How far we've come—or maybe not
Jul. 28th, 2011 07:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blatherskiteLet's start this essay with a quote:
I love sharing quotes not, as some do, because they believe that it shows their erudition, but rather because the author made me think of something I might not otherwise have pondered or reminds me of something I'd forgotten or inspires my imagination. I hope that this and other quotes that occasionally appear here will do the same for you.
This particular quote achieved relevance because of an essay by Robert Silverberg about John de Mandeville that I read this morning. John was one of those medieval explorers (or not) who nominally traveled the world and encountered wonders. Only... many of these individuals never left their library, where perhaps they were inspired by a bottle of wine consumed too fast while browsing Herodotus or some other "natural historian" of the world's remoter regions.
What fascinates me is the magnitude of the distortions created by these authors: It's easy to forgive a short, half-starved European encountering well-fed Masai for the first time for imagining these people as giants—but not 40 feet tall. In de Mandeville's account (as told by Silverberg), it's easy to imagine a sex-starved European explorer stumbling across a placer deposit of diamonds lying on a river bank or beach in South Africa, near an eroded kimberlite deposit, and imagining the male and female diamonds breeding in the sand and scattering their children for all to see.
I think this is part of a larger trend in human social evolution, from a nearly complete lack of understanding of our world to the modern incomplete, yet far more sophisticated understanding permitted by science. Our ancients and not-so-ancients created myths and lower-case-g gods as their attempts to explain their world, but also as their attempt to describe something they wanted to believe in or wished were real. Possibly some of this was the natural human tendency to exaggerate for effect while speaking to a receptive audience, and possibly some of this was the kind of people who would (today) become authors of speculative fiction. Mostly, it seems to be an inherent and ineradicable human desire to observe and explain. As science and logical inquiry have become more integral to our society and way of thinking and have provided increasingly refined tools for understanding our world, these kinds of explanations seem to have faded away, replaced by our own modern beliefs. But as Martin Rees notes, it's hard to imagine what things we believe implicitly based on science and mathematics will be proven to be inaccurate, exaggerations, wishful thinking, or just outright wrong.
It also pays to remember the inherent human desire to believe safe and comforting things, or things we wish were true, and to exaggerate unsupported but attractive opinion until it achieves the status of fact in many minds. Consider, for example, this graph of the correlation between belief in evolution and national wealth. Clearly, the scientific revolution hasn't reached everyone yet. And it's deeply disturbing that one of the most advanced nations in the world has an educational system that has failed so many people.
It's interesting to speculate about whether we'll eventually evolve beyond this primitive state of believing whatever is easiest or most comforting rather than accepting and coping with "objective" facts that can be replicated, explained by a plausible mechanism, and supported by alternative lines of evidence. I'm in the Rees camp, in that I believe our sophistication will grow as we evolve socially and physically, but I have a hard time believing that something seemingly so fundamental to human nature will disappear. Paradoxically, that stubborn belief in the evidence of our eyes and desires rather than the belief in the evidence of our science is very comforting for someone like me who aspires to write comfortable fantasies and hopes he'll continue to have an audience for them.
"I'd like to widen people's awareness of the tremendous timespan lying ahead—for our planet, and for life itself. Most educated people are aware that we're the outcome of nearly 4bn years of Darwinian selection, but many tend to think that humans are somehow the culmination. Our sun, however, is less than halfway through its lifespan. Six billion years from now, it will not be humans who watch the sun's demise. Any creatures that then exist will be as different from us as we are from bacteria or amoebae."—Martin Rees, cosmologist and astrophysicist
I love sharing quotes not, as some do, because they believe that it shows their erudition, but rather because the author made me think of something I might not otherwise have pondered or reminds me of something I'd forgotten or inspires my imagination. I hope that this and other quotes that occasionally appear here will do the same for you.
This particular quote achieved relevance because of an essay by Robert Silverberg about John de Mandeville that I read this morning. John was one of those medieval explorers (or not) who nominally traveled the world and encountered wonders. Only... many of these individuals never left their library, where perhaps they were inspired by a bottle of wine consumed too fast while browsing Herodotus or some other "natural historian" of the world's remoter regions.
What fascinates me is the magnitude of the distortions created by these authors: It's easy to forgive a short, half-starved European encountering well-fed Masai for the first time for imagining these people as giants—but not 40 feet tall. In de Mandeville's account (as told by Silverberg), it's easy to imagine a sex-starved European explorer stumbling across a placer deposit of diamonds lying on a river bank or beach in South Africa, near an eroded kimberlite deposit, and imagining the male and female diamonds breeding in the sand and scattering their children for all to see.
I think this is part of a larger trend in human social evolution, from a nearly complete lack of understanding of our world to the modern incomplete, yet far more sophisticated understanding permitted by science. Our ancients and not-so-ancients created myths and lower-case-g gods as their attempts to explain their world, but also as their attempt to describe something they wanted to believe in or wished were real. Possibly some of this was the natural human tendency to exaggerate for effect while speaking to a receptive audience, and possibly some of this was the kind of people who would (today) become authors of speculative fiction. Mostly, it seems to be an inherent and ineradicable human desire to observe and explain. As science and logical inquiry have become more integral to our society and way of thinking and have provided increasingly refined tools for understanding our world, these kinds of explanations seem to have faded away, replaced by our own modern beliefs. But as Martin Rees notes, it's hard to imagine what things we believe implicitly based on science and mathematics will be proven to be inaccurate, exaggerations, wishful thinking, or just outright wrong.
It also pays to remember the inherent human desire to believe safe and comforting things, or things we wish were true, and to exaggerate unsupported but attractive opinion until it achieves the status of fact in many minds. Consider, for example, this graph of the correlation between belief in evolution and national wealth. Clearly, the scientific revolution hasn't reached everyone yet. And it's deeply disturbing that one of the most advanced nations in the world has an educational system that has failed so many people.
It's interesting to speculate about whether we'll eventually evolve beyond this primitive state of believing whatever is easiest or most comforting rather than accepting and coping with "objective" facts that can be replicated, explained by a plausible mechanism, and supported by alternative lines of evidence. I'm in the Rees camp, in that I believe our sophistication will grow as we evolve socially and physically, but I have a hard time believing that something seemingly so fundamental to human nature will disappear. Paradoxically, that stubborn belief in the evidence of our eyes and desires rather than the belief in the evidence of our science is very comforting for someone like me who aspires to write comfortable fantasies and hopes he'll continue to have an audience for them.