Big question. Recurring question. Is wealth relative?
 
Apparently, that’s not, in Seinfeld’s Kramer’s words, a “moo” question. And here’s why. With the rise of the Industrial Age and the overthrow of traditional European monarchies, a series of attitudes arose among the “working class.” Encapsulated by writers like Marx and Mill, the ideas we now associate with socialism took root, and with them, the growth of class envy. Even after more than a century of socialism’s failures, that envy endures, and it manifests itself in the dislike, sometimes hatred, of the “rich” and the mechanisms of capitalism. We can’t, of course, place the world’s ills solely on socialism or capitalism. Both systems have collapsed at times; both systems generate envy; both generate a wealthy, controlling class.
 
But we can address envy that both socialism, bottom up, and capitalism, top down, have exacerbated.  
 
“These rich people! They’re never for the poor. They just want more and more, and they already have more than enough.”
 
“Enough of what?”
 
“Everything. Cars and houses. Money in the bank.”
 
“But you have both a car and a house.”
 
“Humpf. Not what they have. They should give more. They can afford it.”
 
“Okay. Let’s say they should give more. How much? And to whom?”
 
“The poor.”
 
“Are you poor?”
 
“Well, I don’t have what they have.”
 
“I’ll grant that. But is there someone who doesn’t have what you have? For example, you have a car and live in a house. Some people have no car and no house. Shouldn’t you share your wealth with them? What about your second TV, your dish and clothes washers, your gas stove, two bathrooms, and unused bedroom? Aren’t you wealthy in someone else’s eyes?”
 
“Maybe, but not like the rich. They could give much more.”
 
“How? Directly to you? So, say someone is ‘rich’ because whatever she or he did or risked became a successful business. Certainly, every business involved some risk for many that you consider to be rich. And what about those who became rich? Didn’t they make jobs for others? When is the last time a ‘poor’ man paid a steady income to another ‘poor’ man?”
 
“That’s another thing. That’s why unions are important. We have to beg for money. Wages aren’t fair.”
 
“Whoa! Aren’t you free to work for anyone if you can get the job? Didn’t you decide to get a particular job, and didn’t the so-called ‘rich person’ give you the job you sought? Even the issue of a ‘fair wage’ is a relative matter. That applies under any circumstance, cost-of-living, for instance. Say the cost-of-living is ‘high’ by comparison with another place, San Francisco compared to Pittsburgh, for example. Should everyone make the same amount of money? Is there nothing to be said about someone’s greed when a landlord says, ‘I want to get more from my rental.’ Should there be a restriction on the cost-of-living? Would it be imposed by a government agency composed of people who get a steady paycheck from tax dollars? Think about the area around Washington, D.C. It’s one of the ‘wealthiest’ places in the USA, and it’s dominated by government workers and government-related workers. You are paying them. Are you paying them fairly? Are you giving them a living wage? What if they believe you should be giving them more so that they can keep up with their cost-of-living?”
 
“The rich should pay more taxes. Distribute the wealth. They won’t miss it because they have enough.”
 
“But you have more than those who have less than you. Shouldn’t you distribute your wealth, also? Shouldn’t you make life easier for government workers who have to live in an expensive area?”
 
“No, that’s different. I’m not wealthy.”
 
“But in someone else’s eyes, you ARE wealthy. Think of the poor around the world. They can’t come close to having what you have. At what level of ‘rich’ do you draw the line. Those with less than you would put you above that line, wouldn’t they? But what if there can never be an absolute value to wealth? What if the government worker just wants more because he or she sees that others have more?”
 
“No, you’re ridiculous. I’ve never been wealthy. I can’t pay more taxes. I should be getting tax money from others.”
 
“Because they owe it to you?”
 
“It needs to be fair. The rich have too much. They don’t need it all.”
 
“Is that your definition of wealth, having more than others? Isn’t it relative even though you think the rich have an absolute wealth. Isn't that the basis for judging your economic condition? Do you think some of the 'wealthy' envy the wealth of other wealthy people? Is it all just a matter of envy? So, if someone comes into wealth not by hard work but by the luck of birth or lottery ticket, should that person distribute that wealth? If you win the lottery tomorrow, will you distribute your newfound wealth to the less fortunate?”
 
No answer, except for a disgusted “Humpf.”

Okay, say you go to the moon, pick up a rock, bring it back, and then discover, “Holy cow! This was a piece of Earth blasted off the planet by an impact and sent through space to the moon when the two bodies were closer. How many of these things could there be? I know the moon is small, but with a surface area of almost 15 million square miles and only a few of us astronauts sent to pick up rocks, what are the chances of randomly returning with a rock from Earth? * It’s not just a ‘small world,’ as we say; it is ‘a small Solar System.’”
 
So, we live with coincidences. They catch our attention when they occur because they occur only rarely. Maybe we shouldn’t read too much into them. They aren’t, regardless of their shock value, indicative of something truly mysterious except for those looking for mystery. Sometimes you walk into a casino or buy a lottery ticket and win.
 
Finding that one Earth-moon rock was, however, something out of the ordinary. So much was involved: People, engineering, safe flight, and safe return. Fifteen million square miles of rocks to pick up, and astronauts chose one that had been ejected from Earth? Wouldn’t it seem to any conspiracy theorist that the coincidence is just too much to be believed? “Surely,” a conspiracist might argue, “NASA is revealing the nature of the rock at this time because it is trying to quash those persistent tales that the moon-landing episodes were faked. NASA probably wants funding for a trip to Mars and needs credibility.”
 
It’s easy for any of us to latch onto a conspiracy of some sort, particularly when a phenomenon affects us personally. And it’s just as easy to latch onto a coincidence as meaningful in a personal context. Jealousies arise that way when someone given to jealous thoughts faults a loved one of infidelity after reading into a situation some self-satisfying confirmation that supports a latent emotion. If we haven’t seen or experienced the reaction in person, we’ve seen it played out in novels and TV and movie scripts. Think, for example, of Shakespeare’s Othello. How many “Desdemonas” or their male counterparts have been unjustly accused in the history of couples torn apart by jealousies based on the supposed significance of coincidence?
 
Unfounded jealousies aren’t the only way that coincidences alter lives. There are conspiracists who deny the roles terrorists and individuals played in the 9/11 attacks based on their reading of coincidences. Or, remember the song about the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy, that, for example, Lincoln had a Vice President Johnson as did Kennedy, that Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy and vice versa, and so on? Similarly, UFO enthusiasts spend many hours of their lives looking for evidence in coincidences to support their conspiracy hypotheses about government coverups. They ignore, however, other coincidences, such as the coincidence that with seven billion sets of eyes on the planet currently and with more than a hundred billion sets through human history, no eye has yet seen anything that irrefutably convinces the eyes that have not seen. Coincidence? I think not. Let me give a term you might consider in your daily life: The Null Coincidence.
 
All lives are complex. All have little time for complete awareness and thorough research. As a result, many people grab onto something little or onto the machinations of others as proof that coincidences have special meaning. The process plays itself out in social media and mass media today. It plays itself out in politics today as it played itself out in politics of the past. And it plays itself out in personal lives. Might we try to recognize that coincidences are, to borrow from Freud’s famous expression about a cigar, sometimes just coincidences, especially in a complex world? Convergences seem inevitable in a world that has so much that can converge.
 
The Earth-moon rock is unusual, but not totally unexpected. Because energy is conserved in our Newtonian universe, the moon moves away from Earth by about 1.5 inches per year. Extrapolate back to an early Earth to reveal that the two bodies were once very close. Some ejected piece of our planet did not have to travel far into space to fall into the gravitational drain of the moon slightly past that point of balance, or neutral point, between the gravitational effect of one body over another.
 
Probably no better example of a Null Coincidence exists than one found in a Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, Civil War museum. There in a case lie two bullets fused in midflight during the famous battle. Thousands upon thousands of rounds fired across fields from one side to the other, and two of them, by coincidence, met at high speed and just the right angle to merge, possibly preventing the wounding or killing of two enemy combatants. Those soldiers would never have known their lives were affected coincidentally. They might not even have been firing at each other, but rather at other soldiers. Yes, those soldiers might have been killed or wounded in the fight, but not by those two bullets that met somewhere between them.
 
There are coincidences that we never know, some that alter our lives without our knowing. Every safe trip is a coincidence just as every unintended car accident is a coincidence of two vehicles being in the same place at the same time. What’s the coincidence of all those cars being on the road and no two of them colliding? Of course, bullets and cars that meet to cause damage, injury, or death are what we find significant.  
 
We, of course, are the judges of significance. I saw a film made by tourists who witnessed a sleeping lioness. Suddenly, she raised her head. By “coincidence” a gazelle was leaping through her patch of savannah unaware of the lioness. As it reached the small opening at full speed, the gazelle saw the lion, and made one of its dozen-foot-high leaps, but because, by coincidence it leapt over the predator, it was doomed. Twelve feet above the ground is insufficient distance for safety when it is the twelve feet immediately above the reach of those quick, lethal claws. Had the gazelle taken a different path by just a few yards through the savannah, it would have survived.
 
Less injurious to man or beast are the coincidences we impose on the world. When one of my grandchildren sat in a room lined with knotty pine, she said, “Hey, that looks like a fish.” It was an elongate knot that now I cannot see without thinking that it looks like a fish. Should we call it a coincidence that the knot resembles the profile of a fish (actually, more or less)? Did trillions of branches grow on trees with only one that looked in cross section like a fish in a board? If I didn’t point out that knot out to you, would you impose the figure of a fish on it?

I can’t leave you without an anecdote. While driving through Boston, I noticed a groundhog crossing three lanes of traffic and headed for the cement divider it could never climb. Whatever motivated the groundhog to race for a barrier it could not climb or tunnel under, the critter’s fate seemed to be doomed. By coincidence, no car in the first two lanes hit the groundhog. I was in the third and managed to avoid it—no, actually, I couldn’t slow down, speed up, or swerve because of the traffic. I didn’t hit the ground hog, but a car behind me did. End of groundhog by coincidence of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Should I have read anything into the incident? Sometimes a chicken or groundhog crosses the road and makes it across; sometimes the animal doesn’t. Should we marvel at the coincidence of a nonevent as we might define the safe crossing? Can the absence of convergence be a coincidence?
 
*Lovett, Richard A. Sciencemag.org.  https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/ancient-earth-rock-found-moon   Accessed on January 29, 2019.

You might not have caught the news about monarch butterflies. It’s partly bad if you’re a lepidopterist or aurelian; even worse if you’re a monarch. The species’ numbers seem to be dwindling, their long migration of thousands of miles from the United States to Central Mexico interrupted by parasites, highway traffic, and milkweed-killing glyphosate that is diminishing their food supply. Maybe the population will recover, but a decimated group can rapidly become an endangered one.
 
If you lived in my neighborhood, you could have witnessed until recently an annual migration of crows, reminiscent of the famous swallows returning to Capistrano and the butterflies’ return to central Mexico. Each October over the course of 35 years, I casually observed the return of the birds to farms in my area. From fall to spring, they made daily migrations and sub-migrations between daytime feeding grounds in corn fields and nighttime roosting grounds in nearby woods. Numbering in a few thousands, they crossed from southwest to southeast like senior citizens driving to diners for breakfast, and by suppertime made the return trip for the early bird specials. Twice, I noticed their populations had dwindled, but they recovered their numbers in subsequent years. And then the Turnpike Commission built a new four-lane highway through the farmland to which they flocked. The migrations changed; the crows looked for new sources of food and new resting places. Now, the migrations have stopped, and a few remnant crows make the area a yearly habitat, one family apparently finding the woods behind my house a year-round abode.
 
Two decimated species; two interrupted migrations. And humans seem to be the cause. We use glyphosate to protect our vast corn fields from weeds and highways to transport that corn to our tables. There’s an irony here. We need more and more corn, so we use more and more glyphosate to expand corn fields. At the same time our need and desire for highways means repurposing corn fields to long, wide patches of concrete and asphalt for high-speed traffic, not suitable for tractors and combines. Glyphosate and highways might seem to be different in composition and purpose, but their corollary effects are similar: Dead monarchs and crows and less land devoted to growing a sustaining food supply.   
 
Apparently, much of what we do to make our lives easier not only makes life harder for others, but also threatens the very ease of life we seek. We can’t plant corn in concrete, and glyphosate threatens our health. I wonder whether or not there’s a lesson here about our personal lives and our desire for an easy life.  

The characters in medieval morality plays were personifications of life’s intangibles, such as Perseverance, Knowledge, and Beauty. In the play Everyman, the main character encounters Death, Good Deeds, and Strength. Characters in other such allegorical dramas include the Seven Deadly Sins, such as Pride and Avarice, and sundry human frailties.
 
Are you in the midst of the greatest allegorical tale? Are you engaged in writing your life story as an allegory? I don’t mean a limited allegory like Animal Farm that takes on politics, and I don’t mean one like Everyman that takes on morality. I’m referring to the battle for the symbolism of Everything, an intellectual war that seeks to establish the dominance once and for all of either a secular, causal world or a world of free will. In the allegory you call My Life, what are the symbols? Who are the characters in your play? Is Love one? Justice? Logic? 
 
One representative dramatist on the secular side is the late Stephen Hawking who believed that theology was unnecessary, implying that we live in a natural world derived from “quantum fluctuations.” Regarding the origin of the universe, Hawking framed the world in a manner different from a medieval morality play dramatist. I discovered this quotation from his play of Ideas: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.” I can imagine the characters in Hawking’s allegorical play. There’s a character named Physical Law whose offspring are the Fundamental Forces, one of which creates the Cosmos. The drama’s conflict? Well, Gravity is the weakest of the Forces, but, according to the playwright Hawking, it becomes the Creator. Surely, envy would arise among the other three other and stronger Forces (Electromagnetism, the Weak Force, and the Strong Force—the first two combining to vie for dominance as the Electroweak Force). The drama plays out over a period of about 14 billion years on a stage that keeps changing, and surprising characters, the Virtual Particles, keep popping into and out of the scenes, somehow derived from the stage itself. Hawking’s material world, regardless of the scientific certainty to which it lends itself, doesn’t need the character called God. His main character, Stephen Hawking himself, says, “God is the name people give to the reason we are here. But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship.” Secular allegory, through and through, right?
 
What about the characters Love, Joy, and Beauty found in those medieval allegories? Would they play roles in Hawking’s allegory? He says, “Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can’t be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.” Stephen would probably put a neuroscientist in his allegory of Everything to cover the intangibles. Find the correct neural circuits, and you will find joy. All those years of lovers stumbling in their attempts to say “I love you” will, in Stephen’s play, be a simple matter of explaining a process. I can read the lines of that special moment: “Dear, when I see you, my caudate nucleus and ventral tegmental area both flush with dopamine. And, dare I say it? My amygdala, my hippocampus, and even my prefrontal cortex become embarrassingly sensitive. I don’t know what it is about you, maybe the symmetry of your face or the pheromones. Whatever the cause, I want to be with you as long as the neurotransmitters freely flow. And I’m not even mentioning the abundance of hormones like oxytocin and vasopressin that your touch releases in me.” Although I’m simplifying Hawking, I do think he suggests that intangibles are tangible.
 
And that brings me to your “morality play,” your allegorical drama. If the world isn’t derived from mere physical laws because it includes that which isn’t physical, then what underlies those intangibles that frame your life? Do you see, for example, the need to put the character Evil in your play? What about Good? Is Compassion the foil to Cruelty or vice versa in your play? Here’s a good way to write your allegory: Try listing the characters to whom you might assign roles. The list alone will define the kind of allegory you will write—or are writing as you live.

“Lost in the undeniable complexity of my world, I, like so many others, want “things” to be simple to understand, vizualizable, causal—and therefore, predictable—and safe. I have often written that what one anticipates is rarely a problem, but anticipation is predictive, and to make a prediction, one has to know how both the past and the present add to make the most likely future. Anticipation is often a matter of null hypotheses and of taking into consideration what might not have happened, is not necessarily happening now, and what isn’t worrisome about the future. But no one can rule out every negative possibility in a complex world. A bride can choose a bakery for a wedding cake based on someone else’s cake, on the reliability of the baker, and on the assumption that a tall cake-building won’t collapse or fall over on the way to the reception regardless of her anticipating the potholes, the steps, the doorway, and the security of a table that might or might not be bumped by a passing waiter or running child.
 
“And that makes me think of soot.”
 
“Soot?” you ask.
 
“Soot, coal dust, little particles that make things dirty by accumulating. Even colloidal particles too small to be seen unless in masses suspended by air or water they affect the passage of light. I don’t know about you, but I grew up in a house heated by a coal furnace in a neighborhood—nay, a town—of houses heated by coal. I thought all trees had black bark. Yes, soot does that to trees. Since we’ve mandated cleaner coal, rains have washed the soot away, revealing the natural color of bark. I suppose the most famous instance of sooty vs. non-sooty trees comes from England and the study of changes in the peppered moth, Biston betularia f. typica and its variation Biston betularia f. carbonaria. The former is lighter colored than the latter, and the moth of darker color dominated the populations in areas where trees were sooty, enhancing their camouflage, fooling the birds. Yes, burning coal the old way produces soot. China is discovering what people in the United States and European countries discovered in the twentieth century. You have to burn coal cleanly if you want to reduce the soot and clean the local environment. But to return to where I began, soot by accumulating becomes vizualizable; I could see it on trees and houses, and I’m sure doctors saw it in the lungs of coal miners and others who lived in those neighborhoods heated by coal furnaces. Soot has a cause, a simple cause, the primitive burning of coal devoid of scrubbers and filters. Soot is predictable—or was predictable. Keep burning coal in home furnaces, and the neighborhood and trees will turn black. And unfiltered and un-scrubbed coal smoke is unsafe.”
 
“See,” you say, “and it’s not only the effect on the environment, but the effect on people’s lungs. I’m surprised everyone in your neighborhood didn’t die from black lung disease. Just living there must have been similar to working in a coal mine. And then, what about global warming? All that burning of coal released carbon dioxide. Think, to produce that greenhouse gas, you combine oxygen and carbon, the carbon in coal. Since the carbon in the coal is combined with oxygen, burning a ton of coal produces more than a ton of carbon dioxide. Definitely, we’ve been warming the atmosphere with our burning of billions of tons of coal.”
 
“Ah! You always bring the subject back around to your obsession with global warming, always to its cause, the cause you identify as vizualizable, simple. It’s a cause-and-effect world for you. You might be right, but this climate stuff is really complex, and dirty air makes it so. You have your prediction, and you’re sure about it, and that’s understandable and possibly correct. Just remember the somewhat still shrouded history of climate. We don’t know whether or not in the big picture, a warmer planet might not be a ‘better’ planet. Sure, the distribution of animals and plants will change with changing climates, but then, haven’t they always had to change in response to climate change? Look, there’s enough evidence to suggest that warm climates are the default climates of Earth with glacial epochs coming few and far between. What if, just what if, the current pumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is staving off a return to the glacial events of the past two million years, all those events interrupted by brief warming periods called interglacials. We're probably in an interglacial right now, a period between the retreat of glaciers and the advance of glaciers over the continents. Remember that ten thousand years ago much of North America and northern Europe and Asia were covered by sheets of ice as much as two-miles-thick. Those ice advances followed warm periods that melted existing glaciers of the previous advance. Cyclic stuff, really, over two thousand millennia. If you try to visualize that past, your mind’s eye will envision unstoppable continental glaciers moving across millions of square miles, even cutting out rocks and overriding hills and mountains. If they advance again, say goodbye to Canada and the rest of the civilized North; say goodbye to Boston and New York.
 
“I know you have to your satisfaction a predictable future planned, and I know that it doesn’t include soot or any of the aerosols released by burning coal. But complexity does get more complex at times, the future is not easy to anticipate. Some little kid will play beneath the cake table at the reception and jeopardize the cake.”
 
“I don’t know where you’re going with this. Your’re mentioning a bunch of stuff: Soot, causality, glaciation, and the rest.
 
“I’ll try to tie it together in the context of your comments about coal and climate. Think incoming solar radiation. Some of it reaches the surface of the planet, converts to longwave radiation, and then gets trapped for a bit by the greenhouse gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and others). Not all solar radiation reaches the surface, however. Some is reflected to space. You have had the experience of looking at the tops of clouds. They are white and bright as you see them from above, but people on the ground see grey to purple, depending on the amount of blocking ice and water. Well, a group of researchers just used NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer and found that aerosols, such as the colloidal particles produced by burning coal and making the air ‘dirty,’ reflect sunlight at high altitudes, enhancing the natural reflection of cloud tops. In other words, the stuff that escapes up the smokestack can help cool the planet. In fact, the ‘researchers found that clouds containing more aerosols reflected more heat than prior estimates had suggested—more than twice as much. More specifically, they found that approximately three-quarters of the amount of heat reflected was due to aerosols.’ * Just when you think you have complete understanding of something, someone comes along with a discovery that makes you have to readjust your thinking. Those researchers ‘note that this is important because climate change models include the amount of heat that clouds reflect back into space.’ Now, what am I supposed to do with conclusions based on those old models, the ones that don’t account for the additional albedo of sooty cloud tops?”
 
“So, what are you saying? That you would prefer those sooty days long gone, the ones that made moths of darker color survive against dark bark and the ones that gave your contemporaries black lung? Have you been to China’s big cities in the past ten years? Have you seen the pollution, the smog, air you could cut with a knife? How many young Chinese are destined to die from lung disease?”
 
“Yes, I’ve seen the pictures of smoggy Chinese cities, and no, I don’t prefer the old style of coal burning, that is, of unrestricted coal furnaces in every home spewing soot—and carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide—into the neighborhood air. But, at the same time, I prefer less arrogant conclusiveness on the part of scientists whose minds should always be open to further discovery and modification. What are we going to do with those old climate model predictions based on less reflectivity from cloud tops? There’s a world of laity out there driven to panic status over ‘climate change.’
 
“You know that old idea about one man’s garbage being another’s treasure. So, China and India pollute their air, and the rest of the world gets aerosols that mitigate the effect of adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. It just gets complexer and complexer.”
 
“You’re not one of those climate deniers, are you?”
 
“Whatever that means. Climates change; otherwise, all the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere would be covered in ice from the Arctic to Pennsylvania. Having studied the subject, I know that climates change typically on a scale larger than that of an individual life. No one lived the full duration of the Medieval Warm Period, and no one lived the duration of the Little Ice Age. Even in the midst of those periods that we label warm or cold in retrospect, weather fluctuated, so individuals living at the time couldn’t get the big picture. Climate scientists believe they have a vizualizable future based on what has happened, what is happening, and what must happen. Can the change occur rapidly? Of course, but what does ‘rapid’ mean in respect to the change of the past 8 to 10 thousand years? The seas rose rapidly after the last big ‘melt,’ and then their rise slowed. Earth has its own circadian rhythms interrupted at times by solar output, orbital changes, volcanic eruptions, and orogenesis.
 
“And now a word from our sponsor. I keep seeing the commercial for a special pillow that is supposed to make sleeping better. Maybe the pillow works. I don’t know. But I keep seeing the commercial, and that repetition makes me question whether, as I adjust my pillow for comfort, or not I shouldn’t get that ‘superior’ pillow. In other words, the more we hear something, the more likely we are to consider it. That’s the story of ‘climate change.’ We can’t get away from the subject. Meanwhile, the temperatures do what they always do, fluctuate over the short term and fluctuate over the long term. Possibly, the models that didn’t account for increased reflectivity off dirty clouds and air are still correct. Probably, adding all the greenhouse gases will change who gets more and who gets less precipitation and who needs more and who needs less air conditioning. But maybe the potential warming will keep us in an interglacial period and prevent the bulldozing by ice of Canada, northern United States, and northern Eurasian lands. And maybe dirty air, that soot and those aerosols produced by an industrialized planet, will keep us cooler than the models predict.”
 
“You are sitting on the climate fence,” you complain. “You want me to believe that you accept the idea of climate change and that throwing carbon into the atmosphere will warm the planet, but at the same time you want me to think that there’s a possibility that we can’t anticipate because of the non-visualizable variables like the recently discovered reflection ratios of aerosols and soot. Make up your mind.”
 
“I will as soon as I can, as soon as the world is simple to understand, vizualizable, and causal enough to predict, as soon as I discover all those variables I didn’t know. Not everyone who grew up in my sooty town died from lung disease, and rains have since washed away the soot from the bark. Some of my elders are still alive or died in their nineties. Nineties. That’s a long life in any climate and in any environmental condition, even a sooty one.”  
 
*Yirka, Bob. Researchers find cooling effect of aerosols in cumulus and MSC clouds twice as high as thought. Phys.Org. January 18, 2019. Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-01-cooling-effect-aerosols-cumulus-msc.html  Accessed January 23, 2019.

In an age of social media and agenda-driven news organizations, inference has become "truth." 

You might recognize “without form and void.” It’s one version of a modifier in Genesis. It’s what the writer says about Earth before the creation. From the very beginning of our intellectual heritage, form and substance have been important concepts. By the time of the Greek philosophers, form had become, in part, either “perfect” or “imperfect,” either possible or impossible. There are only five “perfect solids” according to Plato, and no one has invented another. * Thus, in Plato’s sense of “form” all solids that are not one of the special five must be imperfect.
 
Perfect is an interesting word. It has had various meanings, including the common “without flaw,” and “ideal,” but here I’ll use the use the word in the sense “complete” with a corollary sense of “balanced.” When the eighteenth-century optimists said, as Voltaire satirizes, that of all the possible worlds this one is perfect, they were echoing the idea of the hierarchy of being, or, as it has been termed, The Great Chain of Being. If you recall, that idea was the one used to battle the early Darwinists: The world couldn’t be evolving, they argued, because a Perfect Deity made a Perfect World—the Best of All Possible Worlds. God was “perfect” because God was “complete,” that is, in need of nothing. The Creation was “perfect” because there were no gaps: God, Angels, Humans, Animals, Plants, and Rocks, all part of that hierarchical Great Chain. Such a universe had no room for new species because it was complete.
 
You might argue that the Anthropic Principle is a continuation of that basic idea. This world, because it exists in a balance of forces that manifests itself as the venue for our existence, is “perfect.” Maybe we can’t find “ideal” forms in addition to Plato’s perfect solids, but all the less-than-ideal forms exist in a perfectly formed universe, and it is that overriding universal “form” that is complete and whose completeness allows us to exist. The physical forces in this universe are “just right.” Think of those who argue for a multiverse—a universe of universes—and their usual statement that those other universes “might” have physical conditions different from ours and, therefore, might not be able to support life as we know it. **
 
The form of our universe as a problem doesn’t compete with our need for bread, milk, and eggs. Most people don’t go about their days thinking about “perfect forms,” unless they do so when they encounter something “imperfect,” like not getting bread with soup, as in the Seinfeld episode about the Soup Nazi. *** But what does any complaining about life’s imperfect forms get us? “No soup for you” is the Either/Or. We can’t change the way the world works because we aren’t in control of the fundamental forces and the way they arrange matter and energy. And here is where “form” and “perfection” (or completeness) come into our lives. If the world is “perfect,” why does it permit human shortcomings, things left out, and the as yet unresolvable problem of evil? Why is the bread sometimes missing from our bag?
 
In that Seinfeld episode, George is Biblical Job after the Adversary (Satan) takes away all that is complete and before God restores it to completeness. And if George is a modern representation of the medieval allegorical Everyman, his not getting bread with his soup is an analog of all lives. Sometimes the bag doesn’t contain the expected piece of bread.
 
I had a late colleague who received a merit award for his teaching. In receiving the award in front of the faculty, he merely said (though he was given to long conversations in daily life), “Excellence is a journey.” That’s the core of human motivation. Completeness, and thus, perfection isn’t our daily lot. More often than not, the bread isn’t included with the soup, not necessarily intentionally, but once it’s missing, it’s missing. The form of life goes on in imbalances that we cannot correct because they appear to be imposed by a “Soup Nazi” who acts on a whim.
 
Wanting that perfect form, wanting perfect symmetry that mimics Plato’s solids, we look at the imperfections, the imbalances, the lack of symmetry and we praise it where we subjectively impose it. “She has a perfect body”; “She has a perfect face”; “He is Mr. Universe”; “He has his act together.” In looking at the mirror, we notice our personal imbalances: “This is too thin”; “This, too fat”; “Here’s a mole”; “Why don’t I have a body like So-n-So, who’s just perfect?” And we extend the physical imperfections to all things intangible, such as intellect, wit, and personality, seeing in others what they probably don’t see in themselves. Everyman, the character we all are at times in the drama of life, hears “No soup for you.”
 
How balanced is your universe? The physical one in which you live has ratios of strength among the fundamental forces that keep it in existence as we know it. As John Leslie points out in Universes,
 
            “Gravity…needs fine tuning for stars and planets to form, and for stars to burn stably over billions of years. It is roughly 10^39 times weaker than electromagnetism. Had it been only 10^33 times weaker, stars would be a billion times less massive and would burn a million times faster.” ****
 
Maybe we do exist in as perfect a universe as is possible because of those fundamental and balanced forces. ***** It’s just that that perfection, that completeness, exists on a very basic physical level. Those perfect solids of Plato are exceptions within the universe of our daily lives. Getting bread with one’s soup in the Soup Nazi’s deli occurs regularly, but not always. Good occurs, but evil occurs, also. Your one nostril, eyebrow, or breast might be slightly different from the other, though to the rest of us it is a detail and an imperfection we never notice. We don’t see the mirror you that you see. And if your mirror universe is like universe number 10^640 that is supposedly an exact copy of your personal universe, only you see the imbalance. Only you look into the bag that is “supposed” to contain take-out soup and bread to see that the bread is missing.
 
Completion—perfection—occurs only in matters we cannot control, such as the fine-tuning of the universe’s fundamental forces and in those five perfect solids. We don’t have time to look at all the details of other universes—other people—that seem to be perfect and balanced in perfect ratios like gravity and electromagnetism. We look from afar at the "worlds" of people seemingly more fortunate, more perfect, and that perspective blurs the details of their lives and hides their imperfections. “Why can’t our family be perfect like their family?” “Why do they get to have that ideal life”? “Why does everything work out for them?”
 
“Excellence is a journey”; completeness, too. Balance is temporary in daily life, so we could paraphrase my late colleague and say, “Perfection—or completeness—is a journey.” Say you were able to enter one of those other universes or the life of another, would you do so in expectation that all the forces are fine-tuned with all their strength ratios just so balanced that all forms would be perfect?
 
Those Platonic solids might be teases, but they are also motivators. In them we see what perfection would look like and, more importantly, that some kind of perfection is possible. Their perfection can serve as motivation within the reality of daily imbalances and shortcomings. When we are motivated to strive for perfection, we do so in the knowledge that those five forms are all that there are. Other perfect forms are unattainable, but we have a model that underpins our striving.
 
We might be creatures of wishful thinking. We know ultimate and continued perfection is unattainable, but we’ve seen those perfect forms. “Surely,” we think, “such perfection is within my grasp. Others seem to have reached perfection. If the void that became the universe of forms houses some examples of perfection, maybe I’ll be the first to attain similar perfection.”
 
You won’t, but don’t worry. Everyone else has gone to the deli only to find, upon leaving, that someone forgot to include the bread with the soup. That doesn’t prevent you from making repeated trips to that deli. Sometimes the bread is included. Sometimes the forms seem “perfect enough” in a “perfect world” that contains numerous imperfections. Dealing with imperfections is not so hard when one looks at the structure of the universe and its limiting forces. Your bag might not have bread in it at the moment, but it has the soup. Don’t spend time complaining about what you don’t have; you might lose what you do have if the Soup Nazi says, “No soup for you!”
 
 *Tetrahedron, Cube, Octahedron, Dodecahedron, and Icosahedron.
 
**Yes, there are arguments to be made that somewhere, maybe in a universe to which we might assign the number 10^640 that a mirror universe exists in every detail we are and know.
 
*** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6SWr9gWKZM  This YouTube clip shows the development of the scene plus the scene to which I refer.
 
***Leslie, John. Universes. London. Routledge. 1989. p. 5.
 
****Gravity, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force (the electroweak force), and the strong nuclear force. Leslie writes that different strength ratios among the fundamental forces would have resulted in a universe that couldn’t engender or maintain life: “…a slight strengthening [of electromagnetism] could transform all quarks … into leptons or else make protons repel one another strongly enough to prevent the existence of atoms….” p. 4. And he writes, “The nuclear strong force is (roughly) a hundred times stronger than electromagnetism, which is in turn ten thousand times stronger than the nuclear weak force, which is itself some ten thousand billion billion billion times stronger than gravity. So we can well be impressed by any apparent need for a force to be ‘just right’ even to within a factor of ten, let alone to within one part in a hundred or in 10^100—especially when nobody is sure why the strongest force tugs any more powerfully than the weakest.” p. 6.

Do we inordinately rely on projection to explain the behavior of organisms, including other humans? Will we ever invent an artificial intelligence that will project onto us its worldview in an attempt to understand who and what we are?  
 
In 1899, H. S. Jennings published an article entitled “The Psychology of a Protozoan.” * Jennings put paramecia on a slide and observed their activities. At the time, psychology and psychiatry were in their infancy, or, at least, in their childhood stage. In the same year Freud published Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams), and the young Jung was still a year from working at the Psychiatrische Universitätsklinik Zürich. From the perspective of someone in the twenty-first century, the idea that paramecia have a psychology to study might seem odd, but keep in mind that Jennings published in the late nineteenth century.
 
What could Jennings study? He writes, “If Paramecia are placed on an ordinary slide…together with a small bit of bacterial zoogloea…it will soon be found that almost all the Paramecia, which were at first scattered throughout the preparation, have gathered closely about the mass of zoogloea and are feeding upon it.” (503) Okay, I get it. Take a living organism, give it a delicious blob of gelatinous food, and it will eat. I’ve seen the experiment repeated at every restaurant and hotel buffet.  
 
To provide some background for the laity not too familiar with paramecia, Jennings tells us that the organisms live, “by thousands in pond water containing decaying vegetable matter…Examination shows that under normal conditions Paramecia are usually engaged in feeding upon the masses of Bacteria which form a thick zoogloea on the surface of the water in which they are found. These Bacteria form almost or quite their entire food. A first question then might be: How do they choose their food, selecting Bacteria in preference to something else?” (504)
 
My inclination is to say, “Look, H. S., they eat what they evolved to eat. They can’t eat bigger stuff because they are little.” (But, hold on, Donald, remember what you said above. Jennings wrote this in 1899. People still study paramecia. Serious people. Neuroscientists even. Don’t’ mock what you don’t do or know)
 
Jennings does pose an interesting question. It seems that paramecia placed on a slide without the buffet also gather as if they are social beings. After asking how the paramecia know to gather about the zoogloea, that is, how they find the food placed at a distance on the slide, he then asks why they gather “like a human crowd.” Now, here’s where the projection seems evident: “If we mount the Paramecia…without the mass of bacterial zoogloea, we shall soon notice another phenomenon reminding us of human beings under like conditions [italics mine]. The Paramecia do not remain scattered [on the slide] as at first, but soon begin to collect into assemblages in one or more regions. It appears as if they did not enjoy being alone and had passed the word along to gather and hold a mass meeting in some part of the preparation….” (504)
 
Stay with me here. After gathering like some concert crowd in a mosh pit, the paramecia start to separate a bit, but not by much, “as if by common consent no Paramecium was to pass farther out than all the rest.” (504) He wonders whether or not there is a “psychology” at work “which seems forced upon us by the observed facts.”
 
Consider two of your observations: 1) People gather in concert venues and in bars and restaurants for social interaction, but there are circumstances in which even the seemingly less “mindful” of us reject the overcrowding, grow tired of it, and move apart. We are gregarious to some extent, but our sense of individuality overrides our desire to be in a crowd. You remark, “Whenever the crowd becomes unpleasant or dangerous, we break from it.” 2) Pet owners “just know” when their pets are “happy”? They also ascribe personalities to their pets. “Of course,” you say, “and that’s because pets really do have personalities. Dogs differ, cats differ, and who knows, maybe even snakes differ. Animals have personalities as evidence by their likes and dislikes (as we interpret them), and that’s why people have the pets they have. Golden retrievers, among the most popular of dogs, are generally pleasant. Anyone can see that. There’s definitely a pet psychology.”
 
Jennings further experimented by putting not bacteria on the slide, but rather “bits of cloth, cotton, sponge, or any other loose or fibrous bodies” only to find that the paramecia also gather to feed. “Thus it appears that Paramecia exercise no choice as to the nature of the substances which they use for food….We may cut out, therefore, any psychological qualities deduced alone from the supposed choice of food….” (507). But what about the gathering in the absence of food?
 
His conclusion. The animals excrete carbon dioxide that results in carbonic acid, and paramecia seem to be attracted to acidic environments. So, the social gathering is a response to a particular chemical environment. What he found was that paramecia didn’t make any choices and didn’t learn during any of his experiments. “Thus it appears that our social phenomena, with all their implication of higher mental powers, have evaporated into a simple attraction toward carbon dioxide.” (508) Jennings concludes, also, that paramecia have a “machine-like nature.” Finally, he writes, “An animal that learns nothing, that exercises no choice in any respect, that is attracted by nothing and repelled by nothing, that reacts entirely without reference to the position of external objects , that has but one reaction for the most varied stimuli, can hardly be said to have made the first step in the evolution of mind, and we are not compelled to assume consciousness or intelligence in any form to explain its activities.” (515)
 
So, maybe Jennings, back there at the beginnings of modern psychology, gave us something to think about with respect to what we are. We can learn, exercise choice, respond to stimuli differently, and recognize position (place). As we develop Artificial Intelligence, we keep refining our invention, apparently aiming for the sentience we have, sentience we can project onto a robot. Our propensities and properties seem to characterize mind, and mind is the stuff behind all psychology. Jennings used paramecium behaviors as windows into its “psychology” only to find that the organism had no “psychology.”
 
Will we study robot behavior similarly? Will we project our personalities onto robots as pet owners project? And if robots achieve what paramecia cannot achieve, the ability to choose, to recognize place, and to learn, will they put us under the microscope and project their way of existing onto ours?
 
Since the rise of psychology, haven’t we all been under the microscope? Haven’t humans always projected themselves onto both animate and inanimate objects? Why, for example, do we want to put heads on robots? As Jennings also asks: Is there a psychology at work that is forced on us by the observed facts? And I ask: Do we project ourselves into all our observations?
 
 
* Jennings, H. (1899). The Psychology of a Protozoan. The American Journal of Psychology, 10(4), 503-515. doi:10.2307/1412661 Online at https://www.jstor.org/stable/1412661?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents Accessed January 20, 2019.

Certainly, language is important; otherwise, you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing right now. Some argue that it shapes worldview; others, that it doesn’t. Both sides have good arguments and a slew of anecdotes to support their views. Both refer to tests run by psychologists. Language.
 
Definitely, changing language over a generation can change views. In fact, as we see in every generation, using different words and expressions makes one generation’s perspective different from another’s. Once new terminology pervades a group (or a group invents terms), a singular mindset evolves.
 
We could argue that circumstances demand words to describe them. We could argue that ideas generate circumstances. Neologisms abound, driven into existence by the need to be unique in burgeoning populations of the literate, the desperate, the philosophical, the innovative, and the ambitious.
 
No doubt lexicographers and linguists will never run out of work, and their contemporary psychologists and sociologists will stay busy explaining the motivations and attitudes that both generate and derive from neologisms. Nothing wrong in that: Technological advances alone require new terms for new devices.
 
What we all know for certain is that language changes. Old English differs from Middle English that, in turn, differs from Modern English. Take the Middle English of Chaucer as an example.
 
            Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
            The droghte of March hath perced to the roote… *
 
Spelling catches your eye first, but the language sounds a bit different, also. And, as a further obvious example of linguistic changes, go to a text of Beowulf to see how English changed between its beginnings as Anglo-Saxon and its expression in Chaucer’s medieval England. ** Yes, language changes both through reflecting attitudinal changes and propagating them. It changes by dialect and practice. It changes with changing circumstances. But language cannot change math. It can’t change how we quantify. Or can it?
 
According to a report by Teri Webster, *** California legislator Hannah-Beth Jackson imposed new committee rules that ban the use of he and she. Instead, Jackson wants the committee members to use the word they, and Jackson wants members to refer to her as they. Immediately, the absurdity followed, as reported by Webster.
 
“So, the world is a different place. My grammar teacher’s long gone and we won’t be hearing from her,” Jackson said.
According to Webster, noting Jackson’s plunge into her own linguistic trap, “She then corrected her use of the word her.”
“From them…from they,” Jackson said.
 
I guess we are in one of the language transition stages, not a new thing as readings of Middle and Old English texts reveal. You will have to start making everyone (Yes, “one”) around you plural. You’re just not going to change your sense of gender. You’re going to have to change your sense of math. No longer will 1 = 1. One will equal they.
 
Good luck in your brave new world of the new math.
 
*You can hear a reading of Chaucer’s opening lines at http://sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer/gp-aloud.htm  Accessed January 19, 2019.
** You can see a video with a reading at  https://www.realmofhistory.com/2017/04/27/beowulf-read-original-old-english/  Accessed January 19, 2019.
***Webster, Teri. California Dem State Senator bans ‘he’ and ‘she’ pronouns during judiciary committee hearings Online at https://www.theblaze.com/news/california-democrat-state-senator-bans-he-and-she-pronouns-during-judiciary-committee-hearings  Accessed on January 19, 2019. There’s a video with the relevant segment beginning at 13:20. Immediately following the discussion of the rules, the committee begins to discuss the abortion issue, and the reference the opening speaker uses is the feminine pronoun, not the required “they.” After the Chair said that the “Chair” was to be referred to as They, Senator Connie M. Leyva, a… (I don’t know what word to use) referred to the “Chair” as “Madame.” And she said, “Every woman has the right to control her own reproductive decisions….” Almost immediately, as I said, the absurdity of the new math imposed itself, and the Chair followed the witness remarks with the use of “her.” We are in the midst of a very big transition. You are “They.” Get used to the new math.

During one Christmas season a long time ago (in Donald years), a friend of my parents dressed as Santa and visited homes late on December 24. I had fallen asleep before the visit, so I awakened to a visit from Santa. During the day my cousin and I awaited with great anticipation Santa’s arrival, and maybe that’s why the memory, coupled with my now ancient belief, sticks all these (Donald) years later. I also remember the shock when I learned the truth about Santa’s existence. I had to adjust to a different reality. But, young as I was, I adapted; I revised my belief system.
 
That memory makes me wonder sometimes about the adhesion of belief and worldview. What we come to believe has the stickiness of a mouse glue trap. Once on a glue trap, a mouse only further entraps itself. Similarly, insects further entrap themselves on spiderwebs. Belief and worldview both act like glue traps and spiderwebs at times. And these are those times.
 
You can see the adhesive nature of beliefs on public display almost daily. TV, radio, and social media all preserve the nature of the sticky and entwining traps. Here’s an example I stumbled on recently. Seems that David Webb, a conservative commentator of African-American heritage, was being interviewed by a rather liberal network African-American analyst, Areva Martin, when the latter said Webb has “the privilege of doing that people of color don’t have the privilege of…by virtue of being a white male, you have white privilege.” * Now, to be fair to Martin, I should note that the interview was audio only, so she could not see Webb. Webb, an articulate and well-mannered presence, said, “Areva, I hate to break it to you, but you should’ve been better prepped…I’m black.”
 
The glue traps and spiderwebs of political and social beliefs are sticky indeed. And among the worst of those entrapping beliefs lie the inescapable terms of political correctness and mores du jour. I don’t know whether or not the incident had any long-term effect on Martin; she might still be stuck in her glue trap of political or ideological expediency. If she is, then she differs from those of us who once enthusiastically believed in a universal wintertime gift-giver, but altered our beliefs in the face of specific realities. The old belief no longer adheres to us.
 
Of course, there are those who would say all belief is similarly adhesive, that everyone is stuck on some sort of glue trap or in some spiderweb. And they would have a point. They might also point out that the nature of belief can differ in endurance, political and social beliefs being among the most temporary because every generation can reject those of a previous generation (though they often resurface in altered forms). This all might seem to be an exercise in rhetoric if lives weren’t affected. We know, however, that even short-lived beliefs have resulted in human suffering, enslavement, war, and death.
 
Again, to be fair to Areva Martin—though she didn’t do her homework—I remind you that she conducted her interview without seeing David Webb. The question she needs to ask herself if she is in any way rational, however, is whether or not discovering that she was stuck on a glue trap of belief is motive for altering her worldview just a bit, maybe struggling enough to just free a part of her from the glue. If she decides alternatively to reach further onto the trap because she’s already committed an initial step, she will merely find herself forever trapped.
 
There’s a lesson in this for all of us, but to understand it, we have to free our heads from some very sticky stuff.
 
*Dibble, Madison. ‘I Hate to Break It to You’: Fox Contributor David Webb Blasts CNN Analyst Accusing Him of ‘White Privilege.’ Online at https://ijr.com/david-webb-blasts-cnn-analyst-accusing-him-of-white-privilege/  Accessed January 18, 2019. ​ I’m wondering whether or not Kant’s categorical imperative applies here: “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” What do you think those who run from one politically correct view to another would say about the categorical imperative?