January 2025
Currently reading
Meditations for Mortals
- by Oliver Burkeman
The Notebook: A history of thinking on paper
- by Roland Allen
The Best of All Possible Worlds: A life of Leibniz in seven pivotal days
- by Michael Kempe.
Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind
- by Peter Godfrey-Smith.
Completed this month:
Becoming Earth: How our Planet Came to Life
- by Ferris Jabr
A fascinating account of how all sorts of species, from single-celled microorganisms to large plants and animals, including humans, in all sorts of times, from billions of years ago to the present, have shaped the environment in which they live in a way that prepared the earth for other creatures that evolved elsewhere. I can’t/won’t capture all of the detail, but microorganisms in the earth facilitated the breaking down of some minerals into a more complex collection of minerals, so that there is a much wider variety of metals on earth than we know to exist on other planets. The life forms that emerged later, including plankton in the ocean, gradually added oxygen to the atmosphere to a happy medium – less oxygen, and the larger animals couldn’t exist; more oxygen, and wildfires would be more prevalent and destructive.
So it’s not just humans that shape the larger environment in which they live. The earth itself is better viewed (either metaphorically or literally) as an organism seeking its own balance. It’s not a perfect balance, but the overall system adjusts. The unsettling of the earth prompted by our burning of fossil fuels and our destruction of forests and other parts of the environment is not the most severe crisis in the earth’s history, but it’s different in its timeline – we have made so many drastic changes so rapidly that the impact on us and the world is likely to be severe.
However, Jabr is not as pessimistic as many about our future. He thinks, and cites climate scientists and others in support, that we could still escape the worst of it.
Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness and the Making of the World
- by Peter Godfrey-Smith
In the first third (or so) of this book, Godfrey-Smith covers much of the ground covered by Jabr’s book, described immediately above: how life emerged on earth and then shaped the earth in ways that allowed the development of ever more complex life forms, culminating (so far) in the evolution of humans. As one would expect from a philosopher, Godfrey-Smith’s perspective is somewhat different — more, well, philosophical. The philosophical perspective becomes more important in the latter two-thirds of the book, when Godfrey-Smith turns to a development of the difference in humans and the difference it makes. Both consciousness and culture are crucial here. When teaching I often claimed that there was a time when humans developed the ability to imagine alternative futures – this ability depended on the ability to construct symbols in which these alternative futures are expressed. That ability imposes the practice of choosing. I would say that a constitutive characteristic of human beings is that humans cannot choose not to choose. Godfrey-Smith emphasizes what I see as a similar and related turning point, suggesting that there was a period in human development in which humans came to rely so heavily on culture “that it [became] hard or impossible to get by without culture” (p. 124).
In the last third of the book Godfrey-Smith explores questions about the implications of this for our current life in the world. Given that we – like all those life forms that came before us and/or live now alongside us — are part of the natural world and continue to shape it, and also that we are forced to choose just how we will act in the world, and also that our choices are shaped by inherited and developing cultural traditions, what choices should we make about how we’re living now?
Obviously Godfrey-Smith can’t explore all such questions. He focuses on two general areas – how might we treat other animals, focusing here on both domesticated (farmed) animals and on animals living in the wild? And how should we interact with nature more generally, focusing here on climate change and habitat destruction? He acknowledges that there is considerable overlap in these questions.
I’ll not introduce the spoilers of Godfrey-Smith’s answers to these questions. But I’ll say that I found his discussion of these issues very interesting and helpful for my own deliberations. Overall, I think, a book well worth reading.
The Message
- by Ta-Nehisi Coates
This is a powerful book, offering both a poignant account of how Coates’s life is anchored in personal experience and the history of the United States and the world more generally and also insight into the power of writing, of telling one’s story. I was especially moved by the description of his time in Israel and Palestine and how he directly confronted his own naivete about Zionism and the role that Israel currently plays in the Middle East. While in earlier writings he noted the analogies between oppression of Jews and oppression of people of color, during his time in Israel and Palestine he came face to face with his realization Israel is now an oppressor. He doesn’t discount the complexities of the current situation, but he makes a strong case that neither Israel nor the United States lives up to the democratic ideals that both nations claim for themselves.
Definitely a challenging read for this white cis straight male living a privileged life in the United States. But I’m grateful for the challenge. The next (rather more painful) step is figuring out just how I respond to the challenge.
On Thomas Merton
- by Mary Gordon
I’ve read very little of Thomas Merton’s work, but my reading of Mary Gordon’s book leaves me with a better understanding of the person he was. I’m confident in this judgment because the book includes so many quotations from Merton’s writing, especially from his journals. We see him struggling with himself, with the church, and with the world. Gordon’s observation at the beginning of the book sets the tone: “If Thomas Merton had been a writer and not a monk, we would never have heard of him. If Thomas Merton had been a monk and not a writer, we would never heard of him. Merton’s dual identity contained within itself a particular irony: in becoming a Trappist, he entered an order devoted to silence, and yet his vocation was based on words” (p. 1). Gordon agrees that Merton’s person is expressed most powerfully in his journals, and it’s in that section that I find her account of him most poignant.
Life as No One Knows It: The Physics of Life’s Emergence
- by Sara Imari Walker
Walker tackles the question of just what life is; she argues that many of the standard approaches to this question are too narrowly focused on the characteristics of life as we know it – that is, life as it’s developed here on earth. Actually, she would say, these approaches are focused on our current understanding of what life is as it’s developed here on earth. She argues that this narrowness could in fact prevent us from recognizing life if/when we encounter life forms radically different from our own.
For her, the question about the defining characteristics of life is closely tied up with the question how life began. And she’s convinced that we’re more likely to create “life as no one knows it” in a lab here on earth than to discover life that emerged in another part of the universe.
A central point — perhaps the central point – of her discussion is the insistence on a new theoretical approach to this question, an approach that she and many scientists with whom she has worked calls assembly theory. At the risk of over-simplification, I’ll say that assembly theory argues that you and every other object that comes into existence is built out of (or assembled from and with) objects that have come before. “You are never alone in the assembled universe — every evolved object must come with many others related to it” (p. 115).
As an aside, in the course of developing her account of assembly theory she mentions the Boltzmann brain hypothesis, which suggests that the random and spontaneous coming-to-be of a brain, complete with all its memories, is more likely than the evolutionary development that led to the existence of humans with such brains. “In fact, given that [according to this hypothesis] Boltzmann brains are ‘more likely’ than evolved brains, you might even be one! The paradox is that you would never know the difference. You could have fluctuated out of existence just after reading that last sentence as you realized that you might even be such a brain. But now you are reading this, which means perhaps you only just fluctuated into existence right now and have come complete with false memories of having read the prior sentences” (p. 114). My problem with that is similar to the problem I have with the Omphalos hypothesis: how could one test the truth of that hypothesis?
But back to assembly theory and the existence of life. Walker argues that what distinguishes life from non-life is the degree of complexity in objects that are (or once were) alive. Complexity (and here I’m on the edge of and perhaps beyond my understanding) is measured by the number of steps required to bring an object into existence. So there’s a complexity threshold; objects that are “above” that threshold are alive, while objects “below” it are not. Walker and her colleagues claim to have tested this in the lab and place this threshold at 15 steps.
I find this interesting, but it’s also very controversial among those who know much more about this than I do. See, for example, this rather negative take on assembly theory. In any case, my interest isn’t intense enough to push me to learn enough about the biological processes to take a stand on that.
I will, however, note that as I was reading this book I repeatedly saw similarities between Walker’s understanding of life and Whitehead’s process thougt. I was intrigued enough by this to wonder whether anyone else was seeing it, and I discovered that I’m not the only person to see such similarities. I’m setting this aside for further reflection.
Wonderstruck
- by Helen De Cruz
De Cruz discusses the importance of wonder and awe in human life, both generally and in the specific domains of magic, religion, and science. She suggests that wonder can bring us to an experience of firstness, when we see something familiar but from a different perspective. In particular, philosophy, which “is born in wonder,” can lead to see “the familiar as wondrous or strange” (p. 19).
In this light, I was particularly struck by the power of this story from China in the 4th century BCE:
The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (ca. 369-286 BCE) was sitting fishing when two state officials from the kingdom of Chu came to offer him a prestigious position as chief administrator. Without turning around, he said,
I have heard that in Chu there is a sacred tortoise which died three thousand years ago. The ruler keeps it covered with a cloth in a hamper in his ancestral temple. What would you say that the tortoise would have preferred: to die and leave its shell to be venerated, or to live and keep on dragging its tail in the mud?
The officials agreed it would rather be alive, so Zhuangzi concluded, “Go your ways. I will keep on dragging my tail over the mud.” This is a startling response. For readers at the time, as now, turning down a cushy position like this, which comes with wealth and honor, would be virtually inconceivable. Zhuangzi evokes a sense of wonder and unfamiliarity by likening that position to being a desiccated tortoise stored away in a box (p. 20).
I’ll set aside her discussion of wonder in magic and religion.
But I found rather interesting her discussion of how the practice of collecting curiosities into so-called Wunderkammer, or cabinets of wonder, as something of a precursor to science. (As I write this, I’m still reading Roland Allen’s The Notebook, but I’ll note here that some have suggested that there were notebooks describing so-called curiosities that might be considered a paper version of these Wunderkammer.
Relying heavily on the work and perspective of Rachel Carson, De Cruz suggests that wonder and awe can change our relationship with the world, leading us to see both human connections with the environment more generally and the intrinsic worth of nature.
Finally, she refers to scientific research that suggest that “induced awe in participants found that people tend to think more critically in the awe condition compared to a neutral condition. For example, they are better able to spot the weaknesses in an argument. … In social terms, [awe] helps us to transcend a focus on the self and see ourselves instead as part of an interconnected whole. In epistemic terms, it leads us to question what we think we know and encourages us to change our mind and be more investigative. In order to regulate our lives, both are important for us” (pp. 63ff).
Orbital
- by Samantha Harvey
The novel has what appears to be a simple premise: a single day in the life of six astronauts – or, rather, four astronauts and two cosmonauts, representing four different countries – who are circling the earth together in an aging space station. They live a regimented life; the “day” described here is an artificial construction with many sunrises and sunsets. During the “day,” they exercise to maintain their bones and muscles while in space, perform scientific experiments, and take photographs of a major storm and other happenings on the earth. During the “night” – again, a period of time that includes multiple sunrises and sunsets – they sleep.
But the premise is complicated: instead of a descriptive account of the day from the perspective of an outside observer, the reader gets inside the mind of each astronaut, experiencing first-hand what they’re experiencing on the space station, remembering first-hand earlier times in each astronaut’s life. In one sense, the travelers have left their lives behind them on earth. But in another sense, they’ve brought their histories – indeed, the history of the earth and of humanity – with them. Further, both the space station and the earth itself become characters in the novel, each of them with complications and in relationship to humans. Like the complicated painting described in one of the novel’s early scenes, it’s not at all clear who the main characters of the novel are: is it the six people orbiting in the space station? Humankind in general? The earth, with its changing climate and increasing turmoil? Or is the main character of the novel the reader?
And how do these different characters fit together in relationship? Which is real – the earth without boundaries, with the geographic features offering connections between different regions, or is it rather the earth torn apart by human rivalries as depicted in news accounts that the astronauts either ignore, or can’t stop thinking about? I’m thinking here of a particularly powerful passage in the novel.
I found this novel to be very powerful – even haunting. Perhaps it’s because of the chaotic and unsettling times in which I’ve read it.