Carl Sagan: When The Demons Begin To Stir

Carl Sagan (1934-1996) wrote The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark (1996) for the same reason he devoted most of his adult life to popularizing science; “When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.”

But he also points out that science isn’t a mere body of accumulated facts, nor a single organized industry run by men and women in white coats peering through microscopes. Science is a way of thinking, a method of inquiry. Anything utilizing the scientific method – that gorgeously respectable logic – can be called science.

Sagan writes correctly that science is “by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans.” Its history, which was just as if not more important to popularize than its fruits, "teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us." 

The eschewal of scientific thinking is a sentence to decay for a prosperous and ethically fair society. (On ethics, Sagan is clear that “Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action.”) Describing what he fears the future of the United States could hold, Sagan is worried but also hopeful because the preventive medicine is obvious and available. He explains his

“foreboding of an America in my children or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”

This is written at the water’s surface of the second chapter of The Demon-Haunted World with plenty of depth yet to be dived into. He sets up the context for what follows in this chapter, titled “Science And Hope”, with a warning that sadly needs reverberation around the halls of American Democracy now as surely as it will again in the future. This often quoted exert stands on its own, needing no summary or extra comment, so I will leave you with it.

“Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us – then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”

Affording A Sense Of Proportion

The upside of monotonous labor is the time provided for contemplation, if you're into that sort of thing. This may be a sentence to hellish boredom for people who have little to analyze or wonder about, but I savored it. Five years washing dishes at a small local restaurant had offered me many long a productive hours of this sort. I’m not the first to realize that creative juices flow less viscously when the body is occupied in repetitive labor of the sort that can be completed on autopilot. (For some, a long walk might suffice.) This is why I began looking forward to busy work nights, bringing a small notepad to help remember what came to mind on evenings like this one. 

I was mulling over something I read in Douglass Adams' outrageous and insightful science fiction novel The Restaurant At The End of the Universe. Zaphod Beeblebrox is captive and being shuttled into the Total Perspective Vortex, which he is told will kill him. The Total Perspective Vortex was created by a man named Trin Tragula in order to annoy his wife, who always told him to "have a sense of proportion." In his usual absurdly humorous tone Adams writes,

“And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he turned it on she saw in one instant the whole of creation and her relation to it.  

To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his satisfaction he had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a universe this size, then one thing it can not afford to have is a sense of proportion.” 

Unlike the limp fall characteristic of victims' usual exit once the machine's door is reopened, Zaphod sprang out like a flower on an April evening and ate the fairy cake with delight. The reason he survived, he is later told by Zarniwoop, is that he is actually inhabiting an artificially constructed universe (made by Zarniwoop) that was made specifically with him in mind. He concludes by confiding that "[y]ou are therefore the most important person in the universe." In the real universe, Zaphod is assured, he undoubtedly would have perished. 

Adam’s style makes quick reading and tempts you to move on past this ageless insight because of his ability to communicate it with innocuously absurd humor. Our sense of proportion haunts us, especially as we have discovered so much more about the literally incomprehensible immensity of the universe.  

Homo sapiens carries the burden of needing to feel a sense of meaning, which is not a burden shared by other animals insofar as we can tell. Not in the same way, at any rate. This need has historically been in conflict with our increasing understanding of reality, the limits of which have been expanded far past the alleged firmament. Its known limits have retreated to distances so great they can hardly be comprehended by us except in the form of numerical measurements. These limits may be pushed beyond the universe itself, if the multiverse theory is correct. This contradicts what common sense tells us is possible, but so do many other things we now take for granted. Its worth echoing the theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss’s reassurance, that if common sense were enough to understand the universe, we’d have no need for science.

Appreciating the size of the universe necessitates acknowledging our cosmically insignificant position. We're capable of terrifying influence locally on our own planet, but not cosmically. Yet despite what many worried minds believe, our unimportance to the amoral universe and our inability to significantly influence its fate is not itself the issue. The issue is the emotional reaction to this observation. People often react to cosmic insignificance with unenjoyable emotions and blame the insignificance itself rather than their own method of interpreting it. The irony there is that after a moment of shedding our anthropocentric view of reality to understand humanity’s position within it, you discover only a moment later that you are knocking your head over what consequences this understanding has for your view of self. In other words, we are back to assuming we are so important, or ought to be at the very least.

Marianne Fredriksson's novel Simon and the Oaks opens and answers this curiosity with beautiful brevity. Simon and his new acquaintance, the mysteriously felicitous and prophetic trucker named Anderson, are sitting atop a large rock, which Simon compares to the Rock of Gibraltar, overlooking Sweden's Lake Vättern. Anderson begins the conversation,

'Isn't it odd' he said, 'that all knowledge from the outside has you believe that you're nothing but a fly spot on the universe? But what comes from inside insists that you're everything and have everything.'

Simon hadn't given that any thought. He pondered for a moment before answering. 'I suppose its some instinct for survival persuading you that you're so damned important."  

Spoken like someone with a firm grasp of evolution, his explanation makes sense. The takeaway is that we are saddled with this natural inclination for better or worse. One of the chief tasks of Homo sapiens is to continuously recreate the stories it tells itself about its existence in light of newly discovered facts of reality, and doing so in a way that confers a feeling of importance and a comfortable sense of control. Professor Youens put it more succinctly to Lip Gallagher in the television series Shameless. "We have only two jobs on this earth. The first, to learn. The second, to cope." The alcoholic professor may not be a proper model of the best coping mechanism however.

The most human way of coping is through stories that make us feel our lives have meaning. Religion has long done this, and has in fact done a good job in sedating people when their discomfort arises. The Abrahamic religions even declare that, in the eyes of God and therefore the universe, our existence is paramount. They create an imaginary universe in which we, like Zaphod, are the center, and are protected from the vulnerability we feel when afforded with a sense of proportion. Today, increasingly more people reject the trappings of organized religion but adopt a vague belief in "something greater" for the reason that it makes them feel better. Need I explain that the benefit a belief may bring to the person or group that believes it is not evidence for the truth of that belief? The evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein gave an example (in a slightly different context about how false beliefs can be adaptive) of believing a porcupine can shoot out its quills. It can not do this, but believing it can will seriously decrease the believer's likelihood of approaching a porcupine close enough to be quilled in the first place. The belief may serve a purpose, but it is still false.

What I am building to is that a lot of time and energy is spent worrying about one's feelings and especially one's sense of meaning in life. We exert extraordinary effort just so we might feel comfortable with our own existence. We are but poor players who strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then are heard no more. Is there any confusion about what Shakespeare meant when he concluded that "Its a tale told by an idiot?" This indictment can be taken cheerfully if you, like myself, believe that the death of your brain is the end of your consciousness and anything meaningfully "you." Raising your consciousness to be aware of the idiocy of the tale as commonly told should couple with an understanding of your imminent destruction and allow you the beautiful privilege of perspective. Perhaps you’ll one day gaze back on a long life lived, or you’ll too soon cross that hair’s breadth between you and death. If looking back, what will you feel you have wasted time and worry over? Where could you have been more kind, more attentive to the stories of others? If your end comes tomorrow, or next week, or next year, what would you most regret having squandered your precious time and happiness over now? Considerations of this kind turn many troubles trivial as you decide what matters most to you.

Lifetimes of scientific inquiry have revealed a poetic aspect to our existence that also ought to be kept in mind. We are not separate spectators observing the universe, we are the universe. We do not reside within it but arise from it. Echoing Carl Sagan’s fond phrase that we are all “starstuff”, Lawrence Krauss explained this in a 2009 lecture on A Universe From Nothing in a manner necessary to include in full. He said,

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.”

The obvious conclusion is that insofar as we learn about the world and everything outside it, as many have said before, we are at least one example of the universe knowing itself. Richard Dawkins wrote in The Selfish Gene that "Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence." Could a similar statement be made about a universe "coming to age" when it first becomes aware of its own existence? If so, we are on the forefront of that coming of age tale, and its author is no idiot. 

Booker T. Washington and The Great Responsibility of Being Free

Any time given to reading Booker Taliaferro Washington’s (1856-1915) autobiography Up From Slavery will be rewarded with necessary complications about what freedom meant at the time of the abolition of American slavery. Like most of the other people born or brought into the United States of America as capital, he was freed when the Union Army conquered the South and brought the Emancipation Proclamation with it. “Finally the war closed, and the day of freedom came,” wrote Washington. The day of freedom came to him in Virginia, where he'd spent his entire young life up to that point as another person's property. In this same state the author of the morally irrefutable American Declaration of Independence had lived and owned his own children as property too. (Prior to DNA sequencing, the main line of evidence for his fathering of Sally Hemmings’ children was that he allegedly promised Sally he would manumit their children when they reached adulthood. The rumor was confirmed by his keeping good on the promise, and that they were the only humans he ever set free from his enslavement.)

Emancipation was not equality and it was not the salvation it has often been portrayed as to the public. Emancipation opened a door that led to a world of problems people with dark skin had been forbidden to prepare for by design of America's Peculiar Institution. When a Union Army officer read the Emancipation Proclamation to Washington and the other slaves gathered around the plantation mansion, the reality of their sudden situation soon sunk in. Washington describes the reality as such:

“The wild rejoicing on the part of the emancipated coloured people lasted but for a brief period, for I noticed that by the time they returned to their cabins there was a change in their feelings. The great responsibility of being free, of having charge of themselves, of having to think and plan for themselves and their children, seemed to take possession of them. It was very much like suddenly turning a youth of ten or twelve years out into the world to provide for himself. In a few hours the great questions with which the Anglo Saxon race had been grappling for centuries had been thrown upon these people to be solved. These were the questions of a home, a living, the rearing of children, education, citizenship, and the establishment and support of churches. Was it any wonder that within a few hours the wild rejoicing ceased and a feeling of deep gloom seemed to pervade the slave quarters? To some it seemed that, now that they were in actual possession of it, freedom was a more serious thing than they had expected to find it.”

Freedom is serious enough for landed and educated people to navigate. It was made intentionally more difficult for emancipated black Americans by denial of reparations and often successful efforts to keep rights and privileges only in the hands of white society. This denial reinforced itself by circular reasoning: A group is forcefully denied opportunity, unable to achieve similar prosperity as their oppressors as a result, and this lack of achievement is then declared to be the result of inherent deficiencies within that group and used as justification for further oppression.

For some elderly freed persons, freedom was beyond their ability to bear. On Washington's plantation, which he says was not nearly as violent as some others, this coupled with a sentimental attachment to their master’s family, who they raised for most of their lives. As a result, some decided to stay on working and living at the plantation after being freed. Most freed persons were too happy to leave, but those who stayed to live where they’d been held by force had their rationale. Decisions that seem otherwise astounding appear much more rational when the details of one’s circumstances and mental scope of future possibilities is better understood. When we put ourselves in the shoes of people from the past, our folly is that we put ourselves in their shoes with our own memories, knowledge and expectations.

Freedom is still a serious matter and always will be. Depending on your perspective, Homo sapiens was either gifted or burdened by its evolutionary history with the ability and the unshakable need to make moral judgments. The entire scope of human conflict has and will result from the question “what ought we to do?” This question is present in every choice made and underlies the problem of freedom. For example, how ought education be conducted and for how many years? How ought children to be raised and to be reprimanded for bad behavior? How ought criminals be weeded out, tried, and reformed or isolated from the public? Ought we to prioritize individuality or community? If anything, this simple realization stresses the importance for every individual to think critically, honestly, and above all, withhold opinions when they've no reason to have one.

Most of our pressing questions are sheltered under the umbrella inquiry that asks, how should I effect the experiences of the poeple and other feeling creatures around me? Samad Behrangi’s The Little Black Fish turns the question into an answer. In Hooshang Amuzegar’s translation, the Little Black Fish restores her confidence while traversing dangerous waters by assuring itself,

“I know that death can come at any moment. As long as I can stay alive I’ll do everything in my power to thwart it. Of course, once death is inevitable it becomes unimportant. What is important is the effect my life, or my death for that matter, will have on others…”

Behrangi offers a simple yet meaningful dictum. (It is meaningful because the Little black Fish's goals were good. This is obvious because after saying these words it soon dies while saving another fish from the belly of a heron.) Washington shares this belief, which evidently underlies his assertion “that those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.” He was neither first nor last to realize this though. It is notably a central tenet in The Book of Joy by the fourteenth Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. Happiness is not the same as temporary pleasure, it is more akin to the active pursuit of something you feel is meaningful.

Working to turn the human world into a more fair, safe and sustainable realm is both meaningful and laudable, but the conflict is in the details. What does a fair and free world look like? Who deserves the help of those who can provide it, and what does effective help look like? Offering bibles and prayers to people in need of clean food, water, and access to healthcare certainly isn't it. But we'll avoid getting caught in the weeds here. For the sake of argument, we'll assume that one's aims for a future that is more safe, fair, and free from unnecessary suffering applies to all people and even all feeling creatures. So if you believe this to be a good aim, then what?

Sincere belief in the righteousness of one's goal isn't always sufficient to pursue it. Trouble comes  during moments when tempting incentives are aligned against your pursuance of that goal. Overcoming these incentives requires that you understand when and how they act upon you, which is nearly impossible if you do not first understand yourself. 

You are very difficult to understand of course. If you are like most others you are adept at excusing yourself for, if not outright ignoring, your sins and shortcomings. The philosopher Martin Buber expressed this well through a religious parable about when God called upon Adam in the Garden of Eden. In The Way of Man According To The Teaching of Hasidism he writes,

“Adam hides himself to avoid rendering accounts, to escape responsibility for his way of living. Every man hides for this purpose, for every man is Adam and finds himself in Adam’s situation. To escape responsibility for his life, he turns existence into a series of hideouts.”

Self-reflection takes courage because we are often afraid of what we might discover. Of course, in order to improve, you have to learn how you became who you are from who you used to be. That is, why do we hold our beliefs about the way the world works, and how do we make decisions?

Our actions in the world are not truly free. We are born with genetic codes, parents, siblings, local communities, nationalities, and all other constructions of influences which we did not choose, and which are themselves the product of historical processes. (Not to mention natural circumstances, down to the laws of physics by which we must abide and did not create.) Peering into your past is to look back at history, and then beyond our personal past into the history that created the particular circumstances that shaped our life's experiences. This is what John Tosh emphasized when he wrote in The Pursuit of History that “[t]o be free is not to enjoy total freedom of action – that is a Utopian dream – but to know how far one’s action and thought are conditioned by the heritage of the past.” 

The heritage of the past made the freedom of emancipation incomplete, and therefore not freedom at all. This is best summarized in the ironic falsehood that the Army officer told Washington and the crowd on the day of their emancipation. “After the reading,” Washington wrote, “we were told that we were all free, and could go when and where we pleased.” Washington discovered this was untrue while making his way to the Hampton Institute, a boarding school for blacks in Virginia. He was the only black person on board a stage coach that was travelling over the cold mountains of Virginia. At night it stopped at a small hotel, where the passengers all were given room and supper while he was told the inn would not take a black lodger. Nor would they sell him food. He had an experience that black Americans the country over have still today. “It was my first experience,” he wrote, “in finding out what the colour of my skin meant.” Left outside to suffer sickness or death, Washington walked and walked and walked to keep warm during the night until the party left again in the morning.

The most generalized history of what followed the civil war is well known to even an occasional spectator of American history. Jim Crow soon legalized the violent separation of blacks and whites, homeowner covenants and red-lining stopped blacks from free relocation and encouraged the process of urban ghettoization, and lynchings were committed without a hint of justice. The list is long, and it adds more emphasis to two salient points. The first is that emancipation did not mean freedom. The second is that the responsibility of freedom was hard to bear precisely because it was not complete and because the conditions of bondage were designed to deny black people all of the opportunities, education, and generational wisdom accumulated through decades of freedom which white society had at its disposal. 

How then have African Americans gone about claiming and obtaining the full measure of their freedom while also endeavoring like everybody else to bear its accompanying responsibility? How has the larger society in which they are a part of helped or hindered their efforts and aims, and how has this varied by location and time? Frequently the non-black general public have vague, uncomplicated, and as a result, often false ideas about how these should be answered. The answers are by necessity complicated, given to general trends with exceptions that sometimes prove insightful. and other times are solely curiosities.

Emphasizing black America's past and present oppression does not ignore the progress made toward racial equality. The emphasis is necessary for identifying the origins of the historical processes, and the processes themselves, which have resulted in the settings of black experiences today. The progress so far achieved cannot be appreciated without a more complete comprehension of where we've progressed from, and no amount of progress will be sufficient to ignore the problems that still exist. Everybody understands this when it applies to issues that affect them personally, but wish to ignore it when they might be implicated in the problem. 

The temptation to reduce black Americans to the role of perpetual victim may follow continuous descriptions of their suffering, but this reduction denies both black agency and therefore history. This is especially prominent among those inoculated against a particularly insidious strain of the avian flu- who are resistant to the virulent desire to ostrich one's own head deep in the sand.  The remedy they administer to the flu-infected is an emphasis on oppression so singular that it morphs from one vital factor of African American history into the only shape that history could ever take. One of the effects of this is that the only household names of influential black Americans are not the inventors, engineers, politicians, etc., but Civil Rights leaders or victims of racist violence. Having recognized this, we have a responsibility to educate ourselves, to be critical of the thought processes and available or cherry picked information beneath our beliefs, and actively pursue the most complete truth whenever it is clear we do not possess it.

A person can be said to be growing up as they obtain a sense of duty and begin taking responsibility for themselves. This is serious business. People live and die for their ideas of how that responsibility ought to be taken up. Wars are waged, people enslaved, and sometimes truly good ideas do prevail. Other times, bad ideas triumph enough to remind us that the universe cares not for justice, and that if there is to be any of it at all, it begins and ends with us. In other words, how we bear the responsibility of being free. 

Cahokia, It’s Disintegration, And Our Need For Explanation

"Anyone" Charles Mann wrote in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, "who traveled up the Mississippi in 1100 A.D. would have seen it looming in the distance: a four-level earthen mound bigger than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Around it like echoes were as many as 120 smaller mounds, some topped by tall wooden palisades, which were in turn ringed by a network of irrigation and transportation canals; carefully located fields of maize; and hundreds of red-and-white-plastered wood homes with high-peaked, deeply thatched roofs like those on traditional Japanese farms... Covering five square miles and housing at least fifteen thousand people, Cahokia was the biggest concentration of people north of the Rio Grande until the eighteenth century."

Cahokia is the name given to the site of the largest, and at the time most populated, of American Indian societies throughout the eastern half of North America, ranging from Louisiana up to Canada, characterized by large earthen mounds. It is the name of the site but not of the people who built it, nor the name of the language they spoke. This information isn't known, and the name Cahokia is that of a foreign group who moved in to the area much later. Despite this, there is a fair deal known about Cahokian society. Investigation has determined, for example, that the mounds supported dwellings or temples for the society's elite, which included their priests.

Humans constructed these mounds, though the reasons for them vary. The oldest of these Mound Builder sites is in northeastern Louisiana and dates back nearly five and a half thousand years, preceding the advent of agriculture in North America. This is surprising because the organization of labor necessary for such construction implies a hierarchical social stratification and a food surplus great enough to feed the multitudes of people who were not spending their time obtaining or cultivating all of that food themselves. A surplus of this kind is generally believed to require sedentary agriculture, yet these people were hunter-gatherers, and so it has changed the assumptions about the architectural capabilities of pre-agricultural humans. More puzzling is their utility. These mounds have consistently evaded any clear explanation of apparent purpose. It is known however that mounds constructed in the following millennia in other places often served different purposes in different areas, most notably as burial sites or locations of religious temples.

Herb Roe's map of various Mound Builder sites, taken from Wikipedia. 

The site called Cahokia is situated in the Mississippi River Valley. It is almost directly across Mississippi River from modern day St. Louis, where another Mound Builder site used to sit but has long since been destroyed. Unlike its oldest predecessors in Louisiana, it was constructed around the end of the first millennium A.D. and was "preeminent from about 950 to about 1250 A.D." and the only city north of the Rio Grande. This point bears elaboration though. While James Daschuk misleadingly refers to Cahokia as a "metropolis" in his book Clearing The Plains (2014), it was no city in the modern sense. Mann explains that a "city provides goods and services for its surrounding area, exchanging food from the countryside for the products of its sophisticated craftspeople. By definition, its inhabitants are urban- they aren't farmers. Cahokia, however, was a huge collection of farmers packed cheek by jowl." Despite its peak population numbering around fifteen thousand people, almost all were farmers, despite it being a center for regional trade. Mann builds on this apparent dissimilarity with the observation that "having never seen a city, its citizens had to invent every aspect of urban life for themselves." This point is interesting when comparing Cahokia to the cities of Tenochtitlan in the Triple Alliance (Aztec Empire) or Qosqo (Cusco) in the Inka Empire. These cities in modern-day Latin America were true metropolises, and interrogating the reasons for the stark differences between them and Cahokia might yield insights into the project of civilization building.

Monks Mound today. Source: https://newarkearthworkscenter.blogspot.com/2015/10/americas-largest-earthwork-cahokias.html?m=0

The largest of the mounds at Cahokia (or anywhere) is named Monk's Mound after Trappist monks who once lived nearby. Archaeologist and geographer William Woods has headed its excavations and discovered that its comprised of multiple layers. At its core is a giant clay slab measuring around 900 feet in length, 650 feet in width, and 20 feet in height. The innovative engineering abilities of Homo sapiens screams out from the mouthpiece of this architectural feat. Cahokia is located in what's called the American Bottom, a floodplain of the Mississippi river about 175 square miles in area. The soil is mostly clay, which is difficult to till and especially prone to flooding, as was the general area. Clay quickly absorbs water through capillary action, causing it to expand, and then can also dry out to impressive degrees of desiccation, progressively reducing in volume as it does. This repeated expansion and constriction makes it an exceptionally poor building material, especially for large structures. William Woods' excavations have demonstrated the ingenuity of Cahokia's solution to this problem. The mound had to remain constantly moist, which was more easily accomplished at the bottom levels of the mounds as the clay sucked up ground water but became an issue as that water evaporated on the upper levels. Mann explains:

"[T]he Cahokians encapsulated the slab, sealing it off from the air by wrapping it in thin, alternating layers of sand and clay. The sand acts as a shield for the slab. Water rises through the clay to meet it, but cannot proceed further because the sand is too loose for further capillary action. Nor can the water evaporate; the clay layers atop the sand press down and prevent air from coming in. In addition, the sand lets rainfall drain away from the mound, preventing it from swelling too much. The final result covered almost fifteen acres and was the largest earthen structure in the Western Hemisphere; though built out of unsuitable material in a floodplain, it has stood for a thousand years."

                                             Herb Roe's rendering of mound structure, taken from Wikipedia.

Atop the mounds were the dwellings of the Cahokia elites and the temples where they performed ceremonial religious rites in efforts to secure safety and prosperity. The ceremonies were held up there in secret from the peasants, who were also symbolically separated from the elites by a palisade that encircled Monks Mound, but which they could likely pass through freely at any time. At one point the elites of Cahokia added a low platform on one side for priests to perform their rites in public. According to Woods, his acoustic tests demonstrated that everyone below should have heard the priest or other leader with clarity. 

The real mystery of Cahokia is its demise. It should come as no surprise that the remains of a pre-literate society that ceased to exist over half a millennium ago would offer no clear explanation for its disappearance, but that hasn't stopped researchers from trying.

The staple crop of the Cahokia and much of the region was maize. This grew plentifully in the clay floodplains and spurred a population growth which may be tied to Cahokia's disintegration and abandonment. There is no clear answer to why Cahokia was fully abandoned by the early fifteenth century. Ecological overreach does not seem to be the whole story but it almost certainly played a role. As the population grew, Cahokians felled more upland trees for construction and cooking fires. With demand increasing, they had to clear more and more forest and also obtain more water. Mann cites Woods and his research, explaining that they likely diverted the Cahokia Creek to meet the Canteen Creek, which flowed near Cahokia and fed its population, bolstering its flow. (Ecological engineering did not begin with modern society, it became more pronounced.) This allowed access to a greater volume of water that made for a convenient transport network for felled trees, increasing the processes' efficiency. This also increased the creek's likelihood of flooding. The probability of flooding was further increased by the consistent upland deforestation, which Mann explains meant "rainfall sluiced faster and heavier into the creeks, increasing the chance of floods and mudslides." The hypothesis for deforestation is evidenced by a decrease in pollen from the relevant tree species in that area in mud sediments dating to that era. Much of Wood's hypothesis for the collapse of Cahokian society is premised on this and the assertion that floods destroyed maize crops and houses to a severe enough degree as to cause social disintegration. However, Mann contradicts, there "is little indication that the Cahokia floods killed anyone or even led to widespread hunger." 

Reproduction of Cahokia at its peak. Source: http://gotravelaz.com/cahokia/#photo_1

Floods didn't cause Cahoka's abandonment, and there's no evidence it was the result of warfare either. Needing an answer, Mann takes the estimates of the seismologist Otto Nuttli and asserts positively that an earthquake in the early thirteenth century rocked Cahokia and toppled the west side of Monks Mound, causing fires from the splintering houses and falling torches and cooking embers, burning much of Cahokia to the ground. The quake would also have, he says, made the rivers "[slosh] onto the land in a mini-tsunami." This would have led to social breakdown and, as Woods says, a civil war. In my attempts to find Nuttli's seismological estimates, which Mann does not directly cite, I could find none asserting an earthquake likely occurred around the end of the fifteenth century. Of course, it is possible I missed something, but one would expect such positive declarations to be well cited by their claimants. 

Mann is not the only one eager to offer an explanation with all airs of apparent authority. In Clearing The Plains James Daschuk claims with equal certainty that the direct stimulus for decline and disintegration was catastrophic climate change. According to him, that climate change was caused by a massive volcanic eruption in 1259 A.D. which induced a "Little Ice Age" that came on suddenly in the last quarter of the 13th century.

With contradicting claims, all made without qualification, I was befuddled while pondering which was accurate, if any were. My own research brought me no closer to substantiating any one with anything that would even be analogous to a  confidence interval of 95% (the standard in scientific research for a finding to be considered statistically significant). Remembering an old Smithsonian article I'd read had said that the reason for the society's disappearance was unknown, I emailed American History professor Steven Gimber of West Chester Pennsylvania. His response was really a lesson in just how honed the edge of Occam's razor is:

"Frequently ppl/ scholars want to proclaim that they have determined THE ONE thing that led to something major - like the end of a civilization thousands of years ago - but in reality, it's never really just one thing.  Combinations of factors lead to human actions/ decisions and it's difficult to say with certainty why ppl did (or do) something.  We can't ask them so we have to piece together answers from what they left us and what remains of their time that is accessible to us (evidence of conflicts, droughts, floods, invasions, or migrations)." 

There is no clear answer. The further removed one is from the period and conditions of the subjects one is studying, the less evidence there will be for study. The desire to be the researcher who has determined the certain cause of this or that historical phenomenon is at times like these more an answer to one's confusion than those the researcher provides. There is useful information for speculation, but nothing more. Any voice proffering definitive explanations ought to be suspected. Against our deepest desires, sometimes we lack any good answer to serious questions. 

The Nergz Ring

A friend of mine in Kurdistan transcribed and translated a fairy tale that his grandmother told him. He sent it to me and told me that I could edit it so that its quality in the English language would be of a readable level. This is the result!

Centuries ago in a big city situated along the Zagros Mountains, there lived a man with his lovely wife and their daughter, Chyavan (“someone who goes to the mountains”), who was their only child. The man was a very skillful jeweler. So much so that his name was spreading beyond the city limits and permeating the whole country. His products were so well crafted that it seemed he must be using some sort of magic.

The jeweler had a rather hidden and retired personality. He was seldom seen or heard from, so he was something of a mystery to the people. Little was known about him except that his skill as a jeweler was unmatched and that he loved his wife more than anything. Together they lived a very happy life with their daughter, who they cherished greatly.

One day the Jeweler decided to make a very special gift for his wife in celebration of their anniversary. A magnificent gold ring was made for her which featured two golden Nergz flowers crafted atop the golden ornate band. Wanting to give something to his daughter as well, a golden tooth was made for her. They were both extremely grateful and appreciative of their gifts.

Their lives continued happily until the jeweler’s wife became gravely ill. Having been bedridden and knowing her end was near, she gave her will to her husband and died two days later. The Jeweler was overcome with grief. He never thought he could have a life that did not include her.

The usual ceremonies needed to be put in order for her funeral though, and this led him to read her last will and testament. Very plainly it stated, “I know you and my daughter will be so lonely after I am gone, but I don’t want this to happen. For this reason I want you to take another wife. But, there are two conditions which must be met. First, you must take care of our daughter and love her endlessly. Second, the ring you made for me must perfectly fit the finger of the woman you choose to marry, or else she can’t be your wife. If you don’t honor these requests, I will never forgive you and will be eternally sad.”

The Jeweler was distraught by the death of his wife, and his love for her led him to decide he must honor his wife’s last wishes.

So, he began searching for someone to marry, travelling to many towns and cities. Unfortunately, the ring did not perfectly fit a single woman. It was as if the ring was bewitched because it was made for their anniversary, so that only the ring itself could choose who was worthy to wear it.

After three years of searching, the jeweler came home disappointed. Now, his daughter did not know about her mother’s will and one day finds the beautiful wedding band. She decided to try it on out of curiosity and found that it fit her perfectly. How strange! It was made for her mother after all.

But just then her father walks in and sees the ring perfectly wrapped around her finger and realizes that she is the only woman it has ever fit, and so the ring has chosen her. He begins to become so overwhelmed with his love for his lost wife and his duty to fulfil her will such that he becomes blind to rationality. He tells his daughter that she must marry him, her own father. If she does not then his wife will never forgive him, and that is the last thing he will accept. But she cries out that she cannot marry her own father. It’s a crime.

Hearing this, the Jeweler became very angry. He went into a rage and Chyavan was terrified. He was out of his sense. He even began to seem more monster than man in his anguished rage.

The Jeweler turned to his daughter and told her that if she would not marry him and fulfill her mother’s Will, he would have to kill her by his own hands. After being threatened so, his daughter fearfully relented and agreed to become his wife. But, she asks if she can have a little money to get something for the wedding, and her father acquiesces.

The next day, she went to the city’s bazaar, seeking out the tailor. She finds him and asks for a cloth to be made which will cover her entire body except for her hands and eyes. The cloth will be ready in two days’ time.

Over those next two days, she tried hard to stay away from her father because he was out of his mind and had become unpredictable. She had no idea what he might say or do next.

When the two days passed, she went back to the bazaar with some supplies, she picked up her cloth, donned it and left the city. She escaped to the mountains and began living alone in a cave she found. When her father realizes she is missing, nobody knows where she has gone. Her father becomes enraged and vows to get revenge by killing her because she disobeyed him and the will of her mother. If she won’t marry him, he believes killing her is the only way for his wife to rest in peace.

After a month of her new and lonely life, Chyavan ventures into the mountain forest. There she comes across a group of people. At first she is frightened, but soon realizes they are huntsmen. The leader is a man named Ahmed, the son of a Duke of a nearby city. He comes to the forest every year with his companions to hunt for game.

However, the huntsmen needed supplies and water and food since they had been out for two days and nights without killing a single thing to eat. She sees they are in need and shows herself to them, still covered in her cloth. They ask for food and so she invites them to her cave.

Ahmed, the duke’s son, asks her why she is alone in the mountains. At first she says nothing, but then Ahmed asks her to uncover her beautiful face so that he can admire it. She takes off the cloth and then, when he asks again, she tells him the whole story about her father the jeweler and how she ran away. Ahmed decides that he must take her with him to his home and keep her safe, promising to protect her from her father.

She goes to live with him and after two months together they begin to fall deeply in love. Their days started happily and their life together was ideal. After some time, she even became pregnant, and they had a son together. Having begun a family, they were happy and felt nothing could go wrong.

Years pass and they continue to live as if God had showered all of his blessings upon them. But, they did not know that there was trouble lurking. A very old man, strange, peculiar, and internally full of anger, had come to their city. A man who had searched countless villages and cities trying to find his daughter who ran away from him long ago.

The Jeweler has become a conjurer, and was wandering the city performing magic for people and saying that he will give a prize to a woman who comes and smiles at him, and that this prize will be a medal for her son that he had made. While Ahmed was away in another city, Chyavan was wandering the city and heard of the prize she could get for smiling at this man. She does not recognize her father because of his beard and cracking skin, and he doesn’t recognize her at first because of how much she has grown up. But, when she smiles at him he sees the gold tooth that he made for her years ago, and recognizes her as his daughter and decides that the time for revenge has come. He gives her the medal for her son and when she turns and leaves he follows her to her house.

That same night, at midnight, when all is quiet and everyone is asleep, he sneaks into the house. He can’t kill his daughter right there, so he decides that to get revenge he will do something else. He goes into her son’s room and slices his throat. He then goes to her room, drips the blood onto her dress, and hides the knife behind the couch.

He set up the scene so that the Duke’s family would think that she killed her son herself, and that is exactly what they believed. Their son Ahmed was still away and knew nothing of it. They would not listen to Chyavan’s protests, as there was no other explanation. In this city, which the Duke’s family held a lot of power in, the result of murder was a shameful and serious punishment. They had one of Chyavan’s breasts cut off and made her carry the corpse of her expired child on her back through the main street of the city, in front of the eyes of everyone, as she was sent into exile.

Chyavan returned again to the mountains wearing the same cloth she wore to escape her father and carrying her dead child upon her back.

Before reaching the cave, she sits down exhausted underneath a tree to rest. She soon falls asleep and dreams that her mother comes down to relay a prophecy that could cure her unpleasant situation. Her mother tells Chyavan that she feels her husband has betrayed her with how he has acted and will be punished for his sins. She tells her daughter that she will see two pigeons in a tree. One black, one white. One will fall to the ground as the other flies away. If God wants her child alive again, the white pigeon will fall and its blood must be fed to the head of her dead child. If the black one falls though, her son will remain dead as this is what God wants.

Suddenly, she awakens from her sleep and above her in a tree sees two pigeons. One black, one white. After a short time, the black one flies away and the white one falls to the ground. Remembering the dream, she takes the white bird and feeds its blood to her dead son and he comes back to life.

Happiness returned to Chyavan and they built a cottage there in the mountain forest. After ten years of living there, on the same date when she first met her husband Ahmed and his fellow huntsmen, she remembers that he and his fellow huntsmen must be returning soon.

Just as she expected, her husband and his men returned to the woods. She prepares lots of food for a big dinner and tells her son, now twelve years old, to go and invite the men for dinner. Of course they accept, because they are hungry and tired and far from home.

She welcomes them and sets out a proper meal but never identifies herself. While they are eating, she tells her son to take the ring that her father had made for her mother and set it in one of Ahmed’s shoes.

As the men prepare to leave and put on their shoes, Ahmed feels something hard inside of his and checks it. He can’t believe what he finds! Seeing the ring, he becomes shocked and unable to utter a single word. Finally he cries out, wanting to know where his wife is. She comes out and uncovers her face, and Ahmed recognizes her. They both begin to cry and she tells him everything about what happened, how she was innocent and the brutal reaction of his family toward her after their son was murdered. Ahmed asks for forgiveness from his wife and son for what happened and what his family did. Chyavan will forgive her husband on one condition. Her father must be found and revenged.

Ahmed agrees, saying that if he cannot fulfill her wish then she has the right to give him any punishment but that if he can do it, she has to forgive him.

After a long process of searching cities and villages, the old magician jeweler is found. Ahmed and his men capture him and declare that his punishment for his crimes will be to have his legs tied to two oxen, one per leg. One ox won’t be allowed to eat for seven days and the other won’t be allowed to drink for seven days. On the seventh day when the man has one leg tied to each ox, they will be set free to run toward a pile of food for the first and a large barrel of cold water for the second.

The punishment is carried out, and the jeweler’s body becomes severed. After what he caused to happen to his daughter, the result was deserved. Chyavan was no able to live safely and securely, restarting her life with her husband and son, with happier days ahead.

The Importance of History

Lounging atop his mushroom throne, the hookah-puffing caterpillar asked, “Who are you?” Alice began her timid response with, “I- I hardly know sir…”

                Alice’s crisis of identity as she tried to navigate the phantasmagorical Wonderland is similar to what awaits those of us who forget where we’ve come from. That is, those of us who don’t know our history.

                The significance of the need for and search of identity in the human experience cannot be downplayed. Whether we acknowledge it consciously or not, we all understand that it is a necessary aspect of our lives. I was once told that you can’t know who you are if you don’t know where you came from, and this emphasizes the point.   On the scale of the individual to the national, we must interrogate our past to know who and where we came from.

                The engineers of culture and civilization never take this for granted because a shared identity is a prerequisite for a nation’s existence.

                As a sinister example of how well this is understood, the world’s ethnic cleansers who want to rid their territory of a group of people demonstrate their understanding of the necessity of history to identity. The destruction of a people, or the attempt of it, often begins without taking lives. This is done by destroying their history, taking away their language, erasing the sources of their identity. Turkey attempted this by outlawing the language of its subjugated Kurdish minority, as well as any recognition of their existence or anything distinctly Kurdish, such as their folk songs (considered to be Kurdish propaganda). The government even went as far as to label them “mountain Turks” and deny the existence of any ethnic minorities in Turkey.  

                On a more benign level, the source of common identity in history is why the subject is taught in public schools, and taught in a certain way. Though many pause at the idea of the government commissioning a certain curricula for the purpose of molding a collective perception and self-image, this should only be worrisome if history is taught dishonestly and to achieve immoral ends.

Any country you choose to inspect will have some history of egregious violations of human rights. For this reason there are always those who see a need to downplay the shameful parts of their country’s past. The fear is that to do otherwise might breed generations of unpatriotic citizens no longer held together by any common love of country. Such a fear seems to have played a role in the decision by Oklahoma Republicans in 2015 to cut funding for Advanced Placement U.S. History courses because, they said, it emphasized the negative aspects of America and didn’t teach American exceptionalism.

                In America at least, the better parts of our history are emphasized and often mythologized, and not until reaching high school do we begin learning the sordid and often bloody details of the country’s past. This shouldn’t receive pushback though. History is the study of people and how they respond to change, and our great capacity for both good and evil is borne out in those responses. The past is violent, beautiful, intriguing, oppressive and hopeful all at the same time.

Moreover, without understanding the real history of one’s own nation, they can’t know what threads are woven together that have rendered the fabric of society as it currently exists. Further, without giving some emphasis to the manifestations of the worst parts of our nature, we will be helpless to miss the warning signs of their reemergence and repetition both domestically and abroad. But, treading the line between caution and “the sky is falling” hysteria, we need to be scrupulous before asserting just how closely some present-day issue contains analogous warnings from the past.

 Never coming around exactly the same way twice, the worst atrocities do still recur with similar themes. Often attributed to Mark Twain, the old saying tells us that “history never repeats itself, but it does rhyme.” This ought to inspire a greater attention for detail and demonstrate the imperative of education. Civilization as we know it is on the line, and the citizens of the world are responsible for its maintenance.

A tangential benefit of this is necessary self-reflection. Easy though it is to pass judgement on others, to critique yourself and your country is difficult, and for some impossible, until you’re placed in front of a mirror and forced to gaze at the reflection staring back at you. This is precisely what must happen and is often best done through literature, which is one of the most indispensable vessels for teaching history and conveying ideas. To this end, I can’t help thinking of books by great authors like Arundhati Roy and Toni Morrison, among an extensive but hardly exhaustive list of others.

To understand anything, from the Israeli-Palestinian crisis to the inability of Marxism to ever gain a strong foothold in the U.S., we look to history and the deeper we dig, the more we realize just how complex an explanation is often needed. This is another advantage of studying history; you gain an appreciation for complexity, a patience to understand that complexity as thoroughly as possible, and a recognition that there rarely are simple answers to questions of human civilization. In fact, anyone who proffers simple answers to complex situations ought to be approached with a healthy skepticism and may well warrant your distrust.  

                Learning history is therefore multi-purposeful. The pursuit of it as a basis for understanding how we’ve arrived at the present should instill the virtues of patience, skepticism and complex analysis. Without it, we lack identity. With it, we also hold the tools to learn from the errors and successes of our forebears as we move forward toward a more perfect future.

Life After Religion

                When religion is lost, more life may be found. In fact, it should be. But in the process of turning away from belief there is usually a fear that the opposite will happen. 

I have a Kurdish friend in Iraq who has been moving further away from religion every day, and so we’ve talked about belief and the difficulty of beginning to walk away from it. Unable to believe the stories and explanations in the Quran any longer, he recently raised a concern that’s been echoed by almost every person who, from Kurdistan to America and everywhere in between, began to leave religion. That is, if religious claims aren’t true and there’s no higher power, then there must be no point to life. While this can come in the form of either a question or a statement, at the heart of both is a fear of nihilism and that unbelief may necessitate it.

                This is the ostensible impasse most people come to at some point, but a little thought and creativity is enough to break the deadlock.

                “Meaning” comes from whatever makes us feel connected with the world and emotionally full. What makes us feel live. If “purpose” is anything different, it comes with the add-on of what we think we can and ought to do to impact the world. No supernatural belief is needed to find either of these, and in fact it devalues them. To say God has a plan for you is to deny your own freedom. It’s the belief that someone else has decided your fate for you.

                We’re also told by the Good Books that if we have any common purpose, it’s to secure our spot in the dubitable hereafter. For this, the one requirement above all others is the acceptance of astounding propositions on no evidence, or else expect an eternity of torture. This is neither very meaningful nor desirable.

My own view is that rejecting faith opens a door to a more appreciative and meaningful life. Dismissing religion often means rejecting the idea of a greater plan, which puts the determination of your own purpose in your own hands. You and I get to wake up every day and decide how we want to impact the world and leave those around us feeling after each interaction. We decide who we are going to be by the end of the day. We can even change our minds, too.

Atheism also generally brings a disbelief in an afterlife since there is no reason to think we survive after our brain stops functioning. Many worry that this sucks the meaning out of life. What it should do is make you keenly aware of your own mortality. Rather than despair at this thought, it ought to fill us with an increased appreciation for every day we have to take in the heat during our brief moment under the sun. Do you enjoy a favorite food, sex, or conversation with your best friend any less because you know it must end, and will one day occur for the last time? Of course not. The experiences only become more cherished.

                We’re forced to recognize the transient quality of each fleeting moment, and how celebratory it is that we are here to live through it. Awareness of death, and deeply understanding that we’re always a breath away from it, gives us a special opportunity to really live as if each day might be your last, because it may well be. Most people would give anything to know they were having their last kiss with a loved one while they were having it, or to know, as Andy Bernard said, that you’re in the Good Old Days while you’re still in them. Every day is one of the Good Old Days, and each kiss may well be the last. This elusive yet obvious fact can transform your attitude.

The moral implication of this comes from recognizing your own impermanence is shared by everyone else. Everyone can feel ecstasy and extreme pain, and their experience as a sentient person is just as real and important as your own. Anyone who approaches their mortality as I described is certainly able to extend that sentiment to the lives of others. Wanting to build the best possible existence for ourselves while we are here, any feeling person must then extend this desire to the well-being of others too. This was expressed well when Sam Harris implored, “Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?”

The approach of the nonbeliever to purpose is more liberating because it puts the creation of that purpose into the hands of each individual. You choose, or perhaps discover, what your purpose is from what you are passionate about and how you feel you can impact the world in what you think is the best way possible, whether on the large or small scale. You are your own architect of meaning.

Life without religion only seems unfulfilling while one is still in the midst of doubting and unsure about leaving the only construct they have always known. But as you move further away from faith, the exit from Plato’s cave only brings into view expansive landscapes and a heartwarming light that makes every day afterward all the more profound. You may even feel, ironically, born again. There’s a saying that that life is two dates separated by a dash. Knowing that the second, final date is always just around the corner, you’ll treasure and make the most of that dash.