A
lustrum ago, I was introduced to a guy who bears a striking resemblance to a young
pugilist who went by the name Nelson Mandela and of course I was curious if
perhaps he had some of that Madiba Magic
in him. Disappointingly, he didn’t. Pretty sweet looking like the most loved
African man in the world. That aside, we take to each other and parley on a
variety of topics, Brownian motion style. It was during that afternoon that I
was formerly introduced to the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb who is his
favourite mathematician. I had vaguely heard of The Black Swan as there was much hubbub about it but I had only
given it a flit and moved on with life and I didn’t know at the time that Taleb
was its author. My companion proceeded to sell me on what turns out to be a
remarkable Armenian of a man. Hook. Line. Sinker. Admittedly, I’ve still not
read The Black Swan but I have read
everything else in the Incerto
series. It takes a rather special man to write a delightful book such as The Bed of Procrustes. I greeted every
page with residual laughter from the page before. Now that I had encountered
Nassim, I could not un-encounter him. That conversation got me thinking on who
my favourite mathematician is. As soon as I had asked the question, a name came
immediately to mind, well two names actually. Henri Poincaré followed very
closely by Benoit Mandelbrot. I hadn’t heard anything about Gaston Julia at the
time but he deserves a mention as his work preceded and highly influenced the
work of Mandelbrot. I was introduced to Poincaré and Mandelbrot in A brief History of Mathematics presented
by Marcus du Sautoy and in Robert Sapolsky’s Stanford lectures on chaos, reductionism,
emergence and complexity. Sapolsky was explaining how biological systems cannot
be broken down into their parts to understand how the whole works; as can be
done in a mechanical system like a car. Biological systems are emergent. This
for me has since held a deep fascination, and it found deep resonance within
me. Things that couldn’t be measured or predicted have been the things that
have intrigued me the most. Marcus du Sautoy in his lecture titled The Music of the Primes describes how
prime numbers are emergent and there is no way to predict them which is why
they are used in online payment encryption. Mandelbrot provides us with The Coastline Paradox of how the length
of a coastline cannot be measured due to its fractal nature. These have been
the mysteries I have returned to time and time again in wonder. As a biological
system myself, not only is the human body itself emergent (cells→ tissue→
organs etc.) but I’ve felt that my place in this world, as an agent, is also
emergent. Not mine alone but all of our lives should be. This has not been my
experience however. So much of life is prescriptive, homogenizing, normalizing
and most important of all so reductive. We get born, go through twelve years of
school where we are assaulted with standardized tests, go to university, get
degrees (of which we know beforehand which will yield the greatest material
success), get married and have 2.5 kids (or whatever the latest average is),
buy a house and two cars, work until we retire and die. The End. Roll credits
playing Bittersweet Symphony by the
Verve in the background. In William Shakespeare’s words ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his
hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot,
full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ Meaningless existences. Not
only are we estranged from ourselves by not doing what Robert Greene refers to
as Your Life’s Task in Mastery or what in Happy Feet is referred to as your Heart song; but also the domain described above is very crowded and
limited. This is the domain where causes are treated interchangeably with the
sequential as though all our lives were a mere conveyor belt of material
milestones. Static lives coated with a veneer of the dynamic. All that
multiplicity, specificity, complexity, variability and colour thrown into a
melting pot and vulgarized into a grey economic pulp. Sapolsky says that ‘Reductionism works when we are not too picky’.
But we are picky or at least we should be, picky of ourselves. Our complexity
cannot be shirked, denied or rendered an excess. Our biology insists on this
and so does our consciousness. Our variability is not noise. In evolutionary
biology, systems with the most variability generally survive the longest. In
the way we are proceeding, Ben Okri was right when he wrote ‘we are long due an apocalypse’. An
apocalypse in terms of impending disaster (meaning crisis) but also in a
revelatory sense; that this is no way to go about living fulfilled dynamic
lives.
In
his essay Reality is Analog, JF
Martel describes a pernicious Intellectualism
(a term coined by William James), where all experience is reduced to information.
I’d even venture to say that we’ve gone a step further and used that same
information as data to inform how life should be lived, both descriptively and
prescriptively; what in effect becomes a simulation of reality. ‘When an experience is conceived as
information, the universe appears to us as it would to any computer, namely a
series of fixed states without interval, motion or becoming- a zombie cosmos’.
It is not a coincidence that John Vervaeke who lectures in a series called Awakening from the Meaning Crises’ is
also the leading author of the book Zombies
in Western Culture. Our lives have lost their dynamism, their biology and
their enchantment. We are binary 0s and 1s now and our lives’ intolerable
interval has become superfluous. Alicia Juarrero (Dynamics in Action) writes: ‘The
study of living systems (and especially for ecosystems) has taught us that
nature and evolution do not favour stability and equilibrium; instead, natural
processes select for resilience and adaptability for characteristics that
foster evolvability. Living things learn from the past and anticipate the
future- and then modify themselves to handle ambiguity, uncertainty; and
unwelcome perturbations. Handle and manage, not avoid and eliminate ambiguity
and uncertainty.’ Living things learn from the past and anticipate the
future; they don’t try to reproduce the future through Intellectualism. Life is ambiguous, uncertain and unstable. These
are not negative things as they foster evolution and should therefore not be
done away with. C.S. Lewis has a quote ‘God doesn’t care for temples built but for
temple-building.’ The idea is that as we go through life, we develop and
grow (which Vervaeke identifies as one of the principal driving forces in us).
Developing and growing are dynamic terms; there is a continual movement of becoming,
a continual building of temples. Even countries who were previously referred to
as developed countries are in a continuous state of development. Most of life
is marked by this in-between-ness; by the journey, the becoming. ‘What really exists is not things made but
things in the making. Once made, they are dead and an infinite number of
alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them. But put
yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and,
the whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your possession,
you are no longer troubled with the question which of them is the more
absolutely true. Reality falls into passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts
in living its own undivided life- it buds and burgeons, changes and creates’
(James as cited by Martel). Reality is analog, Martel asserts. Consequently,
Reality is Emergent.
‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God’. John 1:1
While
reality is emergent; there is another phenomenon at play here. This is
regarding that which Emanates. While Emergence is understood from bottom-up, ‘Emanance’
is understood from top-down. ‘Emanance’ is defined as something flowing forth
from the source. The neologism coined by complex dynamical students is heterarchy which allows inter-level
causal relations to flow bi-directionally (Juarrero). The John 1st
verse above is an illustration of ‘Emanance’. This is the logos which Vervaeke describes
as the word that helps create history. It is not comprised of just words but
has an intelligibility behind it. It is an underlying structure. It is what Aristotle
would refer to as potential. The other side of the potential coin being
actuality. It is only through actuating by exercising our agency that we can
live up to our potential. And since we are well ensconced in the metaphor of
the coin bearing two faces, the other two coins whose faces I’d like to discuss
is the agent-arena one and the cause-constraints one as well. While reality is
emergent, its emergence is contingent on that which emanates; similarly, an
agent can only act in an appropriate environment or risk being subjected to
absurdity (Vervaeke). You can only live up to your potential if your potential
was there to be lived up to in the first place. Your ability to live up to your
potential, to act in the world, embark on some causal pattern in the world is
dependent on the constraints of your arena. Causes are events that make things
happen and constraints are conditions that make things possible (Vervaeke). Juarrero
distinguishes between two types of constraints: enabling constraints (the
possibility of an event is increased) and selective constraints (the
possibility of an event is reduced). We have constructed our societal arena’s
in such a way that we have limited the ways in which we can participate within
those arenas. We have also codified success misleadingly; the belief being it
can be achieved through following a series of steps. Therefore the failure of
non-attainment falls squarely on those who have failed without even taking into
consideration how the actual arena has contributed to this. Although I am of
the opinion that people crave fulfilment, I’ll proceed with the term ‘success’
because it is an easily understood, modern lexical term. Taleb in Fooled by Randomness writes on how big a
role chance plays in life. ‘No matter how
sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness
will have the last word’ and Martel in the same sentiment: ‘Beneath the conceptual overlay, reality
remains what it is: not an orderly network of humanly comestible ideas but a
turbid, ever-changing, symphonic, indefinable process of becoming that is
accountable to neither the predilections of reason, nor the strictures of
logical grammar.’ We have not only stacked the deck against ourselves
through our reductionism but we have sold the underprivileged lies wholesale;
that they need only work hard to attain success. It’s a double jeopardy in essence:
on the one hand, the arena’s themselves are not accommodating of all who wish
to act in them and on the other hand, the attempted codification of success, itself
rests on ‘turbid, ever-changing,
symphonic’ ground. Katlego Letlonkane in her essay (Theories of Diversity, Difference and Otherness) expounds on this
double jeopardy in the South African context. Now and again a black person
manages to escape the chokehold of poverty through the completion of a university
degree. When this person is interviewed, he will say something to the effect of
‘everyone can do it with hard work and
determination’. Letlonkane disagrees with this one-size-fits-all statement
and I agree with her. There is also the
rising unemployment rates of graduates in South Africa which shows that
education itself is not the security blanket it is purported to be, but I digress.
‘Structural poverty is ignored as having any
constraining consequence on a black individual but rather, as a conquerable
glitch’. Letlonkane writes, ‘What we must also remain mindful of is the often
white opportunistic use of ‘triumph over poverty’ narrative against other black
people to make them accountable for their own poverty as if decades of
structural and institutional oppression are nothing to talk about. We must
understand that black people were never supposed to make it out of the
conditions that were pronounced upon them. The organization of townships and
systems of being for black people were designed to confine black people to
lives of poverty, decay and marginalization. The reality is as was intended in
the first place. Many black people just did not make it out of poverty. Could
not make it out of poverty. The hold of structural oppression was just too
strong and tight. Even those of us black people with degrees and post-graduate
qualifications and revered professions can’t say that we have made it out of
poverty when so much about us is still poor. I worry about being used as the
shining example of hard work to people who inherit so much unbearable
difficulty and trauma inducing poverty as if my path was a real possibility to
every young person in the township. The truth is, things were different for
some who may have been blessed with rare opportunities which shaped the
possibilities that had. This is not the case for everyone, so to make things
fall down to personal drive and hard work erases the wounding effect of
oppression while also drawing a line between black people and making it
possible for black people to be called lazy and wanting to live off welfare,
when their fellow black individuals are working hard and bettering themselves. This
is a cruel and insensitive criticism against black people after being put
through what they were’. Ill-fitting agent-arena relationships; a
hyper-focus on the causal coupled with a hypo-focus on the constraints; a
pretension that possibilities are endless when they are rather limited is not
only absurd but cruel to those who are none the wiser and have internalized
their Sisyphean efforts as personal failures. Juarrero writes, ‘cultural constraints must provide enough
flexibility for the system to be resilient.’ Our constraints are closing in
on us and at some point they’ll give, with many a body buried beneath the
debris.
‘In his novel The Kites, set in Europe amid
the Nazi barbarities of World War 2, the Romanian French novelist Roman Gary
neatly encapsulated the human predicament. ‘part of being human’ he wrote, ‘is
the inhumanity of it’ and for good measure, he added that ‘as long as we refuse
to admit that inhumanity is completely human; we’ll just be telling ourselves
pious lies’. To anyone who might-against all odds-believe in the perfectibility
of humankind, Gary’s view of Homo sapiens might appear a little uncharitable.
But a dispassionate view of history will leave most of us in little doubt about
the enduring accuracy of his observation. True, during its tenure, Homo sapiens
has been responsible for a practically inexhaustible list of wholly admirable
achievements. But it is nonetheless undeniable that the list of the miseries
our species has inflicted on itself, and on the world in general is impressive enough
to suggest that Gary was spot on: that ‘inhumanity’ is or, perhaps more
accurately, that any adequate characterization of our species requires using
both descriptors.’ This is how the prologue of The Accidental Homo Sapien by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle
commences. While I agree that the legacy story of human beings has been one
where the inhumane and humane aspects have walked the historical pages holding
hands in concert (one need only cast a furtive glance in the general direction
of the 19th century and shudder); I don’t believe that the two cannot
be separated going forward. To carry on in this fashion is to personify Dukkha as described by Vervaeke. It is
to keep turning a wheel that is off-axis which damages the wheel with each
revolution. Our stories do not have to be characterised by Dukkha. The path to becoming a fully humane human being is that of
the transformation where we can truly exercise agency in conducive dynamic
arenas to gain wisdom, which will shape our discernment (in thought, in
perspective, in participation, in identity); create coherence between that
which is within us and what is without; live up to our potential and to live
meaningful lives.
‘I find [a fully functioning] person to be a
human being in flow, in process, rather than having achieved some state. Fluid
change is central in the picture. I find such a person to be sensitively open
to all of his experience-sensitive to what is going on in his environment,
sensitive to other individuals with whom he is in relationship and sensitive
perhaps most of all to the feelings, reactions, and emergence meanings which he
discovers in himself. The fear of some aspects of his own experience continues
to diminish, so that more and more of his life is available to him… such a
person is a creative person.’ This is a quote by Carl Rogers that appears
in Scott Kaufman’s Transcend. Not
only is this a creative person, but this is also a successful person- in all
meaningful manner of speaking.
