Forecasts, Futures and Fractals

It has been the rare snowy winter in Baltimore, and I have found myself increasingly obsessed with the amateur meteorological websites that predict the weather with both greater passion and precision than the pros. My favorite site is Footsforecast.org, which is really two sites in one given the comments section featuring the prognostications of Andy from southern York County, Pa., as thusly identified by his screen name. Other contributors to the comments section typically ignore Foot’s forecasts altogether, and address themselves directly to Andy, even going so far as to band together in commenting uproar should anyone post a snide remark highlighting the fact that Andy just blew another forecast. It’s like watching a cult of personality form around that greatest of all know-it-alls, Cliff Clavin from Cheers. I do, however, sympathize with Andy’s defenders in that it has always irked me to hear complaints about the inaccuracy of weather forecasts. Because unless they make a living by trading stocks, betting on sports, or telling fortunes, these whingers have no concept of the difficulties involved in predicting the future.

It was with proper respect for these difficulties, a respect redoubled by the precision with which Foot’s Forecast nailed the timing, intensity, and duration of the whopper that dropped 12 inches on Baltimore last week, that I got to thinking about what really goes into the human process of predicting future events. I kept circling back to the phrase I have learned from Becky Bailey’s book, Conscious Discipline: “The brain is a pattern-seeking device.” Could predicting the future, be it in the form of a weather forecast or an investment scheme sans insider trading, simply be the brain’s pattern-seeking function taken to its logical end? Put another way, is successfully predicting the future in actuality an accurate reading of the past, i.e. the art of recognizing (pre-existing) patterns? If so, increasingly accurate predictions should be understood as increasingly detailed reports on events that have already taken place.

In the Newtonian clockwork universe it was widely held that if you could somehow know all of the variables you would necessarily then know exactly what’s coming next, seeing as Newton’s universe “continues clicking along, as a perfect machine, with its gears governed by the laws of physics, making every aspect of the machine predictable.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clockwork_universe) This understanding was, of course, displaced by quantum mechanics and its uncertainty principle that “the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle) Following this, if we understand predicting the future as the recognition of patterns, then the uncertainty principle may place an outer limit on the accuracy of our predictions. We can only get but so fine grained in our perception of these patterns. But this is hardly discouraging given that quantum effects occur on such a microscopic scale that they are quite literally undetectable; our Newtonian clockwork universe may be an illusion, but that just means prognosticators are in the business of predicting the future of an illusion (which, we should note, isn’t quite what Freud had in mind when he attempted to debunk religion in his own The Future of an Illusion).

So, in our illusory Newtonian universe, if we knew everything there was to know about the past, we would obtain foreknowledge of everything there is to know about the future. This wouldn’t include any information about either where all the particles happened to be or how fast they were going, but should conceivably still include e.g. the revelation of the next 50 Super Bowl winners. I.e. we would still have access to all of the really important information.

The natural objection to all of this is that there is more to the future than the repetition of pre-existing patterns. This takes us all the way back to the debate that raged between the thinking of two great pre-Socratic philosophers, Parmenides and Heraclitus, a debate that can be boiled down to the tension between two truisms: 1) “change is the only constant in life,” which is a direct quote from Heraclitus, who also gave us the more poetic “You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you,” and 2) “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” which Parmenides didn’t exactly say, but which nicely sums up his attitude towards genuine change, i.e. that it was impossible and that all apparent change and motion was mere illusion.

It is as easy as opening your eyes to side with Heraclitus, which is why Zeno and his paradoxes are so important in the debate. Zeno, Parmenides’ leading disciple, crafted several ingenious paradoxes to support his teacher’s claims about the impossibility of change or motion. My mother shared one of these paradoxes with me when I was a boy, and it remains as perplexing to me now as it did then. Here is the paradox, as described on Wikipedia:

“Suppose Homer wants to catch a stationary bus. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, he must travel one-eighth, before one-eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on….This description requires one to complete an infinite number of tasks, which Zeno maintains is an impossibility. This sequence also presents a second problem in that it contains no first distance to run, for any possible (finite) first distance could be divided in half, and hence would not be first after all. Hence the trip cannot even begin. The paradoxical conclusion then would be that travel over any finite distance can neither be completed nor begun, so all motion must be an illusion.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes)

In other words, everything our senses tell us about the world says that Heraclitus must be right and Parmenides wrong, requiring Zeno to demonstrate that what our senses tell us about the world can’t possibly be right and must therefore be an illusion. One can refute the paradox like Diogenes the Cynic, who “said nothing upon hearing Zeno’s arguments, but stood up and walked, in order to demonstrate the falsity of Zeno’s conclusions.” (ibid) But, per the paradox, this would simply be using an illusion to disprove the selfsame illusion. (Could Guns N' Roses’ Use Your Illusion, with an album cover featuring a portion of Raphael’s painting “The School of Athens,” have been an esoteric endorsement of just such a maneuver, and Axl Rose an unwitting mouthpiece for Cynic philosophy?) Like most proofs deployed in philosophy, one either finds Zeno’s paradox intuitively convincing or one doesn’t, leaving strenuous efforts to undermine the logic of the proof mostly beside the point. For example, I, like many, find Anselm’s ontological proof of God’s existence iron clad. To paraphrase Anselm, God is a being than which nothing greater can be imagined, and since a God which exists is necessarily greater than a God which does not exist, the fact that we can imagine a God than which nothing greater can be imagined means that the God we are imagining must necessarily exist. Deep thinkers have tried to poke holes in Anselm’s proof in the millennium since Anselm first formulated it, but none of them have had a definitive success. The proof still stands, and all we can really decide is whether we find it a persuasive reason to believe in God. (I, for one, do not; my reasons for belief lie in other, arational directions.) Just so, I would suggest that Zeno’s paradoxes are as stout as Anselm’s proof, and will never fall despite being under continual intellectual siege. One simply must decide for one’s self if the paradoxes make a convincing case that the world of motion and change we perceive is an illusion. On balance, even taking into consideration the endless wading through one river after another, I am convinced.

This makes it my job to justify the chutzpah of refuting all of the impressions ever given to me by my five senses. But relying strictly on Zeno’s paradoxes in refuting the given facts of the phenomenal world is to lean a tad too heavily on what can come to feel like intellectual parlor tricks. Something tangible is required to bolster Zeno’s defense of his teacher, something from the illusion which, opposite Diogenes, marks it as just that. Which brings us back to our pattern-seeking brains and their quarry. Because if “the brain is a pattern-seeking device,” then it must have evolved in adaptation to an environment churning with repeating patterns. And patterns, I would argue, are nothing but changelessness in motion over time.

All of which got me to thinking about fractals: “A fractal is a mathematical set that typically displays self-similar patterns, which means it is ‘the same from near as from far.’” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal) Which is a fancy way of saying that if you look at fractals microscopically close you will see the same patterns repeating that you see when you pull back for a “God’s eye view.” Unless one is a PhD mathematician, the only really interesting thing about fractals would seem to be the groovy psychedelic patterns they make. But one key line about fractals caught my eye, and hints at the potential of fractals as a foundational element in a changeless Parmenidean universe: “Fractals are not limited to geometric patterns, but can also describe processes over time.” (ibid) Could the phenomenal universe be something of an infinitely intricate fractal pattern in process over time, making it the job of our pattern-seeking brains to “read” the fractals, and making the geniuses amongst us those with the greatest gift in “reading” certain of the infinitely intricate fractal strands? E.g., Shakespeare, Marx, and Freud could “read” the patterns of human behavior better than anyone else while Einstein and Darwin could best “read” the patterns of the physical world. And there is no reason not to think that Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, and the Buddha were the very best at “reading” the most important patterns of all.

If reality is indeed an infinitely intricate fractal pattern in process over time, a few people are going to come out smelling like roses. To name a few: Nietzsche, whose beat up old jalopy, the theory of eternal return, would be in for a fresh coat of paint and some shiny new rims; Daniel Pinchbeck, doyen of all things 2012 and a strong proponent of a switch from a linear to a cyclical (i.e. pattern-based) calendar; and my late father, Jess, who always stressed the importance of trusting his intuition, which intuition could now be understood as the unconscious recognition of patterns discerned by way of globs of information too large for the conscious mind to handle, much less manipulate. Because if, again, the brain is a pattern-seeking device, and if the conscious mind is but the tip of the unconscious’ iceberg, then it stands to reason that it is the unconscious doing the great bulk of the “reading” of fractals.

Earlier this month The New York Times published an article by Edward Frenkel exploring the fact that “Mathematical knowledge is unlike any other knowledge. Its truths are objective, necessary, and timeless.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/opinion/sunday/is-the-universe-a-simulation.html?_r=0) As scientists explore this mystery, Frenkel explains that “one fanciful possibility is that we live in a computer simulation based on the laws of mathematics- not in what we commonly take to be the real world. According to this theory, some highly advanced computer programmer of the future has devised this simulation, and we are unknowingly part of it. Thus when we discover a mathematical truth, we are simply discovering aspects of the code that the programmer used.” (ibid) Frenkel further reports that there are even “certain kinds of asymmetries” which, if present in the universe “would indicate that we might- just might- ourselves be in someone else’s computer simulation.” (ibid) Frenkel closes with the obvious pop culture connection to The Matrix. As someone who knows what-all about math and computers, I would nevertheless (intuitively?) suggest that the computer-simulated “matrix” we (might) inhabit may well be a fractal, or something like it. If nothing else, this would go a long way towards explaining why our brains work the way they do.

It would also prove Parmenides right, and, by extension, Plato, at least as regards the nature of our “matrix” and the eternal, changeless mathematical “forms” that underwrite it. As Frenkel reports, “the possibility of the Platonic nature of mathematical ideas remains- and may hold the key to understanding our own reality.” (ibid) But as one who esteems the truth of reality as either, inevitably, one of Wittgenstein’s lions or the face of God, depending on my mood, (“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” or, more dramatically, “You cannot see My face, for no man can see Me and live!”), I’ll settle for knowing if, and how much, it will snow this Wednesday.

Return to the Beginning

I had my first “Oh shit, this is really happening,” moment in regards to the fallout from climate change this week as three weather-related stories stacked up in my mind like three consecutive flights approaching Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. In no particular order, the trifecta of scary weather is as follows:

• The American south, where winter is typically more of a fashion opportunity than an actual season (why do home sapiens look so good in layers?), is covered in up to an inch of ice, with nearly a half million homes out of power. And where “It’s not unreasonable to expect that Atlanta- sometimes known as ‘the city in a forest’- could lose a quarter of its trees in this storm.” (http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/02/12/atlanta-trees-ice-storm/5432571/)

• The rainiest winter in 250 years “has left parts of southern England under water,” where, it is interesting to note, the climate change doubting Conservative party Environment Secretary Owen Paterson has overseen a 40% cut in funding for adapting to climate change. (http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/feb/13/uk-floods-essential-guide)

• A record summer heat wave on the heels of “Australia’s hottest year on record.” And not just the humans are suffering: “Bats are said to be dropping from trees en masse and kangaroos are collapsing.” (http://rt.com/news/record-heat-australia-animals-388/)

Given my personal history, it is perhaps no surprise that, for me, climate change is finally starting to sink in. Baltimore has been my home now for over twenty years, but, if I may be permitted to deploy the cliché that “home is where the heart is,” I have at least three more: the American south and North Carolina in particular, where I was born and where the paternal side of my family still lives, and where one of the enduring loyalties of my life, Tarheel basketball, lives and breathes (I still have the certificate from my participation in Dean Smith’s basketball sleepaway camp which pronounces me a member of the Carolina basketball program forevermore; if the forevermore part wasn’t on the certificate it was implicit, and overrides my subsequent failure to obtain admission as a UNC undergraduate.); England, where I traveled with my father and Bucky (his Mom) during my eighth grade year to explore the Gaither family genealogy, and where, not inconsequentially, I visited Wimbledon’s Centre Court, a pilgrimage that left its lasting imprint in the form of my steadfast commitment to serve and volley tennis despite never once having set foot on the grass courts for which it (my serve and volley game) is ideally suited (I play hard court tennis, a sport built from the forehand up; that my forehand is roughly as reliable as the Millenium Falcon’s hyperdrive unit explains why, despite a semi-booming serve, a steady slice backhand, and a poor man’s McEnroe feel at the net, I have yet to beat Steve. Hope, though, springs eternal; I may not have a new forehand, but I do have a new racquet!); and Australia, especially Western Australia, where I spent my junior year abroad, and where, having gone to boarding school with my sister and then to college with two buddies from boarding school, I was, for the very first time in my life, alone. Making Australia my introduction into the (solo) art of dying.

Up until now my approach to news of climate change had been that of a faithful initiate into The Tao of Pooh:

“ ‘How… will you know what’s going on in the world?’ I said.
‘By going outside,’ said Pooh.
‘Er…well….’ (Click.) ‘Now just listen to this, Pooh.’
‘Thirty thousand people were killed today when five jumbo airliners collided over downtown Los Angeles…’ the Radio announced.
‘What does that tell you about the world?’ asked Pooh.
‘Hmm. You’re right.’ (Click.)”

It is, however, more difficult to ignore the news when it’s about one’s very own assorted Hundred Acre Woods, and even more so when one can catch the (bad) news simply ‘by going outside.’ So while, like Pooh, I remain very interested in what’s for breakfast, I am also increasingly inclined to sleep with one eye open and fixed upon the existential threat of climate change. (I would note, before moving on from The Tao of Pooh, that ‘five jumbo airliners collid(ing) over downtown Los Angeles…” is eerily similar to the events of 9/11, as if the author, Benjamin Hoff, foresaw the 21st Century’s foundational event; in clicking the narrative off at precisely this point, Hoff as prophet would seem to preemptively cancel the preemptive wars that followed, but really just descends into the ultimate solipsistic act of closing one’s eyes in order to undo the world beyond one’s eyelids. Taoism’ s Wu Wei, or not doing, is no excuse for not paying attention.)

The problem with recognizing climate change as an existential threat is that it’s not the first such threat to our species in this epoch when there have been enough of us around to weather even e.g. the Black Death. That problem has to do with the nature of that first threat, nuclear annihilation. Having staved off the most likely nuclear doomsday scenario, the escalation of the War between the United Sates and the Soviet Union from Cold to Hot, existential threats of the man-made variety, which climate change most certainly is, just don’t seem particularly threatening. We have already gazed right into Nietzsche’s abyss, it gazed back into us, and we didn’t blink.

But, re: climate change, the comfort taken from winning the Cold War is as false as a Hoff-ian sticking of one’s head in the sand. In taking this comfort we are making the same category mistake lamented in the old Valvoline commercials: “Motor oil is motor oil.” I.e. all existential threats are not created equal. Nuclear annihilation, unlike climate change, had a built in solution in the form of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Once both sides had enough nukes, neither side could ever use them. Nuclear weapons existed in order not to, twisting Shakespeare’s most famous line into “To be is not to be.” However irrational the stockpiles of nukes that could incinerate the planet umpteen times over appeared, the stockpiles existed precisely because the players involved were all rational actors.

But if the world gone MAD was essentially rational, then climate change is an altogether different form of madness: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” This Narcotics Anonymous slogan fits the current form of our addiction to oil to a T (an addiction acknowledged by none other than George W. Bush!). That form is the expectation that we can go on consuming mass quantities of oil over and over again and get different results as long as we reduce, reuse, and recycle, which is like a heroin junky pinning his hopes on the needle exchange program. Harm reduction is well and good, but us oil junkies need to go cold turkey. Which isn’t hyperbole. A sustainable climate would require Americans to leave a carbon footprint just 3% its current size, which cuts close enough to cold turkey to count like so many horseshoes or hand grenades. (http://www.manicore.com/anglais/documentation_a/greenhouse/quota_GHG.html)

Narcotics Anonymous and its cousin Alcoholics Anonymous, with their emphasis on surrender to a higher power (Step 3), work for so many because, in the words of Carl Jung, “Sobriety requires a religious or spiritual experience or ‘conversion.’” Like cures like. Just so, addiction, an irrational disease, requires an irrational cure. And the varieties of religious experience, as documented by William James, meet precisely this criterion: “Your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your divinations, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that that result must be truer than any logic-chopping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it.” This is no discredit to religious experience; if nothing succeeds like success, then nothing cures like a cure. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.

The question, then, is where does climate change’s “irrational” cure lie? The various great spiritual traditions may offer a clue. In my own tradition, the clue reads thusly: “Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” In the Tao Te Ching, as quoted in The Tao of Pooh, the clue reads “Return to the beginning; become a child again,” and something similar is likely to be found in each of the traditions. Following this lead in search of a cure for climate change brings us to a children’s picture book, the very first line of which is:

“I am part of all I see,
And all I see is part of me.”

It is, of course, all too easy to dismiss the book, All I See Is Part Of Me by Chara M. Curtis with illustrations by Cynthia Aldrich, as so much “New Age claptrap,” to borrow a phrase from Terry Eagleton. The beauty (or curse) of such labels is that they enable us to categorically dismiss entire schools of thought in one fell swoop, leaving our own Weltanschauung unquestioned and completely intact. The Weltanschauung in play here, the one that automatically labels “I am part of all I see, And all I see is part of me,” as daft, is that lynchpin of modern western civilization, Cartesian Dualism.

When Descartes, with his famed cogito ("I think, therefore I am") split the mind off from the body, he set in motion a way of “being in the world” that can be boiled down to the seemingly harmless two-letter word “in.” (Heidegger’s use of the term “being-in-the-world” tells us that much of contemporary western philosophy, far from being a “footnote to Plato,” is actually a paraphrase of Descartes). Take away the “in” and you take away Descartes. Take away the “in” and you are left with “being the world”; more precisely, you are left with “I am part of all I see, And all I see is part of me.” The bet here is that the choices one makes “in” the world will diverge from those made “as” the world.

As everyone knows, “The Lord Giveth, and the Lord taketh away.” Under the cogito’s lordship we have been blessed with the fruits of the scientific method, e.g. penicillin and electricity. It is nice to be able to turn on the lights, the heat and the internet while not having to worry about polio. But in the bargain, we are losing our ecosystem. It is also nice to have a planet to live on. But if our still-accelerating carbon footprint is any indication, the cogito’s signature accomplishment, the scientific method notwithstanding, is a great forgetting. We have, rather manifestly, forgotten the whole taketh away part of the equation. In our “addiction to oil” we are like a scratched record constantly (and, per Al Gore, “conveniently”) repeating “The Lord Giveth,” leaving the earth looking much like the mutilated stump at the end of The Giving Tree. In our devotion to the cogito we have “forgotten” that “the Lord taketh away,” even as the cogito’s scientific method reminds us that “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Which makes the cogito’s great forgetting more accurately a great repression (and climate change the return of the repressed). What we’ve repressed, what lies outside our current probables and possibles, is that “We are the World,” a proposition that can only be put forward in pop music and children’s books. (To the degree that “We are the World” worked, i.e. raised money for Live Aid, it had much more to do with our love for Michael Jackson than for our neighbor, much less our enemy. When I was in the second grade I wanted to be Michael Jackson, which meant being able to moonwalk, wear fabulous zippered jackets, and be adored by millions of fans, and had nothing to do with feeding millions of hungry people, many of whom, if “Weird” Al Jankovic’s cover of Jackson’s “Beat It” (i.e. “Eat it”) was to be trusted, lived in Japan.)

If one can define something by what it isn’t, than the meaning of “I think, therefore I am” is simply the negation of “I am part of all I see, And all I see is part of me,” giving us another answer to David Foster Wallace’s question, “What the hell is water?”:

“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes ‘What the hell is water?’”

Water, for our purposes here, is Cartesian dualism. For us land dwellers, it is the very air we breathe, which is why we literally choke on “I am part of all I see, And all I see is part of me.” As true believing Cartesians, it is noxious gas. The cure for climate change is hidden in plain sight in a children’s book because children are the last one’s left who haven’t yet internalized the cogito. Children, our only hope, are natural born (Cartesian) skeptics. If we “return to the beginning,” we just may find that “everything old is new again.”

Like Bugs Bunny, with Descartes and the cogito we took a wrong turn at Albequerque. Assuming we can all agree that the destruction of the biosphere is a wrong turn. It is always tempting to conclude that this was simply how things had to be, that this particular human journey was required if we were to learn the necessary lessons. But this way of thinking is a peculiar (convenient?) form of whitewashing which, more than anything, dishonors and disfigures the memories of those who have suffered, as if their suffering was some form of valiant human sacrifice on our behalf when in truth it was and remains a horror story. Not to mention the fact that it is yet unclear if we will learn the preordained lessons in time.

In Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, James Carroll analyzes the “two-thousand year course of the Church’s battle against Judaism” with the basic assumption that something went horribly wrong and, more radically, it could have gone very differently. Carroll looks to a past that might have been otherwise in order to stake a claim on a future that yet may be: “To ask what was the alternative to European Christianity’s hatred of Jews in the past is to assert that such hatred is not necessary in the future.” Following Carroll, we must refuse to paper over the disastrous legacy of the split between mind and body as some sort of necessary dialectical step. We must assert that it is this very split which now sees us fast approaching a biological tipping point like light accelerating towards the event horizon beyond which lies, inexorably, the black hole. Borrowing from Carroll, to ask what was the alternative to the Cartesian manipulation of the physical world in the past is to assert that such manipulation is not necessary in the future. If the future has always belonged to those asking the right questions, then whether or not we have a human future depends on being prepared to ask just this. And fast.

The Truth (About Religion's Future) is Out There

In her 2010 book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record, journalist Leslie Kean makes, amongst others, the following two assertions:

• “There exists in our skies, worldwide, a solid, physical phenomenon that appears to be under intelligent control and is capable of speeds, maneuverability, and luminosity beyond current known technology.”

• “The hypothesis that UFOs are of extraterrestrial or interdimensional origin is a rational one and must be taken into account, given the data we have. However, the actual origin and nature of UFOs have not yet been determined by scientists, and remain unknown.”

Having recently happened onto the topic of UFOs due to the interest of a friend who mentioned it in passing, I don’t have a particular horse in this race. In fact, I come to the subject with the skepticism typical of my (middle class, college educated, faith in science) demographic. Nevertheless, I find Kean’s arguments in favor of her assertions convincing, to the point where I have shifted from my default skepticism to what I would describe as a welcoming agnosticism; if there are indeed ETs about, mi casa, su casa. (Kean and her co-authors - her book includes several – endorse a “miltant agnosticism” re: UFOs, i.e. “no position on whether UFOs are extraterrestrial should be taken until they have been systematically studied” in a “public and strategic” fashion, the latter piece accounting for the “militant” element. I suppose writing about UFOs on this blog makes me a contributor, however small, to this militant agnosticism, but as an Episcopalian- official slogan: “The Episcopal Church welcomes you,”- and a pacifist, “welcoming agnosticism” is more my style.)

If you have even a sliver of an open mind about UFOs, Kean’s book is highly recommended. She presents reams of firsthand accounts, frequently supported by objective, tangible evidence (e.g. radar records, radiation readings, multiple credible witnesses, and, occasionally, non-doctored photographs) which support her assertion that roughly 5% of all (reported) UFO sightings cannot be explained by known earthly phenomena. Kean has put all of the pertinent information into one lucid source, and I leave it to you to consider the evidence and place yourself along the continuum from skepticism to agnosticism to true belief.

If you place yourself anywhere on the continuum outside of absolute, unbending skepticism, two further questions are starving for attention. The first question has to do with the origins of the UFO taboo that underwrites my demographic’s default skepticism, and is addressed directly in Kean’s book. Kean’s co-authors Alexander Wendt and Raymond Duvall, both mainstream American academics at Big 10 Universities, describe the taboo thusly:

“There is a tabbo on this book- the UFO taboo. Not in popular culture, of course, where interest in UFOs abounds and websites proliferate, but in elite culture- the structure of authoritative belief and practice that determines what ‘reality’ officially is. With respect to UFO phenomena this structure is dominated globally by three groups: governments, the scientific community, and the mainstream media. Although their individual members may have varying private beliefs about UFOs, in public these groups share the official view that UFOs are not ‘real’ and should not be taken seriously- or at least no more seriously than any other cultural belief.”

It is tempting to stop there, with the insight that anyone who wishes to be taken seriously has more than sufficient reason to never question their officially sanctioned default skepticism. But Wendt and Duvall take their analysis deeper, answering the question that always cries out for an answer: who benefits from the official reality? Their answer is far from surprising:

“Our thesis is that the origins of this taboo are political. As political scientists, we are concerned with a possible connection between the need to dismiss the UFO and the way in which modern peoples organize and govern their societies. The inability to see clearly and talk rationally about UFOs seems to be a symptom of authoritative anxiety, a socially subconscious fear of what the reality of the UFO might mean for modern government.”

Wendt and Duvall argue that it might mean three very specific things. First, it would establish the existence of a vastly superior Other, unmasking the State as impotent in the face of a potentially overwhelming threat. Secondly, it would likely foment a demand for a world government best equipped to face the threat, dissolving the sovereign territorial states that are currently doing their very best to maintain the taboo. Finally, and most interestingly, Wendt and Duvall maintain that “the extraterrestrial possibility calls into question what we call the anthropocentric nature of modern sovereignty. By this we mean that, in the modern world, political organization everywhere is based on the assumption that only human beings have the ability and authority to govern and determine our collective fate.” Once this assumption is undermined, as certainly the vastly superior intelligence and technology of extraterrestrial “visitors” (had to throw in a V reference, natch) makes them more qualified to govern than Jesse Helms ever was, Wendt and Duvall hold that the following question would become unavoidable: “To whom would people give their loyalty in such a situation, and could states in their present form survive were such a question politically salient?” (As to conspiracy theories, Wendt and Duvall go on to say that “far from hiding the truth about aliens the state is more likely hiding its ignorance.” Being the nation state with the most power to lose per the three scenarios above, the United States, of course, has the greatest incentive to maintain its ignorance via enforcing the taboo, and Kean highlights several such instances over the course of the book.)

As an undergraduate poli sci major, I find all of this fascinating. (Spok reference: check.) But as a human being, Wendt and Duvall’s third existential political threat directs us toward a similar question I find even more intriguing. If extraterrestrials were openly acknowledged and/or plain for everyone to see, would people continue to maintain their religious loyalty in such a situation, and could religions in their present form survive? Kean points out that the authentication of UFOs puts science, which currently sits at the right hand of the government, at equal risk with its political godfather: “UFOs demonstrate characteristics appearing to contradict the fundamental laws of physics on which our understanding of the universe is based.” In such a scenario, science would match government’s impotence with its own ignorance. Wouldn’t religion, whose stock in trade is every bit as much declaring fundamental laws on which our understanding of the universe is based, look just as ignorant, its dogmas and received truths crumbling in precisely the same fashion as our physicists’ most elegant equations?

Religion’s best hope for sustained relevance in its current form might well be if the ETs were at least a little bit aggressive (too aggressive, of course, and there’d be none of us left to pray), a threatening Other being, perhaps, the sine qua non for religion’s relevance. But UFOs have been as remarkable for their non-aggression, even when being threatened or even fired upon by military warcraft, as they have for their remarkable capabilities. (Alien abduction stories, which tales often seem anything but non-aggressive, are a horse of a different color, and would seem to fail to meet any of the criteria which support UFO sightings as an actual objective phenomena. Kean doesn’t even mention them.) Unless the old story about the chickens who trusted absolutely in the farmer who reliably fed them each and every morning right up until the day the farmer came out with a hatchet instead of a feed bag applies here, it appears that religion would be confronting an Other who is at the very least neutral and could very well turn out to be benevolent. My optimistic (non-chicken farmer) interpretation is that civilizations are unable to survive to the advanced stage of intergalactic travel unless and until they first mature beyond the aggressive tendencies that would doom them well before advancing far enough to master e.g. warp drive. And, if I may be indulged in some even more wildly optimistic speculation, perhaps we are at just such a turning point where we either shed our martial skin and take to the stars or spend a final miserable few centuries confined to our little galactic backwater. And, also perhaps, the UFOs are here, Gene Rodenberry and his Prime Directive be damned, to help us make the great pacific leap in whatever way they can.

Another of Kean’s co-authors and one who actually encountered a UFO in his job as a commercial pilot in Great Britain, Captain Ray Bower, takes the following perspective about what he considers the inevitable public acknowledgment of UFO reality: “I suspect this might turn out to be the time when the human race will grow up. Forced to confront their own smallness in relation to Earth’s place in the universe, humans may at last face up to a future as a tiny fish in a big sea.” Confronted with an advanced benevolent civilization, could religion, at long last, grow up too?
Before attempting to answer this question I would be remiss if I did not point out that my hope for timely and effective extraterrestrial intervention may simply be a secular messianic fantasy, rooted in the fertile soil of the Judeo-Christian tradition in much the same way that Marx’s dialectical materialism was just a coming of the kingdom for the un-churched (or un-templed). But while, to take a Christian angle, we “do not know the day nor the hour,” we certainly know that climate change is accelerating towards the point of no return. (http://qz.com/154196/the-only-way-to-stop-climate-change-now-may-be-revolution/) Leaving us Christians looking more and more like the cop in LL Cool J’s “I’m Bad,” who, in response to Cool J’s overwhelming sheer Badness, panics and says “I think I’m gonna need backup!” Confronted by the existential threat of climate change, we’re calling in the Son of God’s backup quarterback in the form of ET. Which, objective radar data notwithstanding, makes my hope for imminent contact with extraterrestrials as potentially ridiculous as the billboards that touted the end of the world on May 21, 2011.

But, with our shared blogging pleasure in mind, let’s set aside the question of whether I am the one who needs to grow up out of my own childish alien messianic fantasy, and return to the question of whether the data collected and reported by Kean hints at a turning point for religion. This question, surprise, surprise, takes us back yet again to early twentieth century Vienna and one Sigmund Freud. Because if we are to make the case that religion is stuck in a kind of prolonged adolescence, then it is Freud who, still to this day, has done the very best job of diagnosing that arrested development.

In the first blow of a one-two punch achieved across the span of two major works, Freud, in Totem and Tabboo, pulls back the curtain on just how much of really existing religion is sheer projection:

“The psycho-analysis of individual human beings… teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.”

Here Freud holds a mirror up to Genesis’ “God created man in His own image,” broadcasting it in reverse for all of us to consider. Taken on its own, Freud’s declaration might simply be dismissed as a projection of his own troubled relationship with his father onto everyone else’s spirituality; Paul C. Vitz suggests precisely this in Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism. But Freud completes his combination several years later in The Future of an Illusion, a work in which he finally gets around to explaining exactly how God ends up being “nothing other than an exalted father”:

“When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child forever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers, he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father; he creates for himself the gods whom he dreads, whom he seeks to propitiate, and whom he nevertheless entrusts with his own protection. Thus his longing for a father is a motive identical with his need for protection against the consequences of his human weakness.”

If we are to believe Freud, religion as we know it is intrinsically bound up in fear. Those who would doubt him should be reminded of religion’s track record in regards to aggression, “fight” being one of the three possible responses to fear (“flight”, i.e. “run away,” and “freeze,” i.e. surrender/submission being the other two). A quick Google search finds that an “estimated 809 million people have died in religious wars throughout the ages.” (http://www.ask.com/question/how-many-people-have-died-in-religious-conflicts) Reading this staggering number it is difficult to come away with any other conclusion but that religion is the most effective instrument ever devised for channeling fear into aggression. Freud’s real genius, then, is in connecting the dots between “human weakness” and the erection of human (religious) institutions that manage the resulting terror by projecting it outward, first bouncing it off God the Father and then, on the rebound, directing it via violence conducted in the Name of the Father, very much like a TV signal bouncing off of a satellite before arriving at its mind-control target. (The use of Christian religious terms here signifies my familiarity with them, as well as the unspoken rule that one can criticize one’s own brand but no one else’s, but should not be taken as a suggestion that Christians have any kind of monopoly or “privileged status” in regards to religious war.)

The problem with this analysis, of course, is that religion isn’t just an outlet for aggression; one need look no further than the two towering religious leaders of the twentieth century, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, to know that religion, when done right, brings out the very best in humankind. Religious greatness, nevertheless, cannot undo the legacy of religious crimes. We are blessed with the former and cursed with the latter. Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities could just as easily be a tale of one religion: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness , it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”

It says here that religion obtains to greatness, spawns its Desmond Tutus, Thich Nhat Hanhs and Dorothy Days in spite, and precisely not because, of the fact that if a police sketch artist sat down with our collective descriptions of God he or she would produce an image of the archetypal father figure. It is the best of times because God is great, the worst of times because the archetypal father is a misplaced idol. The Freudian gamble, if you will, is that we can heal religion’s Dickensian schizophrenia, that the best of times can finally be divorced from the worst of times, if enough of the light of insight can be shone upon the pathological projection of our broken, wounded fathers onto the godhead. (A conclusion reached well within the limits of my rights, being a broken, wounded father myself, if one struggling to be a wounded healer.)

Which is where the aliens come in. (I saw Aliens when it was released with my mom in a movie theater in Orlando, Florida, and it remains superior to 99.44% of all other movies.) If, per Freud, we have essentially made God in our image, then the extraterrestrials, if they accomplished nothing else, would unmake the anthropocentric God. Because why would God want anything to do with our image when She could just as easily select the image of our (vastly more advanced) guests? The great hope is that a God liberated from Her role as an exalted father would no longer function as a container for our fears, nor as an enabler of the unleashing of those fears on the Other. And that worshipping a non-anthropocentric God would be the first step towards realizing a non-anything-centric God, our ticket into a universe where the center holds precisely because there is no center, no fear, and where love spreads. The latter of which happens to be the title of a Stone Roses track, from their sophomore effort The Second Coming, which included these seminal lyrics:

“The messiah is my sister
Ain’t no king man, she’s my queen”

This is a fancy way of saying God is nobody’s father. She belongs to all of us, which, given the uncertain reproductive practices of UFO pilots, may well include citizens of the universe for whom the question “Who’s your daddy?” makes as much sense as the question “What does a five sided square look like?” does to us. I should note that if, in exchange for knowledge of what existence is like in the fifth dimension, we taught the extraterrestrials how to have sex with each other, this would probably be a fair trade. And maybe that’s why they’re here, but they’re shy and when one of us gets close enough for them to ask they chicken out and zoom off, making them a lot like me in high school.

This last speculation includes the anthropocentric assumption that I have been making throughout, which is that the UFOs are here because of us. But perhaps we are completely tangential to their visits. Maybe they’ve recently taken up oil painting and find our CO2-enhanced sunsets the best subjects in the galaxy. Or maybe, if the Gaia principle is correct and the earth is a being with its own advanced intelligence, the aliens are here to talk to her, it being highly unlikely that they’ve traveled this far to hear about our fantasy football teams.

But I hope I’m wrong and they are here to talk to us. Which makes me simultaneously opposed to and in favor of anthropocentrism. “The king is dead; long live the king.” I never did like that second Stone Roses album.

Leave it to Peyton

This Sunday, Peyton Manning plays in his third Super Bowl, and his first for the Denver Broncos. At stake, of course, is the Lombardi Trophy, a prize which most years obtains to its status as the closest thing America has to the Holy Grail, but which in 2014 is a mere pawn in the larger struggle between Manning and the Patriots’ Tom Brady for the mantle of Greatest of All Time. Assuming Manning’s Broncos beat the outmatched Seahawks, who were caught on secret 3-D footage stashed in R2-D2 saying “Help us, Al Roker, you’re our only hope,” the contest between Manning and Brady will head to the fifteenth and final round as a dead heat, much like Bird and Magic on the eve of the decisive ’87 NBA Finals, in which Magic secured his fourth ring to Bird’s three, a deficit Bird would never overcome, or, more apropos of the “fifteenth round” analogy, like Ali and Frazier heading into their third and final encounter, the Thrilla in Manilla, each with a victory under their belt.

This is interesting enough in and of itself, nothing being more satisfying to the hard core sports fan then a lengthy debate as to the Greatest of All Time (G.O.A.T.); e.g. I could write a dissertation on the respective cases to be made for each of men’s tennis’ Mt. Rushmore figures. (With apologies to Bjorn Borg, I rank them thusly: #1 Federer, #2 Laver, #3 Sampras, #4 Nadal, with the caveat that Nadal may yet leapfrog them all. But, you say, what if Laver hadn’t been excluded from playing Grand Slams for five years because he was ineligible under pre-open-era tennis’ sham amateurism? He would have won at least ten more. I would, of course, retort by asking how many Slams Sampras would have won if three of the four majors were played on grass, as they were in Laver’s day. Etc., etc., etc.) But since a protracted discussion of the merits of Manning and Brady’s respective cases for G.O.A.T. status, while making for some great sportstalk radio, is a recipe for death by blogging, I will instead point out that Manning and Brady aren’t just in a dead heat re: the G.O.A.T., but are also running neck and neck in the popularity polls, even though no one is willing to admit this.

The official narrative is that Brady is the resented demi-god, while Manning is the revered man of the people; Brady does ads for Uggs for Men (Which is the equivalent and no less bizarre than if he were doing ads for Secret Antiperspirant for Men, completing the reframing of the old Secret slogan, which used to be “Strong enough for a man, but pH balanced for a woman,” but is now simply “Strong enough for a woman,” and which, if Brady were the Secret for Men pitchman, could be completed as “Strong enough for a woman, but smells enough like Aqua Velva for a man.” ), while Manning shills for Papa John’s Pizza. (Full disclosure: my sister-in-law is in Manning’s most recent Papa John’s spot. You can see her walking into the Papa John’s while Manning waxes poetic about the freshness of Papa John’s ingredients from the driver’s seat of a ’68 Camaro. It must be pointed out that Manning in a ’68 Camaro is about as believable as Mike Dukakis in a tank.) The truth is that we resent Manning every bit as much as we do Brady, just for very different reasons.

The reasons to resent Brady are legion: he’s movie star handsome, has not just a super-model wife but an ur-super-model wife, along with three Super Bowl rings, hundreds of millions of dollars, a mansion that (literally) has a moat, and plays for a coach who is an evil genius. Plus the aforementioned Uggs for Men. Even the Dalai Lama resents Tom Brady. We pretend that we feel just the opposite for Manning, largely because, like the guy the chick just isn’t really into in the Vertical Horizon song:

“He’s everything you want
He’s everything you need
He’s everything inside of you
That you wish you could be
He says all the right things
At exactly the right time
But he means nothing to you
And you don’t know why”

We pretend we don’t know why because it’s much easier to feign ignorance than to admit the truth: We resent Peyton Manning because he reminds us of Eddie Haskell.

Eddie Haskell is the greatest two-faced bastard in the western literary canon, his unctuous, quasi-flirtatious overtures to Mrs. Cleaver lending cover to his bullying of The Beaver. We, the public, are Manning’s Mrs. Cleaver, to whom he says all the right things at exactly the right time. Just today, asked by the media what he hoped his legacy would be, Manning exhibited his exquisite sense of how to come off like a “class act,” explaining, in so many words, that he hoped he would be remembered as a great competitor who played as hard as he could for each team he took the field for, blah, blah, blah. This is complete and utter horseshit. You know it, I know it, Bob Dole knows it. Peyton Manning gets out of bed each morning for one reason only, which is to prove to everyone that he, and not Tom Brady, is the Greatest of All Time. Making the rest of the NFL Manning’s Beaver, whom he never bullied as effectively as he did this year, setting a new single-season NFL record for touchdowns completed (a record previously held by The Man on Manning’s back, Tom Brady, making Manning’s breaking of the record like Eddie Haskell cuckolding Mr. Cleaver). Our secret pact with Manning is that we’ll play along with his (class) act, as long as we can remain voyeurs to his relentless, pinpoint bombing. (Making our relationship with Manning evocative of our relationship with our federal government. Is there, we should be asking, any substantive difference between the subjective experience of controlling Manning’s aerial assault on the Chiefs’ defense in a game of Madden from the comfort of one’s own living room and piloting a drone while executing its aerial assault on Pakistanis from the comfort of a hi-tech office cubicle somewhere in Pennsylvania? Are we already living out Ender’s Game, with video games nothing but practice for a generation of “soldiers” who will, like Ender, never experience war as war? And in cultivating an army of drone “gamers” are we not, in the words of Alain Badiou, one decisive step closer to having “rendered war and peace indistinguishable?”)

As the media attempts to fill the two-week gap between conference championships and the Super Bowl, there has been much discussion of Seahawks’ cornerback Richard Sherman’s post-game interview, conducted immediately after Sherman made the decisive interception in the Seahawks win over the 49ers, a win that sent them to the Super Bowl. Sherman, like Manning (or Brady), is widely considered the best at his position, making him one of the world’s elite professional athletes. Interviewed on the field by Fox’s Erin Andrews about his climactic feat, Sherman expounded thusly:

“I’m the best corner in the game. When you try me with a sorry receiver like Crabtree, that’s the result you gonna get. Don’t you ever talk about me… Don’t open your mouth about the best or I’m gonna shut it for you real quick.”

The narrative thread in the ensuing media melee has been all about whether Sherman, who attended Stanford University and who happens to be Black, is a “thug,” and if the word “thug” is code for the n-word. Which entire narrative reveals either a startling lack of insight into the mind of the elite professional athlete, or the depths of our self-deception. Because Peyton Manning (and Tom Brady, for that matter) feels exactly the same way about his competition as Sherman feels about Crabtree (and if Manning and Brady didn’t feel that way, they’d have ended up as an altogether different sort of pizza delivery guy and shoe salesman). The difference is that Manning is savvy enough to serve up the Mom, apple pie, and Papa John’s pizza instead of granting us access to his throbbing will to power, which is exactly what Sherman let us see two Sundays ago, and which display had nothing to do with the fact that Sherman is Black, and everything to do with Sherman’s failure to grasp that everyone playing the bloodsport we call professional football is also playing the very same character, whose initials are Eddie Haskell.

So even if Manning and Brady retire in a dead heat, and even if deep down we resent Manning’s Haskell as much as we resent Brady’s Midas, we’ll all throw our weight behind Manning’s G.O.A.T. candidacy for the simple fact that he’s a better actor. His act allows us to feel classy too, enabling us to pretend the L.A. Coliseum has nothing to do with the Roman Coliseum, and to act as if nice guys don’t finish last, obscuring the fact that there are no nice guys on football’s gridiron, nice guys not being the type to “punch the opposition in the mouth,” “go for the jugular,” or adhere to the wisdom of football’s most underrated talking head, Brian Billick: “When you go into the lion’s den, you don’t tippy-toe in- you carry a spear, you go in screaming like a banshee, you kick whatever doors in, and say, ‘Where’s the SOB?’ If you go in any other way you’re gonna lose.” (Sherman’s real sin was in reminding everyone of exactly that fact, his rant the equivalent of Haskell goosing Mrs. Cleaver as she does the dishes.) And if in a few years, after he’s finally hung up his cleats, Manning’s neck begins to feel the after-effects of four surgeries and counting, we’ll be too busy arguing about who the new G.O.A.T. is to notice that Manning has gone from hero to goat. (“Our” old hero will have no one to blame but himself for his empty shell of a body and, if Brett Favre and Jim McMahon’s dodgy memory banks are any indicator, mind.)

I can’t wait for kickoff!