The Role of Lies

I’ve been watching Hogfather recently.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

I’ve seen it before but I’ve been rather interested in comfort food lately and Hogfather filled the bill.

 

For those who are unfamiliar, Hogfather is Terry Pratchett’s take on creating a Christmas tale. Hogfather, the television series, an adaptation of the novel. In Pratchett’s Discworld, Hogwatch is remarkably similar to Christmas in that there are presents, an archetype Santa Clause like being, yet no hint of Christianity. It’s more an investigation of Christmas the holiday rather than Christmas the Holy Day.

 

I will not give away any part of the plot—it is a wonderful story—but I will try to get at something important the film talks about. This is the role of illusion—lies—in human society. The foreground metaphor is the Hogfather—the Santa Clause equivalent—but the background for that are all the other illusions: ownership, justice, mercy, honesty, etc. These are no more real than Santa Clause yet we act as if they have heft and substance like a lump of iron.

 

Stories matter. Words matter.

 

This is where I get upset with the current climate. In human beings there is a tension between what we believe and what is factually real. The sun is a great ball of gas and radiation. It is also the symbol of light and grace. Justice the dispassionate determination of the role of the state with regards to crime. 

 

It is also a euphemism of revenge and punishment. In human beings, we tend to slant towards the belief rather than the fact. I remember reading somewhere that there was a selective advantage to running from a tiger that is imaginary to remaining and being eaten by one you didn’t believe was there. Thus, human bias is born. (I do not remember who said it at I apologize.)

 

The comfort I find in science is that if you examine a scientific proposition, you will find in its ultimate heritage observable, experimental facts it is based on. The whole concept of dark energy came from an observation that the universe appears to be expanding faster the further away you look at it. The expanding universe came from Hubble’s observation that all celestial objects observed at a sufficient distance appeared to be moving away from us. That observation was based on the “red shift,” the idea that objects emitting light that are also moving away from us shift their frequency lower (toward the red, hence “red shift”) to compensate that light in a vacuum always travels at the same speed. That was demonstrated by the Michelson-Morley experiment that showed that light moved at the same direction no matter how it was measured in a vacuum—one of the sources of Einstein’s theory of relativity. 

 

This particular path is a bit simplified but shows that if you drill down far enough, you will find the facts and the long chain of analysis arriving at the proposition. One can agree or disagree with the chain of analysis—that’s the basis of scientific debate—but experimental evidence trumps everything else. If the experiment disproves the hypothesis, back to the drawing board. This is why published and peer reviewed experiments are so important, to make the facts clear. Experimental facts are the foundation upon which the scientific edifice is constructed.

 

This is the reason when a false story is accepted as truth—worse, used as proof for a belief—is so terrible. It’s not the story in and of itself, it’s the way the story then is accepted, absorbed, and becomes part of the structure of our social world. Justice and mercy are invented concepts just like revenge and religion. We decide how true they are. Once we’ve decided that, we act—whether or not the original story was true or not. 

 

Because, for good or ill, to humans, truth is malleable. It’s up to us to penetrate the rhetoric and determine what we need to know. Is this justice or revenge? Is this mercy or self-interest? Do I believe this man or am I just following him because he validates how I think the world should work and not how it does work?

 

The Rosewood Massacre happened because white people believed a black man had raped a white woman. In 1931, eight black men were accused and seven went to prison because of fabricated rape story. Hitler rose to power on the lie that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s loss in World War I. Stories matter. Words matter.

 

The theme of Mother Night (Kurt Vonnegut) is be careful who you pretend to be for that is who you will become. 

 

Similarly, beware the lies you espouse and accept, for they will become your truth.

 

Let Humans Be Human

Orgel’s Second Rule is “Evolution is smarter than you are.”

 

(Picture from here.)

 

I first heard this rule (unattributed at the time. Attributed by Francis Crick to Leslie Orgel) back when I was an undergraduate zoology major. It does not attribute intelligence to evolutionary design. It simply states that the solutions natural selection, spontaneous variation, and deep time create appear ingenious to mere humans. 

 

Humans have the irritating trait of either elevating humans to a divine pedestal or degrading them to an undistinguished member of homogenous animals. It is a character flaw we share as a species. 

 

Every species is selected to excel in their particular niche. The front leg of a horse is magnificently built to run on its middle finger. A human is magnificently built to model the world within its neocortex. That limb design did not evolve to pull a cart. Nor did the human neocortex evolve to build skyscrapers. Yet, both manage to do so.

 

This particular set of issues came out of a Thanksgiving conversation as to what was, and was not, more the purview of humans as opposed to other animals. To continue the skyscraper analogy, I’ve heard conversations saying something like “humans are superior because they build skyscrapers” responded to with “well, termites build complex mounds.” Both are true and neither prove the point of the conversant.

 

This particular conversation centered around music. All human cultures have some common qualities. They have stories. They have rules about reproduction and rearing. They have rules regarding community behavior. They have music. The implementations of these can be vastly different but, I think, the fact of their presence is inarguable. I would tend to suggest that qualities that appear in all cultures are likely to have a biologic component. 

 

Yes. I know that all of these cultures invest in the rearing of their children so that we can’t really say there’s a biological underpinning to these qualities—they could just be an artifact of the rearing process. The old nature vs nurture argument. Things might be different if a human were reared in isolation. My only response to that is a human reared in isolation would be barely human. Stories of feral children suggest this. If we have to be around humans to be human, that suggests the biological underpinnings of humanity are a combination of learning and heredity. Therefore, I don’t think it’s such a stretch to think that qualities shared by all of humanity would be any different.

 

I think both of these approaches—that the human species is singular or the human species is one with other animals—are problematic. Continuing to use music as a concept here, if we look at our closest relatives, chimpanzees, they do not have music as we know it. There is evidence of rhythm and spontaneous drumming that begins to approach what humans can do—see here—but we’re back to boiling down a behavior to such a low common denominator that I think the comparison becomes meaningless.

 

There are animals that can recognize melodies—elephants, for example—but do they recognize them as music as we do. Elephants, whales, wolves, and birds recognize and communicate with complex acoustic patterns. Some repeat them. Some repeat them with innovation. Some use them for identification. But I don’t think we should use the word “music” for them unless we’re willing to redefine music to something that is not useful in human discourse.

 

In the case of elephants, birds, and whales, these sounds can be used for individual identification—more akin to names than music. Do animals spontaneously burst into song as an expression of joy to the world? The problem is we don’t know. If a whale sings by itself in the Arctic Sea, is it singing at all? Or is it calling out to find someone else? To extend its community? To attract a mate? 

 

For a long time, ethologists were extremely limited in determining the inner state of an animal. If you have an animal respond to a treat, all you can really say about it is that it responds to a treat under these circumstances. Complex behaviors can be taught by the right training regimen but the internal mental state of the animal could only be inferred from the animal’s behavior. It could not be proven. 

 

The mammalian brain has many similarities between different species. Both humans and dogs, for example, have a neocortex, brain stem, thalamus, etc.—all the same parts but different in size and organization. Dogs, for example, have an enormous olfactory center in the brain compared to a human’s. As technology has improved, the internal state of animals can be sort of demonstrated by using fMRIs on brain activity. I mean “sort of” because there is an underlying assumption that if a given region of the brain demonstrably used in the human for a determined purpose is shown to activate in similar circumstances that the activation is common between the two species.

 

In 2020 a paper was published in PubMed that tested dogs shown images while in an fMRI machine. The dogs were shown facial images of strangers, the primary caregiver, and familiar people while the MRI tracked brain activity. It was shown that the region in humans involved in attachment and emotion were more activated when the images of the caregiver were shown than the other two images. Other studies have shown similar results reflecting oxytocin levels.

 

When this came out, it was suggested that dogs love their humans in the same way humans love their dogs. The studies do not show this at all. To do that, we’d have to know what both humans and dogs feel when they feel love. What it suggests to me is that one of the fundamental mammalian interactions might well be common between two species. (Of course, we will ignore the thousands of generations of dogs being bred to accept human authority. I.e., did we select them for this or is it a happy accident? Until we do the same test with a wolf or an elephant, we’ll never know, will we?)

 

This is further complicated with animals whose brain organization separated long before we had such things as neocortices—birds, for example. Mammals and the line the led to birds (via dinosaurs) split before there was anything resembling a mammal. The term “neocortex” means “new brain” and evolved in mammals after that split.

 

But going back to music. 

 

I am not saying music is the divine nature of human beings, arising de novo in the human species. In evolution, nothing arises de novo. Natural selection always works with what it has, not what it should have. So, for humans to evolve something music, some protomusic had to be there first. Something had to be present to be selected upon. I am saying that we evolved with it to the point that attributing “music” to non-humans can only be done by trivializing what it means to human beings.

 

It’s always been my thought we sang before we spoke. Music evokes emotion and the mechanism of emotion are primitive indeed. They were in the mammalian repertoire long before there were primates, much less human beings. Did we share calls like howler monkeys? Did we practice a cappella harmony out there on the prairie to find each other and console each other when the only thing we had was each other?

 

I think so.

 

Arts and Crafts VII: The Popkes Portable Hanukkah Menorah Kit

This one needs a little back story.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

In early 2023, I was on the phone with a very dear friend of mine from Kansas City. She is Jewish and some white supremacist groups were declaring a national Day of Hate specifically aimed at Jews. 

 

I was, of course, appalled.

 

The problem here is not a group declares hate at another group—that is a problem but not the problem I am talking about here. The problem is other non-Jews are stained with the same brush. You can see this a lot of time in the media. Often, when a person of color commits a crime, the coverage is different from when a white person commits a similar crime. 

 

There’s a well-known psychological trope (the name of which escapes me at the moment) stating that bad acts of your own group are viewed as aberrations while acts of other groups are viewed as examples of their group character. The same can be true in reverse. A member of a given group acting badly reflects that bad behavior across the group as a whole. 

 

This is what I felt when she was telling me about this. These white supremacists as non-Jews were besmirching my good name by what they were saying. It’s not a rational feeling but it’s the way I felt just the same. I felt compelled to do something about it.

 

I’m making this sound like an intellectual moral exercise. That’s not it at all. It was as if someone had decided to declare a day to hate musicians or bird watchers—people who were doing nothing but be who they were. My friend was hurt by these people and I had to do something about it.

 

I decided to make her a Hanukkah menorah. It took me close to two years.

 

Part of that were my own personal issues. I managed to get my parents into Arlington National Cemetery. I reduced my workload and that meant addressing the issue of free time. I had some health issues that needed to be addressed. All that.

 

In addition, there’s the problem I have in ongoing large projects: they get harder as they go along. In any given project a failure can have two outcomes: repair or start over. As a large project goes forward the opportunity to fix a failure via repair becomes less and less viable. This was very true in the case of my parents’ funeral urns. Each step had the potential for disaster and each step was closer and closer to the point where repair was untenable and restarting impossible. Consequently, the stress increased as the project went along. It felt like an ever-increasing headwind as the project proceeded. 

 

It’s a character flaw. I know. And it doesn’t happen with non-physical things. I’m perfectly willing to tear a novel down to bedrock if I see a fundamental flaw. Right up until release date—then, I feel I’m stuck.

 

A Hanukkah menorah holds nine candles. Eight candles represent the eight days of Hanukkah and the ninth candle (the shamash) is used to light the other eight. Often, the shamash holder has special prominence. 

 

My friend had several menorahs of ceramics or other material but none of wood so I decided to build it from wood.

 

My idea was to turn two pieces. One would be horizontal. That would hold the eight candles and the base would have the shamash. It would extend through the horizontal piece and be a little higher than the other candle holders.

 

My first attempt was to turn a cylinder with a thin strip of wood in the middle. The idea, here, is the cylinder would be cut cross ways through the strip. That would give a thin line into which I would drill the candle holders. I had a glue failure so that didn’t work.

 

 

 

I was just as glad. As I rethought it, I decided to put the candle cups into an inlaid piece of wood. I looked at a couple of mockups and came up with this image. 

Meanwhile, another good friend had lost his brother. He wanted to turn an urn for him and his lathe was not up to the task. So, he came down and we turned it together. His first attempt turned out to be too small. His second was beautiful. I inherited the too-small cylinder.

 

I had been thinking of the blonde wood base/redbud center. But working with David changed that. I became enamored of the walnut. So, when David gave me the discarded cylinder, I knew that was going to be what I would use.

 

I turned a narrow cylinder for the horizontal arm. Then, I cut it in half. I knew it would be cut down so I didn’t worry about the ends.

 

 

 

 

 

Then, I routed out a channel and glued in two pieces of redbud. After I’d sanded it down, it looked pretty good. 

Meanwhile, I took the remaining wood and turned out the base. The base had the protruding spire that would contain the shamash. I gouged out some rings on the base for decoration.

 

Turning my attention back to the horizontal arm, I cut a sacrificial holder for it on the table saw. This allowed me to handle it as if it had a flat bottom.

 

 

 

Allowing me to cut it and shape it with relative ease.  

 

The end product came out well. There was still some clean up yet to be done.

Now, we were ready for first assembly. 

Which came out rather well.

 

 

I wasn’t happy with the finish on the base and I knew I was using a different finish (waterlox) on the horizontal arm. So, I stripped the base and finished the two together.

I glued the arm and base together using Apoxie Sculpt black. I did this for a couple of reasons. For one, the material is easy to work with. It comes off when you need it to come off. Secondly, if the material came up through the cracks, I could make it look intentional. The final product worked out okay.

 

 

 

Then, it was a matter of packing up and sending it.

But I got the idea of making the packaging part of the product. I call this the Taymor rule, after Julie Taymor. The idea is to make necessary things part of the product. I.e., use it. Don’t try to make it disappear.

 

Thus, I came up with the Popkes Portable Hanukkah Menorah Kit.

 

The last step was to close the box and ship it.