The Romantic Reaction

Great God, I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn

-W. Wordsworth

I wrote in Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s name for President of the United States in the past election, and I make an effort to keep up with Nate Silver’s blog. I consider these some examples, among many, that I want to be thought of as a logical thinker. Science and technology often leave me in awe, lamenting the fact I was not touched with the type of genius to recognize patterns like Gauss, or conjure experiments like Faraday.  I trust deductive reasoning and the scientific method, and love reading Nature magazine.

“What a Piece of Work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form, in moving, how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!”

(Hamlet II, II)

However, a Romantic reaction persists in my thoughts. “...And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” (Hamlet II, II). In history this reaction has taken many forms. St. Augustine reacted to the logic and vanity of Rome by disallowing Aristotle into his City of Man; John Keats toasted to “Newton’s health, but confusion to his mathematics”, and now David Orr declares “education is the problem” impacting our environment, and in a recent article Beth Hoffman stated “science has a credibility problem”. And they always have a point, even if, like St. Augustine, they can delay the progress of Western scientific thought by a millennium.

A former student of mine, Kate Nelson, showed me the seemingly magical qualities of emergence and the limitations of reductionist science. How does one explain the phenomenon of an entity greater than the sum of its parts? How do a series of cells come together to create consciousness in my brain? How do you explain the 2009-2010 Phoenix Coyotes? How, with no intelligence whatsoever, do individual grains of sand organize themselves into ripples on sand dunes? They cannot be explained by isolating a single cell, Shane Doan, or a grain of sand. Focusing too closely on one variable distracts from macro behaviors.  When countless micro behaviors happen simultaneously, impacting each other, unintentional and unforeseen behaviors can appear at the macro level. They need to be studied as a system with all the variables… but this isn’t easy. The mathematics and scientific tools needed to understand these complex networks remain quite young.

Image by Kate Nelson

Non-chaotic systems can be predicted. The time it takes the earth to complete a full revolution is rhythmic and therefore fairly predictable. If I wanted to predict the time it would take for 100 rotations, I simply take the time it takes for one rotation and multiply it by 100. In a chaotic system prediction takes much more work. Steven Strogatz calls this the “demoralizing implications of the Butterfly Effect”. The successful prediction of a chaotic system depends on our tolerance for error, our ability to understand the initial conditions, and a time system called “Lyapunov time,” which reflects the limits of predictability. The work needed to predict chaotic systems does not grow linearly, like periodic systems, but exponentially. If we want to predict such a system for twice as long it will not take twice the effort; it will take ten times the effort. Four times as long? One thousand times the effort.  Forget about extending predictions 100 times longer. So we rely on reductionism.

The hubris of reductionist science impacts Nutrition and Education perhaps more dramatically than any other fields. Nutritionists attempting to find which nutrients or vitamins we should ingest more or less of inevitably contradict themselves month by month. We have oxymoronic products like “low carb bread” because sometime in 2003 we decided carbs made people fat. In the 1950’s all fats were the same and they all led to heart disease. In order to perform trials, nutrition scientists isolate certain nutrients, but this ignores the emergent qualities of food, or to a larger extent, diet, and to an even larger extent, lifestyle. Diets based on this science of reductionism are bound to fail. I’m inclined to side with the Romantic reactor Michael Pollen here: “Eat Food, not too much, mostly plants”, and submit to the limitations of human comprehension.

Additionally, education specialists continually separate individual variables to uncover the reason US students frequently underperform on standardized tests. How can we test, or educate, a teacher to be respected by his students when the circumstances surrounding respect are so varied? How can we isolate family life, with all its complexity, and without a single case being exactly the same as another, in order to test its impact on test performance? There are infinite ways to teach a student to solve for X, and the effectiveness of each depends on many factors (ie: readiness of the student, relationship between student and teacher, time of day et cetera). These questions deal with emergent qualities. The education of our youth is part of a far more complicated system than any reductionist approach will explain.

Culture is an emergent system: cooking, eating, festivals of entertainment, and playing or listening to music combine to make a culture greater than the sum of its parts. The varying pieces interact and change each other dynamically and constantly. Linear thinking would have us believe the goal of eating is calories; the goal of education is to produce productive workers; the goal of sports is winning. This perspective ignores camaraderie, participation, community, loyalty, family, and the infinite other qualities contained in cultural acts. The imperative we all feel to be logical and deduce causalities needs to always be tempered with humility.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” (Hamlet I, V)

We all want to be logical thinkers, and worship Nate Silver, and win our fantasy league, and eat according to the latest food science. But we also need to heed Ygritte’s warning (“You know nothing, John Snow”); we should be loyal to a player in spite of declining statistics; we should have a huge Italian meal with great friends and great conversation; we should allow curiosity and learning to be dynamic, exciting, and ever changing. We should not feel the need to reduce these joys to their parts. These things combine to make people wonder—love—laugh—things greater than their causes. For the next year I’m going to try and just enjoy them.

On Education

In 1968 the meteorologist Ed Lorenz entered data into a computer and arrived at a result.  When he entered the same data into the computer again, to check his work, he arrived at a drastically different result. The cause was not human error, but a minor shift in how the computer dealt with rounding the never-ending decimal places created by the data.  This small change in the initial conditions had a major impact on his system. This led Ed Lorenz to write his famous paper on the Butterfly Effect, and gave our culture a better understanding of mathematical Chaos. This mathematics taught us to look beyond proximate causalities with the knowledge that small differences in initial conditions lead to drastically different results.

Humanity was then forced to consider again what it had ignored after Poincare’s investigation of three bodied systems at the turn of the century. There can be no control over complex dynamical systems by some ubiquitous structure. To think our financial, political, or ecological systems can be controlled entirely by man made institutions is a foolish paternalistic trend in human intellectual history. If a butterfly’s wing could be a tipping point, then we are all extraordinarily helpless, and, paradoxically, we are all extraordinarily power.

The belief that humanity sits on top of some great hierarchical chain of being has its roots deep in history. The realization that we cannot sit above nature and control our ecosystem has had a devastating effect on our ego. However, if we can accept that our place is not above the system, but inside it, then we can begin to play within it.

As a soccer player for twenty-five years, and coach for five, I learned that I cannot take two forty-five minute halves as a closed system and closely choreograph them second by second. I could not practice or instruct my players, as I could a dance, with step-by-step instructions for the full ninety minutes; the game’s many variables make it chaotic. A soccer game is dynamic and cannot be predicted or rehearsed. The best I could hope for is to teach my players the skills necessary to react within an unpredictable environment, and dwell in the ambiguity of the impeding, and mysterious, next few seconds of play.  

As a teacher of ninth grade students the past seven years, I prepared fifteen year olds to enter a work force in, on average, eight years from the time we met. I have come to realize that the best thing I can teach is, similar to my soccer players, the ability to react in a world that changes day-to-day. Moreover, when we are faced with a system so large that it seems as though no small change can have an effect, and when we accept our role within this system, we can focus on our reactions to the changes around us. Rather than seek one more technological advancement, or form some new governing body to oversee and protect the entire earth, we can focus on our local communities—on the ground in front of us.

Right now, I am not fit to match that standard of education. I rely too heavily on my knowledge base and teach, more often than not, content rather than skills. Even the word “teacher” is harmful because it implies this paternalistic mentality that I have something that should be taught. The process of learning outweighs the material being taught. The ability to recognize patterns, find quality information in a sea of digital noise, and collaborate in meaningful ways with like-minded and adversarial individuals alike are the pass, trap, and shoot of the twenty-first century intellectual world.

In Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog a lone intellectual stands atop a mountain looking out over the world.  He is at once small in comparison to the vast landscape and large in his ability to view and comprehend what stands in front of him. In order to perceive this landscape of mountains and clouds, he needed only to ascend one mountain. When I swim in the Ocean I need not tackle the full force of the ocean, but simply move the water two feet in front of me to keep afloat. Just as the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, seemingly insignificant, can have an impact, the movement and cultivation of the earth ten feet in front of us allows us to play within a system filled with innumerable variables. My amateur study of ecological systems and the culture of food emphasize certain skill sets and modes of thinking that will make me a better facilitator of learning.

For these reasons I will be studying food science and culture at the University of Gastronomic Sciences next year in the Piedmont Region of Italy—to turn that amateur study into something serious, to reflect upon blending learning environments that will teach inquiry rather than content (but of course content in the process), and write about all of it to organize my thoughts.

This is going to be delicious. 

To the Reader

By walking his reader through his intellectual process Montaigne hoped his memory would live through his friends and family.  I am hoping to do something similar with this blog for my friends and family while I live abroad. The essays that will follow represent a similar ambition to that of Montaigne, but with some additional trammels.

Montaigne had the benefit of being the first to write his particular brand of personal essay. I, however, will attempt to assert myself in world of data overload and intellectual noise.  He wanted to survive through posterity, and I wish to survive today. 

Wow. That last line sounded intense. I don't intend to be that dramatic.

I just mean to express my desire that, with all the demands on your attention, you take a moment to read my thoughts from time to time. You can also use this site to keep up with my Art History Videos using the "Videos" tab, and my horribly composed amateur photography.

I, like Montaigne, fear the temptation of vanity in this process.  Writing is, by its nature, an egotistical practice.  As much as I hate to admit this, by writing at all I believe my thoughts may have some use to others.  I have met many men and women I consider more intelligent, more interesting, and whose thoughts deserve more attention than my own, and yet there exists the urge to assert my voice into the millions of web-pages created daily.  Consequently, I, like Montaigne, would like to say a word of caution. Since no one can quite say it as well as the man himself: “I myself am the subject of this work: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.”