Carl Jung was a great psychologist of symbolism. He believed that the imagination roamed where articulated knowledge had not yet voyaged, and that it was the artist and visionary who first explored new territory, civilizing it, in essence, for those who came later. The study of Jung makes the dead religious past spring back to life.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of a series on Joseph Smith

Joseph Smith (December 23, 1805 – June 27, 1844) was an American religious leader and the founder of the Latter Day Saint movement whose current followers include members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Community of Christ, and other Latter Day Saint denominations. The early life of Joseph Smith covers his life from his birth to the end of 1827.

Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont, the fifth of eleven children born to Joseph and Lucy Mack Smith. By 1817, Smith’s family had moved to the “burned-over district” of western New York, an area repeatedly swept by religious revivals during the Second Great Awakening. Smith family members held divergent views about organized religion, believed in visions and prophecies, and engaged in certain folk religious practices typical of the era. Smith briefly investigated Methodism, but he was generally disillusioned with the churches of his day.

Around 1820 Smith is said to have experienced a theophany, now known as his First Vision among adherents. Around this time he, along with other male members of his family, was hired to assist in searching for buried treasure. In 1823, Smith said an angel directed him to a nearby hill where he said was buried a book of golden plates containing a Christian history of ancient American civilizations. According to Smith, the angel prevented him from taking the plates in 1823, telling him to come back in exactly a year. Smith made annual visits to the hill over the next three years, reporting to his family that he had not yet been allowed to take the plates.

Meanwhile, during one of Smith’s treasure hunting expeditions, he met and fell in love with Emma Smith from Harmony Township, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, whom he married in 1827. Returning with Emma to the hill in 1827, Smith said the angel allowed him to take the plates but forbade him from showing them to anyone except those to whom the angel directed. As news of the plates spread, Smith’s former treasure hunting associates sought to share in the proceeds, ransacking places they thought the plates were hidden. Intending to translate the plates himself, Smith moved to Harmony Township to live with his in-laws.

Childhood

Smith was born in Sharon, Vermont, the fifth of eleven children born to Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack Smith. Through modern DNA testing of Smith’s relatives, it’s likely that the Smith family were of Irish descent originally. Smith carried the Y-DNA marker R-M222, a subclade of Haplogroup R1b found almost entirely in people of Northwestern Irish descent today.^[1][2]

The Smiths were a middling farm family, but suffered a fateful loss when Smith Sr., after speculating in ginseng and being cheated by a business associate, was financially ruined. After he sold the family farm to pay his debts, the Smiths “crossed the boundary dividing independent ownership from tenancy and day labor.” In the next fourteen years, the Smiths moved seven times.^[3]

Despite the moves and the financial woes, Lucy Smith remembered the period of Joseph Smith’s early childhood as “perfectly comfortable both for food and raiment as well as that which is necessary to a respectable appearance in society.”^[4] Then during the winter of 1812–1813, typhoid fever struck along the Connecticut Valley, including the area around Lebanon, New Hampshire, where the Smiths had recently moved. A number of family members fell ill, and Joseph experienced a common complication whereby typhoid bacteria infected bone, in Smith’s case, the shin bone. Lucy later claimed that she had refused to permit her son’s leg to be amputated; in fact, the Smiths had chanced on one of New England’s most respected physicians, Nathan Smith, who “probably alone in American medicine at this time” advocated removal of the dead portion of the bone rather than amputation of the leg. After the typically horrific early nineteenth-century surgery without either anesthetic or antiseptic, Smith eventually recovered, though he used crutches for several years and had a slight limp for the remainder of his life.^[5][6]

George Edward Anderson’s photograph of the Smith Family Farm in Manchester, New York, c. 1907. (LDS Archives)

In 1814 the Smiths moved back across the Connecticut River to Norwich, Vermont, where they suffered three seasons of crop failures, the last the result of the Year Without a Summer.^[7] The extended Smith clan had already moved west to New York, and in 1817, Joseph Smith Sr. traveled alone to Palmyra, New York, followed shortly by the rest of his family—although not before Lucy Smith was forced to settle with some last-minute creditors.^[8] In Palmyra village, Smith Sr. and his oldest sons hired themselves out as common laborers, ran a “cake and beer shop,” and peddled refreshments from a cart; Lucy painted cloth coverings for tables and stands.^[9] When Smith was fourteen, he was apparently shot at while returning home from an errand, but was not injured. The bullet missed him, hitting a cow instead, and the perpetrator was not found.^[10] In 1820, the family contracted to pay for a 100-acre (40 ha) farm just outside Palmyra in Manchester Township.^[11] The Smith family first built a log home,^[12] then in 1822, under the supervision of Joseph Smith’s oldest brother Alvin, they began building a larger frame house.^[13] Alvin died in November 1823, possibly as a result of being given calomel for “bilious fever“, and the house remained uncompleted for a year.^[14] By this time Joseph Smith Sr. may have partially abdicated family leadership to Alvin,^[15] and in 1825, the Smiths were unable to make their mortgage payments. When their creditor foreclosed, the family persuaded a local Quaker, Lemuel Durfee, to buy the farm and rent it to them. Nevertheless, in 1829, the Smiths and five of their children moved back into the log house, with Hyrum Smith and his wife.^[16]

Joseph Smith had little formal schooling, but may have attended school briefly in Palmyra and received instruction in his home.^[17] Young Joseph worked on his family farm and perhaps took an occasional odd job or worked for nearby farmers.^[18] His mother described him as “much less inclined to the perusal of books than any of the rest of the children, but far more given to meditation and deep study.” Lucy Smith also noted that though he never read through the Bible until he was at least eighteen, he was imaginative and could regale the family with “the most amusing recitals” of the life and religion of ancient Native Americans “with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life with them.”^[19] Smith was variously described as “remarkably quiet,”^[20] “taciturn,” “proverbially good-natured,” and “never known to laugh.”^[21] One acquaintance said Smith had “a jovial, easy, don’t-care way about him,” and he had an aptitude for debating moral and political issues in a local junior debating club.^[22] Biographer Fawn Brodie wrote, “He was a gregarious, cheerful, imaginative youth, born to leadership, but hampered by meager education and grinding poverty.”^[23]

Religious background

See also: Cunning Folk Traditions and the Latter Day Saint Movement

Smith grew to maturity during the Second Great Awakening, a period of religious excitement in the United States. New York west of the Catskill and Adirondack Mountains became known as the “Burned-over district” because it was “repeatedly singed by the fires of revival that swept through the region in the early years of the nineteenth century.”^[24] Major multi-denominational religious revivals occurred in the Palmyra area in both 1816-17 (when the Smiths were in the process of migrating from Vermont) and in 1824-25.^[25] Small denominational revivals and camp meetings occurred during the intervals.^[26][27][28]

An engraving of a Methodistcamp meeting in 1819 (Library of Congress)

Joseph Smith’s ancestors had an eclectic variety of religious views and affiliations.^[29] For instance, Joseph Smith’s paternal grandfather, Asael, was a Universalist who opposed evangelical religion. According to Lucy Smith, Asael once came to Joseph Smith Sr.’s door after he had attended a Methodist meeting with Lucy and “threw Tom Paine’s Age of Reason into the the [sic?] house and angrily bade him read that until he believed it.”^[30] Conversely, in 1811 Smith’s maternal grandfather, Solomon Mack, self-published a book describing a series of heavenly visions and voices he said had led to his conversion to Christianity at the age of seventy-six.^[31]

Smith’s parents also experienced visions. Before Joseph was born, his mother Lucy, prayed in a grove about her husband’s refusal to attend church and later said she had had a dream-vision, which she interpreted as a prophecy that Joseph Sr. would later accept the “pure and undefiled Gospel of the Son of God.”^[32] According to Lucy, Joseph Smith Sr. also had seven visions between 1811 and 1819, coming at a time when he was “much excited upon the subject of religion.” These visions confirmed in his mind the correctness of his refusal to join any organized church and led him to believe that he would be directed in the proper path toward salvation.^[33] Lucy’s account, recorded thirty years after the period in which the visions are said to have occurred, suggests “a tendency to make her husband the predecessor of her son” by echoing passages in the Book of Mormon.^[34]

Like perhaps thousands of contemporary Americans,^[35] the Smith family practiced various forms of folk magic such as using divining rods and seer stones to search for buried treasure. Four witnesses reported that the Smiths used divining rods in the Palmyra area, and sometime between Joseph Smith’s eleventh and thirteenth years, he began “following his father’s example in using a divining rod.”^[36] Magical parchments handed down in the Hyrum Smith family may have belonged to Joseph Sr.^[37] Lucy Mack Smith noted in her memoirs that while family members were “trying to win the faculty of Abrac, drawing magic circles or sooth saying,” they did not neglect manual labor, “but whilst we worked with our hands we endeavored to remember the service of & the welfare of our souls.”^[38] Smith’s reputation among his Palmyra neighbors was that of a “nondescript farm boy” who was “lazy and superstitious,” and townspeople viewed his family as “treasure-seekers, not eager Christians.”^[39] Thus, Smith was reared in a family that believed in prophecy and visions, was skeptical of organized religion, and was interested in both folk magic and new religious ideas.^[40]

Smith said he had become concerned about religion “at about the age of twelve years,” although later he seems to have wondered whether “a Supreme being did exist.”^[41] Smith apparently attended the Presbyterian Sunday school as a child,^[42] and later as an adolescent, he displayed interest in Methodism.^[43] One of Smith’s acquaintances said that Smith had caught “a spark of Methodism” at camp meetings “away down in the woods, on the Vienna road.”^[44] He even reportedly spoke during some of these meetings, and the acquaintance described Smith as a “very passable exhorter.”^[45]

Nevertheless, at some point after 1822,^[46] Smith withdrew from organized religion.^[47] According to his mother, Smith claimed, “I can take my Bible, and go into the woods, and learn more in two hours, than you can learn at meeting in two years, if you should go all the time.”^[48] Still, Smith seems to have been significantly influenced by the interdenominational revival of 1824-25.^[49]

First Vision

Main article: First Vision

Like his father, the younger Smith reportedly had his own set of visions, the first of which occurred in the early 1820s when Smith was in his early teens and is called by Latter Day Saints the First Vision.^[50] The first description of this event was not published until 1832,^[51] which said the event occurred in 1821;^[52] however, most accounts date the event to the year 1820.^[53] The First Vision was a theophany (a personal and direct communication from God). The details of the theophany have varied as the story was retold throughout Smith’s life.^[54]

According to accounts by Joseph and his brother, William, the First Vision was prompted in part by a reading of James 1:5, which in the King James Version reads, “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him”; William suggested that Smith “ask of God”.^[55] William also suggested that much of the “religious excitement” in the area was caused by the Rev. George Lane, a “great revival preacher”.^[56] Lane is never recorded as having visited Palmyra until 1824, although he visited nearby Vienna in 1819 for a large Methodist conference.^[57] Joseph and his family could have traveled to sell cake and beer at this event, as they did other events in the Palmyra vicinity, but this is pure speculation.^[58]

Stained glass depiction of Smith’s First Vision, completed in 1913 by an unknown artist (Museum of Church History and Art)

The exact details of the First Vision vary somewhat depending upon who is recounting the story and when. Smith’s first account in 1832 dated the vision to 1821 and stated that he saw “a piller [sic] of fire light above the brightness of the sun at noon day”, and that “the Lord opened the heavens upon me and I saw the Lord and he spake unto me saying Joseph my son thy sins are forgiven thee”.^[52] Whether Smith regarded this event as a vision or as an actual visitation by a physical being has been debated, because a missionary tract published for Smith’s church in 1840 stated that after Smith saw the light, “his mind was caught away, from the natural objects with which he was surrounded; and he was enwrapped in a heavenly vision”.^[59]

In an account Smith dictated in 1838 for inclusion in the official church history, he described the First Vision as an appearance of two divine personages sometime during the spring of 1820:

“I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me…When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name, and said, pointing to the other, ‘This is my Beloved Son. Hear Him!'”.^[60]

It is unclear who, if anyone, Smith told about his vision prior to his reported discovery of the golden plates in 1823.^[61] According to Smith, he told his mother at the time that he had “learned for [him]self that Presbyterianism is not true”;^[62] however, mention of this conversation is omitted from Lucy’s own history,^[63] and Joseph never stated that he described the details of the vision to his family in 1820 or soon thereafter. He did say that he spoke about the vision with “one of the Methodist preachers,^[64] who was very active in the before-mentioned religious excitement”.^[65] Many have presumed this to be the Rev. Lane, but there is no record of Lane visiting the Palmyra vicinity in 1820.^[66] Joseph’s brother William was apparently unaware of any visions until 1823,^[67] although he would have only been nine years old in 1820.

Smith stated that the retelling of his vision story “excited a great deal of prejudice against me among professors of religion, and was the cause of great persecution, which continued to increase”.^[65] Tales of visions and theophanies, however, were not unusual at the time, though the clergy of many organized religions often resisted the stories.^[68][69] Early prejudice against Smith may have taken place by clergy, but there is no contemporary record of this.^{[original research?]} The bulk of Smith’s persecution seems to have arisen among laity, and not because of his First Vision, but because of his later assertion to have discovered the golden plates in a hill near his home;^{[citation needed]} the statement was widely publicized and ridiculed in local newspapers beginning around 1827.^{[citation needed]}

Years later, one non-Mormon neighbor summed up views of Smith and his family by their Palmyra neighbors by saying, “To tell the truth, there was something about him they could not understand; some way he knew more than they did, and it made them mad.”^[70]

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_life_of_Joseph_Smith

The dreadful allure of Edgar Allan

Issue 88, 12th May 2020 (iai.tv)

J. Gerald Kennedy 

| professor of English at Louisiana State University and author of Strange Nation: Literary Nationalism and Cultural Conflict in the Age of Poe (Oxford, 2016), currently working on a new book Peering into Darkness: Edgar Poe and Our Culture of Fear.

Both Poe and Kierkegaard were preoccupied with death, denial and fear – worries never more prescient than during the Covid-19 pandemic. Unlike the philosopher, the poet projected his obsessions into a world of stories filled with agnosticism and uncertainty. 

In 1832, five months before an Asiatic cholera pandemic reached the United States, Edgar Allan Poe started publishing magazine tales. That summer, the disease killed 3,700 people in Baltimore, where Poe was living, and in two early tales, “Shadow” and “King Pest,” he projected that crisis onto remote, Old World settings. Not until 1842, however, did he fully capture its horror in “The Masque of the Red Death.” Set in Europe, the tale depicts an arrogant ruler’s response to contagion. After his realm has been “half depopulated,” Prince Prospero belatedly invites a thousand “hale and light-hearted friends” to a Gothic abbey and then bolts shut the gates. Five or six months into the quarantine, “while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad,” Prospero defiantly stages a masked ball. But the soirée ends badly. Poe concludes: “Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” He implies that while we may temporarily escape a certainkindof death, we cannot avoid dying.

For many, the most frightening aspect of the coronavirus pandemic has been the collapse of our illusions of personal safety. COVID-19 has created shocking scenes, and its complexities have confounded medical experts. Both highly contagious and extremely fatal, the virus and its multiple, dire symptoms have been as puzzling as its insidious transmission by asymptomatic carriers. Factoring in underlying health issues, researchers still cannot explain why some cases remain mild while others spiral from slight discomfort to respiratory failure.

The social upheaval seems equally unreal. In the United States, armed protesters—incited by the President—are rejecting surgical masks and mitigation strategies. They demand the “freedom” to restart the economy, whatever the consequences. Understandably, many wish to return to work. We also long to resume old pastimes—like sporting events—by which (as Kierkegaard remarked) we tranquillize ourselves with the trivial.

Poe was — with the possible exception of Kierkegaard himself — the most deeply preoccupied with mortality, existential dread, and its spiritual corollary, despair.

Prospero’s masked ball, inspired by raging pestilence, illustrates this truth about our species: most people most of the time strive to deny an implacable fact—their own mortality. As Ernest Becker observes in The Denial of Death (1973), “The final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one’s own death, which is the peculiar sentence on man alone in the animal kingdom. This is the meaning of the Garden of Eden myth and the rediscovery of modern psychology: that death is man’s peculiar and greatest anxiety”. Yet as Becker also notes, most human pursuits, especially our most cherished achievements, represent symbolic denial.

“The Masque of the Red Death” exemplifies Poe’s powerful yet perverse attraction for contemporary readers.  The perverseness lies in his intractable fascination with death. For among his nineteenth-century contemporaries, Poe was—with the possible exception of Kierkegaard himself—the most deeply preoccupied with mortality, existential dread, and its spiritual corollary, despair. To say that Poe and Kierkegaard were both alive to death is to recognize how they explored, in different forms and registers, the linked problems of fear and denial already afflicting nominally Christian bourgeois culture. Poe devoted his fiction to the subject he embraced (in a preface to his first book)as his legitimate field of study: terror. He traced that terror to the soul and regarded it as a sickness unto death. Fittingly, Kierkegaard’s great work by that title appeared in 1849, the year Poe died.

Anders Sandberg, Patricia MacCormack and Janne Teller ask if fear of death prevents us from living

I have linked these pioneers of dread to bolster the audacious claim made by Michael Capuzzo in Smithsonian magazine: that Poe is “the most influential American author ever.” Yes, more influential than Twain, Whitman, Faulkner, or Morrison. In that article from January 2019, evidence of Poe’s influence comes mostly from popular culture: the Vincent Price Poe films, Poe’s face on the Sgt. Pepper album cover, Homer Simpson’s madcap recitation of “The Raven,” and so forth. But Poe has inspired such ardent, extensive homage, I would argue, because his strange works open us vicariously to the death-anxiety we usually repress. His tales deliver measured doses of the dread that paradoxically makes us feel more fully alive.  

One of Poe’s most distinctive themes, premature burial, helps to explain his morbid appeal. Although Becker assumed that fear of death dated from time immemorial, the French historian Philippe Ariès has constructed a more nuanced view. In The Hour of Our Death (1981), he traces the evolution of death imagery and funerary practices across the ages to contrast “the great modern fear of death” with an older attitude of solemn acceptance. The pivotal change occurs in the eighteenth century. Until then, Ariès writes, “incredible as it may seem, human beings as we are able to perceive them in the pages of history have never really known the fear of death”. Previously, people felt sorrow, expressed grief calmly, and acknowledged death’s inevitability. But meek acceptance of mortality faded with the advent of science, medical understanding, and enlightened self-consciousness. By the 1700s, Ariès says, “dissection had become a fashionable art”, and wealthy folk were devising wills to protect their remains from eager anatomists. Some also feared being buried alive and directed that their bodies be preserved until the onset of decay.

As physician Jan Bondeson documents in Buried Alive (2002), scientific debate about the uncertainty of signs of death, a problem elaborated by Jean-Jacques Bruhier in 1749, fueled a reform movement aimed at preventing premature burial. Across Europe, progressive thinkers pondered cases of apparent death and advocated “waiting mortuaries” for the recently deceased. Such topics excited anxieties about death not previously apparent, and analogous literary imaginings produced the cult of melancholy, the Gothic novel, and graveyard poetry. Suffice it to say that these complex cultural influences came down to Poe, a half-century later, via Thomas Gray, Ann Radcliffe, and others. By the nineteenth century, as Bondeson notes, living entombment was stirring new controversy, now inspiring “security coffins” equipped with escape mechanisms. This context illuminates Poe’s “The Premature Burial” (1844), a tale that epitomizes “the great modern fear of death.” Poe used the theme repeatedly to amplify death anxiety by describing the sensations of burial. 

While Kierkegaard contemplated death, even suicide, to free himself from the inauthenticity that masked despair, preparing his soul for a leap of faith, Poe projected his anxieties into tales rife with agnosticism.

In Poe’s day, melancholy also had a resurgence in the cult of mourning. Dread disguised itself as sentimentalism and promoted what Ariès has called “the age of the beautiful death”. Meanwhile, accumulating scientific knowledge was challenging religious wisdom. Hard geological evidence undermined the creation story in Genesis as well as the biblical reckoning of time and history. As Kierkegaard remarked sardonically in the preface to Fear and Trembling (1843), everyone was suddenly doubting everything. But while Kierkegaard contemplated death, even suicide, to free himself from the inauthenticity that masked despair, preparing his soul for a leap of faith, Poe projected his anxieties into tales rife with agnosticism. His doubt formed a veritable abyss, and fear of death—with utter uncertainty about a spiritual afterlife—lay at the heart of it all.

Poe had chronic, personal fears—the death of a beloved woman, madness, perverse self-destruction, and accidental burial. With his contemporaries, he also shared several social terrors. Poe was horrified, for example, by Jacksonian mobs and rioting gangs. As a Virginian, he feared slave rebellion, especially after the Nat Turner revolt of 1831. And, having experienced mass death in 1832, when so many acquaintances died of cholera, Poe feared contagion.

But the author’s deepest terror arose from unfocused fear, dread. That unease also permeated a seemingly confident, jingoistic American nation. An increasingly secular culture looked to the mass media, newspapers and magazines, for beliefs and opinions, quoting not preachers but pundits.  If, as Benedict Anderson has suggested, print capitalism began to conjure “imagined communities,” reading publics linked by collective national longings, it also began to cultivate audiences attracted by lurid news. Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” illustrates the impact of newspapers on public hysteria after a double homicide. The author brilliantly anticipated the “culture of fear” identified by sociologist Frank Furedi in the late twentieth century. In fiction, Poe prefigured many dangers that preoccupy our electronic mass media: frightening strangers (“The Man of the Crowd”), cold-blooded killers (“The Tell-Tale Heart”), sadistic cruelties (“The Pit and the Pendulum”), terrorist acts (“Hop-Frog”), uncontrollable pandemics (“Masque”), and planetary catastrophes (“The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”).   

Poe could not make Kierkegaard’s leap and wrote most brilliantly when sounding the depths of modern doubt.

In an age Ariès associates with “invisible death” and rampant denial, fearful themes resonate powerfully. In How Fear Works (2018) Furedi laments our preoccupation with “therapeutic” socialization and risk avoidance. Long ago we jettisoned the old beliefs that provided a “grammar of meaning” for anxiety. In the process, Furedi writes, fear “lost much of its moral bearing.… The fear of God was increasingly displaced by an unfocused and confusing and therefore often meaningless force: the fear of fear itself”. This is precisely Roderick Usher’s predicament in Poe’s greatest tale, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where an atmosphere of dread underscores the absence of faith or hope. Only “evil things in robes of sorrow” pervade Usher’s domain. Poe’s most celebrated poem, “The Raven,” similarly stages the torment of a man wracked by grief and skepticism. The speaker asks his feathered visitor whether there is “balm in Gilead” (salvation) or whether he will be reunited with Lenore in “some distant Aidenn” (heaven)—already anticipating the bird’s crushing reply, “Nevermore.” Sometimes, however, Poe betrayed a craving for faith, and in works such as “Mesmeric Revelation” he envisioned a transcendent order of being. He even composed a quasi-scientific treatise, Eureka (1848), to prove God’s existence. But he could not make Kierkegaard’s leap and wrote most brilliantly when sounding the depths of modern doubt. 

A bit like Furedi, who decries the “fatalistic influence” of our “culture of fear”, Poe also understood, however, that dread can paralyze us. He wrote survival tales (such as “A Descent into the Maelström”) in which characters escape destruction by resisting panic. His final tale of contagion, “The Sphinx,” unfolds during a cholera outbreak in New York. Distressed by daily news, the narrator swoons when a “monster” appears outside his window. But in fact the near-sighted fellow has been gazing at a death’s-head moth dangling before his eyes. Yes, perspective matters, facts matter. So do logic and reason. Like Poe’s narrator, we can inflate trifling risks into terrible threats. Just as ignorantly, though, we can dismiss deadly pandemics as trumped-up hoaxes, becoming, alas, the most recent victims of Prospero’s arrogance.

J. Gerald Kennedy
Issue 88, 12th May 2020

Disaster and disease won’t alter the human condition

Issue 88, 14th May 2020 (iai.tv)

Silvia Camporesi 

| Senior Lecturer in Bioethics & Society and Director MSc Bioethics & Society, in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College London

Do some societies trust each other and their governments more than others, and does this explain why stringent lockdown rules have been applied in some places and not others? Or should we be wary of this binary sliding scale reinforcing social stereotypes? 

After the lockdown, as measures start to be eased up around the world, who will we trust to see without a mask? Who will we trust with a kiss and hug? Who will we trust to have intimate relationships with?

These are some of the questions on my mind as we very slowly emerge from one of the most stringent lockdowns in Europe. In Italy, Phase 2 has officially started.

After eighty days of isolation, I am free to go out, and can finally go for a run in the park. I can also visit family within the limits of my region, albeit not friends until the Phase 3 is rolled out.

A friend of mine put this beautifully in an email: “I think people will have to restack their self-identities and relationships with family, friends and community. Will we be able to trust the judgment, behaviour of others to ensure our safety before the vaccine and even after? Trust will take on a new dimension I think. But so too will love”.

What does trust even mean?

Trust pervades the everyday reciprocity of social relations: it is the oil that permits the cogs in the wheels of society to run.

As the British sociologist Anthony Giddens theorised in his book “The consequences of modernity, 30 years ago, trust is the foundation of self and provides ontological security. Through primary relationships with parents and carers during the early years of life, we learn to trust others, trust ourselves, and navigate the world.

As we grow up, we learn to do this by trusting others beyond our family unit: from the first persons that our parents trust for childcare, to teachers, and then friends and lovers. Trust pervades the everyday reciprocity of social relations: it is the oil that permits the cogs in the wheels of society to run.

Trust is often quantified. Is there trust? Isn’t there trust? Discussions around covid-19 were dominated by numbers, as pointed out by sociologist Mark Davis at the University of Melbourne. Infection rate, mortality rate, graphs showing the number of daily tests, discussions on whether the expected target was reached, etc… all summed up the calculations and projections which we have been absorbing in the past three months. They have determined in one way or another (although, in ways that have not always been transparent), whether we are confined within the walls of our homes, or whether and when we are able to go out again.

Philosopher Nancy Cartwright asks if science deserves the trust we place in it

Research aimed at assessing the levels of trust of individuals linked, in a statistically significant way, with the compliance to public health measures is not new. To cite one of many similar studies, surveys conducted by researchers at the University of Georgia in the United States on public responses to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic found that respondents who exhibited lower trust were less likely to comply with public health advice. Similar surveys are being conducted now to measure compliance with public health advice in the pandemic.

Governance and politics are imbued with questions of trust and distrust. The expertise and authority of science and medicine are an object of trust, since so many of the life choices individuals are required to make depend on the expert knowledge possessed by others. This was evident in the discussion around lockdown measures and governments claiming to be ‘following the science’.

However, different governments have come up with different solutions (different public health measures) to the same problem. Can that be reconducted to low and high trust in governments? An article appeared in the Guardian which conceptualised trust in a binary way by investigating the cultural factors that shape different countries’ responses. The authors compare the lockdown model of Spain (the most stringent lockdown in Europe, on a par, with Italy’s) with Sweden’s, where social distancing was not enforced by the police but was left to individuals’ moral responsibility. The authors write that they were both “convinced that the “Swedish model” could not be exported to countries such as Spain or Turkey, where levels of social and institutional trust are much lower”.

This is an intuitively appealing view and one shared by many.

I have discussed my critical views on stringent lockdown policies with some friends and family. Fellow Italians have rebuked me: “Yes, of course, this could work in Sweden, or maybe in the UK” – apparently, along this continuum of ‘disciplined and highly-trusting societies’, Sweden ranks higher than the UK – “obviously it couldn’t have worked in Italy, where we don’t know how to queue (though we have been forced to learn in recent months) and we respect the laws only if they are actively enforced.” Plus, they would add: “Italians don’t trust their governments”. Had it been left to us Italians to behave responsibly and socially distance, this reasoning implies, we would not have done it. Trusting societies will follow guidelines voluntarily, it suggests, untrusting societies must have guidelines enforced.

The expertise and authority of science and medicine are an object of trust, since so many of the life choices individuals are required to make depend on the expert knowledge possessed by others.

I remain unconvinced. Isn’t this the exact sort of reasoning itself which reifies the stereotype? In other words, if this sort of argument forms the basis for stringent lockdown policies, it will also – necessarily – end up reinforcing those same behaviours that the public health measures were put in place to counteract.

As a matter of fact, the idea that trust varies along a continuum, and that there are ‘high trust’ and ‘low trust’ societies has been challenged by social scientists before. Among many other researchers, I have also investigated with colleagues the factors that lead to compliance with expert advice in a variety of settings from vaccination , to pharmacological treatment, to climate change, and in a variety of countries and cultures. Our research has shown that more complex and qualitative notions of trust, beyond quantifications along a gradient, are needed to explain the complexities of trust in expert knowledge systems.

There is not a single, simple answer behind child immunisation refusal, nor is there one which can explain compliance or lack thereof. Unfortunately, to make sense of the pandemic, simple and easy answers do not work. Iit is not a coincidence that the authors of the Guardian article cited above write that they could not explain, on the basis of their discrimination between low trust societies (i.e. Spain, Italy) and high trust societies (i.e. Sweden), why the model was not adopted by other Nordic countries, such as Denmark, Norway, that share many of Sweden’s social characteristics. This is because, while enticing, such binary notions of trust need to be abandoned. Other factors will need to be investigated to explain the difference between Sweden and the fellow Scandinavian countries, and the differences between Italy and Spain.

Vaccination elicits strong opinions. So does lockdown. Along the lines of pro or against lockdown, new friendships and relationships are being forged, others are being damaged.

Many people have found themselves divided along the lines of “pro” or “against” lockdown. I, for one, have been reluctant to discuss openly my views about lockdown with some of my friends, because I was afraid of their reactions. What if they did not agree with my views? Would I think less of them? Would they think less of me? Instead of sharing our views, and the information we believe support them, with peers we fear disagreeing with, we turn to the web and fnd other people who, although far away, may be closer in sentiment. After a while, the algorithms behind Facebook and Twitter may just propose back to you the same arguments and ideas, reinforcing your convictions that you are in the right.

Given this complex background, what will trust mean in a post covid-19 world? After the lockdown, as measures start to be eased up around the world, who will we trust to see without a mask? And who will we trust to kiss, hug, and have sex with?

Unfortunately, to make sense of the pandemic, simple and easy answers do not work.

Trust goes hand in hand with vulnerability as a concept. As humans, our condition is to be vulnerable. The Italian poet Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) captured the human condition beautifully in his poem: “Si sta come d’autunno sugli alberi le foglie” or “we are vulnerable, like leaves on a tree branch in the fall”. This is the human condition; it has not changed with covid-19. Worse and more devastating diseases have ravaged the world before covid-19, and we should be prepared for still worse diseases to emerge in the post-covid-19 world. We are still leaves on a branch as fall is approaching. On a day breezier than others, more leaves than usual will fall. Eventually, they will all fall.

Research is needed to discover the ways in which vulnerable people want to be protected, including, the older people, and those at risk of experiencing severe covid-19 due to pre-existing conditions. I suspect that many people classified as vulnerable — including the older demographics — will not want to spend the last years of their lives isolated from their children and most importantly grandchildren. I suspect that many would rather run the risk of being infected, and dying, by being closer to those they love. I may be wrong. The important message here is: we need, to ask them. The question to ask ourselves is then transformed from “Who will we trust in the post-covid-19 world” to “Who will we allow ourselves to be vulnerable with?”

Shifting the burden from ‘trusting’ others to ‘allowing oneself to be vulnerable’, allows us to think in a different way about the future, and to act differently in the present to make that future possible. Natural disasters and emergencies, including pandemics, will not change the human condition, and should not change the way we live and relate with others. Unless we let them do so.

 Find Silvia’s research here, and follow her on Twitter at @silviacamporesi

Silvia Camporesi
Issue 88, 14th May 2020

ESSAY

by Jake Skeets (emergencemagazine.org)

Observing the grief that has arisen during the coronavirus pandemic, poet Jake Skeets explores apocalypse, time, and futurity from a Diné perspective.

My family tells many stories. They are the best storytellers. They use language efficiently and precisely. They have a keen sense and understanding of time. It is through the reimagining of time within their storytelling that they conjure survivance. Of course, we are not allowed to gather today, as the world battles a virus. As a child, I remember the many times my family gathered over mutton, watermelon, and tortillas. We gathered near our hogan at the Other House. My aunts and their families live a short walk from my childhood home. We all refer to their collective homes as the “Other House.” Each home of the Other House holds memories that I remember during these long, tense days. The Other House holds time through our memories. The Other House as a construct and physical space is as sophisticated as any technology. The energy of our landscapes is enough to hold so much of ourselves. The reimagining and reconfiguring of time, I believe, starts with the land.

Today, I notice, among the newfound excitement of working from home, small moments of tense air. These small pockets of density last only moments before another joke cracks or a sarcastic remark bursts the room into laughter. My house is composed of three young adults in their late twenties. We are all relatively healthy, except for the existential dread of our family histories that include diabetes, high blood pressure, certain types of cancers, alcoholism, and mental illness, which are not uncommon among most Native populations across the United States. These temporary moments, though small, are still large enough to notice in the room. I feel their heft balloon in the room before it pops and plastic ribbons fall gently around us. I saw an article headline recently that said this stillness is actually grief. If grief, what are we grieving?

Perhaps grief is related to time. Once upon a time, I considered my best childhood experience to be the many times my older cousin brother would drive us to Gas Man, a local convenience store, to buy junk food. I would stock up on Mr. Goodbar, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and nachos with extra cheese. It is still argued that our Gas Man store has the best nachos because of the cheese. The store sits on checkerboarded land, so it is actually not on the reservation. This means it can and does have a liquor license. Each Sunday, while my brother drove us to Gas Man, we would see a line out the door of men and women looking to enjoy a drink, or many. Reflecting now, perhaps that is not the best experience to recall, as today some of my cousins have become those very men and women. Hell, even I have waited in one of those lines. Maybe the small air that heavies when I drive past the store is also filled with grief, and only with time is this grief possible.

Where Gas Man at?
Where Gas Man at?
Shí ga’ anishní
Far away, Far away,
Shí ga’ anishní1

Diné College (DC), where we all work, is considered the first tribally controlled college in the United States. It was founded in 1968 to address the needs of the Navajo Nation. Today its Board of Regents is selected by the Navajo Nation government. When the coronavirus pandemic first hit the United States, DC was very quick to respond. The college has restricted access to the campus. Like a majority of faculty and staff, we are at home. Our days are relatively routine. My partner and I make breakfast and then continue our day as a mix of work, chores, and breaks. My breaks are spent mostly playing solitaire, Scrabble Go with my older sister, or checking social media. Lately, my breaks also included writing this essay and other small poems. Several posts on Twitter and Facebook lament the impossibility of poetry. How can we write poetry at a time like this? How can we write poetry during the apocalypse? Why poetry? How poetry? This essay is not a reflection on why poetry is or is not necessary. Instead, this essay focuses on these so-called end times. I write through and about the concept of apocalypse, time, and futurity from a Diné perspective.

I ask again, if this stillness that envelops the room cyclically is grief, what are we grieving? The world faces a global pandemic, and that type of devastation reaching our reservation, where basic infrastructure and healthcare are already limited because of past and current conquest, would be catastrophic. It would be apocalyptic even. So each day passes with a reminder from the Navajo Nation President to remain at home and limit visiting our families. Each day more cases are confirmed and I am sure each one of us worries about a confirmed case within our family. The Navajo Nation now has the highest number of coronavirus cases per capita in the US, higher than even the hardest hit states of New York and New Jersey. High schools are now being turned into rooms for beds. High schools that once housed Navajo families watching a game of basketball, because rezball is everything on the reservation, are now housing Navajo people infected with this virus. That, for me, is enough for grief. However, there’s something else as well in all that grief, I think.

As with time, I find yearning is an element of grief because we yearn for and desire an absence of grief. As an undergrad, I would run several miles on Johnson Field, an outdoor track on the University of New Mexico’s main campus. During these runs, I would yearn for and desire several things. First, it was hard not to desire the mostly white men completing their workouts on the field. Second, I would imagine myself publishing a book and talking about a book. I would imagine titles of potential collections. I told myself, in true American Dream fashion, that I would become successful. My success, however, was tied to money, capitalism, and advancement of the individual (and not necessarily the self). Today it seems foolish to imagine myself not connected to my community. My community is what molded me, and my success is only possible because of this place. So I often imagine my younger self running on Johnson Field, yearning for something that is causing the current troubles of the world today.

Where Johnson Field at?
Where Johnson Field at?
Shí ga’ anishní
Far away, Far away,
Shí ga’ anishní

As with time, I find yearning is an element of grief because we yearn for and desire an absence of grief.

If grief is tied to yearning and we are indeed grieving and thus yearning, for what or whom do we yearn? The world before this pandemic was already lethal: see the list of conditions above and add to it the long list of things impacting Native and Indigenous communities across the country. I grew up with several cousins I consider brothers. More than half of them we either lost to death or incarceration. Every month, there are numerous headlines announcing the deaths that occur in border towns around the reservation. So if we yearn for the time before this virus, are we also yearning for those ills as well? Or do we yearn for the post-pandemic, which will include either further disaster capitalism or the so-called end times, both of which would be catastrophic for families in the United States? The strangeness for me exists in the fact that even yearning has been conquered. Our yearning has been colonized to such an extent that we can only yearn for the very things that result in colonization. Perhaps that is an apocalypse of the human condition as much as the human experience on earth.

Apocalypse is a funny thing. I do not mean funny as in humorous but funny as in there is not much to feel about it. For me, apocalypse has always been represented in two ways: as an end to human life or a replacement of human life. In the feature film Resident Evil: Extinction, we follow the story of Alice navigating post-apocalyptic Las Vegas where human life has ceased to exist due to zombie outbreaks. On the other hand, X-Men: Apocalypse is a prophetic tale about the character Apocalypse’s intention to destroy the current world and to replace it with a new super civilization. (Cut to my partner mocking Apocalypse’s line, “Everything they built will fall.”) Both of these representations seem overly dramatized. Apocalypse is actually a project of colonialism. The linearity of beginning and ending is the very construct of the American Dream (for which we yearn and grieve). Our futures are set in a binary of success or apocalypse, depending on how tight we tie our bootstraps. The essay “Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto” posted by Indigenous Action (indigenousaction.org) details the way apocalypse is a linear project that relies on a colonial past.² It asks the question, “Why can we imagine the ending of the world, yet not the ending of colonialism?” Colonialism is somehow both immune to an end and reiterates that human lives can and do end. The essay rejects a colonial future and relies on the deep time of Indigenous people. After all, Indigenous people have gone through many beginnings and endings, but never linearly and never without teaching.

There is a joke my father told me as a child. Language and culture loss continue to worry many Diné elders on our reservation; there are several revitalization efforts ongoing to address these losses. As a result, high school students can take Navajo language classes to fulfill foreign language requirements, and most universities and colleges now recognize Navajo as a foreign language, despite its millennia-long existence in the Southwest and its Athabascan relatives to the north and south. The joke my father told captures the politics of language and culture loss and revitalization within a singular punch line. The joke takes place in Chinle, Arizona, a small town located near the heart of the Navajo Nation. Its place name in Diné is Chʼínílį́. The joke is as follows: Two men are arguing over a meal about the correct pronunciation of Chinle. One says they are in Chinle, using the English pronunciation. The other says they are in Chʼínílį́, using the Diné pronunciation. To settle the dispute, one stops a restaurant worker and asks her, “Are we in Chinle or Chʼínílį́?” The worker replies, “Sir, you are in Burger King.” The joke acknowledges the existence of a Burger King near the heart of the Navajo Nation.

Today the Burger King is still a popular destination. Before the outbreak, I myself traveled the twenty minutes down to enjoy a burger and fries. Outside, numerous unsheltered Diné relatives asked for money or rides. Today the Burger King still has the unsheltered Diné, but no patrons dining inside. Instead a drive-thru line extends out into the main road. I repeat: apocalypse is a funny thing.

Where Burger King at?
Where Burger King at?
Shí ga’ anishní
Far away, Far away,
Shí ga’ anishní

Ever since I was a child, I have heard tales of apocalypse and rebirth. In the Diné creation story, worlds are destroyed in apocalyptic ways, most famously by a flood. Each time, the Diné were able to escape through the sky to find a new world. Each time, the Diné took teachings and items from the previous world into the new one, thereby building our current reality from the ground up. Today, in ceremony, we bless ourselves first with our feet and then upward toward the sky. Diné weavers start a rug from the bottom and work their way up. So apocalypses have occurred within our history. Each time, we were reborn from the ground up. I have attended many presentations by Diné medicine people, and they each talk about another apocalyptic event, never with grief but with hope. Right now, it seems hope is hard to feel amid all this grief. Perhaps the social media questions and posts should not be about the impossibility of poetry but about the impossibility of hope.

Hope, however, connotes a type of linear time wherein the subject that hopes is looking forward toward a future without the current challenge. This kind of hope I fear is linked to the onslaught of capitalism and the genocidal ideation of the American Dream. So maybe an answer lies within the reimagining of hope through the reimagining of time.The reimagining and reconfiguring of time, I believe, starts with the land.

Diné time has never been linear. As mentioned above, time is literally built vertically. Time is never on a horizontal axis, never point A to B. Time is hard to imagine through a Diné lens. I’m sure most Diné medicine people and fluent speakers of Diné know the concept of time. For me, a non-fluent speaker, I am on the periphery, ever caught between vocabulary drills and spelling tests and never between the conceptualization and actualization of the Diné language. I do not dream in Diné, and there lies the challenge. However, even from the periphery, I can see time as a nonlinear construct. In English storytelling, one famous phrase we learn early on is “once upon a time.” This phrasing marks time within a particular story as existing in a past and marked on a timeline. Hence the operative word “once,” as in “in this moment this happened.” To make a dangerous reductive comparison, Diné has a similar (but not quite the same) marker of time when storytelling, and that is ałkʼidą́ą́.³ Dą́ą́ is the reference to time. However, the words before dą́ą́ don’t mean “once upon.” After several days of wrestling with translation, I conclude now that there is no neat translation of ałk’i-, but through its broken components, we can piece together an idea of how time is constructed in Diné. K’i is related to planting, perhaps referencing the way plants grow from the ground up or a planting of a thing that took place in time, and this story is the harvest. Like “once,” the Ł takes center stage in this phrasing. I thought long and hard about the Ł and its translations. Many words use Ł, including dił (“blood”), łeezh (“sand”), łį́į́’ (“horse”), and dootłizh (“turquoise”).⁴

After conversations with my partner, we concluded that the Ł connotes a deep space that has the capacity to possess an entity within it, like time. Dił translates as “blood” and we see how the Ł here references an internal function of the body. Łeezh translates as “sand.” After each apocalypse, our deities carried with them sands from the previous worlds, sands from deep beneath us. This deepness of the world is also represented in the word dootłizh, which translates as “turquoise,” and from that translation can also mean the color blue or green. However, the Ł in this word connotes the deepness of turquoise itself. Whenever I hear the word, I first think of the deep black markings within the blue. Łį́į́ʼ is an onomatopoeia that translates as “horse.” The sound is a matching of the sounds of horses. It uses the nasal and guttural spaces of the head. A medicine person told me once that the breath is the connection between the physical external and the sacred internal, so sound, language, and breathing are considered sacred acts. The nexus being the nasal and guttural spaces of the head. Hair represents rain on a body and the neck represents clouds. This means the head makes up sky space and łį́į́’ is a direct engagement with that idea. The Ł in ałkʼidą́ą́ then becomes a reference to a story being conjured from a deep space and time.⁵ Time in actuality is built from the deepest spaces of the human and geological body and consciousness.

So perhaps time actually extends from within us and beneath us, from our pasts. And because we are in active movement, each moment of present time is actually our future. Our bodies are our future. Our landscapes are our future. So if we return to the manifesto of an anti-colonial future, we can also employ an anti-colonial hope. One that relies not on linearity but one that is deeply intimate, from the deep space and time of the self. One that is birthed from the deepest parts of our bodies and times. For me, the best way to achieve this is through storytelling and language. I think maybe this is an answer to the question about the impossibility of poetry: the possibility of storytelling. Storytelling has the ability to conjure the deepest parts of ourselves and reimagine time and thus reimagine hope. Storytelling allows us to embrace what is far away, remember what was forgotten, and hope for a future existing now. It starts with Ałkʼidą́ą́, “Once upon a time…”

Where’s the Other House at?
Where’s the Other House at?
Shí ga’ anishní
Far away, Far away,
Shí ga’ anishní
Far away,
Far away,
Shí ga’ anishní

Our bodies are our future. Our landscapes are our future.FootnotesCredits

• WriterJake SkeetsJake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He is the author of the poetry collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, winner of the National Poetry Series. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He won the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.

Nobody expects atoms and molecules to have purposes, so why do we still think of living things in this way?

Illustration by Claire Scully

Michael Ruse

is the Lucyle T Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and director of the history and philosophy of science at Florida State University. He has written or edited more than 50 books, including most recently On Purpose (2017), Darwinism as Religion (2016), The Problem of War (2018) and A Meaning to Life (2019).Listen here

Brought to you by Curio, an Aeon partner

Edited by Brigid Hains (aeon.co)

One of my favourite dinosaurs is the Stegosaurus, a monster from the late Jurassic (150 million years ago), noteworthy because of the diamond-like plates all the way down its back. Since this animal was discovered in the late 1870s in Wyoming, huge amounts of ink have been spilt trying to puzzle out the reason for the plates. The obvious explanation, that they are used for fighting or defence, simply cannot be true. The connection between the plates and the main body is way too fragile to function effectively in a battle to the death. Another explanation is that, like the stag’s antlers or the peacock’s tail, they play some sort of role in the mating game. Señor Stegosaurus with the best plates gets the harem and the other males have to do without. Unfortunately for this hypothesis, the females had the plates too, so that cannot be the explanation either. My favourite idea is that the plates were like the fins you find in electric-producing cooling towers: they were for heat transfer. In the cool of the morning, as the sun came up, they helped the animal to heat up quickly. In the middle of the day, especially when the vegetation consumed by the Stegosaurus was fermenting away in its belly, the plates would have helped to catch the wind and get rid of excess heat. A superb adaptation. (Sadly for me, no longer a favoured explanation, since latest investigations suggest that the plates may have been a way for individuals to recognise each other as members of the same species).

But this essay is not concerned with dinosaurs themselves, rather with the kind of thinking biologists use when they wonder how dinosaur bodies worked. They are asking what was the purpose of the plates? What end did the plates serve? Were they for fighting? Were they for attracting mates? Were they for heat control? This kind of language is ‘teleological’ — from telos, the Greek for ‘end’. It is language about the purpose or goal of things, what Aristotle called their ‘final causes’, and it is something that the physical sciences have decisively rejected. There’s no sense for most scientists that a star is for anything, or that a molecule serves an end. But when we come to talk about living things, it seems very hard to shake off the idea that they have purposes and goals, which are served by the ways they have evolved.

As I have written about before in Aeon, the chemist James Lovelock got into very hot water with his fellow scientists when he wanted to talk about the Earth being an organism (the Gaia hypothesis) and its parts having purposes: that sea lagoons were for evaporating unneeded salt out of the ocean, for instance. And as Steven Poole wrote in his essay ‘Your point is?’ in Aeon earlier this year, the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel is also in hot water since he suggested in his book Mind and Cosmos (2012) that we need to use teleological understanding to explain the nature of life and its evolution.

Some have thought that this lingering teleological language is a sign that biology is not a real science at all, but just a collection of observations and facts. Others argue that the apparent purposefulness of nature leaves room for God. Immanuel Kant declared that you cannot do biology without thinking in terms of function, of final causes: ‘There will never be a Newton for a blade of grass,’ he claimed in Critique of Judgment (1790), meaning that living things are simply not determined by the laws of nature in the way that non-living things are, and we need the language of purpose in order to explain the organic world.

Why do we still talk about organisms and their features in this way? Is biology basically different from the other sciences because living things do have purposes and ends? Or has biology simply failed to get rid of some old-fashioned, unscientific thinking — thinking that even leaves the door ajar for those who want to sneak God back into science?

Biology’s entanglement with teleology reaches right back to the ancient Greek world. In Plato’s dialogue the Phaedo, Socrates describes himself as he sits awaiting his fate, and he asks whether this can be fully explained mechanically ‘because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones… are hard and have joints which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones’. All of this, says Socrates, is not ‘the true cause’ of why he sits where and how he does. The true cause is that ‘the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me and I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence’. Socrates describes this as a confusion of causes and conditions: he cannot sit without his bones and muscles being as they are, but this is no real explanation of why he sits thus. In the Timaeus Plato develops this further, describing a universe brought into being by a designer (what Plato called the Demiurge). An enquiry into the purpose of the bones and muscles was not only an enquiry into the ways of men, but ultimately an enquiry into the plans of the Demiurge.

Now, however, the governing metaphors of nature changed. No longer did scientists think in terms of organisms: they thought in terms of machines

Aristotle, Plato’s student, didn’t want God in the business of biology like this. He believed in a God, but not one that cared about the universe and its inhabitants. (Rather like some junior members of my family, this God spent Its time thinking mostly of Its own importance.) However, Aristotle was very interested in final causes, and argued that all living things contain forces that direct them towards their goal. These life forces operate in the here and now, yet in some sense they have the future in mind. They animate the acorn in order that it might turn into an oak, and likewise for other living things. Like Plato, Aristotle used the metaphor of design but unlike Plato he wanted to keep any supervisory, conscious intelligence out of the game.

All of this came crashing down during the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. For both Plato and Aristotle, the question of final causes had applied to physical phenomena — the stars, for example — as much as to biological phenomena. Both thought of objects as being rather like organisms. Why does the stone fall? Because being made of the element earth it wants to find its proper place, namely as close to the centre of the Earth as possible. It falls in order to achieve its right end: it wants to fall.

Now, however, the governing metaphors of nature changed. No longer did scientists think in terms of organisms: they thought in terms of machines. The world, the universe, is like a gigantic clock. As the 17th-century French philosopher-scientist René Descartes insisted, the human body is nothing but an intricate machine. The heart is like a pump, and the arms and legs are a system of levers and pulleys and so forth. The 17th-century English chemist and philosopher Robert Boyle realised that as soon as you start to think in the mechanical fashion, then talking about ends and purposes really isn’t very helpful. A planet goes round and round the Sun; you want to know the mechanism by which it happens, not to imagine some higher purpose for it. In the same way, when you look at a clock you want to know what makes the hands go round the dial — you want the proximate causes.

But surely machines have purposes just as much as organisms do? The clock exists in order to tell the time just as much as the eye exists in order to see. True, but as Boyle also saw, it is one thing to talk about intentions and purposes in a general, perhaps theological way, but another thing to do this as part of science. You can take the Platonic route and talk about God’s creative intentions for the universe, that’s fine. But, really, this is no longer part of science (if it ever was) and has little explanatory power. In the words of EJ Dijksterhuis, one of the great historians of the Scientific Revolution, God now became a ‘retired engineer’.

On the other hand, if you wanted to take the Aristotelian approach and explain the growth and development of individual organisms by special vital forces, that was still theoretically possible. But since no one, as Boyle pointed out, seemed to have the slightest clue about these vital forces or what they did, he and his fellow mechanists just wanted to drop the idea altogether and get on with the job of finding proximate causes for all natural phenomena. The organic metaphor did not lead to new predictions and the other sorts of things one wants from science, especially technological promise. The machine metaphor did.

Yet even Boyle realised that it is very hard to get rid of final-cause thinking when it comes to studying actual organisms, and not just using them as metaphors in the rest of the physical world. He was particularly interested in bats, and spent some considerable time discussing their adaptations — how their wings were so well-organised for flying and so on. In fact, almost paradoxically, in the 18th century the study of living things became more interested in teleology, even as the physical sciences were turning away from it.

‘Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival’

The expansion of historical thinking played a key role here. History no longer seemed static and determined, and the belief that humans could make things better through their own unaided efforts meant that there was no longer a need to appeal to Providence for help. This secular ideal (or ideology) of progress put talk of ends and directional change very much in the air. If we as a society aim for certain ends, let us say an improved standard of living or education, could it be that history itself has ends too — ends that are not dictated so much by the Christian religion (judgment and salvation or condemnation) but that come as part of a general end-directed force or movement? Could life, and human history, be directed upward and forward from within?

Alongside philosophers and historians such as Hegel, in the 19th century natural historians began to speculate about organisms in proto-evolutionary ways, and to talk of goals — usually, one admits, goals involving the arrival of the best of all possible organisms, namely Homo sapiens. Here is ‘The Temple of Nature’ (1802) by Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s physician grandfather:

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves

Was born and nurs’d in Ocean’s pearly caves;

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These, as successive generations bloom,

New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;

…

The lordly Lion, monarch of the plain,

The Eagle soaring in the realms of air,

Whose eye undazzled drinks the solar glare,

Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,

Of language, reason, and reflection proud,

With brow erect who scorns this earthy sod,

And styles himself the image of his God;

Arose from rudiments of form and sense,

An embryon point, or microscopic ens!

In the writings of some of the early evolutionists, notably the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, we get a strong odour of Aristotelian vital forces pushing life up the ladder to the preordained destination of humankind. No longer was teleological language confined to the purpose of individual organisms and organs such as the hand or the acorn, but now it seemed to explain a general direction for the development of life itself.

It was in this atmosphere of fascination for the history of life that Charles Darwin developed his theory of natural selection. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was the watershed. He nailed the question of individual final causes, by explaining why organisms are so well-adapted to their environments. Teleological language was appropriate because such features as eyes and hands were not designed, but design-like. The eye is like a telescope, Stegosaur plates are like the fins you find in cooling towers. So we can ask about purposes. (Of course, questions about the dinosaur could not have been Darwin’s own: when the Origin was published, Stegosaurus still slumbered undiscovered in the rocks of the American West.)

Natural selection explained how design-like features could arise, without a designer or a purpose. There need not be any final cause. There is a struggle for existence among organisms, or more precisely a struggle for reproduction. Some will survive and reproduce, and others will not. Because there are variations in populations and new variations always arriving, on average those surviving will be different from those not surviving, in ways that will have contributed to their greater success. Over time, this adds up to change in the direction of adaptation, of design-like features. No God is needed — even if he exists, he works at ‘arms-length’ — and neither are any vital forces. Just plain old laws working in a good mechanical fashion. The teleological metaphor was just a metaphor: underneath it lay quite simple mechanical explanations.

So this cracked one side of the teleology problem: that of why individual organisms were well adapted to their environments. But what about the other side, the question of whether life itself had some overall direction, some overall sense of progress? What about the process that led to the development of humans? Darwin did believe in some kind of progress of this nature — what the Victorians called ‘monad to man’ — but he wanted nothing at all to do with Germanic, Hegelian kinds of world spirits taking life ever upwards. That smacked too much of a kind of pseudo-Christian faith, which he did not share.

There was a Newton of the blade of grass and his name was Charles Darwin

Characteristically, Darwin thrashed about on the matter of whether evolution had a direction. He agonised in his notebooks, and never really came up with a definitive answer. The closest he got was suggesting that improvement comes about naturally because each generation, on average, is going to be better than the previous one. Adaptations improve, and eventually brains appear, and get bigger and bigger. Hence humans. Darwin wrote: ‘If we look at the differentiation and specialisation of the several organs of each being when adult (and this will include the advancement of the brain for intellectual purposes) as the best standard of highness of organisation, natural selection clearly leads towards highness.’ What Darwin never really considered is the fact that brains are very expensive things to maintain, and big brains are not necessarily a one-way ticket to evolutionary success. In the immortal words of the late American paleontologist Jack Sepkoski: ‘I see intelligence as just one of a variety of adaptations among tetrapods for survival. Running fast in a herd while being as dumb as shit, I think, is a very good adaptation for survival.’

Darwin might have solved the teleological problem in biology once and for all, but his solution was not an immediate success. Most people really could not get their heads around natural selection, and frankly most people were not troubled by the question of whether the evolution of life had an end point. Obviously humans were it, and were bound to appear. All sorts of neo-Platonists were happy to believe a Christian interpretation of Darwin’s view of life: God set evolution going in order to ascend to Man. They could have Jesus and evolution too! In the words of Henry Ward Beecher — the charismatic preacher, prolific adulterer, and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe — ‘Who designed this mighty machine, created matter, gave to it its laws, and impressed upon it that tendency which has brought forth the almost infinite results on the globe, and wrought them into a perfect system? Design by wholesale is grander than design by retail.’

While Christians could interpret evolution in a Platonic frame, as the working out of a Divine creator’s purpose, some biologists revived Aristotle’s idea of vital forces that impelled living things towards their ends. At the turn of the 20th century, the German embryologist Hans Driesch described such forces that he called ‘entelechies’, which he described as being ‘mind-like’. In France, the philosopher Henri Bergson supposed ‘élan vital’, a vital spirit that created adaptations and that gave evolution its upwards course. In England, the biologist Julian Huxley — the grandson of Darwin’s great supporter Thomas Henry Huxley and the older brother of the novelist Aldous Huxley — was always drawn to vitalism, seeing in evolution a kind of substitute for Christianity which provided people with a sense of meaning and direction: what he called ‘religion without revelation’. But even he could see that, scientifically, vitalism was a non-starter. The problem was not that no one could see these forces: no one could see electrons either. Rather it was that they didn’t provide any new explanations or predictions. They seemed to do no real work in the physical world, and mainstream biology rejected them as a hangover from an earlier age.

So what of now? Today’s scientists are pretty certain that the problem of teleology at the individual organism level has been licked. Darwin really was right. Natural selection explains the design-like nature of organisms and their characteristics, without any need to talk about final causes. On the other hand, no natural selection lies behind mountains and rivers and whole planets. They are not design-like. That is why teleological talk is inappropriate, and why the Gaia hypothesis is so criticised. And overall that is why biology is just as good a science as physics and chemistry. It is dealing with different kinds of phenomena and so different kinds of explanation are appropriate. There was a Newton of the blade of grass and his name was Charles Darwin.

But historical teleology — the question of whether evolution itself takes a direction, in particular a progressive one, is a trickier problem, and I cannot say that there is yet, nor the prospect of there ever being, a satisfactory answer. One popular way to explain the apparent progress in evolution is as a biological arms race (a metaphor coined by Julian Huxley, incidentally). Through natural selection, prey animals get faster and so in tandem do predators. Perhaps, as in military arms races, eventually electronics and computers get ever more important, and the winners are those who do best in this respect. The British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has argued that humans have the biggest on-board computers and that is what we expect natural selection to produce. But it is not obvious that arms races would result in humans — those physically feeble and mentally able omnivorous primates. Nor that lines of prey and predator evolve in tandem more generally.

I’ll offer no final answers here, but one final question. Could a full-blown teleology, of the more scientific Aristotelian kind, reappear, complete with vital forces? There’s no logical reason to say this is impossible, and that is why I think it is legitimate for Nagel to raise the possibility. Two hundred years ago, people would have laughed at the idea of quantum mechanics, with all its violations of common-sense thinking. But there is a big difference: quantum mechanics was invented because it filled a big explanatory gap. This is Nagel’s big mistake: his argument for returning to the idea of purposes and goals in biology is not based on an extensive engagement with the science, but a philosophical skim across the surface. Quantum mechanics is weird, but it works. There is nothing in the idea of final causes to encourage such wishful thinking.

So what’s a Stegosaur for? We can ask what adaptive function the plates on its back served, as good Darwinian scientists. But the beast itself? It’s not for anything, it just is — in all its decorative, mysterious, plant-munching glory.

“The only true aristocracy is that of consciousness.”

― D.H. Lawrence

David Herbert Lawrence (September 11, 1885 – March 2, 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. Some of the issues Lawrence explores are sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. Wikipedia

(Contributed by Sarah Flynn)

Begins today, May 14, 2020. Peaks on June 20, 2020.
See chart for details.
Prepared by Rick Thomas, H.W., M.

Right click “Open Image in New Tab” for larger view.

52nd Prosperos Assembly from September 4 to September 7, 2020 at the Westin Westminster Hotel in Denver, Colorado, has been cancelled until next year, it was reported to the BB today.

Stay tuned and the BB will keep you posted.