Containing multitudes

By day, I am a scientist and biomedical engineer.  I synthesize and characterize nanoparticles and image cancer.  Hopefully it will make a difference in human medicine some day.

By night, the artist peeks his head out, singing wild cat Odyssean blues.  Hopefully it will make a difference for the human condition.  There's more of this coming so keep your eyes peeled.

Roll Steady

Last night (and the night before) I went out and had a beer (or two) and shot the breeze with friends, talked music, how cancer might be cured, the interaction between players and puppy dogs who fawn over them, and the responsibilities of mentorship.  Today I am coating nanoparticles with polydopamine, functionalizing them with an optical dye that specifically targets cancer cells, injecting them into mice (because we have to do that first if its ever going to help humans), and then imaging the mice to quantitatively determine nanoparticle accumulation and degradation in tumors.  I'm a steady rollin' man (most of the time at least), and I roll both night and day.

Wave-particle duality and free will

The wave-particle duality tells us that reality is on a fundamental level very strange for us humans to comprehend.  In short, depending on the situation (or how a quantum experiment is designed), particles behave either as a single particle or as a wave.  This has broad implications both physically and philosophically.  The two main broad interpretations of this reality is the Copenhagen interpretation (associated with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg) and the many-worlds interpretation first extrapolated by Hugh Everett.  The first takes the quantum wave-particle duality as the fundamental piece of reality, then leading to things that cause the collapse of the wave function into the one reality of which we are all a part.  The many-world interpretation implies that the waviness we see is actually an interference between multiple universes that are actually real, though we can only find ourselves in one at any given time.

I mentioned David Deutsch in my previous post. He is a follower of the many worlds interpretation.  Stated most simply (this is relative when we get to this fundamental physics stuff), when we run a double-slit experiment, the interference pattern we see is actually telling us that the photons or electrons or whatever particle we use are being interfered with by their identical particles in another universe.  Deutsch believes the interference is direct evidence for other universes existing.  Now it may not be Occam's razor to all, but then whatever the answer is, it is going to be strange, even if you go with the more accepted Copenhagen interpretation.

Further in the book, Deutsch devises a thought experiment about time travel to further his explanation of the many worlds interpretation.  He brings up the grandfather paradox, where you go back in time and kill your grandpa, who then would not be able to have your parent, and therefore you should not exist, hence the paradox.  Now if you are of the Copenhagen school, you have to argue that either this type of time travel is absolutely impossible, or somehow, reality will conspire to make it impossible for you to kill your grandfather.  Deutsch says that is not a good explanation.  Assuming for the moment that this type of time travel is possible, in a Delorian or other time machine, he argues there are people who would choose to, if not kill their grandfather, choose to change something radical enough that the future they know would change.  Now assuming still that this time travel is possible (yes, a big assumption), then what is Occam's razor?  That the world would somehow conspire to stop these changers, or that doing something to change a timeline implies that there would then be an extra universe (the original one and the changed one)?  Deutsch himself chooses the latter as a better explanation of this thought experiment, and one that interference phenomena provides evidence for.

I just watched Donnie Darko and similar questions are asked.  In it, Donnie is visited by a scary bunny rabbit (yeah, the movie's got its quirks but in my humble opinion it is well worth watching), who initially saves him from a fate of death when a jet engine falls through his roof and onto his bed.  As the movie progresses, Donnie comes to realize he may have the ability to travel back in time and change things.  In the end, given the information of how the world with him will go, he (spolier alert, stop reading if you want to watch the movie and want a surprise) chooses to die by being smushed by a jet engine.  One way to interpret this is through prophecy, that his self was given information about a possible future if he survived, and he chooses to die to save others.  Another is that there are actually two (or more) universes, one where he lives and one where he dies.  So either he is given a vision of a possible future or that future is real.

What is interesting is that in either case, Donnie is provided a choice in the matter.  In either case, he has the freedom to choose his path.  We all have that freedom.  While we may not have perfect information about the future we can imagine how our choices will play out in multiple futures.  I am not going to argue in this post for either the Copenhagen or many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but I will argue for our freedom of action.  Whether our choices are collapsing wave functions to keep us in one world, a power not to take lightly, or our choices are splitting universes, perhaps an even greater power, we still have a say in the matter.  Our choices are real, and they have dramatic effects on the world in which we live.  What we do matters to matter and perhaps even more.

Sandburg's Chicago

I spent some time in Chicago.  I called it home for six years. Carl Sandburg is its Warrior Poet.  Chicago is this to him:

Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,

Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,

                   Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.

Some days I can find that laughter and it is good.

Discovering "hard to vary" explanations

David Deutsch and his ideas have affected my perception of reality greatly.  He is a brilliant physicist.  His book, The Fabric of Reality, is one of my favorite non-fiction books and does an intriguing job of connecting multiple scientific disciplines into a broader theory.  It even influenced my own fictional book, Odyssey In Black and Blue, which included time travel and free will and where our choices fit in that.  I've got a comic book adaptation that is coming soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that.

I recently watched a TED talk by Deutsch and it is well worth watching.  In it he brings forth a theory about why human progress has seen exponential growth over the last 400 years or so.  Related to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, Deutsch makes a subtle argument that the key discovery that humanity has come upon is the ability to distinguish between good and bad explanations of the physical world.  To him, the key distinguishing feature of a good explanation is that it is "hard to vary," whereas bad explanations, such as explanations of seasons varying based on the actions of mythical gods, are "easy to vary" and therefore do not get to the heart of explaining the physical world accurately.  It is a compelling argument, and the TED talk is well worth watching.

Wise Word Reply to 'Solitude, Loneliness, and Sharing Convictions'

Someone I know very well and who is wiser than me gave a reply to one of my posts that was too long to be a comment.  I give it a full post here:

During a recent visit with my only son, who I admire greatly, he encouraged me to stop being a passive observer of the world and start writing.  Despite turning the big 6-0 next week, I have decided to get out of my comfort zone, follow his advice, and set aside for a few minutes my normal routine of blog surfing for an hour or two before starting work, then stewing in the angst of simply observing the seeming deterioration of the state of the world, in general, and my country, in particular.  This Comment represents my first attempt to actually string a few words together after my early morning coffee (and a modicum of blog surfing, I admit).

I have read WarriorPoet with interest since its resumption in early June.  I’ve even moved it ahead of Instapundit, my previous favorite blog, in my browser Bookmarks.  As The Dude from ‘The Big Lebowski’ might say (featured in your 6/24/15 post, ‘The Dude’), if he read and grokked Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’ (the subject of your 6/5/15 post): “Keep forking the f***’in’ lightning!” Since I’m probably more like Sam Elliot’s character (The Stranger) in ‘The Big Lebowski’ than The Dude, I will leave that fourth word to the reader’s imagination. I was raised, after all, as a good Southern Baptist boy in West Texas.

‘Solitude, Loneliness, and Sharing Convictions’ struck a chord with me, as I have recently experienced a bit of solitude myself over the last month and a half.  My wife and love of my life for over 35 years has been in a distant city for 50 days or so, during her 8-week summer work hiatus, caring for a loved one in need.  I did a little math and figured out that the span represents about how much time she and I have spent apart for the past 6-7 years!  I’ve realized, in her absence, how much she helps me deal with my own demons, in addition to my own “wits and grit.” So while I admire your confrontation of the challenge of solitude, don’t refrain from seeking some solace in your family and true friends, no matter how far away they might be.

If you asked me to recite my own convictions and moral code, they would be nearly identical to yours, although I would not be able to articulate them nearly as well as you have.  One minor difference might be that I usually refer to your moral code “that in general is a live and let live philosophy, a do unto others as you would have them do unto you mentality,” as the Golden Rule.  I’m a failed Southern Baptist for almost 45 years, but that Rule, as posited by Jesus, still hits the nail on the nail on the head for me.  I would be glad to discuss the technicalities with you over a beer, or a dram or two of Laphroaig, over and over, if necessary!

Before my only son was born, I worried how I could pass along my convictions and moral code to him (and his sister born seven years later), on my own, despite having rejected organized religion.  I read a lot of books (no Internet back then!) and, among others, discovered C.G. Jung.  He wrote the following in ‘Man and His Symbols,’ which I believe whole-heartedly:

“When life runs smoothly without religion, the loss remains unnoticed; when suffering comes, however, people begin to seek a way out and to reflect about the meaning of life and its bewildering and painful experiences.”

“Man positively needs general ideas and convictions that will give a meaning to his life.  He can stand the most incredible hardships when he is convinced they make sense.”

“It is the role of religious symbols to give a meaning to the life of man.”

I also discovered Joseph Campbell, one of the world’s foremost authorities on mythology, during that phase in my life.  He documented the parallels between the mythologies of ancient cultures around the world, and wrote, among seemingly millions of other words, in his ‘Masks of God’ series:

“Man, apparently, cannot maintain himself in the universe without belief in some arrangement of the general inheritance of myth.

“Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. There is a real danger, therefore, in the incongruity of focus that has brought the latest findings of technological research into the foreground of modern life, joining the world in a single community, while leaving the anthropological and psychological discoveries from which a commensurable moral system might have been developed in the learned publications where they first appeared.  For surely it is folly to preach to children who will be riding rockets to the moon a morality and cosmology based on concepts of the Good Society and of man’s place in nature that were coined before the harnessing of the horse!”

In ‘Myths to Live By,’ Campbell wrote the following:

“... Carl G. Jung, in whose view the imageries of mythology and religion serve positive, life-furthering ends.... Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inward forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums. Thus, they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep.”

“The mythologies, religions, philosophies, and modes of thought that came into being six thousand years ago and out of which all the monumental cultures both of the Occident  and the Orient derived their truths and lives are dissolving from around us and we are left, each on his own to follow the star and spirit of his own life.”

“The first condition, therefore, that any mythology must fulfill if it is to render life to modern lives is that of cleansing the doors of perception (Aldous Huxley, anyone?) to the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves and of the universe of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind.”

Shortly before his death, Campbell worked with George Lucas on his first Star Wars trilogy.  Say what you will about George Lucas (yes, I know he couldn’t write dialog if his life depended on it), but he revered Joseph Campbell and wanted above all, I think, to provide a new mythology that would help provide the benefits of mythology to modern children like my own, raised outside of the traditional religious fold.  I have no problem with Lucas becoming a bazillionaire from it.  Just read how dicey it was to actually make and fund the original ‘Star Wars’ and ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ films.  Lucas took enormous risks.

To make my point, take my favorite Star Wars character, Yoda, from ‘The Empire Strikes Back,’ who said the following while training his young Jedi apprentice, Luke Skywalker:

“... for the Force is my ally,
and a powerful ally it is.
Life creates it, makes it grow;
its energy surrounds us ... and binds us.
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.
You must feel the Force around you ...
here ... between you, me, the tree, the rock.

Does that not sound markedly similar to Jesus, as quoted by Thomas, in his Gospel:

“The Kingdom is within you and it is without you.”
(Aside: the Kingdom as symbol of transformed consciousness)
“When you make the two one, and
when you make the inner as the outer
and the outer as the inner and the above as the below…
then shall you enter [the Kingdom]
Cleave a piece of wood, I am there;
lift up the stone and you will find me there.”

How about this from the Upanishads, stated a little more succinctly:

What is within us is also without.
What is without us is also within.

I will reveal now that this is really WarriorPoet’s Da .  Your Mom and I truly celebrate the remarkable, complex, sometimes profane, man that you are today.

Keep up the blog posts.  As Glenn Reynolds would say, “Faster, please!”  Thanks for encouraging me to flex my long dormant writing muscles.

WarriorPoet’s Da

Solitude, Loneliness, and Sharing Convictions

Solitude is a skill to be learned.  It is not easy to be alone and accept existence for what it is, but once faced, it gives you, or at least me, an inner strength that makes life worth living.  I have faced this challenge in life before, and I am once again facing solitude and what comes with it.  It forces you to face demons with only your wits and grit, but it also allows time for contemplation over what is important in one's life, even if sometimes that is just contemplation.  I myself use it also to blast some tunes and get on the level of artists, whether it be rock and rollers or blues men.  I use it to read, most often about philosophy, history, and current events, gaining knowledge about what this world is all about.  Many mythological stories have their heroes dealing with their demons in solitude.  Jesus faced the temptation of the devil in the desert, and Nietzsche's Zarathustra went up to the mountain to find his way.

Yet too much of a good, or maybe even necessary, thing can become toxic.  It is easy for prolonged solitude to bring chronic loneliness.  While accepting loneliness may also be necessary at times, there is a wide world of 7 billion people out there, all of us dealing with that same human existence of remembering our past, being in the present, and able to imagine possible futures. Sharing that existence with others is another skill to be learned, and another part of the human condition.  Ultimately, Jesus came back from the desert and brought his convictions to the people.  Zarathustra eventually comes down from the mountain to share his wisdom.  There is inherent risk in sharing one's convictions with others.  Ultimately, whether you believe he was the son of God or not, Jesus was killed for his convictions.  Since I myself am not a Christian, it appears that was all in vain.  He came back to the people, did his best to teach them what he knew and believed in, and then he was killed for it.  He was not redeemed or resurrected.  And yet to me, this may be a more powerful interpretation of the story of Jesus.  It certainly makes him more courageous when he is humanized.  It may not be a happy ending for him, but he was providing an example for all, an example that has spread life wildfire since his death (we can discuss whether his teachings are represented in current Christian practice at another time).  His life and his choices, how he interacted with the people around him, mattered immensely whether or not he was the son of God.

So I, along with the rest of you, find ourselves in solitude, at least at some point in every day that we live.  What will we do with it?  How will we use it?  When we inevitably find ourselves out of solitude, in the light of day, or the heat of the night, with others, what will we share with them?  There are no easy answers to these questions.  They are the questions of human existence.  For me, I have found several convictions on which to stand.  One is the belief in my own freedom, and therefore the belief that everyone else is free as well, whether we want to admit it or not.  This also makes us equal in a fundamental sense, equally free to choose our lives.  I believe in honesty, instilled by my parents, and something I have come to appreciate because it is a way to truly express who I am without deception.  I believe in integrity, related to honesty, but also including a moral aspect.  I have a moral code that in general is a live and let live philosophy, a do unto others as you would have them do unto you mentality (I am speaking generally; we can get into technicalities over a beer).  I believe that I have responsibility to follow that moral code that I have chosen for myself.  I believe in loyalty and oppose betrayal, because having come down from the mountain or out of the desert a few times believe the bonds we build are the framework of civilization and good will.  None of us deserve betrayal because that cuts the bonds that are so important for us to make it through the challenges of life.

None of us are perfect.  I myself have betrayed my convictions on more than one occasion.  Yet we still must act in the present choosing what we will make of our lives and what that will mean for humanity as a whole.  We remember our past triumphs and failures.  We can imagine what might happen in the future.  Here we are.  Ain't it grand?

The Crossroads

One of the amazing things (and burdens) is that us humans can imagine many futures and choose which way we go.  I personally am at a significant crossroads in my own life and the possible futures in my imagination stretch out years in the future, my eyes only seeing days ahead, but choose I must.  Fuckin' A, man, fuckin' A.  Sometimes it would be easier for someone else to choose for me, but that ain't no way to live.  So choose I will, myself.

Johnny Cash, American Badass

Johnny Cash is an American badass.  He stood where he stood.  He had attitude and mojo.  He was not one to back down, especially with a little help from Tom Petty.  He grew as a man throughout his life, often as a solitary man, wrestling with demons until the end.  He hurt, in the process turning a Nine Inch Nails classic into one of his own.  He saw a darkness and yet he endured, wishing peace to his friends and himself.  He was the man in black to represent those who were not represented.  He looked for strength in God, which is not my style, but for which I give respect.  He had a personal Jesus, and he spoke for the Lord to bring justice to those long tongue liars.  I can dig that.

In some ways he was a man of constant sorrow, but he did it with style, courage, and grit.  And yet he  still fell into a burnin' ring of fire and walked the line, perhaps shakily, but walked it nonetheless, for his true love, June Carter.  There ain't no grave that can hold this dude's body down, that's for sure.  Respect, Mr. Cash, respect.

Natural Rights and Existential Responsibility

The idea of natural rights grew out of the Enlightenment and is linked most closely to the writings of John Locke.  To Locke, there are certain rights that each of us have, that are universal.  In a state of nature, the reality in which we find ourselves, according to Locke, individuals are "in a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or dependency upon the will of any other man."  To him, there are bounds to the law of nature that require that "no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions."  He wrote in the 1600s and so did not have to face the intellectual challenges brought against this idea by the emergence of nihilism that found voice from, among others, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger.  Their interpretation of the meaninglessness of life and how we humans deal with it was interpreted (perhaps misinterpreted is a better word) by movements such as Nazism, to justify conquest and death on a mass scale, which was only stopped by the Allied powers in World War 2.

So can the idea of natural rights survive the challenges from nihilism?  Our current world is figuring that out as I type, and I will enter the fray.  Out of nihilism came existentialism, whose most famous adherent was Jean-Paul Sartre, whose most famous phrase is that man is "condemned to be free," but for him it is not necessarily the freedom with limits that Locke describes.  Natural rights, to him are a phantom from a false God.  They are just a claim.  He argues, however, that each of us is responsible for our actions in a very broad sense.  Not only do we have to accept our choices as our own, but our actions are choosing values for all of humanity.  Our actions are an example for all, whether we want to admit it or not.  We are defining what humanity is each time we make a choice, whether it be mundane or significant.

For Sartre, "man is responsible for what he is, thus existentialism's first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.  When we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men...To take a more individual matter, if I want to marry, to have children; even if this marriage depends solely on my own circumstances or passion or wish, I am involving all man in monogamy and not merely myself.  Therefore I am responsible for myself and for everyone else.  I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing.  In choosing myself, I choose man."  We are all an example for each other, and how we live our lives is defining the type of life and values that we would choose for all humanity.  It is a significant responsibility, and I would argue ultimately not a responsibility that the Nazis and other totalitarian movements accept.  The Nazis stared into the abyss of the death of God, and blinked, falling back on a world where it was justified to murder on a mass scale, conquering by force, gassing millions who were "not like them."  They were not choosing for all humanity.  They did not accept all of humanity.

I have written before about Camus and I will do so again because he did his damnedest to chart a path through meaninglessness and away from nihilism.  His book, The Rebel, faces directly the reality that man finds himself free without a God to tell him what to do, a world which does include absurdity.  He analyzes how this absurd world has led to the mass killings of the wars of the 20th century, if it is justified or if there really is a better way for humans to live.  He ends the introduction to this book thusly:

"Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is." (aside: another way of saying he is condemned to be free).  "The problem is to know whether this refusal can only lead to the destruction of himself and of others, whether all rebellion must end in the justification of universal murder, or whether, on the contrary, without laying claim to an innocence that is impossible, it can discover the principle of reasonable culpability."

Reasonable culpability.  This is an important phrase, and I argue one that reaches back in time to Locke's state of nature.  In this world where we accept we are responsible for our actions, and that by choosing certain actions, we are choosing for all of humanity, the idea of natural rights begins to come into focus.  For when we accept that we are in this position of responsibility, we accept that everyone else is also in this position.  We are all responsible for what humanity is and will become.  In this reality, in this state of nature, if we truly accept it, this means that we must let others be free, too.  For Camus, "rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love" and "real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."  Locke's statement that "no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions" makes sense, and is a value that all of us can choose for one another.  It is certainly a value I choose to emulate for the rest of you.  I hope you will too.  Humanity depends on it.

You Gotta Move

Sometimes life is just about keeping going, moving on down the road.  That goes for the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the woman who walks the street, the policeman on his beat.  When life and the world comes at you with all it's got (some would interpret this as the Lord getting ready), you gotta move to avoid being crushed.  Keep movin', y'all.

Rebellion

It is now July 5, the day after the Declaration of Independence was signed, when there was no going back for the men (yes, only men) who signed that document, giving themselves a death sentence.  What came next was rebellion, and, though this is debatable, a revolution.  I am in the midst of reading Camus's essay called The Rebel.  Being a Frenchman, he writes from a very European perspective, but he is piercing, brilliant, at times cynical, but ultimately courageous.  Why is it that the French revolution led from overthrowing a monarchy (something most people today take for granted) to the terror?  Is it inevitable?  What drives that social phenomenon?

For him, rebellion and revolution stem from a rejection of the current normative justice systems that individuals and groups of individuals find themselves.  Camus defines this as a contradiction in the human mind because it is where man finds himself in the absurd position of wanting clarity and seeing meaninglessness.  "It abandons us in this contradiction with no grounds either for preventing or for justifying murder, menacing and menaced, swept along with a whole generation intoxicated by nihilism, and yet lost in its loneliness, with weapons in our hands and a lump in our throats."

This nihilistic despair makes tyranny oh so easy, but Camus fought all his life to chart a path that avoided nihilism.  He makes a very technical argument, but it is one that is well worth examining closely. Quoting Camus:

"This basic contradiction , however, cannot fail to be accompanied by a host of others from the moment that we claim to remain firmly in the absurdist position and ignore the real nature of the absurd, which is that it is an experience to be lived through, a point of departure, the equivalent, in existence, of Descartes's methodical doubt.  The absurd is, in itself, a contradiction...  It is contradictory in its content because in wanting to uphold life, it excludes all value judgments, when to live is, in itself, a value judgment...it is true that it is impossible to imagine a life deprived of choice.  From this simplified point of view, the absurdist position, translated into action, is inconceivable.  It is equally inconceivable when translated into expression.  Simply by being expressed, it gives a minimum of coherence to incoherence, and introduces consequence where, according to its own tenets, there is none."

In other words, if one chooses to rebel at the absurd, at meaninglessness, there is meaning in that rebellion, hence meaninglessness is a false prophet.  The rebel believes in his protest, and that belief matters, it has meaning.  The absurd is not the final answer.  Man finding himself in the absurd has meaning itself.  How men and women act staring at absurdity is some heavy shit, but it certainly means a whole lot.  Murder and terror are not the answers, my friends.

Camus argues that those that follow absurdity to rebellion, revolution, and tyranny (the French Reign of Terror and the Russian Red Terror are some of the most horrific examples) are living a lie, a contradiction that allows them to think mass killing has justification or really anything to do with why they first wanted to rebel.  Camus even claims these mistaken ideas lead forward to the horrors and death camps of the 20th century world wars.  These leaders and conquerors of nation states are mistaken in their understanding of their absurd situation, and tragedy ensues.

For Camus, his final hypothesis on how an individual deals with his reality, that he is here and that he perceives the absurd around him, is to accept "limits."  Camus says, "We now know, at the end of this long inquiry into rebellion and nihilism, that rebellion with no other limits but historical expediency signifies unlimited slavery.  To escape this fate, the revolutionary mind, if it wants to remain alive, must therefore return again to the sources of rebellion and draw its inspiration from the only system of thought which is faithful to its origins: thought that recognizes limits."  He chooses moderation as a cardinal virtue for the rebel: "moderation, born of rebellion, can only live by rebellion.  It is a perpetual conflict, continually created and mastered by the intelligence...Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of man, in the place where solitude is found.  We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages.  But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others."

I started this post talking about the American rebellion and revolution.  It is unfortunate that Camus spoke little about how American rebellion fit into the picture.  He was a Frenchman, not an American.  So I can only speculate on where my country fits.  I will say that it appears we avoided mass reigns of terror through both the creation of the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.  Slavery was a stain that survived the revolution to be sure.  Perhaps the civil war could be seen as our reign of terror, where ideas about freedom and culture clashed so completely that mass death ensued.  But these were not purges, these were battles on fields where men fought and died.  And yet, with the war, slavery was abolished.  And yet, the republic as we know it survived the civil war.  That war was not moderate, but its aftermath just might have been.

John Miller proposes that the American revolution is a continuing force in the world.  The ideas that Jefferson encapsulated were too big to contain to a single time and place, perhaps even to a single country.  American global influence is evidence this argument has truth.  He further states that the ideas in the Declaration of Independence are a framework for continuing generations of Americans.  They certainly still inspire me, yet it also troubles me when I look at the current state of our country.  Many don't know why they celebrate the 4th of July.  The ideas of personal responsibility and moderation, which both Camus and our founders took to be central to preserving all of our freedoms, are lost in a sea of ignorance and other ideas antithetical to a truly free society.

Yet here we are.  Here I am, looking at these absurdities around me, yet reaching out, finding friends where I can.  I deal with the demons of excess just as all of us do, and I face them as openly and honestly as I can each day.  I will struggle for my own freedom and the freedom of others.  In that, I aspire to be a rebel in the true sense of the term, where I accept my own limitations in that struggle, believing "that rebellion cannot exist without a strange sense of love."  I am but one man, aspiring everyday to, in the words of Camus "discover the principle of reasonable culpability."  I am responsible for my actions in this world.  It is up to me how I will make it in this world, just how my rebellion could matter and make a better world, avoiding the excesses that too often adjoin it.  For a rebel at the beginning of the journey, before he is lost in his contradiction if he falls prey to nihilism, is someone who truly believes a better world can exist.  In that I rebel for me, for you, for America, for all of us who find ourselves in the human condition that none of us can avoid.  Once more into the breach.

Independence day

Here is the beginning text of the Declaration of Independence, which is what we are commemorating today:

The Declaration of Independence: A Transcription

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IN CONGRESS, July 4, 1776.

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.

Pertinent as ever, these words.

Violence, Versatility, and the Choices of Men

Two evolutionary biology papers have stuck with me because I believe they give a glimpse into that gray area where fate and human freedom clash.  I will be coming at this from a male perspective because some of the science is specific to men, and also because I am a man, but I believe similar and perhaps even richer arguments can be made for women as well, so stick with me, whoever you are.  The first paper is titled The evolution of violence in men: the function of central cholesterol and serotonin (unfortunately you can only see the abstract for free unless you are in the halls of academia).  I don't want to get too bogged down in the details, but the main point of the argument is that violence in men has been selected for through serotonin signaling, specifically its breakdown, when there is a lack of high cholesterol food available.  In short, men are hard-wired for violence, particularly when there is a lack of food available and hunting or fighting other humans for resources is necessary.  It is a dark side of human nature, particularly for men.  Does that mean we all have to be violent, to choose violence?  No, but it is an ever present storm that men must temper.

The second paper is called The evolution of dopamine systems in chordates (and the article is free of charge for all), and points toward another aspect of our behavioral hard-wiring that we all have (this science is not specific to men or women).  Dopamine is a neurotransmitter linked to many behavioral aspects in humans, and is in a class of molecules called catecholamines that also includes adrenaline (epinephrine), noradrenaline (norepinephrine), and L-DOPA, a molecule used to treat Parkinson's disease.  Humans have 5 distinct dopamine receptors that regulate a broad range of physiological responses.  Again, I don't want to get too bogged down in the technical details, so the main point of this paper is that the dopamine system is functionally flexible, which allowed for it to be co-opted over evolutionary time to adapt the brain to give vertebrates the ability to survive in many different environments and ways of life.  In short, it makes us versatile.

So here we have two papers that tell us we have evolved to be both violent and versatile.  Interestingly, the ancient Greek poet Homer seemed to have figured this out long before us scientists, encoding these human natures in his two most famous heroes, Achilles and Odysseus.  The Iliad tells the tale of Achilles and his centrality to the Trojan war with the Greeks.  Here is Homer opening his epic, telling us of Achilles:

"Rage -- Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters' souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end."

Maybe he wasn't getting enough cholesterol in his diet, and his serotonin signaling was not fully functional, but either way he is violence incarnate, a conqueror and killer of men.  There is no stopping his rage, and he pays with his life in the end, but not before bringing death to countless lesser warriors.  There is another man who was present on the beaches of Troy, however, a man who survived that war and many other travails.  That is Odysseus. Homer describes him thus:

"Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home."

Here we have the man of twists and turns, that man skilled in all the ways of contending, who himself plotted the end of the Trojan war with his crafty Trojan horse, as even the fury of Achilles had not been enough to end the bloody war.  Here is a man of endurance, suffering great pains while also learning from other men and trying to be his brother's keeper.  While himself a great warrior, it was not rage that defined him, but his versatility, his ability to weather many storms, who finally does make it back to his wife, where his final battle is to outsmart his wife's suitors to win her back.  Here is a man whose dopamine system is running on full cylinders, who will contend however he needs to in order to survive, to endure, to save who he can and learn from those who can offer it.

So who cares about all this crap?  Well for one, I do.  The stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey, with their mythical heroes put in broad relief the fates that we have been given, and also the range of choice that those fates provide.  We've got brains with serotonin and dopamine coursing through them, causing all sorts of physiological shit.  And yet knowing that gives us a perspective, perhaps a broader range of choices than if we did not know.  So how will you channel your catecholamines?  Will you burn with the rage of Achilles?  Will you endure like Odysseus, contending in all those ways possible?  What will you do?  It's up to you.