“They (heroes) come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.”
     --Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
 
In 1998 the IMAX production Everest became a very popular film. A documentary on the climbing of the tallest mountain, the film showed the travails of climbers who suffered the dangers of wind chill factors (-100oF), avalanches, and storms to reach the top regardless of the costs. Those costs were great. Some died; others suffered terrible frostbite; and one endured the risks on his honeymoon, taking his wife part way up the mountain. 
 
Envision the romance of the place. No, not the romance of a honeymoon. I mean, instead, the meaning of the word romantic in the sense of the late eighteenth century and nineteenth century writers and artists who saw raw Nature in a geography of all that was antithetical to living in cities. Because of philosophers, painters, and poets, many of us carry that romantic and ideal perspective in our collective consciousness. Mountainous regions are, in that sense, “Nature in the raw.” Among the rawest of such earthly environments, Mt. Everest is a special place because it was unconquered until the middle of the twentieth century when Edmund Hillary and Tenzig Norgay scaled the peak, becoming famous in the process. If there is a place associated in the collective mind as an environment for the Noble Savage, the Yeti, or the intrepid and undaunted hero, Everest is it. Why, there’s even a roller coaster ride at Disney World that provides an ersatz experience. Most people might not be able to point to the mountain on a map, but most people have a mental map of the place drawn by imagination and stored in the collective mental map library through hearsay and folktale.
 
For most that saw the IMAX film, the mountain climbers were daring and strong. They had both strength of will and physical strength. Think, however, about the perspective under which they undertook their risks. What they were driven to accomplish cost lives, limbs, and, in one instance, a marriage—an off-the-screen reality. For one climber’s wife, her husband’s leaving her for months, his suffering the loss of fingers and toes, and his desire to reach the peak of Everest, meant one thing: he cared more for conquering Everest than he cared for her and their long-term relationship.
 
Perspectives vary: In a world suffused by art, literature, and folk history with romantic notions of Nature and heroes, do we now deem heroism in the context of The Unnecessary? Or, was the “hero” mountain climber a “jerk” who shirked his responsibility to his marriage? Who determines that the cold space at the top of the world’s highest mountain is a more heroic space than the space in the home of a good marriage? If we subjectively romanticize a place, do we change its reality? Certainly, risks multiply on a cold and forbidding mountain, but what of the risk to a marriage? The climb affects the climber, but it also affects those left behind, risking any emotional and financial support a healthy, devoted spouse might give for decades.  
 
Years after his receiving knighthood for climbing Mt. Everest, Sir Hillary attempted to climb K2. Fortunately for him, the younger climbers were able to carry his ailing body wracked by altitude sickness down the steep slopes in time to save his life. The personal distance to the top of a mountain apparently changed for Hillary midway in the climb. His perspective probably also changed when life was precariously dependent upon the ability of others to get a sick person down a mountain, others who had to risk their own lives for his safety, and others who had to alter their own plans for a climb.
 
In the instance of the IMAX Everest expedition, the film’s producers deemed the climbers’ efforts worthy of a documentary film for viewing on the largest of all screens. In the context of a collective mind that embraces the romantic notion of risk in “wild” Nature, such a movie had a ready audience of vicarious climbers and risk-seekers. Sir Hillary’s K2 climb was also the subject of a documentary viewed by many. Even before audiences view such films, they are already primed by more than two centuries of inculcation to focus on the “heroism” of the movie’s subjects. Disney’s Everest will always have long lines of eager riders. But should those who voluntarily seek the dangers of such extreme adventures as climbing the real Everest be praised for their efforts and emulated by the rest of us? Before you answer, however, remember that this is not a practice life.
 
The climbers in the two documentaries endangered themselves, some of their fortune, and some of their relationships. Risk is a part of living, but extraordinary risk for its own sake, for fame, or some other purely voluntary purpose outside of necessity can have deleterious consequences. Here’s one more example to drive the point: If you search National Geographic’s website, you will find a photo taken by Subin Thakuri of Utmost Adventure Trekking that shows climbers struggling to ascend the Hillary Step on May 19, 2012. With the photo is the caption that says some climbers, in their attempt to scale the mountain, “spent as long as two hours at this 40-foot rock wall below the summit” of Everest. On that spring day 234 climbers reached the mountain’s top. The caption for the photo ends in an unemotional statement: “Four climbers died.”
 
Necessary risk is, however, another story. Firefighters face risk (on average 98 die annually in the USA).  Policemen also face it as they battle the uncivilized elements of our society (160 deaths in 2010). War is the least civilized circumstance that makes my point that this is not a practice life. Soldiers face risk. By choice, some soldiers face extraordinary risk. We mourn those who take such risk for the sake of others because they do so in the knowledge that life is not practice. 
 
Corporal John Henry Pruitt from Fayetteville, Arkansas entered the U.S. Marine Corps to serve in the First World War.  Cpl. Pruitt, in defense of his company, single-handedly attacked two machine guns, killing both men operating the guns at Blanc Mont Ridge in France. Running toward two firing machine guns was a risky business, born of the necessity of battle and the need to save the lives of those around him. That he received the Congressional Medal of Honor for his risk is an acknowledgement of his heroism. Facing two machine guns would be enough risk for a lifetime one would think, but the corporal did not stop. After quieting the machine guns, he then captured 40 Germans in a nearby dugout. The young marine also received the Navy Medal of Honor for his acts, but, alas, war is risk; war is in Hegel's terms, "uncivilized conditions." War is not practice. Cpl. Pruitt was killed by an artillery shell shortly after his heroic acts, and he received both medals posthumously. There are many stories like those of Cpl. Pruitt in the annals of the Congressional Medal of Honor, the annals of individual military units, the annals of firefighters, and the annals of police. Their stories emphasize the reality of this website's title and the truth in the quotation from Hegel that begins this essay.
         
Billions of individual humans have lived and died, maybe as many as 100 billion since our emergence two- to three-hundred thousand years ago. Trillions of individuals of other species have also lived and died. The planet sustains us, but it also poses risks—from other organisms (lions, bacteria, drunk drivers, viruses, and terrorists) and from inorganic processes (earthquakes, storms, floods, and trips down the stairs). If this life were practice, then there might be a good argument outside of war and protection of the public or family for placing ourselves in extraordinary jeopardy—just to see how risk makes us feel, to see what it feels like to stand on Mt. Everest, skydive, or stand up on a roller coaster, and to receive the accolades of the adoring public. But this life isn’t practice, and we have responsibilities to ourselves and to those who love and rely on us.
 
We have long sought the stories of heroes, and we have long tried to emulate heroes both real and imagined. Our music, art, literature, filmography, philosophy, myths, and folk traditions have infused us with notions of heroism and with romanticized natural settings. By the time we have become independent adult thinkers capable of questioning our fictional notions of heroism, many of us are already too steeped in the teas of tradition to break free from them.
 
Are heroes born of necessity? Are they still heroes when they purposefully seek, in Hegel’s words, “uncivilized conditions”? Should we equate the accoladed “heroism” of Sir Edmund Hillary and his ilk with the forgotten “heroism” of Corporal John Henry Pruitt?
 
The next time you stand in line awaiting your turn to ride Disney’s Everest, think not of Hillary, but of Pruitt. 

“There are many ways to characterize “human.” Here’s one: Humans are humans because they can map better and more complexly than any other kind of organism,” I say. “They can map the past, the present, and the future; they can even map worlds that don’t exist. If I may borrow from Descartes, I map; therefore, I am.”
 
Thinking you have me in your mental grasp, you respond, “Birds migrate; so do whales, salmon, turtles, and even horseshoe crabs. One doesn’t migrate without some type of mapping. Dogs can map a way home or to food on the other side of a fence. Obviously, animals also have the ability to map.”
 
“Good point, but their maps are limited to getting food, reproducing, and finding family and shelter; and their maps are used instinctively at one time or another for something necessary: go north in spring; go south in fall; return to Capistrano or any migratory location. Humans, by contrast, map even the unnecessary, like the route to Capistrano to see the birds return. Or even a route to Capistrano that is so indirect it includes scenery for the sake of seeing scenery and takes an extra day to get there. It doesn’t matter what kind of map they make, physical or mental, humans map everything all the time.
 
“Mental maps do more than define us as a separate species; they define us as individuals. Your maps and mine differ. I see a feng shui where you see an uncomfortable arrangement. I see a neighborhood I would avoid where you see one with nostalgic fondness. I go out of my way to avoid highways in favor of two-lane country roads, whereas you head for the highway. I map a route for its geologic sites; you map one for its farmers’ markets. Mental maps aren’t just directions. They are infused with attitude. They reflect emotion and desire. The infusion and reflection define each of us. Our mental maps are representations of our worldviews, our Weltanshauung. And that leads to some advice I’ll give at the end of this essay that is not too different from that given by A. E. Housman in his poem ‘Terence, This Is Stupid Stuff’:
 
          Therefore, since the world has still
          Much good, but much less good than ill,
          And while the sun and moon endure
          Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
          I'd face it as a wise man would,
          And train for ill and not for good.
 
“Because this is not your practice life, you would be well advised to map realistically the physical and social landscapes through which you daily travel. Mental mapping is a survival mechanism that enables you to avoid dangers and enhance your life. You cannot impose a map on reality to satisfy your inner desires without consequence. The landscape is what it is; you know that because you have mapped your dwelling sufficiently well enough to find the bathroom at night without turning on the lights. You know where the steps are because you have mentally mapped them. Those disposed to impose their imaginative maps on the world tumble down real steps they do not include. You have to know where you are in relation to what is helpful, harmful, or inconsequential. To live happily and effectively, you also have to know how to find your way in a world that, as Housman writes, ‘has much less good than ill.’
 
“If what you mentally map reflects the world as it is, you’ll live effectively and you might find happiness. The trick for you is not to impose patterns where none exist or to think that all mental map projections are equally good at representing the world. You have a choice, of course. You can choose to map the world as your emotions and desires dictate, or map the landscape as it conforms to a real landscape across which you can navigate safely and, hopefully, happily.
 
“True, it’s not in human nature to look at the world without imposing some wishful thinking, that is, without elaborating the map like some medieval monk’s illuminating a manuscript or some early cartographer’s adding pictures of sea monsters or the words ‘Here there be dragons’ to fill in gaps in knowledge. Everyone probably has an idea of what the world could be if everything conforms to personal desires and will. Unfortunately for those who want a world that conforms to their imaginations, the world exists independently of any individual; there are realities that exist outside the mind. We fool ourselves when we believe, as John Milton has Satan say in Paradise Lost, ‘The mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’ Some Hells remain Hells regardless of our mentally mapping them differently.
 
“But since I’ve referred to a couple of poems, let me put the advice I said I would offer in verse.”
 
                        The Landscape in the Mind
 
Happy little bunnies freely frolic in a field.
They share the leaves and flowers and to each other yield.
The sun is shining brightly as bees go buzzing by
While puffball clouds make images against an azure sky.
 
Oh! No! Some clouds are merging there, it’s getting very cloudy.
The bunnies scramble for a hole; now some are very rowdy.
The rains now pound the flowers and bend them to the ground,
And water soon accumulates; the dam cannot impound.
Its wall is breached; the stream is filled,
And soon the water floods the field.
The bunnies drown down in their holes.
But then the clouds, like spritely souls
Turn white again like angels’ wings
And gently move as black bird sings.
 
Well, no, not sing, more like a “caw.”
The crows alight to fill their maw.
The fungi grow to eat the rest
While maggots wiggle with great zest.
Ah! Mother Nature at her best!
The field’s now changed at Her behest:
A muddy land, decay, and death;
No floral scents on bunnies’ breath.
Then happy maggots change and fly
And zip across the azure sky.
 
Which landscape’s better in your mind?
But if you think the flowered kind,
Remember flies are what you find
In natural states if not your mind.
Don’t map a world you want to be,
Map one with harsh reality.

One of the tendencies that bugs many “hard” scientists is the New Age use of physical processes to describe emotional and mental states, those subjects that involve the “soft” sciences. To make this clear, I’ll let a couple of “hard” scientists explain:
           
            “All this has led…to widespread attempts to make science more spiritually meaningful. This is most evident in the “New Age” section of [Barnes and Noble], where writers combine scientific terminology with, typically, ‘Eastern’ mystical thought.” (ix) *
 
There are stereotypes for this, of course: On a perfect summer’s day a young woman waltzes through a field of flowers, a slight breeze blowing through hair held in place by a crown of daisies, some gentle herbivore grazing in the distance, and butterflies all aflutter; a western musical group sits at the foot of a guru as he utters the koan “Everyone knows the harmony of six guitar strings, but what is the harmony of a single string?” that inspires the writing of a song like “Let It Be”; an astronaut freely floating in space sees the Earth as Enya sings a song without words or discernible meaning; and, also, a spiritual leader holds a replica of a pyramid over the head of a follower while a tiny cymbal chimes until friction stops its vibrations.
 
This meaning stuff is difficult, isn’t it? It’s difficult because we know that we can divide types of meaning, separating, for example, poetic meaning from scientific meaning. And it’s made more difficult by all that gets thrown into the mix: Various psychologies, philosophies, arts, and sciences, all thrown at us in the context of our experiences in a particular culture. Eventually, we settle on one meaning that fits our worldview until we find that it doesn’t work as our worldview changes, and then we alter the nature of “meaning” slightly or abandon it altogether in favor of some new meaning. But what is the process by which we transition from one meaning to another?
 
A brief debatable history: Humans have never understood “IT All.” We began as animals seeking to maintain our individual and group survival. Early on, as evidenced from Neanderthal burial practices, we adopted various religious interpretations of matter and process, placing meaning outside ourselves. We were practical in our architecture and primitive in our initial efforts, but then tied the practical to the religious, even finding, as in the case of Pythagoreans, a meaning in numbers and mathematical standing. That led to the beginnings of science that we related to philosophy (making many mistakes explaining natural processes along the way). Then, to mark a point of departure, we had a birth of science during the so-called “Re-birth,” the Renaissance, typified by the work of Copernicus and then Galileo. From that point on, we centered our search for meaning in the “hard sciences” with Newtonian physics and the rise of a machine age. Then, during the time when story-telling gave way to philosophical poetry, we began to explain human behavior in terms of developing psychologies, such as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy and then those psychologies of Freud and Jung that coincided with many misunderstandings of Darwinian evolution. When the scientists eventually recognized that all Nature is underlain by the mysteriously operating world of the very tiny that could only be described in terms of probabilities and entanglements, artists (writers, painters, sculptors) tied the rudiments of physics to the rudiments of psychology and philosophy and set the stage to make meaning very personal, to make it the province of everyone’s machinations. The New Age introduced us to full relativism, probably, as I have said elsewhere and Rothman and Sudarshan pointed out in their book Doubt and Certainty, as a result of Einstein’s work being called “The Theory of Relativity” as opposed to “The Theory of Invariance,” the important key to his work. Because several generations have now grown up with “relativity,” we are metaphorically tied to the concept of meaning as a variable concept. Oh! And when West met East, we decided that the exotic was more in tune with a universal harmony than the reductionism of Western science, so we just had to incorporate mysticism into our worldview.
 
As Rothman and Sudarshan point out, science has had an impact on philosophy and psychology, but it has had that impact as a consequence of metaphors and analogies. “There are no logical implications of science for anything except technology.” (266) Yet, if you peruse the New Age books in a Barnes and Noble, you’ll find authors who have somehow found a way to merge mysticism and science, just as an examination of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art reveals an apparent merger. Sometimes, I think I have fallen into the same kind of merging.
 
With understandable reason: Although we know that knowing itself is separate from what is known, we’ve become analogs of Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism: “The medium is the message.” We find ourselves believing that “knowing is meaning” and that it is not separate from “what is known.”
 
At the jeopardy of doing what I just described—making a New Age use of science—let me tie the physical and the non-physical. We know what phase changes are because early on in elementary school we had to learn the definition of solid, liquid, and gas. We learned that by adding energy in the form of heat to a substance like solid iron, we could turn it into a liquid. And, of course, there are those common experiences with freezing water or melting ice.
 
Now, a group at the University of Tokyo has studied a phase transition from one liquid state to another liquid state. ** The change occurs without a change in temperature and occurs in one of two ways, one by a process the authors call “nucleation and growth,” and the other by a process called spinodal decomposition. The former introduces a barrier between a change from a liquid to a glassy state (a kind of liquid phase in which the molecules are mobile, but less so than in the other liquid phase), whereas the latter provides no barrier. The substance undergoing the change was triphenyl phosphite. Getting the triphenyl phosphite to transition was smoother under spinodal decomposition than under nucleation and growth. Now, here’s that New Age analog.
 
Sometimes in changing our ostensible worldview, we actually just transition to a different version of the same thing. True, at other times, we completely reverse, accepting a view that counters our old view, but generally, it’s difficult for us to completely abandon something we have held for a long time. When we do change our views even so slightly, we often do so from a nuclei of an idea that already lies within our belief system because every thought and belief system contains the seed of its opposite. But often our change is a smooth transition, one that occurs even without our knowing that we are changing. It’s a spinoidal decomposition of the old in favor of, if not the new, at least the slightly different. We change little by little but seem to retain much of what we were.
 
Is that too New Age for you? Well, I thought you might like to think of all those transitions through which you have gone while remaining essentially the same. Some of those transitions required you to take a kernel of an idea or belief and break through it to a new version of your old phase, whereas other transitions were so smooth as to be unnoticeable—at least to you. Take an inventory, not of your changing philosophies and beliefs over your adult life, but rather of the transition periods that led to the changes. Were they instances of nucleation and growth like some water droplet in a cloud forming by condensation on hygroscopic nuclei like a particle of dust or pollen, or were they instances of spinoidal decomposition?
 
*Rothman, Tony and George Sudarshan. Doubt and Certainty. Reading, Massachusetts. Perseus Books (Helix Books), 1998. I have referred to this book in other essays on this website. It is essentially a fictional debate among many “famous” representatives of science, philosophy, economics, religion, and the arts, or as the subtitle runs: “The celebrated Academy debates on science, mysticism, reality, in general on the knowable and unknowable, with particular forays into such esoteric matters as the mind fluid, the behavior of the stock market, and the disposition of a quantum mechanical Sphinx, to name a few.” The book’s methodology is Socratic discussion ala Plato’s Dialogues.
 
**Ken-ichiro Murata, et al. Link between molecular mobility and order parameter during liquid-liquid transition of a molecular liquid. Reported on at Phys.org. March 26, 2019. A fascinating phase transition from one liquid state to another. Online at https://phys.org/news/2019-03-fascinating-phase-transition-liquid-state.html   Accessed on March 26, 2019

Typically, I stay away from most political matters on this site, save, of course, my comments about two claims running rampant through media and politics: Claims that socialism is a panacea and claims that climates should not change. But I’m driven to share something the famous American essayist H. L. Mencken wrote in the 1930s that seems applicable to those two claims.  

If Mencken lived in the twentieth-first century, he would lose every public job he once had; his books and essays would be anathema on the grounds that they offended just about every group. He was not given to political correctness. He was in some ways anti-Semitic and racist, but he argued that the Jews persecuted in Germany should be welcome refugees in America, and he did say that every race has its outstanding representatives. Apparently, he didn’t trust people like me, one of the commoners who believes citizens should vote and that individuals, whoever they are, have both potential and talent. I think he would have considered a commoner like me to be somewhat moronic, a simpleton among simpletons. Yes, Mencken was a bit of a snobbish elitist, but he could turn a phrase, and his essays, regardless of his Nietzschean affinities, sometimes hit the nail on the head. One of those times is, I think, now.
 
Here’s what Mencken wrote: “The average American…does not really prefer the true to the false; he prefers the false to the true, for the false is always more comforting.” * He then writes that truth is “uncomfortable.” According to H. L., what we crave is “solace, relief, assurance.”
 
So, how do we satisfy the craving for solace, relief, and assurance? To paraphrase him—and extrapolate—we seek satisfaction in theology, poetry or music, alcoholism, drugs, pseudo-science, and “such quackeries as communism, fascism, Nazi-ism, and the New Deal.” (135) He writes that those quackeries are “foolish on their faces, and they never work, but nevertheless there is a powerful soothing in them, and so, at least transiently, they help their converts to bear the unbearable.” (Ibid.) Now here’s where Mencken would lump us into a crowd of simpletons:
 
            “…when the common will to believe and be fooled is whipped up by a preliminary sounding of fire-alarms…and every evil is magnified to cosmic dimensions, and every fear pushed on to paranoia…then the great masses of confiding anthropoids are willing to believe anything, and to be led anywhere. The present becomes completely intolerable to them, and the future looks as sinister as the entrance to a coal-mine. Show them the gates of Utopia, and though the turnstile be built like a rat-trap and the gilt be shabby and the plaster breaking through, they will swarm in with loud hosannahs, seeing glories that are not there and hoping hopes that are hollow and vain.” (136)
 
Although I’m not a Mencken fan, I have to say that he appears to be onto an analysis of our times. I added above three solaces that Mencken didn’t mention: Music, drugs, and pseudo-science. I reason that music provides another form of poetry and that drugs prove to be a substitute for alcohol. As for pseudo-science, I'll simply refer you to multiple studies that indicate the limited understanding of Earth history that characterizes the minds of most people. Mencken seems particularly set against seeking solace in religion, poetry, and alcohol, but he lived in a time before tens of thousands of Americans died from opioid overdoses each year. If he were writing today, I feel certain he would include music and drugs, and he would also include addiction to social media and entertainment media. Mencken wouldn’t suffer us very well or without acerbic criticism.
 
And maybe Americans have always sought solaces that were comforting regardless of their relationship to the Truth. We can see today, however, the power of the few to lead masses of people almost instantaneously through social media and main-stream media. Once we adopt a point of view, we find ourselves confirming it by steeping like a tea bag in the words of those with whom we have sided, regardless of what is true. If a belief is comfortable, we wear it.
 
So, we find many who now flock to the solace of socialism in spite of the misery it has wrought over the past century. And we find those who know little of Earth’s history easy to lead into a belief that climates should be unchanging, regardless of the major change all climates underwent long before humans even knew what fossil fuels are. And all who accept what the socialists and climate doomsayers advocate, continue to do so without critically examining the histories of both socialism and climate.
 
Interestingly, Mencken, who seems in his statements to be opposed to alcoholism, was not opposed to an occasional drink, as he writes of “dilute ethyl-alcohol.” He says that all of us are bewildered by the enigmas of life and death that drive us to seek solace and comfort. But he also says that “the demand for these invaluable anodynes tends to diminish…with the progress of knowledge.” (137)
 
Anodynes come in those two forms: 1) something tangible like drink or drugs and 2) something intangible like a comforting belief. Knowledge reduces our reliance on both such tangibles and intangibles. Look at the anodynes of your society. Think of them the next time you’re given to panic over your condition or your society’s condition, and ask yourself whether or not you are seeking comfort in the hollow and vain or in the truth.
 
*Mencken, H. L., “The New Deal Mentality,” originally published in The American Mercury in 1936 and reprinted in The Anxious Years: America in the 1930s, Ed. By Louis Filler, New York, Capricorn Books, 1964, 126-140. 

I suppose any contemporary American would say that there is a political rift in the country. That notion, however, misses the nature of polity: There is no American era sans rift. Political rifting is common throughout the current world, and has always been common. Pulling apart is natural, even after a widespread coming together.
 
Of course, there have been times of convergence, moments like the beginning of WWII brought many Americans together. But even during a dominantly convergent time, tiny cracks and separations reveal themselves, and sometimes isolated maars of disagreement form rather violently. Not too long ago, for example, a south Chicago minister proclaimed that America got what it deserved during the attacks on September 11, saying, “The chickens have come home to roost” while much of the country uniformly mourned. But that’s the nature of our humanity, and it appears to follow the nature of Nature itself. Similarly, there were those who did not empathize with the general convergence of feeling after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
 
Take the Great Rift Valley, or East African Rift, as an example of how rifting rips a larger unity. Evident on maps because of the large lakes that fill parts of the rift, the split in eastern Africa is a zone where a new sea will form much the way the Atlantic Ocean began to form at the time of the dinosaurs. From the Mesozoic Era through today, the Atlantic has widened; the ocean is a product of the breakup of supercontinent Pangaea. In a similar process occurring in eastern Africa, the rifting that will produce a new sea runs from the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia in the north southward toward Lake Malawi and Mozambique. Along the path, the rift bifurcates, notably from Lake Turkana southward to encircle Lake Victoria, and then rejoins as a single rift zone in the vicinity of Lake Mweru. In addition to the rifting, as the new seafloor spreads, it also produces volcanoes and earthquakes. Breakups of any kind are rarely smooth.
 
The East African Rift hasn’t been a uniform splitting. Its various segments have been active at different times, and some are currently not undergoing any apparent rifting. But the entire rift system bespeaks of a general trend to produce an ever-widening gap in eastern Africa. Little by little, the continent is breaking up, just as Madagascar broke off the continent long ago as evidenced by its western coastline that matches like a puzzle piece the coastline on the opposite side of the Mozambique Channel.
 
Intermittent and irregular rifting is normal in seafloor spreading, that process that widens a rift valley turned ocean. The planet’s crust is a rather brittle substance, so one can expect the unexpected as one zone of relative weakness breaks whereas another zone of relative strength or elasticity resists breaking. In addition, unseen movements of magma add to stresses, sometimes making their presence known through explosive volcanic activity: Thus the maars that once formed in places like the Ririba section recently studied by Giacomo Corti and others.* The volcanism in that section has become quite dormant over the past three million years.
 
Political rifting appears to mimic crustal rifting. Unseen forces at times, welling up from beneath the surface perspectives of many with common mind, show up at times as little splits and at other times as isolated violent outbreaks of protestors. Just as the physical rifting in a continent is complex, so also is the rifting of any polity, especially in a diverse population. That is, just as breaking Africa apart isn’t uniform in either time or segment, so the breaking of any political unity isn’t uniform.
 
Today, the forces of political rifting appear to be not only more diverse, but also more numerous than ever before. Political magma erupts with force through seemingly small cracks, and various media appear to be devoted to widening any rift. Splits of any kind, from celebrity breakups to social fractures, make interesting stories. And in a world highly focused by social media on breakups, those associated with the body politic seem to be constantly in the news.
 
Maybe, since our ancestors from Australopithecus on evolved in the East African Rift, we inherited an innate penchant to rift apart any polity shortly after a unifying convergence. Yes, at times we ostensibly “come together” over some common cause or perspective, but during those very times of convergence, we set up a future rifting.
 
Just as no supercontinent is permanent, so no polity is permanent. Every “political season” sees a manifestation of rifting in formerly uniform bodies of polity. Watch as the rifts widen during the many debates that will occur in the party seeking power as various members representing separate factions fracture their political continent. And then, once the splitting has isolated first one and then another of the upwelling magma chambers, observe a general annealing of the cracks and how some segments that once formed by rifting, like the Ririba Valley in Eastern Africa, become dormant old scars on the landscape of polity.
 
    
 
* Giacomo Corti et al, Aborted propagation of the Ethiopian rift caused by linkage with the Kenyan rift, Nature Communications (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-09335-2

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-03-evolution-african-rift-valley.html#jCp

Graphene, a material composed of carbon atoms, is gradually working its way into our culture, and soon everyone will be familiar with the material. It is both flexible and strong, and it can be thinner than a sheet of paper. Its electrical properties are impressive, and it can replace current materials used in most technologies, including phones, computers, aircraft, and even clothing. You might think of it as nylon or Teflon on steroids.
 
Nobel prize-winning professors Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the University of Manchester will someday find their names in textbooks as two who took the world into a new stage of technological development because of their invention. As graphene works its way into our lives, we might note a need for a similar advance in that other part of our existence, the immaterial one, the world of emotions and thoughts, for both require flexibility and strength if they are to withstand the stresses of their environments.
 
Graphene is remarkable because it can exist in just two dimensions: A layer just one-atom thick. It is, in fact, the first two-dimensional crystalline substance, and it is both flexible and 200 times stronger than steel. That two-dimensional crystalline structure invites a comparison to interlocked hexagons in a sheet of common chicken wire fencing though metal wires that are many atoms thick are three, and not two, dimensional.
 
The material and immaterial worlds in which we live aren’t very similar. Even a supposed two-dimensional sheet of graphene has the “thickness” of an atom. Our physical world is three-dimensional in its thinnest forms. And ascribing dimensionality to emotions and thoughts is, at best, figurative. We can say, for example, that someone thinks linearly, but that limits a sequence of thoughts unrealistically: In our best efforts at concentration, we have brain regions competing for attention and contrasting and complementary thoughts and emotions vying for dominance. We also mix emotions and thoughts as both occur in the presence of the other seemingly simultaneously, maybe making a mix better than any Bose-Einstein Condensate.
 
“What about that monk on the mountain?” you ask. “Surely, he is the epitome of graphene-like thinking. His power of concentration, acquired after years of self-denial and mediation, make him unlike the rest of us scatter-brained products of a helter-skelter world, our thinking and emotions looking like those flashing bar graphs that indicate our effort on a treadmill," you add. "And a monk in meditation probably has mathematical linearity of thought as I understand the definition of line. Unlike our up-and-down cognitive efforts, the monk’s thoughts make a graphed line in X and Y dimensions.”
 
“No," I say, "and if I may be allowed to juxtapose material and immaterial worlds, he’s still immaterially “thicker” than chicken wire and more like a Venn diagram than like a line graph, and by comparison with crystalline structures is like most, if not all, natural crystals, imperfect because of included foreign elements. Even diamond, that other carbon substance, often includes non-carbon atoms that change its color. So also, the monk's thinking isn't 'pure.' Whoa! How did we get to this point?

“Think of how I’ve led you through this little essay. I began with a discussion of the relatively new material called graphene, noting its ‘two-dimensionality.’ I then added a ‘thickness’ by making you think of thinking and emoting, drawing, as I guided you, through contrasts and comparisons. Now, you’re asking yourself, ‘Am I multidimensional?’ And you’re responding, ‘Of course, I am.’ And you’re also saying, ‘What do I mean by dimensions? How can I compare the physical world with that other, immaterial, world that I recognize in myself? Am I changing my definition of dimensionality?’
 
“Sorry, I just had to do that to make a point because too many people want to ascribe two-dimensionality (or even one-dimensional linearity) to others. We’re all rather complex beings, and living in the times that we do, we have layers of complexity thrown on us daily, not to mention all these new materials and products made from them. It should surprise all of us, then, that in such a multidimensional age there are still so many who want to ascribe simplicity to others, to say, for example, that because one holds this or that perspective, he or she is uni- or two-dimensional. Yet, simultaneously, we shouldn’t be surprised. It’s easier to see others as flat sheets of uniform structures of singular composition than it is to see them as complex intersecting crystals composed of many elements.
 
“Just as you aren’t one- or two-dimensional, so others aren’t. Just as you aren’t simply linear, so others aren’t. Graphene will change our technology and our material world and make two-dimensionality an important part of our three dimensional world, but it will never serve as an analog for our multidimensional emotions and thoughts.”
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A pair of cloth dice hang vertically from a car’s rearview mirror when the car is stopped or moving at a constant speed. Physicists teach us that acceleration is evident when the fuzzy dice move backward, say in going from 0 mph to 15 mph. The amount of change is irrelevant, and a change from 15 mph to 30 mph still makes the dice swing toward the backseat. Of course, we know acceleration without the hanging dice because we, too, apparently move backward, our bodies pushing into our car seats as we increase our rate along the road. Physicists also teach us that the dice and our bodies, acting as accelerometers, indicate acceleration in the opposite direction as we come screeching to a halt. The dice and our bodies fly forward during rapid “deceleration.” That is, the lesson physicists teach is that varying speed in any direction is acceleration. Rapid deceleration during a crash sends us toward the dashboard; we become accelerometers held in place only by our seatbelts.
 
For most of our lives we live in an inertial condition of constant speed or constant rest. We get up in the morning and proceed through our daily lives without much acceleration. And then there are those moments when the dice on our personal mirrors move either backward or forward. It’s those moments when we recognize something different about our lives. We pay attention to ourselves during acceleration, waking ourselves from the ho-hum of uninterrupted inertial everydayness.
 
Granted, there are those among us who prefer inertial conditions, either standing still or moving at a steady rate. But for some, and maybe that includes you, acceleration of any kind makes life more interesting, makes one “feel more alive,” and provides new and interesting perspectives.
 
Some seek acceleration through chemicals, leading at times to a new inertial condition, one of addiction or dependence in varying degrees. Others seek acceleration in risk taking. Still others seek it in changing place, that is, in travel. Finding a mental mechanism for moving the dice is a challenge we all face, and I assume that you, in reading this, are attempting to accelerate just as I, in writing this, am attempting to accelerate.
 
In reading, in seeking, in discovering, all of us attempt to break free from inertial conditions. True, we can’t maintain acceleration indefinitely; sometimes we need to coast or even come to complete rest. But, gosh, those moments of speeding up or slowing down make our lives very interesting, don’t they?
 
Throughout each day, look at the dice hanging from your personal mirror. Are they hanging vertically or swinging forward or backward?  

John Selden (1584-1654) had this insight: “We measure the excellency of other men by some excellency we conceive to be in ourselves.” * Is there a negative corollary of this?
 
Say you play the ukulele well enough for singing folk songs in a family gathering, and then you hear someone play “The Flight of the Bumblebee” on the instrument. I know it’s a stretch of the musical imagination, but I also know that in my hypothetical performance scenario, you would judge on the basis of your limitations on ukulele proficiency. Selden’s principle probably applies to many of our judgments and evaluations. For some of us, the comparison engenders wonder, praise, and emulation, but in others, it engenders envy.
 
I ask, “Is there a level of any ‘excellency’ in you that exists without begging comparisons?”
 
I also give you the task of discovering whether or not Selden’s principle has a negative corollary. And if you do discover that corollary, I leave you to ponder whether or not it applies to you.
 
**“The Measure of Things,” in  The Table Talk of John Selden.  Reynolds, Samuel Harvey Reynolds, ED., Oxford. The Clarendon Press, 1892. Chapter LXXXVI. Online at https://books.google.com/books?id=2Jc_AAAAYAAJ&pg=PA110&lpg=PA110&dq=john+selden+the+measure+of+things&source=bl&ots=c9ZPDMPu_k&sig=ACfU3U1F3r9YLDLfYgdSu7bE1VqXgb44ig&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwja_LGFm47hAhULvFkKHcOqCoUQ6AEwB3oECAQQAQ#v=onepage&q=john%20selden%20the%20measure%20of%20things&f=false Accessed March 19, 2019. 

“Okay, I’m throwing out a challenge: Make a government that is not embroiled in contention.”
 
“I can do that,” you say. “I have my ideas for Utopia.”
 
“But let me guess. First, you will have to eliminate those who disagree with you, and second, you will have to ensure continued agreement among those who sign up for your Utopian world.”
 
“I’ll admit that making a perfect society from scratch would be difficult because some would resist. But I would peacefully convince them that my society and my government would be better in the long run,” you continue. “I think I know where we’ve gone wrong, and I think I know how I can fix society for the benefit of the world.”
 
“Really? Then you might consider a thought by Bernard Bailyn, who wrote, ‘Since government is power, its control will always be a matter of contention.’ * Bailyn wrote that in the context of America’s founding as an independent nation. Your Utopia would invite contention regardless of your foresight and meticulous execution of its details. And the reason? People; plain and simple. Sure, there are some who like the idea of complying because compliance makes life easy, but then there are others who, regardless of the benefits afforded by compliance, will rebel. The latter will always find someone else’s control to be untenable. It’s a Garden-of-Eden-tale. You can put two people in an ideal setting only to find that one or both of them will break a rule or object in some way, maybe by silently stewing in disgust or anger, by overtly defying the government in power, or by making slight alterations driven by daily needs and changing circumstances.
 
“Look around. Look at every government on the planet, small ones or large ones. About the only places where government might not be a center of political contention are Lost Springs and Buford, both Wyoming towns claiming a single resident. My guess, however, is that even with a population of one, a government still has a problem because the human condition is rarely one of complete satisfaction. Think. Are you completely happy with yourself? Have you no struggles between the person you want to be and the person you are? Have you put restrictions on yourself that you have violated, say, restrictions imposed by wanting to live moderately, but having that extra dessert or drink, smoking when you want to quit, driving too fast on a curvy road and crossing the double-yellow line when you know your safety is at risk, or desiring and obsessing over what you can’t or don’t have? Even a government-of-one has its contentions unless I am mistaken about human nature.
 
“So, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that the current political condition is one of anger. Surely, you covered previous contentious times in your history lessons. Think American Civil War, American Revolution, French Revolution and subsequent Reign of Terror, Russian Revolution, The Glorious Revolution, and, well, every overthrow in every place that has housed humans who have objected to controls of any kind. Parallels abound.
 
“Every generation seems to produce those who would impose another set of controls. Some are dictators; others, just nice people who are ignorant of the way things work, ignorant of history, or overwhelmed by idealism rooted in words and not historic examples.
 
“In 1725, James Logan addressed the Pennsylvania House, saying, ‘Some kingdoms within less than a century…have been changed from a state of greatest freedom into the most absolute and arbitrary government.’ ** Logan had his own misunderstandings of history, but his statement could apply at almost any time and in almost any place. He noted that other countries where freedom of the individual was paramount had fallen prey to ‘politic arts and the contrivances of men truly ambitious and designing….’
 
“That’s the problem, isn’t it? Governments aren’t run by robots. People run them, and since people probably can’t even construct a government of one that exists without some contention, then all governments are subject to dissatisfaction, more so whenever those who practice the ‘politic arts’ do so with hypocritical self or group aggrandizement as a goal under the feigned aegis of utopian ideals.***
 
“We could think of today’s political anger as an isolated phenomenon, but to do so would be to ignore the nature of humans, revealed, so it seems, in that tale of Adam and Eve. Placed in Paradise, they just had to obey the only rule emplaced by a Benevolent Government. As a species, we like power, just not someone else’s power, and that’s why every government has a contentious and temporary existence.”
 
*Bailyn, Bernard. The Origins of American Politics. New York. Vintage Books, 1967, p. 104.
 
**Bailyn, 150.
 
***Green New Deal: Check out the statements by former Greenpeace founder, Patrick Moore, available online. Moore says a government-imposed fossil-free society would be far from utopian. But the Green New Deal is just one instance of a proposed or formerly instituted government that purports to be or purported to be ideal. 

In Donald R. Prothero’s account of the eruption of Toba that affected your life, he quotes Pliny the Younger. * Yeah, I’ll get back to that “affected your life” later, but first here’s a line from Prothero’s translation of Pliny’s Latin that applies to more than just a population fleeing from a violent volcanic eruption. Pliny wrote to Tacitus to recount his escape from the 79 A.D. ** eruption of Vesuvius:
 
          "We were followed by a panic-stricken mob of people wanting to act on someone else’s decision in preference to their own (a point in which fear looks like prudence) who hurried us on our way by pressing hard behind in the dense crowd." (33)
 
Pliny obviously escaped the eruption and the crush of the fleeing mob, and his detailed description of the that horrific event that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum is the reason that we now call such eruptions “Plinian.” The physical details of the eruption, however, are not what interest me here. It’s that sentence about how people acted in the panic that catches my attention. It’s in that context that I thought of how in our contemporary times, we, too, can act “on someone else’s decision in preference” to our own and how in acting on the preference of others we are shaping the future of our species.
 
Now, a situation that causes panic isn’t an ordinary one, and hopefully, you and I will never encounter a situation in which we desperately try to save our lives and the lives of our loved ones (Pliny fled with his mother). But I think we might pause a moment to consider how often and in what circumstances we—yes, you and I—“act on someone else’s decision in preference to” our own. Let’s start simply.
 
We walk past a crowd of people staring at the sky. We look, don’t we?  It’s human to look, and probably that turning of our heads is a safety mechanism built into our genes, like prairie gophers or meerkats all looking toward a danger first perceived by a single member. Not to turn our heads to see what attracts the attention of others might invite injury or death. We survive by paying attention to an alert.
 
In Pliny’s case, panic overwhelmed the people. It was dark under the cloud of pyroclastics and settling ash. The ground was shaking and the ocean boiling both figuratively and actually. Buildings were collapsing. Not good times for anyone in the vicinity of Vesuvius. So, people running hither and thither would have been natural since those on the ground had no way of knowing the extent of the danger and the direction of true safety. We can’t really blame a people who had no science called volcanology and whose culture had forgotten the previous eruption of Vesuvius 296 years earlier. They ran like headless chickens from whose necks blood erupts.
 
But let’s get back to that “in preference to” in Pliny’s account. Take whatever panic you want: The Salem Witch Trials, the riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King incident, Al Gore’s rising seas, the suicides of people in Jonestown or in Heaven’s Gate, the actions of spring breakers, or any of an almost uncountable number of circumstances, incidents, or proclamations that have people acting on someone else’s decision in preference to their own. Each of us now faces a world of ostensible eruptions and ensuing panic. Despite our supposed literacy and education, we are apparently little different from the residents of Pompeii and Herculaneum fleeing a violent volcano. And every such “eruption” creates a bottleneck on the other end of which a different mindset emerges, a new mindset that sets humanity off in a different direction.
 
So, someone spews the pyroclastics of warnings: “The climate is changing”; “The disease is spreading”; “The….” You get it. And yesterday, the Ides of March, 2019 C.E., saw high school children skipping classes to “save the planet” from climate change, the same students who will use electronic equipment, air-conditioned buildings and homes, running city water supplies, cars, toilet paper, and concert venues strewn with abandoned garbage, all without seeing a relationship between the direction they run in protest and the direction of their daily lives, and all running about according to the preference of others. But it’s not just the young that run as someone else dictates. Adults, also.
 
The running like headless chickens is the product of inexperience, limited perspective, and lack of knowledge. Again, I can’t fault the Pompeiians for their panic. They thought angry gods were at work, the sky was dark, debris was falling, choking ash filled the air, and the ground was shaking. The crowd was moving in the direction toward apparent safety. But I can fault myself. And I can fault all around me for panicking when the loudest voices start shouting the directions we follow in preference to our own.
 
Prothero’s book is about the largest eruption in the last 28 million years, the eruption of Toba some 74,000 years ago. That eruption might have caused a bottleneck in human evolution, a partial extinction that left survivors to procreate the current line of descendants that includes you and me. The direction of humanity was determined by a few survivors if the hypothesis about Toba’s effect on human destiny is true.
 
And now we have a different kind of eruptive event, the eruption of information—both true and false—that causes panic and determines the direction of humanity. Each of us has to ask whether or not we are acting on our own preference that is the product of knowledge or on the preference of others, many of who might be running in the darkness of partial knowledge. Each of us has to ask whether or not we are running like headless chickens beneath a dark sky, or even whether or not we are following headless chickens erupting the blood of panic from places that once housed heads with brains.
 
Because of our penchant to follow the panicked crowd, we are always at a potential bottleneck of human destiny.
 
 
*Prothero, Donald R. When Humans Nearly Vanished: The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano. Washington, D. C. Smithsonian Books, 2018.
 
** “C.E.” for those afraid to mention anything that hints of religion while still using Christ’s birth as a starting date. “Common Era” appears to be acceptable, whereas Anno Domini (“in the year of our Lord”) isn’t though both begin with the approximate year of Christ’s birth. Strange mental contortions of the “wise,” right? As though writing C.E. is somehow more “scientific” than the other. Similarly, B.C.E. (“Before the Common Era”) replaces B.C. (“Before Christ”). So, the date of Caesar’s assassination, the Ides of March in 44 occurs as 44 B.C.E. and not 44 B.C.—Wow! That sure makes a difference.