I have been arguing for years that the fastest path to scientific progress is not focus on what we “know”, but in the effort to falsify the paradigms within which we operate. For my own purposes, I often use martial metaphors for what I call my “attacks” on knowledge. Imagine a great dark place before you, and you are the commanding general. How do you take it? How do you illuminate it? It is pregnant with the danger of error and obsession.
What is done most days in most universities is what I would term a frontal attack. They assume that the “front” they are attacking is in the shape it appears to be, and that–as an example–deconstructing the DNA of 1,000 species represents 10x the knowledge we had when we had deconstructed the DNA of only 100. I disagree. Unless something profoundly unexpected is found, almost nothing useful has been accomplished.
The focus, in my view, needs to be on anomalies, on the apparently small details that don’t fit within the mix, for example the ability of salamander parts, when severed to become multiple things, depending on when and where they are reattached. It appears to depend on a magnetic field, a field which can be measured. That sort of thing is interesting. It offers up the possibility of a profoundly new conception of life.
In my own view, “Intelligent Design” happens every time any life form comes into being. We know exactly what proteins combine with what other proteins, in what order, how cells come into being, etc. Yet if, as Haeckel posited, “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, then we are forced to include some sort of extracorporeal, extramaterial agent of organization, since the proteins organize themselves.
The standard explanation given amounts, in effect, to the claim that this process fell into place, and has been falling into place for millions of years in roughly they same way. This seems to me patent nonsense, particularly since it seems impossible to me for the process to fall together long enough by chance for natural selection to enter the process.
The interesting question, to me, then (and I don’t want to delve too deeply here) is this: what facts can we find which do NOT fit in the existing paradigm? This is where the focus should be. If we return to the military analogy, this is the equivalent of marching through the night to attack the enemy–ignorance–where it least expects us and at an unexpected time. Such attacks can lead to enormous gains at little cost. Most of what we are doing is in my view wasted time.
To do an Arlo Guthrie, let me turn to what actually prompted this post. Rejection. Sad, sad me, told no again. Specifically, a piece that was turned down for publication. Now, failure is the inevitable result of trying anything. The ’72 Dolphins were perfect, but they weren’t in ’71 or ’73. Success, likewise, is often the result of trying things, particularly if you try hard enough, long enough.
What bothers me is that most would-be thinkers across the political spectrum appear to me to be stuck in qualitative ruts. Just as we need to pursue radically new paradigms within the hard sciences, so too do we need to be asking in what ways we can achieve the end of universal human happiness. This, in my view, is the final question. The maintenance of American political sovereignty is a means to this end, but I really do see us as leading the charge for global peace and prosperity. I think that was the vision of our Founders, too.
If you look at most websites and blogs, what you see is much of the same. Outrate at this or that human thing done by a human being. Hypocrisy, stupidity, unwarranted aggression, cowardice: you know the drill. And reiteration of much the same points: variations on social justice or free markets, demonizing the fat cats, or demonizing the demonizers and would-be autocrats.
We need to think big, and nobody seems to be doing that. Take the Tea Party. What do most of the bumper stickers say? Taxed Enough Already? Obama hasn’t really even raised our taxes yet. And if he does, it will be through allowing some portion of Bush’s tax cuts to expire. We all know we can’t afford to keep doing what we are doing, so tax increases are inevitable, but that isn’t the primary problem.
The problem is spending. We are bankrupt, clinically bankrupt, in that the sum of our debts, as they exist today–if we were to enter them into a ledger honestly–is much greater than our POSSIBLE income.
ALL the Tea Party and less passionate Republicans can do is slow the hemorrhaging. They can reverse Obamacare, stop the “stimulus”, and maybe even at some point do away with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, although that last would be in the current climate what Van Jones would call a “maximal” goal.
This does nothing, NOTHING, to address the interest on our national debt, or the unfunded Social Security and Medicare liabilities. That demographic wave is beginning to hit, and it is a decade or more long.
We can’t postpone telling the truth: as desirable as these things are, we can’t afford them.
In our current climate, that is a qualitative outlier, and making that case is, I assume, what got my piece rejected. I was accused of not citing sources, but that wasn’t accurate. I did cite sources: the Dept. of Defense website, in which the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff called our national debt our top national security threat, and if memory serves bloomberg.com in which a professional financial analyst shared the good news that the IMF has officially declared us broke, unless we double our income tax rates for the next ten years or so, which is simply not possible. I self published the piece below.
In a fit of pique which I’m not precisely proud of, but which I think was warranted, I accused the editor of a failure of moral courage and imagination. What he heard was moral courage. What he should have heard was imagination.
Imagination can only be as broad and wide as your courage. To be able to think big thoughts, to dream big dreams, you have to have the stomach both to see heavens and hells. You have to be able to see both the demons and the angels, and most people want to live in a prosaic, well ordered world, in which nothing radically new is ALLOWED to walk through the door. You can shut such ideas out simply by not seeing them. Negative hallucinations–not seeing things that are there–is a common enough hypotic phenomenon, and if you are attentive, you will catch yourself doing it daily.
In times of heightened stress, people tend either to cling more tightly to their tried and true ideas, or search about far and wide for something better. This latter tendency is well expressed in the Tea Party movement, which looks rhetorically to the past, but which must in the end realize that what is needed is not something old, but something new. We must dream new dreams, based on the ideals–not the realities, but the ideals–of the past.
We were founded as a nation run by de facto aristocrats. We were founded as a nation which accepted slavery in its foundational document. These are historical facts. Yet, we are also a nation that, over and over, when pressed to hold close to its ideals, has chosen to do so.
We need to lead the way into the future. We can do so, if we learn to think.
This is the qualitative challenge people like Glenn Beck face: altering the style of our public dialogue. It is one thing to add new information. It is another entirely to add the qualitative idea that we are all responsible for the development of our own worldviews. People that accept that latter idea can be relied on, in aggregate and over time, to reach reasonable conclusions, if given access to a genuinely free market of information. This is the point of democracy and the protection of free speech.
Few thoughts.