OpenSpace4Life

"So, in order to protect the populace from their own governors, the law must be universal.  More, it must require transparent and consistent behaviour from those appointed to rule.  Hence, the rulers must function, not as individuals, but as applicators of perfect justice, the willing part (and here I use the term 'willing' meaning intending and asserting rather than merely accepting) of a machine for good government."
        - The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway, p. 125

In computer science we have a data structure called a search tree, where you can quickly find your way from the "root" data item to any of the "branch" or "leaf" items by following simple rules.  But whenever this structure is diagrammed in textbooks or on whiteboards, the root is always drawn at the top, with all the leaves below it:



A similar thing happens with any large organization: the org chart shows the boss at the top (whether that's a CEO, a governor, or the Pope), and like a search tree, the organization often becomes machinelike, blindly following rules and executing orders that come down from the "top."  In a natural tree, by contrast, the roots are of course at the bottom, and their purpose is to "serve" the branches and leaves by collecting water and nutrients and sending them up the trunk.  In both cases something is flowing outward from the root, but in the former case, accountability only runs one way: all those below are held accountable for their work by those above them.  In a tree it runs both ways: both the roots and the leaves provide nutrition without which the tree could not survive.

Is there a way to apply the natural tree model to human organizations?  Well, in the case of democratic government, there is a tradition of referring to elected officials as "public servants," accountable to those who elected them.  This is the definition of "accountability" favored by progressives, in George Lakoff's interpretation, while conservatives prefer to focus on citizens' accountability to the laws -- hence their greater tendency to make "I'll be tough on crime!" a major campaign promise.

The problem is that "downward" accountability -- Senator to constituents, or CEO to employees -- never seems to be nearly as strong as the "upward" kind (using the directionality of the org chart here).  In the case of most religions, I'm not sure "downward" accountability exists at all.  Is there any way to flip this tendency upside-down?

In the case of corporations, employee ownership is the obvious answer -- the CEO is always accountable to the shareholders, so if the employees are the shareholders, one can expect a much more balanced relationship.  So yeah -- corporate democracy now!

In the case of religions, at least religions "of the book," immutable top-down rules are inevitable -- but their interpretation is far from set in stone.  It would be interesting to know how many pastors, rabbis, etc. have tried involving their congregations in theological debates.

In the case of government, the problems are many: how to get citizens more interested in holding their leaders/servants accountable, how to keep politicians from acting more accountable to their biggest campaign financiers than to their constituents, how to give all interest groups the same level of access that high-powered lobbyists currently have.  Public financing of elections is probably a big part of the answer to problem 2.  The others I'll leave for later posts.

Through all of these issues runs the question: is there any way to consistently choose leaders who aren't power-hungry, who are honestly willing to think of themselves as servants?  And if not, does that mean we have no choice but to try to build machinelike structures with rules so inhumanly rigid that it doesn't matter how corrupt the leaders are?

Note to Philip Pullman fans: Quibble all you like about the strange rearranging of the plot in the new Golden Compass movie, or the unnecessary renaming of the polar-bear king from Iofur to Ragnar--but please don't complain so much about the lack of overt religious references. Rest assured: in this movie, religion is still the bad guy. It's a thinly-veiled allegory instead of a direct statement, yes, but if that counts as "taking the heart out of it, losing the point of it, castrating it" (as claimed by the National Secular Society), then the makers of the most recent Chronicles of Narnia incarnation must have done the same to their source material by failing to say outright that Aslan is actually a parallel-universe Jesus.

The key to decoding The Golden Compass movie's Magisterium/Authority is the use of the word "heresy," which as everyone knows is most commonly used in a religious context. Given this clue, it becomes easy to recognize the cathedral-style architecture of the Magisterium HQ and the cross that's clearly visible in the Magisterium sigil. The more clever members of the audience will see straight through the awkwardly-phrased line about how "some of our ancestors disobeyed the Authority, thus bringing the evil Dust into the world." And anyone who wants clinching proof need only spend a moment on the Internet to find out what the word "Magisterium" actually means. With that last bit of information in hand, the fact that the script takes pains to avoid saying the word "church" starts to look just plain silly.

Anyway...how about environmental themes in the movie? Well, it does include plenty of free publicity for polar bears, but "Iorek is drowning" doesn't really work as an anti-global-warming slogan. I mean, the guy lives in a parallel universe where, if anything, the problem seems to be too much cold. But how about the idea of daemons, which in my opinion is the coolest thing about the whole story? Doesn't watching all those little critters scampering and flitting around the human characters make you want to live in a green-built community that attracts wildlife rather than repels it? ...Okay, maybe not, but I had to try.

Link to part 1

Science sees itself as superior to religion precisely because it is so much less certain of itself than religions are. Scientists believe that their model of reality is the best that humanity has ever found, precisely because they have always accepted that it is not synonymous with The Truth and probably never will be; that we can only approach The Truth in successive approximations.

Scientists also accept that almost anything is possible. Science might one day literally find God, sitting out there in an eleven-dimensional quantum workshop building Universes from scratch. That's just one in a nearly unlimited ocean of possibilities. The only hard limits on that ocean are that the scientific model must always be consistent with empirical observations. A softer, but still fairly reasonable limit is that new theories should be consistent with the best-established ones we have now. Currently, I can think of four:

• Quantum mechanics: All matter and energy are made up of tiny entities that can behave as either particles or waves.



• Relativity: The speed of light is always the same, no matter how you observe it. If you travel very fast relative to the world around you, then space, time, and gravitational forces will appear to distort so that you still see beams of light traveling at the same speed.



• The standard model of cosmology: Planets orbit stars, billions of stars make up a galaxy, and there are at least hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe. The Universe began as a tiny speck about thirteen to fourteen billion years ago and has been exploding outward ever since.



• Natural selection: Through genetic variation and survival of the fittest organisms, all the diversity of life on Earth arose from a few simple primordial species which arose spontaneously about four billion years ago.

Note that all of these theories seem to run counter to everyday experience; they have only become so well-established because scientists learned to make the right kinds of observations. The fact that most people never get to make these kinds of observations firsthand is a major impediment to the popular acceptance of the scientific worldview.

Now, while scientific theories are always subject to change, that doesn't mean that change is easy. If you make a claim like "Everything we know is wrong and the world is just an elaborate simulation," or "The gaps in the story of evolution on Earth should be filled by invoking an intelligent designer," or even "Global temperatures are rising so fast that human influence must be the dominant cause," then you are making an extraordinary claim. Such claims aren't immediately accepted as valid theories; they require extraordinary evidence. In the case of human-caused climate change, this kind of evidence is available, but the theory is still not The Truth. It could be wrong. Most climatologists think it's probably right, but none of them is certain. A true scientist is never absolutely certain about anything.

Why would I, an essentially nonreligious person, try to make up something like the Church of Gaia/Earthseed?  Well, in order to solve environmental problems and ensure that they stay solved over the long term, we need what Harvey Mudd professor Paul Steinberg calls "the thousand-year institution," a collection of rules, roles, and responsibilities that is capable of surviving into the distant future without major changes in its core principles.  And religions are the institutions that have best proven their ability to last thousands of years while maintaining large followings.  There are disadvantages, of course--in particular, religions often lack the resilience needed to adapt the implementation of their principles to changing times--but the advantages are too great to be lightly ignored.

Given this, the project of reconciling science and religion gains added importance.  So consider this: a good scientist does not deny the posibility of supernatural explanations; s/he merely says "I can't study that" and focuses on theories that meet the standards of testability and falsifiablity.  There has always been an "outside" where science cannot yet reach, and there probably always will be.

Of course, the reach of science is constantly expanding; at the moment it extends, with some gaps, to the limits of the observable universe and back in time to a few moments after the Big Bang.  But while religious people may see this expansion as "pushing God into the dark corners," the truth is that God has currently been pushed out to about where S/He logically belongs.  After all, if God created the Universe, S/He has to be capable of acting from outside it.  And given that, there is no reason to deny the possibility that God could sometimes reach in and make the Universe behave in ways inconsistent with its own internal logic, so again, the existence of supernatural phenomena can't be ruled out. In particular, the true nature of human consciousness is not and may never be truly understood.

Nevertheless, science will continue to fight for a more complete understanding--the proponents of "p-brane" theory are already looking for evidence of gravitational forces coming from outside our Universe--and those who value faith will continue to fight back.  So do scientists have any equivalent to faith that they can hold out as an olive branch?  Well, there is the idea of "sense of wonder," the scientist's awe at the grandeur of the Cosmos and the marvellous order that has arisen spontaneously in the form of galaxies, complex molecules, and most especially life.  This provides at least some grounds for the idea that life is precious, an idea that motivates the systems of ethics that lie at the core of most religions.

According to Mr. Wright, my tenth-grade social studies teacher, religion provides people with answers to three important questions: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? The last question is particularly important, since the answers given are usually used to counteract the fear of death. Belief in an afterlife or resurrection is probably most of what makes religion so attractive to so many people. So if the science-based Church of Gaia/Earthseed is ever going to get anywhere, it will probably need to include one or more of these concepts: ( read the list )

It's pretty well accepted that on average, men are better at spatial or "left-brain" skills and women are better at verbal or "right-brain" skills. What would human history have been like if this were reversed?

Would women have been the hunters and leaders, men the gatherers and childrearers? If so, would the matriarchy be any more peaceful than the patriarchy has been? On the one hand, women would still be the childbearers and would care for infants, so they might be more inclined to avoid violence than male leaders are. On the other hand, more limited verbal skills and a history of hunting may hinder nonviolent conflict resolution irrespective of gender.

And what would all this mean for the environment? Would we call it "Father Earth" instead of "Mother Earth?" The Ancient Egyptians actually had a male earth god, but what if more cultures had been like them? It would be nicer to posit that the childbearing role would still lead to the "Mother Earth" association, linking nature to the gender in power and perhaps making environmentalism a constant throughout history. But all that is wishful thinking.

On the other hand, given that sexual roles would remain the same, patriarchy might still become prevalent, though in a form that might be more amenable to environmentalism. If the gatherers rather than the hunters were in charge, the concept of a battle between humanity and nature would be less likely to shape the policies of those leaders.