Vanishing Utopias

We all know that utopias cannot ever exist. But, according to historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, we keep getting closer to it. In fact, our approach to it is accelerating.

It is a long book, almost 500 pages, but it covers the entirety of human prehistory and history, up until the present day, which for the author was 2014. You will not find lists of empires and dates. In this way, it is almost the exact opposite of what is still perhaps the most famous overview of world history, the Outline of History by H. G. Wells.

Instead, the author seeks general trends and explanations for everything that has happened. Here is an example. Why did human evolution seem to proceed so slowly before the arrival of modern humans? For example, Homo ergaster stone tools in Africa remained unchanged for a million years. Harari says that all other animal species, and all humans before Homo sapiens, have or had a biological constraint on their ability to think of new ways of living. Before the human lineage could make any progress, we needed an innovation, invisible in bones and DNA, which allowed us to imagine the future. Neanderthals, for example, he said, did not have “the ability to compose fiction.”

But the author suffers from the delusion of technological optimism, which is very common among writers of popular sociology. Here are two examples which considerably erode the credibility of the conclusion of the book.

First, he seems to assume we will never run out of energy. This is because we invest some of the profits from the old kinds of energy into developing new ones. This has, in fact, happened. One obvious example is that England was running out of wood, so they invested money and research into using coal, which required the invention of the steam engine. Before modern times, all energy was either from burning wood or from human and animal muscle power. Medieval people did not even imagine steam, hydroelectric, or atomic power.

But this will happen only if we deliberately invest in new technology. Right now we need to invest in green technologies such as wind and solar energy. We have done so, but powerful ideological and political forces oppose the adoption of green technology. Donald Trump has made it very clear that his solution to our future energy needs is to pump more oil. Technology will not save us, because Trump will lead us boldly into the twentieth century.

Harari also speculated that wars were becoming rare. It is true that there were fewer wars in 2014 than there had ever been in the past. This was easy to believe in the balmy days of the Obama administration. But almost as soon as Harari’s book was published, Putin decided to invade the Ukraine, for reasons that are not clear even to his supporters, who do not dare to have an independent opinion; and Harari’s own country, Israel, is waging what many observers claim to be a war of extermination against the Palestinians.

Harari even speculated about how to be happy. Happiness is, he said, the product of serotonin levels in the brain. No matter what your external circumstances happen to be, no matter if you are in pain or slavery, you will be happy if you have a lot of serotonin. I think this opinion is a product of the author’s scarcely-hidden admiration for Buddhism. And, he implies, serotonin levels are not only biologically determined—you are either a happy or a depressed person—but also remain unchanged during your life. But this is true only for people who are clinically depressed. They need more serotonin but I do not. Also, I am certain that I am happier now, having completed so many of my life goals, than I was back when I had no idea if my future would be successful.

We need to admit that lots of things are getting better—the same message as Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature—but that we still have a lot of work to do and our success is not assured.

We all live in imagined realities. Despite the absence of evidence for spiritual realities, we will be individually unhappy and collective failures if we live in the way the apostle Paul described in one of his epistles: Eat, drink, for tomorrow we die. We have to at least imagine that we can make the world better.

How I Became a Scientist

I became a scientist one evening in 1978 when I was participating in the plant ecology group studies seminar at the University of California at Santa Barbara. I asked a stupid question.

I was an undergraduate environmental biology major. I took some very good courses that acquainted me (firsthand, with extensive field trips) with the ecology and vegetation of southern California. I continue, over forty years later, to draw from the wellspring of the inspiration I got at that time for my writing.

If I just wanted to write, and to teach at perhaps a community college level, all these experiences would have been enough. But I wanted to be a university professor. For this, I needed to learn how to do my own research. If I had just wanted to help a researcher, I could have become a lab technician. But I wanted my own research to expand our understanding of nature.

When we got back our graded exams in Bill Schlesinger’s plant ecology class in 1977, I got an 88, which seemed kind of mediocre to me, but it turned out to be the best grade in the class. Bill invited me to participate in the plant ecology group studies seminar, which met once a week in the evenings. These were the meetings in which the graduate students presented their own research, leading to advanced degrees. I assumed I was up to the challenge of participating in this.

The instructors (all of the botanists at UC Santa Barbara) assured me that the first quarter of this course all I had to do was participate intelligently in discussions. In many cases, we read a paper published in a scientific journal and discussed it. I, however, struggled to understand the papers. Anyone who has, without training, looked at a scientific paper knows that scientific research is a world unto itself. I read the papers as carefully as I could and wrote down questions that seemed intelligent to me. But I was unable to launch myself into a discussion that was at the level of some of the best researchers in the world.

That is, until one of the faculty said, “I want to hear from the new people.” I was the only new person there. Bruce Mahall looked and sounded like a fierce Scottish warrior.

Fortunately, I had a question ready. The paper was about air pollution infiltrating into the soils of a forest. My question was, “What is the oxygen layer?”

Everyone in the room was stumped. They didn’t know what an oxygen layer was either.

Finally one of the younger faculty piped up, “Oh, he’s talking about the O₂ (oh-two) layer.” O₂ is the chemical formula of atmospheric oxygen. Each molecule consists of two oxygen atoms. I knew this from the year of general chemistry, and another year of organic chemistry, that I had been required to take from 1975 to 1977. But apparently, as it turns out, O₂ also refers to the second organic layer in the soil. The two organic layers, the second of which is sticky humus, sits on top of the mineral soil layers. I think the young professor was gloating a little, as young professors at big research universities often do. They have to prove themselves by outshining others, even if the others are little undergrads. No harm done, though. I had asked my question and was now a participant, rather than just an observer.

This was the evening I became a scientist. My first act as a scientist was to ask a stupid question. But, in a way, the entire history of science is about people asking stupid questions and then pursuing the answers. For example, it is obvious to us today that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but in Galileo’s time, it was not obvious. Other scholars were openly hostile to Galileo. Go outside and look. You cannot see the Earth going around the Sun; you have to figure it out from evidence. This would not be the last stupid question I would ask myself or others.

A student could take the evening seminar course as many times as necessary, because the course was never twice the same. The second time I took the course, I had to sign up for leading one of the discussions. We sat at tables around a central point. The signup sheet started on the other side from me. By the time the sheet got to me, there were two slots left: the next week, and the week after. Bill Schlesinger was my undergrad advisor and he signed up for the first slot. I “chose” the second. I had no idea how to get started, so Bill offered to show me how.

When I went to his office, he said, “If I were you, I’d be pretty scared right now.”

I think he was only half serious, since all the faculty and graduate students knew to not judge me by their standards. Bill’s advice was pretty simple. Choose a paper (within the topic the group had chosen), and then also read the papers in the reference list at the end. Put them all together, and you have a presentation.

The next week I gave my presentation, something about nitrogen in grasslands. It was apparently pretty good for an undergraduate. Some faculty told me so. Cornelius H. Muller (“Neil”), however, did not say anything. He was a very old and experienced plant ecology researcher, from back in the 1930s when to do research all you had to do was ride your horse around. By riding his horse around, he had discovered the complex mixture of oak species that lived on hilltops over the Texas desert. (He spoke with a Texas accent.) This was an important breakthrough in our ecological understanding, because the oak woodlands of these “sky islands” were little remnants of what had once been extensive oak forests, which died out as the weather became dry in recent millennia, except for the hilltop survivors. He discovered several species that had almost become extinct. As an elder statesman in ecology, he always wore a tweed jacket, white shirt, and red bowtie. He came up to me after my presentation. Though he said nothing, he had a tin of cookies, and offered me one, with a smile. I think this meant he was pleased.

The next summer, 1978, I was as ready for my own research as an undergraduate was likely to be. Bill Schlesinger oversaw the research project. I remain amazed at how a well-known and rapidly rising star of plant ecology took time for what turned out to be a research project that was big on experience and short on success. I had access to all of this grant-funded research equipment. Short on success, but experience was what I needed.

I chose to analyze the patterns of which plants grew where in an area of the Santa Ynez Mountains upslope from Lompoc, California. In some places, there were chaparral shrubs, that needed fire to persist; sage scrub bushes, that did not; and some very interesting pine trees. These bishop pine trees were a little population over a hundred miles away from its main habitat. This little area was also unique because it did not have what we would normally call soil. The ground consisted of a thick layer of diatomaceous earth. It had formed when dead diatoms (floating single-celled algae) had built up in shallow oceans, such as the Pacific coast that was only a few miles away, over the course of millions of years. The diatoms became rock. Geologic forces (such as earthquakes with which California is all too familiar) raised these rock layers, bright white, up a few hundred feet. Here, and only here, was where the bishop pines grew. Why? Nobody really knew. Here was my chance to not only get experience but to advance the scientific understanding of nature.

The diatomite is not really rock, and is very lightweight, as you can see from this 1978 photo of me.

We quite reasonably assumed that the pines grew on the diatomaceous earth because of the chemical composition of the earth, which was different from the soil of the surrounding hills. My project was to estimate the importance of the different kinds of plant cover (pines, chaparral, etc.) and to get soil samples. We would, quite simply, see if the pines grew where they did because of the chemistry of the soil samples.

Here is where the experience came in. Crawling through a chaparral is difficult and dangerous. Little branches almost completely fill the space. I was not a large person but even I had trouble getting around in the chaparral. Rattlesnakes, which were abundant, could get around in it better than I could. I also took wood core samples from the pine trees. It was very hot. If I could do this project, out in an almost brutal natural setting, then the life of a field researcher was for me. I was on my way to eventually becoming a professor. You don’t get there by sitting in a library.

But it was not the only experience I had along the way to becoming a researcher. We analyzed the major soil nutrients in Bill’s lab, which was one of the best places to do so. When we compared the nutrient makeup with the vegetation cover, we found that the pine forests had more magnesium in the soil than the other types of plant cover. This might mean that pines grow best on high-magnesium soil. Or not. But there was one puzzling aspect of the results. The diatomaceous earth seemed to be ten percent sodium. When I presented my results at the seminar, we were all puzzled. Bruce pointed out that if the sodium was in the form of sea salt, not unthinkable with the ocean just a mile away, then there would also be ten percent chloride, and the soil would therefore be twenty percent salt. This would not only be enough to kill any plants, even the pickleweeds down in the nearby salt marsh, but it would mean that the soil would dissolve in the rain.

My seminar presentation also turned out to be funny, but not because of the salt. Some of my measurements were from the edges of the Johns Manville quarry, where the company dug away whole hillsides of diatomaceous earth to sell. The man I stayed with in Lompoc was the leader of the little church I attended, and as an employee of JM, he got me permission to work near the mine. At the seminar, I showed a picture of myself that I had taken with a camera on a tripod. I had on a miner’s hard hat on which I had placed two flaps to cover my ears. I explained that this was to keep the flies out of my ears. For some reason I still do not understand, the whole room of professors and students erupted into unaccountably prolonged laughter when I said this.

Later, long after all interest in my research project had passed, Bill realized what had happened. Sodium was one of the components of the solution which we had used to extract nutrients for the analysis. The sodium was not actually in the soil. This seemed like such an obvious blunder that only I could have made it, but an eminent scientist had made it instead. The experience I got from this is that anybody, even a great scientist, can make a silly mistake.

The Stars in their Courses

This is from an email I wanted to send to the office of the Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters. However, neither he nor the department had any way for the public to contact them. They hand down their decisions from an undefiled lofty summit, without any input from the public they supposedly represent.

Walters has become infamous for mandating that all Oklahoma Public School classrooms teach from the Bible, and he means this literally. He has sought bids for the state to buy 55,000 Bibles to distribute among Oklahoma classrooms. But to my knowledge he has not provided any guidance about how to do this in a manner that is acceptable to him, personally.

I pushed the limits of truth in this letter. I retired from public university teaching in Oklahoma. My university classroom would not, itself, have been required to teach from the Bible. I taught biology and evolution, not astronomy, but there was some cosmology and astronomy in my courses.

“Dear Superintendent Walters,

“I have been an Oklahoma science teacher for many years. Among the subjects that I have taught are biology and astronomy.

“In order to comply with your order, I would have to use the Bible as the basis for astronomy. I assume from what I have heard that you are a creationist who accepts the recent miraculous creation of the Earth. But that is not what I am writing about.

“Instead, my understanding is that even creationist astronomy does not include astrology, that is, the belief that stars and planets directly influence human affairs.

“Imagine my surprise when I re-discovered Judges 5:20. (I have read the Bible twice, but I forgot about this verse.) Judges is a book, which you would consider historical (it is not psalms, proverbs, or prophecy) about the Israelite conquest of Canaan. This passage is from the victory song of Deborah (a woman army leader) and Barak about a recent Israelite victory over the Canaanites. It reads, “From heaven fought the stars, from their courses they fought against Sisera.”

“Am I supposed to teach that astrology is, under some circumstances, true? If so, perhaps the state should also require classroom horoscopes and, if so, your department would issue the official horoscopes for public school use.

“If, instead, you consider this passage to be poetic allusion, then I would have no difficulty with this passage. However, how is a public school teacher to decide which Biblical passages are literal and which are poetic allusion? Your department should also issue official guidelines about this as well, perhaps an official state manual for Bible interpretation.

“Could you help me out in my confusion?”

There is much legal uncertainty about whether Walters will have to rescind his command for public school Bible instruction.

Gutenberg and Printing: A View from Strasbourg

 Strasbourg, France, where I now live, is justly proud of Johannes Gutenberg (about 1406-1468), who invented the printing press. He was born in Mainz, nearby in what is now Germany, and returned to it later, but his crucial first steps in developing the printing press were taken in Strasbourg, where a statue and a plaza commemorate him. I have posted a YouTube video, from Strasbourg, France, about Gutenberg.

One would think that Gutenberg’s idea for a printing press would have been a flash of insight that everyone would have immediately appreciated. But he did his initial work as a sideline and without funding from other people, as far as we know. His main work seems to have been as a goldsmith, polishing gems, and making mirrors. He got his idea for the printing press from another kind of press: the wine-press, which removed juice from grapes. Perhaps if he had just stuck to his polishing and mirrors, or had gone into the wine-press business, he might have had fewer financial setbacks. At least, the return on investment was very slow. His few major investors sued him. But, if Gutenberg had not persisted, the world would not have had what is now widely considered one of its most important inventions.

As a result of the printing press, ideas could now be publicized through a large number of copies, rather than copied by hand or by meticulous engravings that were affordable only for illustrations. Gutenberg developed an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony that could be melted and re-used. The greater number of copies allowed the written ideas to spread more widely and gain a recognition that they would not otherwise have had, or had only after a long delay.

 

Some examples of such ideas, themselves changing the course of history, are depicted on panels on the Gutenberg monument. One of them shows the signing of the American Declaration of Independence, with a Gutenberg press squarely and symbolically in the middle of the Continental Congress. Copies of the Declaration then spread around the world, where they stirred the ideas of liberty and democracy more than any handwritten document could have done.

Another example is the idea of emancipation of slaves and the end of the institution of slavery. Were it not for the printing press, relatively few people would have been aware of how cruel a system slavery was. Anti-slavery documents stirred the hearts of good people and embarrassed those who owned or profited from slavery. This plaque graphically depicts the cruelty of slavery.

 

Another example is education. The ideas and works of all kinds of intellectuals, from Descartes to Kant to Mozart to Milton to Newton, might have been lost had it not been for the printing press making their creations widely available. As the plaque shows, it was almost entirely white male creators who benefited from this, but the spread of knowledge was a process which, once started, could not be restrained.

Who knows what great ideas might be lost even today because, even if published, go unnoticed. How much worse it would be had there been no way to publish them. This shows the important role that chance plays in evolutionary adaptation (in this case, cultural evolution).

Evolutionary Altruism and Human Genealogies

This is a letter I mailed to Tiya Miles, a Harvard professor, minority activist, and novelist, regarding her most recent novel, Cherokee Rose. I wrote on paper to her academic address, since she must be flooded with emails.

Dear Tiya Miles,

My name is Stan Rice. I am an emeritus professor of biology at Southeastern Oklahoma State University. I am the author of five popular science books about evolution, botany, and scientific thinking. I have also had a long scholarly interest in Cherokee history, due to my tribal membership, but I have no credentials in Cherokee or Native studies. I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed reading your novel, Cherokee Rose. I immediately recognized the James Vann character. It is a story that needed to be told.

The irresistible lure of family history, of mixed racial ancestry, has recently been an important part of my life as it was for one of your main characters, Jinx, and I assume for you also. Like Jinx, my interest in Native ancestry exploded long after the death of the last person who knew much about it, my mother. I remembered and wrote down everything my mother told me about our family’s past, but I did not seek further information from her. She was not interested in asking her Cherokee father about our family history either. She and all her siblings, long after the deaths of my Cherokee grandfather (the last one to speak Cherokee) and white grandmother, wished that they had asked them about everything they knew. I have reconstructed an historical framework and filled in the rest with imagination. As with you and Jinx, my ancestry is a major part of my identity today.

Human interest in ancestry is somewhat hard to explain from my scientific point of view. My evolution books deal with the evolution of altruism. My Ph.D. advisor was on the faculty of Harvard University, your institution. Among evolutionary biologists, altruism extends in primarily one direction, forward—an animal helping its offspring and indirect descendants—and is proportional to the degree of genetic relatedness. Parents care about offspring because they have a genetic relatedness of one-half, and their nieces and nephews because they have a genetic relatedness of one-fourth. Against this background, why should anyone care about ancestors? My Cherokee genes are 17/256, just a smidgin’ over one-sixteenth. Which is, biologically, nothing. My fascination with the story of Cherokee experiences, and the nearly universal interest in genealogies, are inexplicable from the biological viewpoint. This is one reason, of many, that I not only liked your novel but strongly identified with Jinx.

I spent my life ignoring the question of Cherokee freedmen. But I know firsthand about Cherokee hostility toward Blacks. Both sides of my family, especially the Cherokee side, was strongly racist toward Blacks. I was fortunate to have escaped this influence, as far as I am aware. I think this attitude is changing in the Cherokee tribe. I heard Chief Chuck Hoskin, Jr., whom you seem to have met, give a presentation at a little rural library in Oklahoma (before I moved to France). He had just discovered that one of his ancestors was a freedman. His message was that Cherokees need to face up to the fact that some of our ancestors were slave owners. (Mr. Hoskin is the kind of positive and empathetic leader our tribe has not had since Chief Wilma Mankiller.) My sixth great grandmother, Nancy Ward, one of the most famous Cherokees in history, was apparently the first Cherokee to own slaves. As I understand, she was a little unclear on the Southern concept of slavery; she did not abuse her slaves or treat them as chattel, but as employees who could not quit their jobs. Which does not alter the facts of the case. For me, the plot of your novel (about freedmen) is a personal one.

I have written, separately, to your assistant (as per your website request) to ask if you might be interested in writing a jacket endorsement of my upcoming book, Forgotten Landscapes, about the Native American transformation of the “wild” landscape of North America. I hope this request is forwarded to you. But even if you do not have time to look at my book, I wanted you to know that I, as an informed reader, appreciated your novel not just because of its superior fictional qualities but from a personal space in my heart.

A Humorous Interlude

Come on, admit it, you are ready for a little humor. I promise it won’t take long. And it is relevant to what I have recently written.

I tried and tried to be a great composer. But it was frustrating, because I learned just enough about music to recognize how great the Great Composers were (are?) and how I would never match them. If I had worked on composition all my life, I might have been the late twentieth century equivalent of Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. Never heard of him? That’s my point.

I recently wrote an essay (August 9) about genius. Humor is a kind of genius. One kind of comedic genius I envy is stand-up comedy. You have to come up with something really funny, with essentially no time for preparation.

Here are a couple of examples of great ripostes that I could have made, but didn’t think of them until it was too late.

I was an incoming freshman at Santa Barbara in 1975, which was, I think, very early in the Anthropocene Epoch. Departments with low enrollments recruited students by having tours during orientation week. I visited the geography department. While I was there, a student (I hope not a graduate student) was practicing his presentation in front of a paper map. When he saw us clueless freshmen walk past, he turned to us, and pointed to the map. “This is a map.”

If I’d been a comedic genius, I might have said, “Oh, really? Is that what they teach you here? Wow, maybe if I’m a geography major I will be as smart as you someday.” But, of course, I didn’t think of this response until decades later.

I was teaching a university botany lab one time about ten years ago. I had the students taste different foods that they, in their rural Oklahoma dietetic narrowness, had probably never tasted. One of them was seaweed. One student in the class clearly considered himself too good to be in the class. He should have dropped it and taken something more interesting to him, like a correspondence course in shit-kicking. He swaggered in, a half hour late, with a smirk on his face. The others had tasted the seaweed. I had him taste it, too.

"Tastes like shit," he said to the silent class.

If I'd been a comedic genius, I might have said, “How do you know?” But of course I didn’t think of it until long afterwards.

Genius requires a lot of neural connections. I have a lot of them. But they have to work fast also. They have to work like monkeys jumping around. Mine sometimes work more like naked mole rats, bringing up a brilliant insight from deep underground just before it decomposes.

Happiness is Fill in the Blank

I’ve been looking through a dull but well-intentioned book from 1937, 101 of the World’s Greatest Books. That is, five to ten page summaries of them. They were the ones you would expect from the era which continued with Great Books of the Western World, whose numerous volumes filled many library shelves even in small towns because teachers and librarians thought these were the books that everyone ought to know about to be considered educated. Great novels, epic stories, great scholarly works, great plays, great works of philosophy, almost all of which were outdated even in 1937. I wasn’t expecting much, not having much interest in the classical authors (Dante was especially silly), but just in case I missed something, I wanted to check.

Rather than to discuss the summaries of the “great” philosophers, which would lull you to sleep, I have chosen one narrow question: What is happiness?

Aristotle answered this question in a prolonged and painful contemplation of the obvious. His was the doctrine of the golden mean, which says that happiness is where you have enough, but not too much, of everything, from wealth to strength. Is there anyone who didn’t already know this? Some people act as if the right amount of sexual pleasure is as much as possible, but even they get worn out once in a while, and they will probably admit this. Some people act as if the right amount of sexual pleasure is none at all, not even accidental thoughts of sex. They are not happy, protestations notwithstanding. But the vast majority of humans already live by the doctrine of the golden mean. I certainly do.

While the golden mean seems obvious, there are lots of people who say that happiness is different for every person. Let me cite, rather than a philosopher, the mid-century musician Ray Coniff, whose song said that “Happiness is different things to different people” (“To a beatnik, it’s a beard, beard, beard…”) In the 1960s, when as a little kid I was absorbing television, I heard the tobacco corporation version: “To a landlord, it’s a great big rent, to a smoker, it’s a Kent.” (I’ve never heard this song on the radio since the 1960s. I assume the tobacco company bought the rights to the original song and is hoarding them.)

I think we all, regardless of philosophy or religion, know that there must be some universals to happiness (except among psychopaths). And, I maintain, many of these universals match the behaviors and feelings produced in our species by evolution. We can only be truly happy when we can honestly feel we are doing the right things with our lives—that is, altruism. We actually enjoy being good (up to a point), and having allies rather than having only enemies and competitors. And having a sense of purpose—which is also the product of evolution—and not just disconnected events.

Happiness is, therefore, not just whatever rings our bells, or floats our boats, or tickles our fancy, or verbs our object. It is a product of evolution, just like language and toenails and the cockles of your heart.