The Purse Seine

Here’s a term I daresay most won’t recognize: the purse seine. My introduction was as the title of a poem by Robinson Jeffers. More generally, the term refers to a net drawn between two fishing boats to encircle a school of fish. The poem captures something both beautiful and terrifying, drawing an analogy between a fishing net and government power over human populations gathered into cities (confined by economic necessity?) rather than subsisting more simply on the bounty of nature. Whether Jeffers intends a traditional agrarian setting or a deeper, ancestral, hunter-gatherer orientation is unclear and probably doesn’t matter. The obvious counterpoint he names plainly: Progress (capital P).

My own analogy to the purse seine is more pedestrian: cloth masks strung between two ears and drawn over the face to encircle the breath in futile hope of impeding the respiratory virus that has impacted everyone worldwide for the last two years (needs no name — are you living under a rock?). Like a seine allows water to flow through, cloth masks allow airflow so that one can breathe. Otherwise, we’d all be wearing gas masks and/or hazmat suits 24/7. And therein lies the problem: given the tiny particle size of the pathogen, cloth and paper masks are akin (yes, another analogy) to using a chain-link fence to hold back the wind. That’s not what fences (or face masks) are designed to do. More robust N95 masks do little better for the very same reason. Gotta be able to breathe. Other pandemic mitigation efforts such as social distancing, lock downs, and vaccines suffer from similar lack of efficacy no matter how official pronouncements insist otherwise. The pandemic has come in similar, unstoppable, year-over-year waves in locations/states/nations that took few or no precautions and those that imposed the most egregious authoritarian measures. The comparative numbers (those not purposely distorted beyond recognition, anyway) tell the story clearly, as anyone with a principled understanding of infectious disease could well have anticipated considering humans are a hypersocial species packed into dense population centers (compared to our agrarian past).

Although these are statements of the obvious, at least to me, I’ve broken my previous silence on the pandemic and surmise I’m probably tempting the censors and trolls. I’m not giving advice, and others can of course disagree; I’ve no particular issue with principled disagreement. Decide for yourself what to do. I do have a problem, however, with self-censorship (read: cowardice). So although this blog post is a rather oblique way of saying that the putative consensus narrative is a giant, shifting pile of horse pucky (disintegrating further into nothingness with each passing day), please exercise your synapses and evaluate the evidence best you can despite official channels (and plenty of water carriers) herding and bullying everyone toward conclusions that make utterly no sense in terms of public health.

Synthetic Knowledge

I had that dream again. You know the one: I have to go take a final test in a class I forgot about, never attended or dropped from my schedule. Most higher-ed students have this dream repeatedly, as do former students (or for those who take the educational enterprise seriously as a life-long endeavor, perpetual students). The dream usually features open-ended anxiety because it’s all anticipation — one never steps into the classroom to sit for the test. But this time, the twist was that the final test transformed into a group problem-solving seminar. The subject matter was an arcane post-calculus specialty (maybe I’ve seen too many Big Bang Theory whiteboards strewn with undecipherable equations), and the student group was stumped trying to solve some sort of engineering problem. In heroic dream mode, I recontextualized the problem despite my lack of expertise, which propelled the group past its block. Not a true test of knowledge or understanding, since I hadn’t attended class and didn’t learn its subject matter, but a reminder that problem-solving is often not straight application of factors easily set forth and manipulable.

Outside of the dream, in my morning twilight (oxymoron alert), I mused on the limitations of tackling social issues like there were engineering problems, which typically regards materials, processes, and personnel as mere resources to be marshaled and acted upon to achieve a goal but with little consideration — at least in the moment — of downstream effects or indeed human values. The Manhattan Project is a prime example, which (arguably) helped the allied powers win WWII but launched the world into the Atomic Age, complete with its own Cold War and the awful specter of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Borrowing a term from economics, it’s easy to rationalize negative collateral effects in terms of creative destruction. I object: the modifier creative masks that the noun is still destruction (cracked eggs needed to make omelets, ya know). Otherwise, maybe the term would be destructive creation. Perhaps I misunderstand, but the breakthrough with the Manhattan Project came about through synthesis of knowledge that lay beyond the purview of most narrowly trained engineers.

That is precisely the problem with many social ills today, those that actually have solutions anyway. The political class meant to manage and administer views problems primarily through a political lens (read: campaigning) and is not especially motivated to solve anything. Similarly, charitable organizations aimed at eradicating certain problems (e.g., hunger, homelessness, crime, educational disadvantage) can’t actually solve any problems because that would be the end of their fundraising and/or government funding, meaning that the organization itself would cease. Synthetic knowledge needed to solve a problem and then terminate the project is anathema to how society now functions; better that problems persist.

Past blog posts on this topic include “Techies and Fuzzies” and “The Man Who Knew Too Little,” each of which has a somewhat different emphasis. I’m still absorbed by the conflict between generalists and specialists while recognizing that both are necessary for full effectiveness. That union is the overarching message, too, of Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (2010), the subject of many past blog posts.

Offered Without Comment 15

Further to this blog post, see this quote from Daniel Schwindt’s The Case Against the Modern World (2016), which will be the subject of a new book blogging project:

As Frank Herbert, the master of science fiction, once put it: “fear is the mind-killer.” And this is the precise truth, because a person acting in fear loses his capacity for judgment precisely insofar as he is affected by his fear. In fear, he does things that, in a peaceful frame of mind, he’d have found ridiculous. This is why we would expect that, if fear were to become a generalized condition in a civilization, knowledge itself would begin to deteriorate. [p. 35]

Animal Farm

There’s a Joseph Conrad title with which I’ve always struggled, not having read the short story: The Secret Sharer (1910). The problem for me is the modifier secret. Is a secret being shared or is someone sharing in secret? Another ambivalent term came up recently at Macro-Futilism (on my blogroll) regarding the term animal farm (not the novel by George Orwell). Is the animal farming or is the animal being farmed? Mention was made that ant and termites share with humans the characteristic that we farm. Apparently, several others do as well. Omission of humans in the linked list is a frustratingly commonplace failure to observe, whether out of ignorance or stupid convention, that humans are animals, too. I also recalled ant farms from boyhood, and although I never had one (maybe because I never had one), I misunderstood that the ants themselves were doing the farming, as opposed to the keeper of the kit farming the ants.

The additional detail at Macro-Futilism that piqued my curiosity, citing John Gowdy’s book Ultrasocial: The Evolution of Human Nature and the Quest for a Sustainable Future (2021), is the contention that animals that farm organize themselves into labor hierarchies (e.g., worker/drone, soldier, and gyne/queen). Whether those hierarchies are a knowing choice (at least on the part of humans) or merely blind adaptation to the needs of agriculturalism is not clearly stated in the blog post or quotations, nor is the possibility of exceptions to formation of hierarchies in the list of other farming species. (Is there a jellyfish hierarchy?) However, lumping together humans, ants, and termites as ultrasocial agricultural species rather suggests that social and/or cultural evolution is driving their inner stratification, not foresight or planning. Put more plainly, humans are little or no different from insects after discovery and adoption of agriculture except for the obviously much higher complexity of human society over other animal farms.

I’ve suggested many times on this blog that humans are not really choosing the course of history (human or otherwise) as it unfolds around us, and further, that trying to drive or channel history in a chosen direction is futile. Rather, history is like a headless (thus, mindless) beast, and humans are mostly along for the ride. Gowdy’s contention regarding agricultural species supports the idea that no one is or can be in charge and that we’re all responding to survival pressure and adapting at unconscious levels. We’re not mindless, like insects, but neither are we able to choose our path in the macro-historical sense. The humanist in me — an artifact of Enlightenment liberalism, perhaps (more to say about that in forthcoming posts) — clings still to the assertion that we have agency, meaning choices to make. But those choices typically operate at a far more mundane level than human history. Perhaps political leaders and industrial tycoons have greater influence over human affairs by virtue of armies, weapons, and machinery, but my fear is that those decision-makers can really only dominate and destroy, not preserve or create in ways that allow for human flourishing.

Does this explain away scourges like inequality, exploitation, institutional failure, rank incompetence, and corruption, given that each of us responds to a radically different set of influences and available options? Impossible question to answer.