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Mankind's Seventh Mistake
Oct. 18th, 2014 09:59 amTwo thousand years ago, the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero described what he believed to be the six mistakes that consistently and continually plague humankind:
1. The delusion that personal gain is made by crushing others
Obviously, these hold up today. It is difficult to come up with a modern problem that doesn't fall into one of these categories. For almost 25 years - since my old good friend Charles Garbowski told me about these six mistakes - I've thought about this, and I think I finally have another one:
7. The inability to appreciate measures of time, distance and degree beyond our personal experience
This observation arises primarily in defense of science in general, and evolution in particular. The primary obstacle to the understanding of the rules that govern our planet and our universe -- aside from religious fundamentalism (which is already covered by Nos. 6 and probably 4) -- is the failure to comprehend truly large numbers.
As a species we are pretty good at understanding observed phenomena by filtering it through our own experience, taking something objective and making it personal. The way in which we relate to the world is naturally relative. We consider a man "old" by virtue of our awareness of current life expectancies. We consider a line "long" if it stretches outside of a door that was ostensibly designed to stay closed, or if it's taking more than 20 minutes for us to order our goddamned burrito.
We are not so good at reverse-engineering this process. In fact, it could be argued that the bulk of our active lives is spent trying to manage developments that arise in contravention of expected patterns. And it becomes especially difficult when we try to understand things that not only upset our expectations, but exceed our entire experience.
So when you start talking about billions of years or billions of miles or billions of stars, and understanding becomes intellectual rather than personal, we run into serious problems. Even an established, concrete figure like the speed of light -- 670,616,629 miles per hour -- is reduced to an abstraction because we don't know what 670,616,629 miles is.
Even if we are told that it's slightly longer than distance between Earth to Jupiter, we have a really tough time getting the picture in our head. To wit: this to-scale model of the solar system, which will make you feel truly, profoundly alone.
Likewise, the theory of biological evolution relies on subtle mutations and other factors over billions of years. But skeptics only hear that humans evolved from monkeys and assume that we lost our tails shortly before the fall of Rome -- perhaps because they cannot conceive of a time from before the oldest story they've been told.
In a way, my proposed No. 7 this is a more passive cousin of No. 3, in that we are insisting that a thing is nonsense because we cannot make sense of it. Whereas No. 3 is willful, No. 7 is inadvertent and perhaps even natural. No. 7 is rooted in ignorance rather than arrogance.
And in a way, it is a distant relative of No. 5, which might be sharpened as the steadfast substitution of faith and instinct for knowledge. But No. 7 is not a matter of failure to study; it is a lack of perspective. We cannot count high enough, live long enough or step back far enough to see The Big Picture -- at least, not without viewing it through a kalaidescope of math (which, incidentally, is where I start pleading the 5th myself.)
The most obvious problem with my proposal is the extent to which it is simply unavoidable. If it is an inherent flaw in our species, then it is not really a mistake, per se. Maybe it's just another bummer about being human, like heartbreak or hemorrhoids or the inescapable proliferation of reality TV programming.
1. The delusion that personal gain is made by crushing others
2. The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected
3. Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it
4. Refusing to set aside trivial preference
5. Neglecting development and refinement of the mind and not acquiring the habit of reading and study
6. Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we doObviously, these hold up today. It is difficult to come up with a modern problem that doesn't fall into one of these categories. For almost 25 years - since my old good friend Charles Garbowski told me about these six mistakes - I've thought about this, and I think I finally have another one:
7. The inability to appreciate measures of time, distance and degree beyond our personal experience
This observation arises primarily in defense of science in general, and evolution in particular. The primary obstacle to the understanding of the rules that govern our planet and our universe -- aside from religious fundamentalism (which is already covered by Nos. 6 and probably 4) -- is the failure to comprehend truly large numbers.
As a species we are pretty good at understanding observed phenomena by filtering it through our own experience, taking something objective and making it personal. The way in which we relate to the world is naturally relative. We consider a man "old" by virtue of our awareness of current life expectancies. We consider a line "long" if it stretches outside of a door that was ostensibly designed to stay closed, or if it's taking more than 20 minutes for us to order our goddamned burrito.
We are not so good at reverse-engineering this process. In fact, it could be argued that the bulk of our active lives is spent trying to manage developments that arise in contravention of expected patterns. And it becomes especially difficult when we try to understand things that not only upset our expectations, but exceed our entire experience.
So when you start talking about billions of years or billions of miles or billions of stars, and understanding becomes intellectual rather than personal, we run into serious problems. Even an established, concrete figure like the speed of light -- 670,616,629 miles per hour -- is reduced to an abstraction because we don't know what 670,616,629 miles is.
Even if we are told that it's slightly longer than distance between Earth to Jupiter, we have a really tough time getting the picture in our head. To wit: this to-scale model of the solar system, which will make you feel truly, profoundly alone.
Likewise, the theory of biological evolution relies on subtle mutations and other factors over billions of years. But skeptics only hear that humans evolved from monkeys and assume that we lost our tails shortly before the fall of Rome -- perhaps because they cannot conceive of a time from before the oldest story they've been told.
In a way, my proposed No. 7 this is a more passive cousin of No. 3, in that we are insisting that a thing is nonsense because we cannot make sense of it. Whereas No. 3 is willful, No. 7 is inadvertent and perhaps even natural. No. 7 is rooted in ignorance rather than arrogance.
And in a way, it is a distant relative of No. 5, which might be sharpened as the steadfast substitution of faith and instinct for knowledge. But No. 7 is not a matter of failure to study; it is a lack of perspective. We cannot count high enough, live long enough or step back far enough to see The Big Picture -- at least, not without viewing it through a kalaidescope of math (which, incidentally, is where I start pleading the 5th myself.)
The most obvious problem with my proposal is the extent to which it is simply unavoidable. If it is an inherent flaw in our species, then it is not really a mistake, per se. Maybe it's just another bummer about being human, like heartbreak or hemorrhoids or the inescapable proliferation of reality TV programming.
