Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (37 page)

This is important stuff, because arguably our failure to understand Socrates’s argument—and our willingness to be bullied by Raphael’s—has shaped our entire civilization. The second-century Christian writer Tertullian was trying to mimic the “good,” meekly obedient Adam when he wrote that the Gospels contained all truth and that therefore, for the faithful, “curiosity is no longer necessary.” This infamous quotation is from
The Prescription of Heretics
, chapter 7. Some Christian commentators say it’s misunderstood, so in fairness a fuller version is worth giving:

Away with those who put forward a Stoic or Platonic or dialectic Christianity. For us, curiosity is no longer necessary after we have known Christ Jesus; nor of search for the Truth after we have known the Gospel. (
Nobis curiositate opus non est post Christum Iesum nec inquisitione post euangelium.
) When we become believers, we have no desire to believe anything else. The first article of our belief is that there is nothing else we ought to believe.

The first sentence might suggest that you can defend Tertullian by arguing that he’s not so much saying “Thinking is no longer necessary” as “There’s no point going back to
Greek
authors, specifically, and trying to interpret
them
, because everything that matters in
them
is already incorporated into the Gospels.” But I don’t think this is a plausible way to defend Tertullian, for two reasons.

First: if that is what he’s saying, it’s hopelessly wrong. The idea that all Greek ethical thought of any value is incorporated into the Gospels may be traditional, and Christians may have been taught for centuries that they ought to believe it, but nobody ought to believe it, because (a) nothing about being a good Christian depends on believing it, and (b) it’s unmitigated hogwash.

Second: for reasons that the rest of the passage suggests, it really can’t be all Tertullian is saying. He’s very clear here that it’s not just the wisdom of particular pagan Greeks that we no longer need, but rather the very type of inquiry (call it science, or philosophy, or critical thinking) that they invented.

Why don’t we need critical thinking, according to Tertullian? Because the Gospels contain a complete and perfect source of moral truth. And it follows (?) that skeptical questions about the origin and veracity of that truth undermine the ability of the faithful to believe it. And therefore (?) skeptical questions are dangerous and should be condemned as heretical.

This kind of reasoning (a form of which, alas, Saint Augustine shared: see his
Confessions
, chapter 35) is one of history’s great intellectual and moral catastrophes. It infected early Christianity, quite unnecessarily, with the guiding principles common to all fundamentalism. Because of Christianity’s subsequent success, that fundamentalism went on to shape the viciously anti-pagan, anti-pluralist, anti-intellectual attitudes that dominated so much of the late-Roman and post-Roman world. Its results are illustrated in the fate that, over the next fifteen centuries or so, befell the Library of Alexandria, the entire literary civilization of the Maya (ten thousand codices were destroyed in the 1560s by a single individual, the Spanish bishop Diego de Landa, who thought they were the work of the devil—four of them survive), and a thousand pyres on which it was not mere words that were set alight.

Which brings us back to today’s headlines, and to that first large problem, set aside a few paragraphs ago. Fundamentalists think it’s arrogant and dangerous to question the will of God. But they are confused. It’s arrogant and dangerous
to believe that you already know
the will of God—and no one ever accuses someone of committing the first error without having already committed the second.

“Better rockets?”

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, born in 1857, was two or three generations ahead of his time: around 1900, he published a large number of papers covering such arcane matters as the minimum velocity needed to reach Earth orbit, how to design multistage rockets and space stations, the use of solid and liquid fuels, and what would be needed for planetary exploration. Unfortunately—so much for all the propaganda we keep hearing about how fast our technology is advancing!—not much has changed in the field of rocketry since Tsiolkovsky invented it. And it’s a humbling problem: relative to the scale of interstellar space, never mind intergalactic space, rockets are many thousands of times too expensive, inefficient, and slow to be much use. Exploring the stars is going to require a technology as different from rockets as rockets are from feet.

The Bretz Erratic

The Bretz Erratic doesn’t exist, but it seemed like a nice gesture to invent it. J. Harlen Bretz was the brilliant, visionary, stubborn geologist who endured decades of ridicule from his peers for insisting that the amazing geology and topography of Eastern Washington’s “channeled scablands” could be explained only by cataclysmic flooding. In an earlier era, no doubt he would have been praised for finding evidence of Noah’s flood; instead the experts said his ideas were preposterous—where could all that water have come from?

The answer wasn’t the wrath of God, but two-thousand-feet-deep Lake Missoula. Formed repeatedly by giant ice dams during a period roughly fifteen thousand years ago, it emptied every time the ice dams failed. These “Missoula Floods” happened about twenty times, at intervals of about forty years, sending ice-jammed floodwaters, hundreds of feet deep, racing west and south toward the Columbia River Gorge. Boulders embedded in remnants of the ice dams were carried hundreds of miles from the other side of the Bitterroot Range in present-day Idaho and Montana.

Brunhilde

Partridge has named his VW Kombi after Brynhildr, the Valkyrie or warrior goddess of Icelandic legend. She features in various adventures, most famously the
Völsunga Saga
, in which she angers the god Odin. Asked to decide a contest between two kings, she picks the “wrong” man; Odin punishes her by excluding her from Valhalla and making her live as a mortal.

“
Unscientific
is a bully word
 . . .
evidence-free drivel”

Partridge could be thinking of the behaviorist John B. Watson. His immensely influential writings, from 1913 on, persuaded many psychologists and self-styled child development “experts” to be concerned about the alleged danger of too much parental affection. This must have seemed like an interesting hunch, but after so many decades, the shocking truth is still worth emphasizing. First, Watson and his school—while hypocritically vocal about the need for psychology to be rigorously scientific and therefore evidence-driven—had no evidence whatever for a causal connection between affectionate parenting and any particular psychological harm. Second, and more significantly, they seem to have been incapable of even entertaining the intrinsically more plausible “mirror” hypothesis: that if parents were to take such ideas seriously, and change their parenting style as a result of such advice,
this itself
might cause children terrible psychological harm.

Tragically, Watson produced his own body of evidence, treating his own children appallingly, by any normal humane standard. One committed suicide, one repeatedly tried to, and the other two seem to have been consistently unhappy.

Sigmund Freud’s follower and rival, Carl Jung, managed to arrive at a similar and similarly baseless and dangerous “scientific theory of parenting” from a different direction. He encouraged parents to worry that close affection would create what Freud had called an “Oedipal attachment” of child to mother. It has been suggested that Jung’s advice was partly responsible for the terrible upbringing of Michael Ventris, the ultimate decipherer of the Linear B script, since both his parents were “psychoanalyzed” by Jung, and it seems as though they became even colder and more distant from their son in response to their Swiss guru’s “expert” advice.

There are at least three distinct problems with that advice. First: many people have concluded that there’s simply “no there there”; on this view, “Oedipal attachment” is like the “black bile” referred to in medieval medical texts, in that it simply doesn’t exist. Second: even if it does exist, the people who believe in it have been unable to agree on whether it’s a natural and inevitable stage of childhood development or a dangerous perversion of that development. Third: even if it exists,
and
is a dangerous perversion of normal development, there is (at the risk of sounding repetitive) no evidence of any specific causal connections that would justify any advice aimed at improving the situation through a change in parenting style.

If you’re in the mood for a big dose of irony, at this point it’s worth looking up “refrigerator mother theory,” a campaign started in the late 1940s by Leo Kanner and championed endlessly by Bruno Bettelheim, in which mothers of autistic children were assured that their children’s problems had all been caused by their parenting
not being warm enough
. This turned out to be another case of bad science—lots of “expert” pronouncement, little or no underlying evidence, a complete unwillingness to take alternative hypotheses seriously, decades of largely unquestioned influence, a vast sea of unnecessary suffering.

For just one more example of psychotherapeutic overreach—allegedly expert, allegedly scientific, and with devastating effects on real families—see
The Myth of Repressed Memory
by Elizabeth Loftus or
The Memory Wars
by Frederick Crews. The “memory wars debate” of the 1990s illustrated particularly well a lamentably common theme in the history of psychiatry: abject failure to distinguish between potentially illuminating
conjectures
(ideas that we have essentially no evidence for yet but that it might one day be possible to confirm or refute) and well-established
theories
(general explanations that we have reason to believe are probably true, because they’ve survived rigorous testing against all plausible rivals in a context of related theories and bodies of evidence).

The problem with failing to make this distinction is profound. Suppose you inject your patients with a drug after representing it to them as an established method of treatment, when in reality it’s a dangerous experiment. This is about the grossest possible violation of medical ethics, short of setting out to murder people. In effect, though, this is what Watson, Jung, Bettelheim, and their many followers were doing to their thousands of victims, all under the phony guise of “my ideas have a scientific basis and yours don’t.”

Supernova

The ultimate stellar show ought to occur within our galaxy once every few decades, but not one has been observed since Tycho’s Star in 1572 and Kepler’s Star in 1604; both of these just barely predate the invention of the telescope. Still, if Antares blows, you won’t need a telescope: for a few days it will outshine the rest of the Milky Way, and will be visible as a bright dot even during daylight.

P
ART
II: Z
ONE OF
M
IRACLES

“Bullshit . . . a philosopher who wrote a whole book about it”

It’s true. Harry Frankfurt’s
On Bullshit
is a fascinating analysis of what makes liars different from bullshitters. In brief: liars care about steering people away from the truth; bullshitters don’t care one way or the other about truth, but only about using cheap rhetoric to sell either themselves or their stuff. So bullshit isn’t the opposite of the truth, but a kind of
gilded
truth that’s not honest.

Nearly the entire vocabulary of marketing and advertising consists of bullshit in this sense—think of expressions like
all-new
,
all-natural
,
farm-fresh
,
hand-crafted
,
revolutionary
,
exclusive
,
executive
,
select
,
luxury
,
gourmet
, and
artisanal
. Only the most gullible consumer literally believes what these words imply, but we’re all happy to engage in a sort of conspiracy of pretending to believe what they imply, because we feel better about spending the money if we’re being bullshitted. You could even say that being bullshitted is the service we’re paying for. Do you really want them to tell you that your “revolutionary” new phone is—as, I’m sorry to say, it certainly is—pretty much the same as the last model? Or that your “rustic Italian loaf” was baked—as it probably was—from Canadian ingredients in batches of a hundred thousand by Korean robots in New Jersey? Of course not. You’d rather pay for the bullshit. That’s why there’s so much of it.

Teosinte

Modern corn (maize) shows up as a complete surprise in the archaeological record about nine thousand years ago, as if thrown out of the car window by passing aliens. Where did this bizarre-looking plant come from? In the 1930s, working at Cornell University, George Beadle worked out that it was a domesticated version of teosinte, a grass from the Balsas River in southern Mexico—and it shows up as a surprise because the work of domestication took almost no time at all. Look up a picture of teosinte, and be suitably amazed that its genome is almost identical to that of the fat, juicy bright-yellow botanical freak you just covered in salt and butter.

As the chimp never said to the human, “Isn’t it amazing what a big difference small genetic changes can make?”

Breath, nostrils, and the creation of Adam

“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7).