These days you are
encouraged to focus and specialize, both in academia and in the
business world. By finding one thing you can do really well and
becoming an expert, you more easily garner money and fame because
you've got something rare and special to contribute to society.
But might this
tendency be harming our mental ecosystems?
Just as a forest
ecosystem can be weakened or destroyed by a too-successful insect or
vine, a human mind can be weakened or destroyed by a too-successful
idea. Examples of this are common among scientists, philosophers, and
poets. The mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918) was the first to
develop a detailed theory of infinity. By the time he was thirty he
had published a paper proving that there was more than one kind of
infinity (“countable” and “uncountable” infinity). Many of
his mathematical peers ridiculed him. Still, he continued to develop
the theory, proving that there were in fact infinitely many
infinities, increasing in size without limit. He became so obsessed
with his theory—equating infinity and God in his mind—that as
time went on he had difficulty thinking about anything else. A
certain result known as the “continuum hypothesis,” which stated
that there was no infinity between “countable” and “uncountable,”
proved particularly elusive, and his obsession with proving or
disproving it became so powerful that he neglected his wife and
children and was in out of sanitariums for the last two decades of
his life.
Cantor's fascination
with infinity became expertise—but expertise became obsession. Like
a parasite or invasive species, infinity destroyed a mind that lacked
any ideas capable of balancing it.
Similar examples are
manifold. The greatest logician of
the 20th
century, Kurt Gรถdel,
who thought exclusively about a handful of foundational problems,
began to see the world in terms of ancient struggle between
intelligence and non-intelligence. Fear of poisoning by hidden
enemies led him to starve himself to death.
Robert
Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance, recounts the story
of how the singular question "What is Quality?" led him
step-by-step to madness, an asylum, and electro-convulsive therapy
before he recovered.
Many
other philosophers appear to have lost their sanity to singular
questions, from Zeno to Nietzsche. The psychologist Kay Jamison
estimates that at least 40% of famous poets have had psychotic
episodes, including Lord Byron, Alfred Tennyson, Sylvia Plath, and
Robert Lowell. In most cases these episodes are characterized by
thoughts either racing out of control (mania) or plodding in a slow
circle (depression)—a few unbalanced ideas dominating the mind.
To explain what I
mean by saying that the mind is an ecosystem, I need to give clear
idea of what an ecosystem is. We'll need to talk about the theory of
evolution for a bit.
Originally, Darwin
said that evolution depends on three basic principles: (1) Variation,
(2) Heritability, and (3) Natural Selection. His followers, trying to
be concise, took (1) & (2) for granted and spent most of their
time arguing for (3), redubbing it “survival of the fittest” to
make it sound more intense. T.H. Huxley in particular led this
movement, which succeeded spectacularly in popularizing Darwin's
ideas, but led to widespread misunderstanding of the theory.
The problem with the
term “survival of the fittest” was that it made Darwin's theory
sound like a huge bloody free-for-all, favoring the strongest
fighters. This point of view obscures that fact that different
organisms and species often work together. Once this fact had become
obscure enough, you had a whole movement among biologists trying to
prove that species could work together -- and their theory was called
"group selection."
A decades-long,
academic bloody free-for-all ensued. One side argued, "If
you don't pass down your genes you don't survive so it's really about
genes, not groups." The other side retorted, "What
difference does make whether you talk about genes or groups? If a
group doesn't survive that is just as fatal." Back and forth it
went, getting more and more technical until no one was even sure what
was at issue, because yes, organisms do help each other and work
together in many cases, but should we call this behavior selfish or
unselfish, given that all organisms must survive to survive?
To this day the
debate goes on. But it has illuminated something interesting about
ecosystems that has gone largely unremarked. An ecosystem can be
considered a web of what gene selectionists call "mutualists."
The organisms in an ecosystem all help one another in certain ways in
the expectation of being helped in return. For this reason group
selectionists will often promote ecosystems to the honorary status of
"group," something that can be selected in its own right.
Gene selectionists
like to say that these are really just two different ways of looking
at the same thing. I will agree with them but take this insight one
step further and say that the group-selectionist way of looking at it
is more useful. Let's call an ecosystem a group. That means an
ecosystem is an organism in its own right. Now we can talk about how
it evolves much more easily, even if this can be “reduced” to
individuals doing what they can to survive and pass on their genes.
I think it makes
good sense of ecology to say that ecosystems are organisms, that
ecosystems evolve. Imagine you've got a territory with forest,
plains, and desert. What if the organisms in the forest tend toward
mutual destruction? For example, maybe you've got a parasitic insect
that spreads from tree to tree and kills the trees faster than they
can recover. Great for the insect (short term), bad for the
ecosystem. Eventually the forest dies out, and the grasses of the
plains and the scrub of the desert are given a chance to move in and
take over. Ecosystem selection. And that selfish tree-destroying
insect has actually caused its own destruction because it could not
live in balance with the rest of the forest.
Maybe you have
another forest without any insects to decompose trees. The growth
gets out of control and you get frequent fires that kill everything.
Also an "unfit" ecosystem that dies out.
Now imagine a third
forest, where you've got a certain kind of bird that loves to eat the
tree-eating insect. Now you've got an insect to control the growth of
wood and prevent fires, but you've also got a bird to control the
growth of the insect. The forest thrives! It spreads across the
territory!
Ecosystem evolution.
The sorts of
phenomena I just described are real. They happen all the time—ask
any conservationist or ecologist. It doesn't matter if you call it
group selection or gene selection. It's the way the world works.
Now let's bring this
back to philosophy and see how we can apply ecology and evolution to
ideas.
Every idea, and in
fact every bit of culture, is subject to natural selection. Why?
Because they all require matter to survive. Ideas must be stored on
paper, on a hard disk, in a brain, a picture, or some piece of
technology. All of these things take matter and energy, and there is
only so much matter and energy on the planet. Millions of people
write books every year but only a tiny fraction receive significant
public notice. The same goes for music albums. Everywhere you turn
people are trying to sell their ideas. But not everyone can write a
bestseller; it's physically impossible because if the 300 million
citizens of the U.S. each sold 1 million books, then your average
person would have to buy a million books.
Is this situation
unfair? Probably. I'm sure there are plenty of great books out there
that should have been published but were never advertised enough to
take hold. But maybe the situation isn't quite as unnatural as it
seems. Frogs typically lay several hundred or several thousand eggs
at once. For a frog population to remain roughly constant, only two
out of these thousand eggs can result in a breeding adult frog. Some
eggs are eaten, perhaps, and when they hatch most of the tadpoles
will also be eaten. Maybe they weren't fast enough swimmers, or
couldn't find enough food. Maybe as adult frogs they don't catch
enough flies and never survive to reproduce. Maybe they can't find a
mate to breed with. Some of these factors are pure luck, many involve
natural selection that allows for evolution.
The eggs of the wood
frog and the northern red-legged frog are symbiotic with a kind of
green algae that provides oxygen in return for certain nutrients
expelled from the eggs. So frogs belong to an ecosystem even at the
earliest stages of life, and of course I'm not even mentioning the
millions of species of bacteria involved as well, which are still
little understood. You and I, in fact, are walking ecosystems,
containing many times more bacterial cells in our body that human
ones. Don't panic—this is a good thing. It's good to be an
ecosystem.
So really, each of
those frog eggs is not just an infant frog but an infant ecosystem.
And most of these ecosystems will perish. What we think of as the
evolution of a single species is really the evolution of an
ecosystem. Almost all evolution can be seen as ecosystem evolution.
The
organism/ecosystem of ideas known as "the writer" will
struggle mightily to spread his or her eggs—books—across the
literate world. Success, as in biological evolution, means that these
books will help construct new ecosystems-of-ideas that will
themselves be fertile and create still more.
Ecosystems thrive
best on diversity. If you play around with an online ecosystem
simulator (I'll provide a link later), you'll find that if you put
more species and connections in, it will usually reach equilibrium
sooner, and with less chance of extinction. It also helps to have top
predators—without enough vertical eater-eaten relationships it's
more likely someone will spread out of control. Predators will often
help the species below them survive in the long run. Species help
each other best by preserving the overall equilibrium, even if this
involves predation, which non-ecologists often mistake for a form of
competition.
For example—and
this was a something that actually happened in a number of national
forests—if you get rid of wolves and bears your deer population is
likely to explode. As a deer population grows it can strip parts of
the land bare of vegetation, expose the soil, and cause massive
erosion. Without anything to hold river banks in place, rivers
disperse and evaporate, and forests can become deserts. Famine sets
in and even the deer populations themselves eventually dwindle or
disappear. This process is called desertification and it is happening
world-wide, often as a result of livestock like cows and sheep that
are allowed to grow out of control. In some national parks wolves or
bears have been re-introduced, stabilizing the deer and moose
populations and restoring much of the ecosystem that has been lost.
Complex interactions
form an ecosystem. Thought is an ecosystem. Thought evolves.
Monocultures—fields of a single crop, sterilized by chemicals—are
harmful because they destroy the ecosystems of the soil and halt
evolution. When thinking is dominated by a small collection of ideas,
it destroys the natural soil of the mind, which should be alive with
a thousand skills, ideas, reasons, and myths.
Life is flourishing
diversity. The most ancient forms of agriculture respect this
principle. Like most traditional societies, the Amish always leave
some fields fallow, allowing them to relax and play and foster new
diversities of wild plants and animals. This restores the soil for
free, and keeps populations of predators like birds healthy and
present to control outbreaks of insects or mice.
Philosophy is
flourishing diversity of thought. The greatest thinkers have been
renaissance men and polymaths: broadly-read, creative, less narrow
than their peers. Charles Darwin was an avid reader of not only
botany and zoology, but of philosophy, geology, agriculture,
animal-breeding, and plant-breeding. Thomas Jefferson was a
scientist, philosopher, scholar, lawyer, inventor, and agricultural
pioneer. Isaac Asimov wrote both fiction and non-fiction, and
popularized every field of science from mathematics to biology.
Masanobu Fukuoka, one of the founders of the modern
sustainable-agriculture movement, was a trained scientist, a Buddhist
philosopher, a mystic, a poet, a father, and of course a successful
farmer. It is said that human knowledge is now too vast for there
to be polymaths anymore. It's more reasonable to think that the more
there is to know, the wider and more diverse your knowledge can be,
and the more fertile the soil for polymaths. Broad knowledge gives a
thinker stronger context. A scientist seeking knowledge for its own
sake will probably find nothing of interest. A farmer without any
reading or education will probably do what his neighbors do. But a
passionate farmer who uses science to improve his farm is far more
likely to advance both science and farming.
The greatest novels
show deep insight into human nature, careful thought concerning the
individual's place in the world, and broad learning about many
diverse aspects of life and nature that are portrayed. Music is the
same, though less obviously so. The most powerful melodies evoke a
range of emotions, challenge the mind, and show intricacy of
structure that can only come from active and diverse thought.
Classical painting, too, shows geometric reasoning, deftness of hand,
an understanding of human and natural forms, insight into human
emotion, and dramatic expression. And if broad thinking can benefit
us in making likenesses of life, how much more might it help us in
living our lives, in seeing the big picture, setting higher goals for
ourselves, and achieving them? How much more might it benefit our
family lives and our culture as a whole? This is what leadership is
made of. Alexander the Great was the student of Aristotle, the
greatest philosopher of Greece. Charlemagne was considered the wisest
king of his time in Europe, and helped keep Roman learning alive
through the Dark Ages. Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin
Franklin, and other founding fathers were profound thinkers, broadly
read, with well-trained rhetorical skills. I can't help but feel that
this is precisely the sort of thing that the 21st century is already
lacking. You don't see technical logicians – who specialize in
elliptic curves or Hilbert spaces – accomplish anything of note.
Leave it to the Einsteins of the world, fed up with narrow
scholarship and working in patent offices.
Modern philosophers
love to praise the Greeks for being more "objective" and
"scientific" than any other ancient civilization. This is
nonsense. It forgets that modern mysticism, magic, music, poetry, and
art also have their origins in Greek culture.
Ancient Greece was
the first nation to produce a written tradition of philosophy, but
also of tragic and comic plays, of political theory, of ethics,
logic, physics, literary criticism, and axiomatic mathematics. Other
subjects which they did not invent they brought to their highest
pre-Renaissance level, including geometry, arithmetic, algebra,
astronomy, poetry, epic poetry, mysticism, and music. No single
society has had as big an impact on Western culture. We still use
Greek harmonies in our music, we still learn Euclid's theorems in
geometry class, and Xenophon's writings about horses were still
considered authoritative among cowboys of the old west.
Why were the Greeks
so intelligent, so wise?
There were other
empires throughout the Middle East that were larger and wealthier.
What was truly remarkable about Greece was the richness and plenitude
of culture there. It was a healthy and thriving ecosystem of ideas.
Greece excelled in so many things because it was so many
things. History suggests that novelty is the result not of
specialization, but of variety. We might expect our philosophy to be
Hittite, our military theory to be Assyrian, and our music to be
Egyptian. But it all came from Greece, because that was the first
place that reached a critical diversity of ideas, a prototypically
healthy cultural ecosystem. While the Persian empire was a vast
machine designed to produce only conquest, wealth, and power for the
Emperor, the Greeks—who lived in autonomous city-states—admired
wisdom over wealth, and preferred the advice of their barefoot
philosophers to that of fearsome tyrants. The first democracies were
Greek. The Greek philosophers were all polymaths and were expected to
be. If a man did not value virtue above all else, Plato would refuse
to call him a philosopher. And if a man did not know geometry, or had
no practical inventions credited to his name, Plato would also
withhold the title. For Plato, a philosopher must be an ethicist, an
inventor, a mathematician, an astronomer, a dialectician, a logician,
a politician, a metaphysician, and a physicist. His student Aristotle
demanded mastery of biology, meteorology, and epistemology as well.
This way of thinking stretched back to Thales, reputedly the first
Greek philosopher, who was skilled in science and math, an inventor,
a businessman, and at the same time considered one of the "Seven
Sages" of Greece for his dedication to virtue. Philosophy was
not simply a thing to read about or study for the Greeks. It was an
entire way of life.
***
In a book about permaculture, Masanobu Fukuoka wrote,
"It seems that the main goal in
the life of the average American is to save money, live in the
country in a big house surrounded by large trees, and enjoy a
carefully manicured lawn. It would be a further source of pride to
raise a few horses. Everywhere I went I preached the abolition of
lawn culture, saying that it was an imitation green created for human
beings at the expense of nature and was nothing more than a remnant
of the arrogant aristocratic culture of Europe" (Sowing Seeds in
the Desert, p. 129).
Instead, Fukuoka suggests scattering
seeds of clover and daikon over your existing lawn and letting it
grow wild without using chemicals from the store or replanting. This
works because it creates a natural ecosystem that is self-sufficient.
Clover fixes nitrogen so that you don't have to add fertilizer, and
it naturally gives your turf a deeper green color. Daikon is a kind
of radish that prevents soil compaction and can even be eaten.
Recently I went to a Cal Ranch store to
find some organic gardening supplies (which they didn't have) and was
astonished at how many shelves of chemical lawn products they had,
including pest poison, weed poison (products promising to get rid of
clover!), and artificial coloring to cover up “dog spots.” If you
use these sorts of products you'll have to reseed or spread sod every
couple of years. You won't build an ecosystem at all, and though it
will look like nature it'll be a factory-made product. This is why
Fukuoka calls it "fake nature."
A
healthy ecology sees a balance of creativity from every species. No
one substance or process or rule of order dominates the rest, and
thus there is a perfect balance of power from largest to smallest.
Even the lion must answer to the grass because without the grass
there are no deer.
No
one book or thinker or discipline can teach you how to think, or what
wisdom is. There are thousands of classics out there—why not make
use of them? There are thousands of skills to learn, thousands of
points of view to understand.
It
is not possible to learn everything, nor is it possible for most of
us to be heard by everyone. But I think it is beneficial to find ways
to keep your ideas your own, to keep them rich and diverse and
different from the almost univocal perspective of the media. Here are
some of the ways I've been attempting to do this:
(1) Keep a journal
of ideas that's uncensored, uninhibited, and completely honest. Go
back and reread all your entries every year or so. Over time you will
start collecting your best entries and learn how to write better,
more insightful entries. This is evolution taking place inside your
own mind/journal ecosystem.
(2) Read classics.
These are filled with robust ideas that have managed to replicate
themselves for centuries or even millennia. Plant them in your mind
and let them grow. The most brilliant philosophers, writers,
scientists, and leaders all had a solid education in classic
literature. Their minds had become rich, healthy ecosystems.
(3) Have as many
“deep” and “honest” conversations as you can. This is the
best way to spread your ideas and allow others to spread their ideas
to you. Ask
for sincere criticism. Good critique stings, but you can't do better
until you know what you've done wrong. Like a good top-level
predator, honest criticism (from yourself and others) can help keep
obsessive ideas from taking over.
(4) Cultivate
practical skills. Challenging yourself, whether it's in gardening or
fitness or writing a computer program or learning a new language,
will put selective pressure on your ways of thinking and force bad,
impractical ideas out.
(5)
Learn how to express yourself clearly in writing. Blogging is a great
way to do this because you can get immediate feedback from people you
know and give your ideas a chance to spread more widely. Write
letters to the editor of your local paper. Write letters to your
family and friends. There are many things that can be expressed
better in writing, and by writing an idea down you create a seed that
can spread far and grow into new thoughts in faraway places and
times.
(6) Keep cultivating new passions. Don't schedule away all your time. Always leave “fallow time” to investigate new things, or simply think about whatever comes to mind. When you learn something interesting, put aside time to read more about it. This will happen less as you get older, but don't let your playfulness die completely if you want to stay creative.
(7) Stick to the one hour a day rule. I am at my
happiest when I have a least an hour a day for my research and
writing, and one hour a day for random meditation or thinking. The
latter is easy to fit in—do it in the shower and while driving.
Evolutionary quality gives ideas power. Books or
statements that became famous simply because they were provocative or
well-advertised will not last through the ages. This gives me peace
of mind. It reminds me that chasing fame is ultimately useless. An
honest, insightful idea may spread very slowly, like a plant whose
seeds are carried on the breeze, but if it is good and true it will
spread steadily and may stay vital for ages.
A
previous post about the decline of philosophy:
A post about
localism of ideas:
An
ecosystem simulator:
Some
ecological problems with mass media:
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