculous drugs. This disabuses them from being interested in putting new vigor into their moral compass. It goes beyond this.
If a person is involved in a single-car accident, then it’s the car’s fault or the road’s fault. If we get fat or suffer harden arteries, it’s the “Fast Food Nation’s” fault. If we become drug addicts, it’s the drug dealer’s fault. If we get lung cancer, it’s the tobacco company’s fault. If we hit a bad patch in life, and have no savings to fall back on, it’s society’s fault. Accountability and frugality are words out of favor today with an entropy driven society because if they weren’t we would have nobody to blame but ourselves.
Twenty-first century man has become “Nowhere Man” in “Nowhere Land,” filled with the hubris and arrogance of utopian (“nowhere”) dreams: living without limits, living out-of-control, and living without moral constraints. It is a high entropy hedonistic bomb.
“Nowhere Man” has forgotten that his mind and spirit are no less critical to his physical well being than his heart and lungs are. True, severe damage can result from the foul air we breathe, but equally true the foul information we process can do comparable damage to our minds. We are not only what eat and breathe, but what we think and dream as well.
Science and God are partners in this enterprise. Science can issue warnings on pollution, but it is the Church that should take measure of our moral and cultural pollution. Instead, it too often takes the stance of the apologist. This is equally true of the intellectual.
Novelist Milan Kundera has produced a novel with an expression that has come to identify our culture and mindset, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (1988). This phase defines what life is like when the burdens of responsibility and consequence are lifted from the protagonists of the novel. These burdens may be unbearable but it is the lightness of experience that cast them off. A society that has lost its moral compass or sense of accountability is rushing toward entropy.
A CASE OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES
The war between science and religion took a strange direction in the nineteenth century when Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) claimed the descent of man from apes. Then the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) added an exclamation point to this by proclaiming: “God is dead!” Nietzsche welcomed the death of God as a necessary precondition to the Industrial Revolution where human greatness would finally unfold. The Russian novelist Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881) in “The Brothers Karamazov” (1880) has Ivan Karamazov saying, “If God is dead, then everything is permitted.” Western culture would make his words prophetic from the counterculture of the 1960s to the “me” generation of 1980s to the present climate of today.
Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626) claimed “modest man” found his mind in science, but I would suggest he lost his head to Nietzsche’s superman. Bacon was describing the scientist of his day. The scientist admitted to the limits of human reason, and felt science would lay bare the true wonder of God’s creation, and ultimately lead to a greater worship of Him. Bacon even saw the Church as the rudder to steer a course to God, as the small vessel of human reason required such s guidance system to the divine.
Incidentally, Bacon is the man who perfected the inductive method (i.e., reasoning from the particular to the general) and set the stage for science to take off. Since his day an endless series of breathtaking accomplishments in science through the use of reason have occurred, only to be reduced to a host of unintended consequences.
Science has made everything appear as possible! Reason in the form of science has eclipsed the divine and now presses forward without reserve. Through discovery of new "Toys of the Mind," science has inadvertently created a new entity, “Nowhere Man.”
Man as a specimen has become a thing to study like an insect, and in work, to manage, label, classify, collate, and program as a dumb beast, which increasingly he resembles.
Whereas the “death of God” led Dostoyevsky to see everything evil was now permitted, the new worshipers of reason believed from the dawn of science that everything good was now possible. Dostoyevsky proved a better prophet than utopian rationalists, while their legacy is personified in “Nowhere Man.”
The grisly horrors of twentieth century wars, African genocide in the twenty-first century, the perpetuation of totalitarian systems of ubiquitous terrorism across the globe, along with the doublespeak of Western democracies, it is apparent “Nowhere Man” has found a home in self-indulgent "Nowhere Land.” As progress embraces South East Asia, China and India, it is clear that “Nowhere Land” is no longer limited to the West.
As the nineteenth rushed into the twentieth century, sociologists and political scientists no longer saw “modest man,” but instead visualized depersonalized man reduced to pie charts and statistical grids. Man became part of random numbers of specialists with reality reduced to "game theory." History, economics, sociology, psychology, and anthropology split off developing complex trees of scores of subsequent disciplines within each branch, with scores of people then working on mundane problems with findings often equally self-evident and mundane.
It is easy to forget that Communism and Nazism were both products of social engineering with dialectical scientific foundations. Nazism preached the eugenics of culture cleansing after the crushing and humiliating German defeat of WWI . The Communists of the Russian Revolution (1917) saw themselves as scientific socialists. The hidden history of Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) was implemented by Lenin (1870 – 1924) and then solidified by Joseph Stalin (1879 – 1953).
What was the mission? To create the utopian “new Soviet man,” eradicate God and capitalism, and spread the doctrine to working people across the planet. Unfortunately, idealism turned to a new kind of totalitarianism with the USSR falling on its own petard of entropy in 1989. When the spirit is denied, whatever the process, Nowhere Man is not far away. Somewhere is where the soul lives, and where the soul lives, life blossoms.
Many well-meaning intellectuals supported communism, which had aptly been described as “the religion of science.” Likewise, Nazi advocates saw its principles as being a science beyond religion. The failure of both was blamed by their respective supporters on the atavistic influence of religion and the forces of irrationality and superstition, not on their self-generating chaos and uncertainty and waste of human capital. Science for these ideologues was to be the panacea to human nirvana.
Men have stepped forward to show the folly in such thinking. Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947) entertained deep reservations about the idea of science as the exclusive account of reality. He wrote, “Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904 – 1967), who supervised the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos (1943 – 1945), took to agonizing over what science had wrought with the bomb. He became beset with doubts about the role of science in the Nuclear Age. This found him against the making of the hydrogen bomb. For criticizing the program, he endured professional rebuke and public scorn, which resulted in his loss of security clearance (1954). Critical of this new god of war, he regressed to being a recluse, a victim of the news media, as it became the new Spanish Inquisition of the modern age.
RETROFITING PAST IMPERFECT/PRESENT RIDICULOUS INTO FUTURE PERFECT
The arguments of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274) in the Age of Faith, once thought dead and irrelevant, are being resurrected in light of today’s problems in the Age of Science. Aquinas believed every human being regardless of his or her faith shared in a common humanity through the possession and use of faith. He maintained that reason is the essential quality of humanity:
“It is that without which man cannot be man.”
Aquinas insisted truths of reason did not refute or negate the truths of religion. He argued that philosophy examined the supernatural order in the light of reason, and theology examined it in the light of revelation. Although reason was used in theology, revelation did not fall into the province of philosophy. He concluded philosophy could not contradict theology because truth could not contradict truth. For Aquinas, then, faith and knowledge were not mutually exclusive, insisting that belief took over where knowledge ended.
Within the realm of science, there is a sense of a return to the “modest man” of Bacon. In his book “God and the Astronomers” (1992), Robert Jastrow writes:
“It is not a matter of another year, another decade of work, another measurement, or another theory; at this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation.”
With biogenetics and stem cell research notwithstanding, Jastrow is even more emphatic in the last sentence of his book:
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
Jastrow is not suggesting, nor is it being suggested here that the elegance of empirical science should be curtailed. The quest to know is a beautiful pursuit. It is suggested only that a vast intelligence that could create such a being as man, who is driven to understand the ways nature works, only to discover, once he does, that it was obvious. This led Einstein to reflect: “When the solution is simple, God is answering.”
THE SUMMING UP
Man presses on, not as a god, but imbued with the modesty of knowing. He was subject to a principle, a physical law long before organic laws existed, which we know as entropy, “the second law of thermodynamics.” This law humbles man.
Robert Wright says: “It is entropy that punishes with extinction strands of DNA that fail to surround themselves with walls against entropy.” This provoked Martin Heidegger (1886 – 1976) to say, “As soon as we are born, we are old enough to die.” To survive we must be on a lifelong quest to generate negative entropy, to reinvent, reconstitute, and renew ourselves as our structures deteriorate, and chaos and uncertainty threaten our being. “Body and soul are not two different things,” notes Einstein, “but only two different ways of perceiving the same thing. Similarly, physics and psychology are only different attempts to link our experiences together by way of systematic thought."
Nothing is static. Everything in nature is in a state of dying, to be reborn, live, and then die again. Complexity and simplicity, order and chaos are constant dynamics to life whether we are conscious of them or not. Consequently, when nature is out of balance, so are we.
We are in an Information Age. This information, under the metaphysical laws governing the universe, seems to bring conscious experience to an ultimate synthesis where we are learning “to go with the flow” (as Native American Indians first taught us), while at the same time resisting this flow as if we could. Nature has its own codes as E. O. Wilson has uncovered in his study of ants, which operate in similar complexity to that of man. James Watson and Francis Crick discovered DNA, the information code to our genetics, which has led to new information technology regarding life itself. Einstein expressed the scientist’s quest this way: “I want to know God’s thoughts, all the rest are details.” Einstein also claimed no special gift other than curiosity, and a capacity to stick longer than most others to problems.
As marvelous as scientific discoveries are, Nature is always waiting silently to be discovered, making all the notable discoveries to date shallow by comparison. While we operate in ignorance, the mind of nature continues its will. Kenneth Boulding seems comfortable with this, advocating, “Go with the flow.” The flow he sees as directional and complex, operating on several levels simultaneously with parts being integrated into wholes, and wholes being fragmented into parts.
The American Indians did not see nature and the spirit as two different things but two different ways to perceive the same thing. For Indians, Nature was not protected by systematic thought but systematic action. The Mind of Nature spoke to them. They listened because they understood its language. What can it tell us?
That God and science are not adversaries but partners as man is not separate from nature but part of it, that man’s lot is as much a reflection of the second law of thermodynamics as are the mountains and the valleys, the rivers and the seas, and all life within and about. Theologians on the top of that mountain described by Jastrow are waiting for us all.
---------------------------------
This is taken from Dr. Fisher’s new book TECHNOLOGY THE NEW RELIGION OF “NOWHERE MAN.”
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
FISHER OF IDEAS -- SHARING AN EPHEMERAL BUBBLE OF MEMORY!
FISHER OF IDEAS
SHARING AN EPHEMERAL BUBBLE OF MEMORY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 2006
Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.
Jean Paul Richter (1763 - 1826)
German Humorist
So many of my colleagues have died this present year (going on twenty). It reminds me that all we have is now. So, there is no point in protecting the "now" with supercilious pretensions or false modesty. Life is life and it is lived or it is not. "Not" has reached career status. This is a bubble of life most recent.
Only last night Beautiful Betty and I were talking and I mentioned "taking notes" in college. I asked her if she was good at it. Quite predictably, she answered, "I'm sure not nearly as good as you were. God, you did them in color code no less as if they were a finished manuscript." Being a pack rat the evidence exists to corroborate the fact.
For the longest time, I didn't respond. "Well, didn't you?"
"Yes, I did," I answered finally, "and then I would go back to the dorm and type them up and even elaborated on them further. I was a bit of a grind."
She shook her head.
"But that is not why I didn't answer you," I confessed. "I was thinking of a guy I knew in college that took many of the same courses I did and was the best note taker I ever saw. I was thinking about him because he had such a beautiful mind, and for some reason that surfaced in mine now."
BB could feel I was about to launch into one of my stories and so gave me that captive look that I know so well. Wonder was in her eyes: is this one of the old stories or something new? It was something new.
"I played football, basketball, track and baseball against him in high school. Not only was he a great athlete, he was a four-point student, and first team all-state in football and basketball. Like I did, he took all the hard courses: four years of math, physics, chemistry, four years of English, and four years of foreign language.
"He was a four-point student in college, too, majoring in chemistry, and then a four-point student in med school.
"During his undergraduate years, if you can believe this, he managed to play varsity football for four years and make all-American in football in his junior and senior year, and later star in the All-Star Football Game at Soldiers Field in Chicago.
"More impressive still," I continued, "he was the most modest guy I have ever met. Athletes on campus were celebrities in my day, and yet he was approachable by anyone who needed help. I can remember asking him to have coffee with me after I was stumped by an unusually difficult problem in calculus. Then, without making me feel stupid, he said, 'Jim, did you ever think of looking at it like this,' outlining a simple approach that made the problem crystal clear.
"He went on to become a doctor. But even before that all happened, I sensed that he was not in control of his demons.
"It is one of the reasons I wrote the recent article on WHAT ABOUT YOUR DEMONS? I was thinking about him but chose to write about another person. Here I was only an acquaintance of his, but I could feel his unresolved turmoil that had little to do with intellect and much to do with emotions.
"I didn't know, then, that this was a gift that would carry me through my long career, and give me a window to understand others as if there was a banner over their heads telling me what was going on inside them. It was the reason I wrote CONFIDENT SELLING. . .
"Aren't you getting a little off track?" she asked with her patience thinning.
"I guess. Anyway, one of the proud moments of my life was when he tapped me at the University of Iowa Fishbine Dinner, which indicated that I was being selected into Omicron Delta Kappa, the national leadership honorary. I could tell he was as proud to extend the honor to me, as I was surprised to receive it. All of this rushed into my head when I thought of note taking."
"You know, Jim, you frustrate me," BB confessed. "You give me this wonderful stuff piece meal. One of these days you're not going to be here, and I won't have any sense of this chronology."
"I know," I answered, "I'm a bit of a scatterbrain."
"Your word, not mine. No, I think a better word is denial. You don't want to think that this wonderful adventure has an ending."
As always, she is right, but unfortunately, even with all my acquaintances passing, I choose to let these little explosions of memory pop up, and leave it at that.
"Where is your friend now?" BB asked.
"Oh, didn't I tell you? He died several years ago, not a happy death, not even a fulfilling life with all his promise, but he lives in me as friend, and as a beautiful person." Then as I turned to go back into my study, I said, "He reminds me not only how fragile life is, but how fragile we all are."
SHARING AN EPHEMERAL BUBBLE OF MEMORY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 2006
Recollection is the only paradise from which we cannot be turned out.
Jean Paul Richter (1763 - 1826)
German Humorist
So many of my colleagues have died this present year (going on twenty). It reminds me that all we have is now. So, there is no point in protecting the "now" with supercilious pretensions or false modesty. Life is life and it is lived or it is not. "Not" has reached career status. This is a bubble of life most recent.
Only last night Beautiful Betty and I were talking and I mentioned "taking notes" in college. I asked her if she was good at it. Quite predictably, she answered, "I'm sure not nearly as good as you were. God, you did them in color code no less as if they were a finished manuscript." Being a pack rat the evidence exists to corroborate the fact.
For the longest time, I didn't respond. "Well, didn't you?"
"Yes, I did," I answered finally, "and then I would go back to the dorm and type them up and even elaborated on them further. I was a bit of a grind."
She shook her head.
"But that is not why I didn't answer you," I confessed. "I was thinking of a guy I knew in college that took many of the same courses I did and was the best note taker I ever saw. I was thinking about him because he had such a beautiful mind, and for some reason that surfaced in mine now."
BB could feel I was about to launch into one of my stories and so gave me that captive look that I know so well. Wonder was in her eyes: is this one of the old stories or something new? It was something new.
"I played football, basketball, track and baseball against him in high school. Not only was he a great athlete, he was a four-point student, and first team all-state in football and basketball. Like I did, he took all the hard courses: four years of math, physics, chemistry, four years of English, and four years of foreign language.
"He was a four-point student in college, too, majoring in chemistry, and then a four-point student in med school.
"During his undergraduate years, if you can believe this, he managed to play varsity football for four years and make all-American in football in his junior and senior year, and later star in the All-Star Football Game at Soldiers Field in Chicago.
"More impressive still," I continued, "he was the most modest guy I have ever met. Athletes on campus were celebrities in my day, and yet he was approachable by anyone who needed help. I can remember asking him to have coffee with me after I was stumped by an unusually difficult problem in calculus. Then, without making me feel stupid, he said, 'Jim, did you ever think of looking at it like this,' outlining a simple approach that made the problem crystal clear.
"He went on to become a doctor. But even before that all happened, I sensed that he was not in control of his demons.
"It is one of the reasons I wrote the recent article on WHAT ABOUT YOUR DEMONS? I was thinking about him but chose to write about another person. Here I was only an acquaintance of his, but I could feel his unresolved turmoil that had little to do with intellect and much to do with emotions.
"I didn't know, then, that this was a gift that would carry me through my long career, and give me a window to understand others as if there was a banner over their heads telling me what was going on inside them. It was the reason I wrote CONFIDENT SELLING. . .
"Aren't you getting a little off track?" she asked with her patience thinning.
"I guess. Anyway, one of the proud moments of my life was when he tapped me at the University of Iowa Fishbine Dinner, which indicated that I was being selected into Omicron Delta Kappa, the national leadership honorary. I could tell he was as proud to extend the honor to me, as I was surprised to receive it. All of this rushed into my head when I thought of note taking."
"You know, Jim, you frustrate me," BB confessed. "You give me this wonderful stuff piece meal. One of these days you're not going to be here, and I won't have any sense of this chronology."
"I know," I answered, "I'm a bit of a scatterbrain."
"Your word, not mine. No, I think a better word is denial. You don't want to think that this wonderful adventure has an ending."
As always, she is right, but unfortunately, even with all my acquaintances passing, I choose to let these little explosions of memory pop up, and leave it at that.
"Where is your friend now?" BB asked.
"Oh, didn't I tell you? He died several years ago, not a happy death, not even a fulfilling life with all his promise, but he lives in me as friend, and as a beautiful person." Then as I turned to go back into my study, I said, "He reminds me not only how fragile life is, but how fragile we all are."
Saturday, April 01, 2006
DO YOU KNOW YOUR DEMONS?
DO YOU KNOW YOUR DEMONS?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
The Peripatetic Philosopher
© March 2006
Metaphorically, we all have “rocks in our heads,” and “snakes in our secret gardens.” Our snakes, sunning themselves on these rocks, symbolize our fantasies and wicked thoughts. To deny their presence is to throw our lives off balance, out of control, as if suddenly pierced by their deadly venom. What we do is one thing; what we think is quite another. No one is absolutely good or absolutely evil, but a combination of both. If we ignore one at the expense of the other, we are bound for trouble. To respect our wickedness gives us an advantage. Others less self-accepting may stumble on their snakes at any time, whereas we, ever alert, gingerly step around ours. We can even use them, on occasion, as creative people do, to stimulate our visionary powers. Fantasies are an important source of energy, not so much to be acted on as to add dimension to our vision, to widen our horizons.
THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), p. 321.***
Everyone has his or her demons. They occupy their soul as James Hillman tells us in his book, THE SOUL’S CODE (1996). To understand these demons is to understand ourselves, and in understanding ourselves, we are then in a position to understand others.
This is a problem that is as eternal as the story of man. Now, should you be one that insists you are not haunted by your demons, I suggest that you don’t know yourself, and are in open season to be exploited by others.
The second thing I would suggest is that these demons of the soul that take residence early in our life are there throughout it. As a consequence, our behavior changes very little over the course of our life from those initial psychic footprints on the soul. It behooves us therefore to understand and deal with it openly, confidently, honestly, empathetically, and understandably.
It is not wrong to have demons, as significant others foist many of these upon us. They do this when we are mere protoplasm, or essentially an amorphous being. They push, jostle, shape, ply, and pressure us into the individual we ultimately become.
The Nobel Laureate Eugene O’Neil (1888 – 1953), who has been called America’s Shakespeare, had a tumultuous life and a fragmented education. For six years, he went to sea, lived the life of the tramp at docksides, and made an attempt at suicide. After a spell in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, he began writing plays as a means of making sense of his disturbed emotions having come from a volatile theatrical family. To this day, The Ice Man Cometh (1946) and Long Days Journey Into Night (published posthumously in 1956) are considered classics in American literature. His plays were autobiographical and cathartic in their presentation to the world. He put in his will that Long Days Journey Into Night should never be published, but his wife published it after his death, receiving his fourth Pulitzer Prize for which we are the benefactors.
This play is the story of a family: a mother, father, and two sons. The father had the potential to be the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day, but sold out to comfort, security and public adulation. This found him committed to the singular role of the Count of Monte Crisco instead of venturing into more challenging classical roles made famous by Edwin Booth. To his dying day he regretted his sellout, punishing his family through the years for it.
His mother lost her favorite son and became a morphine addict after his death and drifted into insanity. His older brother became an alcoholic and never realized his potential. Eugene O’Neil shuttled off to boarding school at an early age, lost his faith in Roman Catholicism at age fourteen, and drifted first as a college dropout, then as a sailor and roustabout, becoming a drunkard until he finally found his moorings in the word.
He wrote many stunning plays receiving Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922) and Strange Interlude (1928), and posthumously for Long Days Journey Into Night (1956). Not only was he the first American dramatist to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1936), it was awarded years before his greatest works.
The Ice Man Cometh (1946) is about a favorite bar on the waterfront that he frequented as a roustabout at a low point of his life; and Long Days Journey Into Night (1956) was of his family as crucible of his torment and creativity. O’Neil, rather than denying his gifts, used his demons to find his way in art. That said he was never a happy man, never a comfortable man, but he was a hard working man, and used his art to express his soul, and release his demons, and thus gave the world a window into its own.
There is another person I have in mind who is not a bad man, more a good man, but a man not only failing to have his demons in control to soar to self-realization, but is invariably crippled by them in perpetual self-defeat. He is that great American contemporary prototype, the entrepreneur.
Last year, he netted over two million dollars in income. This year he is so far in debt that he may lose everything. The difference is that when he lost it before he did not have a family, no loving wife, no loving son and daughter, no nuclear core of depth and breadth and consequence. He is seemingly strapped to demons he does not know and does not understand, demons he continues to ignore to his continuing regret.
Now, what are his demons?
Only he could answer that with any certainty. I sense knowing the man that his brother was his parent’s favorite, and that he constantly did everything in his power to win their affection, recognition, approval, and acceptance. His brother was a self- indulgent, narcissistic dilettante who could do no wrong. He was always considered above the fray, always provided excuses for his failures and excesses, which ultimately took him down to his parents’ eternal sorrow, dying at a young age.
The family was somewhat affluent, but he was treated as hired help rather than given the freedom to play athletics that he was gifted to perform, and the time to develop the insouciant social graces of adolescent youth. He worked at his father’s auto dealership after school and on weekends washing cars, doing as many as twenty in a day.
Physical labor became a palliative. To this day he is more comfortable in hard physical activity than in either intellectual problem solving or social interaction.
He was dyslexic at a time when parents thought it was indicative of retardation. Far from being slow, he graduated from a major university, became a police officer, went on to earn his master’s degree in criminal justice, taught as a professor in that university’s program, went on to earn his law degree, and then doctorate in jurisprudence, becoming a lawyer in a small firm.
As a lawyer, he discovered that he was not a nine to five person, didn’t like to be confined to a schedule, prisoner of the clock, to the authority of a boss and performance measuring indices, or, indeed, to the billing of long hours to ingratiate himself to his law partners. Trained as an advocate, he failed to find legal work satisfying. He desired his freedom to come and go as he pleased, and to do as he willed.
When his parents died, he received a generous inheritance. Part of it he invested in a automotive salvage business, and part of it he used to promote his dream to own and drive race cars on the amateur circuit.
One manifestation of his demons was that, as blind as he was to his own talent, he appeared even blinder to see such talent exaggerated in others. This made him vulnerable to the con.
That said one of the wisest moves he ever made was acquiring a partner in the salvage business, a person who had no money to invest, but knew the business. It turned out this was the only instance when a partner did not exploit him. The opportunity was always there because he had little interest in learning the business, working the business, or being in anyway engaged in the business other than as a venture capitalist. This predilection would prove his undoing.
He would continue to practice law without joy moving from one law firm to another, eventually establishing his own, while showing no enthusiasm for developing the business. Instead, his sights were always on a new opportunity, where he could identify a promising venture, then find the expertise to run it, retreating into the woodwork, as he had with the salvage business. The opportunity came in the Internet pharmacy business, especially for clients on pain medications who were interested in expeditious delivery of these medications with little concern of the cost involved. The business boomed.
He acquired wealth he didn’t dream of, but now moths were attracted to the beaming light of his demons and he was unable to escape the glass encasement, vulnerable to the con in all its devious personalities.
First it was a partner who had unsavory ways that made him uncomfortable. He allowed the partner to buy him out, gave him the building he had purchased on his own, and is still waiting to receive his due from the buy out. Prior to that he acquired a partner for marketing he didn’t need, and who never delivered, and whom he set up in his own pharmacy business, a person who now fails to return his telephone calls.
He built an estate of his own design in which he acted as prime contractor, giving struggling subcontractors business, many of whom not only failed to deliver, but did shoddy work. An inclination was revealed here to do business on the cheap, and to stay away from licensed and established contractors. It also exposed a vulnerability to hard luck stories of people who conned him into giving them loans with no intention of repaying him.
How could a person go from being a multimillionaire in 2005 to nearly destitute in 2006?
It was a tapestry of his demons playing havoc on his soul, not in the minor leagues as it had always been before, but now in the major leagues where you win or lose with catastrophic finality. With a blissful vision of irresponsibility, he decided that he would partner with a garage mechanic to manufacture high-end super fast automobiles and sell them to Hollywood types at a major profit.
Once again, he failed to contact an established manufacturer with a history of success in this high-end field. Instead, his new partner had no money and operated out of a job shop. This meant that he had to purchase six of these automobiles sight-unseen before they were constructed with most of his 2005 income as the venture capital. Two of them have been constructed, one delivered, failing speed test after speed test, blowing engines, until today the partner is bankrupt with little chance of any recovery of the venture capital much less return on the investment.
The demons reign supreme. He got lucky with his partner in the salvage business, to be sure, but never again. Thereafter, he thought they had special knowledge, marketing acumen, and connections, and were honest men. Instead, they were con men with similar ephemeral dreams, but not the cash to support them. They took from him until he had nothing more to give, and then like the moths disappeared out of the light of his demons as if they never existed.
You might wonder how an attorney trained in law could allow so many people to deceive him, and yet do nothing. Like the playwright O’Neil, the state of the demons is revealed when he was putty in the hands of his parents. O’Neil used these demons to create his art, while he has been caged by them.
His non-confrontational timidity is incongruous with his handsome countenance, powerfully built physique, and quiet retiring disposition, but engaging personality. His mother was always telling him how bright she was, that she had a genius IQ, while reminding him that he was less gifted by comparison, which he was not. His father, who was kinder to him, but was under his mother’s dominance, often treated him as if hired help. His father’s affection was parceled out by the odd manual laboring jobs he did for him. Consequently, he came to equate manual labor with affection, while retreating from any intellectual comparison as the anathema of rejection.
Remarkably, he has not wandered into drugs, alcoholism, or profligate behavior as his brother had, but has been a devoted if secretive husband – his wife is never party to his misadventures until after the fact -- and a dutiful and loving parent. His family means everything to him. Yet, his demons attack him in subtle psychosomatic ways racking his body with back pain as if to level him for denial of their existence.
His demons have him living in a zone where he cannot say no, he will not say no, while he insists in thinking that people that say no, and don’t want to assume other people’s problems, are uncaring when it is quite the reverse of this.
The sad thing is that I see this person often and have been trained to help him. Rather than deal with his demons, he instead reads these stupid self-help books and watches these stupid self-help television programs in an effort to escape them. The self-help industry delights in trauma and exploits it with one fad after another. Meanwhile, these demons reign in control because now they are monsters. They will not let up until he dies. Demons are like “rocks in our heads” and “snakes in our secret garden.” To deny them is to live in peril for they will not disappear.
* * * * *
***James R. Fisher, Jr., THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND, The Delta Group Florida, Tampa, Florida, 1996. The book is available from this website, Amazon.com or electronically from any bookseller.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
The Peripatetic Philosopher
© March 2006
Metaphorically, we all have “rocks in our heads,” and “snakes in our secret gardens.” Our snakes, sunning themselves on these rocks, symbolize our fantasies and wicked thoughts. To deny their presence is to throw our lives off balance, out of control, as if suddenly pierced by their deadly venom. What we do is one thing; what we think is quite another. No one is absolutely good or absolutely evil, but a combination of both. If we ignore one at the expense of the other, we are bound for trouble. To respect our wickedness gives us an advantage. Others less self-accepting may stumble on their snakes at any time, whereas we, ever alert, gingerly step around ours. We can even use them, on occasion, as creative people do, to stimulate our visionary powers. Fantasies are an important source of energy, not so much to be acted on as to add dimension to our vision, to widen our horizons.
THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND (1996), p. 321.***
Everyone has his or her demons. They occupy their soul as James Hillman tells us in his book, THE SOUL’S CODE (1996). To understand these demons is to understand ourselves, and in understanding ourselves, we are then in a position to understand others.
This is a problem that is as eternal as the story of man. Now, should you be one that insists you are not haunted by your demons, I suggest that you don’t know yourself, and are in open season to be exploited by others.
The second thing I would suggest is that these demons of the soul that take residence early in our life are there throughout it. As a consequence, our behavior changes very little over the course of our life from those initial psychic footprints on the soul. It behooves us therefore to understand and deal with it openly, confidently, honestly, empathetically, and understandably.
It is not wrong to have demons, as significant others foist many of these upon us. They do this when we are mere protoplasm, or essentially an amorphous being. They push, jostle, shape, ply, and pressure us into the individual we ultimately become.
The Nobel Laureate Eugene O’Neil (1888 – 1953), who has been called America’s Shakespeare, had a tumultuous life and a fragmented education. For six years, he went to sea, lived the life of the tramp at docksides, and made an attempt at suicide. After a spell in a sanatorium recovering from tuberculosis, he began writing plays as a means of making sense of his disturbed emotions having come from a volatile theatrical family. To this day, The Ice Man Cometh (1946) and Long Days Journey Into Night (published posthumously in 1956) are considered classics in American literature. His plays were autobiographical and cathartic in their presentation to the world. He put in his will that Long Days Journey Into Night should never be published, but his wife published it after his death, receiving his fourth Pulitzer Prize for which we are the benefactors.
This play is the story of a family: a mother, father, and two sons. The father had the potential to be the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day, but sold out to comfort, security and public adulation. This found him committed to the singular role of the Count of Monte Crisco instead of venturing into more challenging classical roles made famous by Edwin Booth. To his dying day he regretted his sellout, punishing his family through the years for it.
His mother lost her favorite son and became a morphine addict after his death and drifted into insanity. His older brother became an alcoholic and never realized his potential. Eugene O’Neil shuttled off to boarding school at an early age, lost his faith in Roman Catholicism at age fourteen, and drifted first as a college dropout, then as a sailor and roustabout, becoming a drunkard until he finally found his moorings in the word.
He wrote many stunning plays receiving Pulitzer Prizes for Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922) and Strange Interlude (1928), and posthumously for Long Days Journey Into Night (1956). Not only was he the first American dramatist to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature (1936), it was awarded years before his greatest works.
The Ice Man Cometh (1946) is about a favorite bar on the waterfront that he frequented as a roustabout at a low point of his life; and Long Days Journey Into Night (1956) was of his family as crucible of his torment and creativity. O’Neil, rather than denying his gifts, used his demons to find his way in art. That said he was never a happy man, never a comfortable man, but he was a hard working man, and used his art to express his soul, and release his demons, and thus gave the world a window into its own.
There is another person I have in mind who is not a bad man, more a good man, but a man not only failing to have his demons in control to soar to self-realization, but is invariably crippled by them in perpetual self-defeat. He is that great American contemporary prototype, the entrepreneur.
Last year, he netted over two million dollars in income. This year he is so far in debt that he may lose everything. The difference is that when he lost it before he did not have a family, no loving wife, no loving son and daughter, no nuclear core of depth and breadth and consequence. He is seemingly strapped to demons he does not know and does not understand, demons he continues to ignore to his continuing regret.
Now, what are his demons?
Only he could answer that with any certainty. I sense knowing the man that his brother was his parent’s favorite, and that he constantly did everything in his power to win their affection, recognition, approval, and acceptance. His brother was a self- indulgent, narcissistic dilettante who could do no wrong. He was always considered above the fray, always provided excuses for his failures and excesses, which ultimately took him down to his parents’ eternal sorrow, dying at a young age.
The family was somewhat affluent, but he was treated as hired help rather than given the freedom to play athletics that he was gifted to perform, and the time to develop the insouciant social graces of adolescent youth. He worked at his father’s auto dealership after school and on weekends washing cars, doing as many as twenty in a day.
Physical labor became a palliative. To this day he is more comfortable in hard physical activity than in either intellectual problem solving or social interaction.
He was dyslexic at a time when parents thought it was indicative of retardation. Far from being slow, he graduated from a major university, became a police officer, went on to earn his master’s degree in criminal justice, taught as a professor in that university’s program, went on to earn his law degree, and then doctorate in jurisprudence, becoming a lawyer in a small firm.
As a lawyer, he discovered that he was not a nine to five person, didn’t like to be confined to a schedule, prisoner of the clock, to the authority of a boss and performance measuring indices, or, indeed, to the billing of long hours to ingratiate himself to his law partners. Trained as an advocate, he failed to find legal work satisfying. He desired his freedom to come and go as he pleased, and to do as he willed.
When his parents died, he received a generous inheritance. Part of it he invested in a automotive salvage business, and part of it he used to promote his dream to own and drive race cars on the amateur circuit.
One manifestation of his demons was that, as blind as he was to his own talent, he appeared even blinder to see such talent exaggerated in others. This made him vulnerable to the con.
That said one of the wisest moves he ever made was acquiring a partner in the salvage business, a person who had no money to invest, but knew the business. It turned out this was the only instance when a partner did not exploit him. The opportunity was always there because he had little interest in learning the business, working the business, or being in anyway engaged in the business other than as a venture capitalist. This predilection would prove his undoing.
He would continue to practice law without joy moving from one law firm to another, eventually establishing his own, while showing no enthusiasm for developing the business. Instead, his sights were always on a new opportunity, where he could identify a promising venture, then find the expertise to run it, retreating into the woodwork, as he had with the salvage business. The opportunity came in the Internet pharmacy business, especially for clients on pain medications who were interested in expeditious delivery of these medications with little concern of the cost involved. The business boomed.
He acquired wealth he didn’t dream of, but now moths were attracted to the beaming light of his demons and he was unable to escape the glass encasement, vulnerable to the con in all its devious personalities.
First it was a partner who had unsavory ways that made him uncomfortable. He allowed the partner to buy him out, gave him the building he had purchased on his own, and is still waiting to receive his due from the buy out. Prior to that he acquired a partner for marketing he didn’t need, and who never delivered, and whom he set up in his own pharmacy business, a person who now fails to return his telephone calls.
He built an estate of his own design in which he acted as prime contractor, giving struggling subcontractors business, many of whom not only failed to deliver, but did shoddy work. An inclination was revealed here to do business on the cheap, and to stay away from licensed and established contractors. It also exposed a vulnerability to hard luck stories of people who conned him into giving them loans with no intention of repaying him.
How could a person go from being a multimillionaire in 2005 to nearly destitute in 2006?
It was a tapestry of his demons playing havoc on his soul, not in the minor leagues as it had always been before, but now in the major leagues where you win or lose with catastrophic finality. With a blissful vision of irresponsibility, he decided that he would partner with a garage mechanic to manufacture high-end super fast automobiles and sell them to Hollywood types at a major profit.
Once again, he failed to contact an established manufacturer with a history of success in this high-end field. Instead, his new partner had no money and operated out of a job shop. This meant that he had to purchase six of these automobiles sight-unseen before they were constructed with most of his 2005 income as the venture capital. Two of them have been constructed, one delivered, failing speed test after speed test, blowing engines, until today the partner is bankrupt with little chance of any recovery of the venture capital much less return on the investment.
The demons reign supreme. He got lucky with his partner in the salvage business, to be sure, but never again. Thereafter, he thought they had special knowledge, marketing acumen, and connections, and were honest men. Instead, they were con men with similar ephemeral dreams, but not the cash to support them. They took from him until he had nothing more to give, and then like the moths disappeared out of the light of his demons as if they never existed.
You might wonder how an attorney trained in law could allow so many people to deceive him, and yet do nothing. Like the playwright O’Neil, the state of the demons is revealed when he was putty in the hands of his parents. O’Neil used these demons to create his art, while he has been caged by them.
His non-confrontational timidity is incongruous with his handsome countenance, powerfully built physique, and quiet retiring disposition, but engaging personality. His mother was always telling him how bright she was, that she had a genius IQ, while reminding him that he was less gifted by comparison, which he was not. His father, who was kinder to him, but was under his mother’s dominance, often treated him as if hired help. His father’s affection was parceled out by the odd manual laboring jobs he did for him. Consequently, he came to equate manual labor with affection, while retreating from any intellectual comparison as the anathema of rejection.
Remarkably, he has not wandered into drugs, alcoholism, or profligate behavior as his brother had, but has been a devoted if secretive husband – his wife is never party to his misadventures until after the fact -- and a dutiful and loving parent. His family means everything to him. Yet, his demons attack him in subtle psychosomatic ways racking his body with back pain as if to level him for denial of their existence.
His demons have him living in a zone where he cannot say no, he will not say no, while he insists in thinking that people that say no, and don’t want to assume other people’s problems, are uncaring when it is quite the reverse of this.
The sad thing is that I see this person often and have been trained to help him. Rather than deal with his demons, he instead reads these stupid self-help books and watches these stupid self-help television programs in an effort to escape them. The self-help industry delights in trauma and exploits it with one fad after another. Meanwhile, these demons reign in control because now they are monsters. They will not let up until he dies. Demons are like “rocks in our heads” and “snakes in our secret garden.” To deny them is to live in peril for they will not disappear.
* * * * *
***James R. Fisher, Jr., THE TABOO AGAINST BEING YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND, The Delta Group Florida, Tampa, Florida, 1996. The book is available from this website, Amazon.com or electronically from any bookseller.
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