Leonardo Da Vinci had one of the great scientific minds of the Renaissance. Right up there with Galileo, and he painted, also. The guy was very insightful. He realized that marine fossils contained in the rocks of the Apennines meant that the mountains were at one time below sea level. And then there were his observations of fluid flow. After looking at streams and waterfalls, Leonardo realized an early version of stream flow that Bernoulli and Euler put to more sophisticated mathematical descriptions: Channeling a flow speeds up the flow while lowering pressure. But Leonardo didn’t lack a mathematical approach: If a channel of uniform depth narrows by half, he figured, the water through the channel has to go twice as fast. Cut it by a third, and the water has to flow three times faster in the narrower passageway. That’s the continuity: Keeping the flow going; otherwise, at the “bottleneck” the water would start backing up just as it does behind a dam. The same principle works at a concert venue where fans gather outside the doors before entering. In order for the people to get into the theater or stadium through the turnstile to keep the crowd flowing, the people entering have to move faster. And it’s this last application that applies to ideas and mobs.
 
Whenever we simplify ideas about society or politics, we narrow the passageway of social behavior, and the flow of people, once steady and calm, becomes, if not turbulent, at least faster. As long as people think generally, their movements are somewhat random but also generally unidirectional: Democrats vote for Democrats; Republicans vote for Republicans. There’s a uniform flow, rather slow but continuous. But incited by notions either true or false and given human targets to hate, given a simplified understanding based on those either true or false statements and ideas, the masses can act like that flow through the narrower channel, not a physical barrier so much as a perspective barrier. There’s a speeding up, a frenzy, a mob driven to get through and past the idea weir, funnel, or pipe.
 
So, I have been bothered by several incidents over the past year, namely, the shutting down of speech on college campuses like Berkeley because of the narrowed idea that only one side has something to say. Seems that rioting and dressing in black with black masks is the order of the day. Nothing like anonymity and broken glass to support rational debate! Nothing like a narrow view to transform a crowd into a mob. And I was disheartened when I saw a crowd protesting the President, the grandfather of Jewish children and a supporter of Israel, being called an anti-Semite when he went to Pittsburgh to honor the victims of the synagogue shooting, a massacre perpetrated by an actual anti-Semite. What sense does that make except in the Da Vinci sense of the Continuity Principle, the one that says flow must speed up when the channel narrows. Are we now in an era of extreme idea channeling, of labeling without supporting facts, of forcing the fluid of thought to flow through a channel too narrow for passage, and of trying to squeeze everyone through the gate, inciting them to riot or to protest because of a narrowed view unsupported by facts? 
 
Extreme idea channeling isn’t new. Humans have always forced themselves through the narrowest of views. What seems to be new is the rapidity with which a few can decrease the channel size. That rapidity is the product of social media and sometimes of Media media. But, as I said, it isn’t a new phenomenon. Remember that people rioted outside George Washington’s Philadelphia residence after John Jay returned from England with a prudent, but unpopular, treaty. It didn’t take long for the mobs to form, and Jay said he was probably burned in effigy up and down the East Coast. So, yes, every civilization undergoes some extreme idea channeling, and no age has been exempted from its occurrence. 
 
If there’s a lesson in this it might lie in our remembering what Leonardo Da Vinci discovered and Daniel Bernoulli mathematically described. In analog, when previously encompassing ideas pass through the narrowest of channels, they will inevitably have to speed up. Don’t make the mistake of jumping in the water at that time. If you do, you’ll probably find yourself caught up in the swift flow through the narrow channel, unable to grab onto some anchor along the bank, or, like Cincinnati concert goers at that infamous The Who concert in 1979, you might be crushed in the process. 

The  Times  of  India has an online page devoted to “spirituality.” If you turn to it, you’ll find your horoscope. Yes, newspapers still publish horoscopes regardless of the knowledge that the configuration of stars has changed over the past 3,000 years, so the signs of the Zodiac aren’t actually what they were. Nevertheless, let’s look the paper’s advice for Capricorn on October 31, 2018, when Mercury can be seen in transit across the sun: “Mercury, known to be the planet of technology, communication, and travel, turns retrograde in Sagittarius and scrambles signals with your closest people. The time is high to strengthen your privacy settings that may be sensitive data or your passwords.” Let’s break it down.
 
Mercury is the planet of technology communication? You think the ancients thought that? “Claudius, I’m having trouble with my ITablet (literally, a clay tablet). Could Mercury be in transit?” Or take the advice: “strengthen your privacy settings that may be sensitive data or your passwords.” Who would have thought of such actions without the writer’s astrological advice? “What, Mercury’s in transit? Why didn’t someone tell me? Sorry, I can’t stay for coffee; I’ve got passwords to change.” Or, take the advice to Pisces, “This Mercury transit will give you a reminder that it is important to slow down and do one thing at a time.” There goes my plan to multitask just when I put a stick of gum in my mouth.
 
Speaking of the stars, The  Times  also has an article entitled “Wanted: Volunteers to give birth in space.” Kees Mulder, the CEO of SpaceLife Origins says that to become a multiplanetary species “we…need to learn how to reproduce in space.” Wasn’t there a final scene in Moonraker showing that we already have a good idea what to do? The scene involved Roger Moore and Lois Chiles in America’s and Britain’s “first joint space venture” as Bond attempts “reentry” discreetly covered by a sheet?
 
We’ve really got this planet-star-universe thing in our heads. Now, there’s no denying that the rocketry and space explorations provide us with some hope of living in some utopian place as colorful as Pandora, the moon-world that provides the backdrop for Avatar. And surely, on that distant world, on the way to which we will learn how to “joint venture,” we’ll find unobtanium. Unobtanium? Is it unobtainable? You’re telling me we’ll go all the way to Alpha Centauri just to find something that we can’t obtain? 
 
Well, maybe the unobtainable is the reason we can’t let go of horoscopes and fantasies about traveling to distant planets on the way to which we will join not just a Hugh Hefnerian “sky high club,” but a “light year high club.” And when we eventually reach Pandora, whose “jar” (not box) released the world’s evils, will we look back to see that from Alpha or Beta Centuari our own sun appears to be part of the constellation Cassiopeia?
 
We’re never going to hear the end of astrological advice, fictional futures, or utopian places and un-obtainable elements that lie beyond our reach. Do you really want to risk exposure to cosmic rays, suffer muscle atrophy and neuronal damage in an enlarged head, lose bone mass, suffer from Aspergillus fumigatus and pathogens that can survive in space, live in a confined space for very long time without a resupply of food and medicines, dwell in a community that might forget what deceased fellow travelers knew, or trust that your computer equipment and machinery can function under attacks by radiation, micrometeorites, and time? Then, again, maybe that last scene in Moonraker is what you envision. I’m guessing that half way (or less) to that distant world, the spaceship’s denizens will look back at a distant sun and this planet with the question “Could we have made that one Utopia?” 
 
Of course, the answer is that we already live on Pandora, or at least on a planet on which we have had our share of Pandoras that have released what we imagine we can escape. This might not be Utopia, but whose fault is that?
 
Need a source of advice on which you can rely? Commonsense is often the best advisor. 

Geologists’ efforts to retrace the past are sometimes like taking selfies on a precipice. You think you have a good picture in the making while you are dangerously close to a perilous plunge. And when you return to civilization with your picture, you are met with comments about you, rather than about the scenery in the background. “Yeah, you look nice. Weren’t you afraid of falling? No one’s going to get me that close to a cliff that might give way to gravity.” One more, “I don’t see what the big fuss is. They’re rocks. Who really cares?”
 
Aside from the general ignorance that everything we have originates in rocks and in the soils they make, there’s the general disinterest in how the surface of Earth acquired its present forms. Sure, everyone is now exposed to Plate Tectonics and seafloor spreading in elementary school texts, but generalized maps and videos of Pangaea’s breakup take us all to a time so far in the past we can’t comprehend its temporal distance and their relevance to our current lives. “What are you saying? Hundreds of millions of years? Geez, I have trouble picturing the temporal distance to 1975, even when I read the books and see the movies.” Disinterest in and ignorance of the past compounded by a weakness to understand the significance of the past make every generation vulnerable to thinking the configuration of the world is a product of the present. 
 
You can imagine, then, the difficulty of getting anyone interested in digging deeper into Earth’s past, say into rocks that formed hundreds of millions of years earlier than those produced by the formation of Pangaea. Nevertheless, some geologists have taken that underappreciated selfie on the side of the Grand Canyon.* They were in search of an even more ancient past, one centered on the formation and breakup of Rodinia, a predecessor supercontinent, a landmass composed, like Pangaea, of “all lands.” Rodinia formed a little over a billion years ago. And its pieces, like Tasmania and the Grand Canyon, have become the petrologic diaspora now widely separated from their point of origin.
 
Again, for the geologically disinterested, the reaction might be “So what? Isn’t this just one of those subculture moments, like knowing the location where The  Rocky Horror  Picture  Showwas shot?” (Bray Studios and Oakley Court, by the way; and in case you are unaware of the cult movie, it has nothing to do with rocks).
 
Okay, I won’t give the details beyond saying that connecting Tasmania and the Grand Canyon revamps older maps of Rodinia. But I’ll draw a parallel. It is very difficult to trace the origins of Earth’s surface forms because they have undergone numerous changes in shape over a very long time, and they have undergone many new relationships. In short, the character of the present rocks resulted from a complex history. And so have the attitudes and ideas of the current generation of humans. Take anti-Semitism and the October 2018 shooting in a Pittsburgh synagogue as an example.  
 
When you see definitive mapping by TV pundits or newspaper editorialists seeking “to explain” to the rest of us “nonspecialists” the causes of current behaviors in society, take a look to see whether they involve careful and thorough research that shows all the links that have come and gone. The current generation of humans did not form in a vacuum. Generations are not “self-contained”; they are the results of many interactions, and many of those are now either lost or hidden just like the relationship between Tasmania and the Grand Canyon.
 
Whatever motivated isolated individuals like Emanuel Samson,** Dylann Storm Roof,*** Devin Kelley,**** and Robert Bowers***** isn’t a simple matter. We can hold individuals responsible for their actions, but we need to recognize that those actions never occur in vacuums. The hate behind the individuals is rooted in the deep past. Think, for example, of the anti-Semitic violence during the First Crusade in 1096, the expulsion of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 or the horrific Holocaust perpetrated by Hitler. Hate runs into the deep past. And in every resurfacing, those responsible rarely, if ever, see or understand that past. They merely walk over the “rocks” of their present time. 
 
The rocks of Rodinia have undergone both burial and exposure over the course of hundreds of millions of years. Though far less long-lived than those rocks, our own species has resurfacing emotions and attitudes that the uninformed exhibit. Just as the rocks of the Grand Canyon are unaware of their own origins and distant connections, so those who carry ancient hatreds seem to be unaware of why they believe and act as they do. They carry forward the hate that should have remained long buried in the rocks of ancient collisions that looked nothing like the current makeup of the world. 
 
*You can see the pic (not exactly a “selfie” because someone else snapped it) at https://phys.org/news/2018-10-dataset-configuration-supercontinent-rodinia.html, and you can read the report by Steve Car of the University of New Mexico, October 29, 2018:
Dataset may resolve questions about the configuration of supercontinent Rodinia, based on Mulder, Jackob A., et al. Rodinian devil in disguise: Correlation of 1.25-1.10 Ga strata between Tasmania and the Grand Canyon, Geology (2018). DOI: 10.1130/G45225.1.
 
**Burnette Chapel Church shooting in 2017 in Antioch, Tennessee.
***Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting in 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina.
****First Baptist Church shooting in 2917 in Southerland Springs, Texas.
*****Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in 2018 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Sorry, I was distracted in our last discussion by scientists thinking that writing B.C.E. while using the same dating scheme for B.C. somehow makes them more objective, more secular, and less religious. What I really wanted to talk about was John Brock’s comment that “Hippocrates stands for the fundamental and primary importance of seeing clearly—that is of clinical observation.”* But it isn’t with respect to the healing arts that I mention this. Rather, it’s with regard to our current state of mind, our current behavior, and the prognosis of an insidious disease.
 
Hippocrates thought that maladies had their special courses to run. Given a particular disease to observe, one could see its prognosis. Ailments have predictable outcomes. 
 
And so I wonder whether or not we have a predictable outcome for our current infection, the one that drove James Hodgkinson to shoot Republican Congressmen who were practicing baseball in 2017 and Cesar Sayoc to send bombs to Democrats in 2018. Sure, I know that this kind of violence has occurred in every culture and that political thinking breeds those who would assassinate their perceived enemies. To name a country that has not had some kind of political violence is to coin a name for a fictional tale. What has infected the brains of Hodgkinson and Sayoc has been an ailment as old as our biology? What made them take the extreme actions they took? Has the disease of political violence mutated into a more virulent strain?
 
Are the assassination attempts on American political figures in 2017 and 2018 symptoms of a disease? If they are, then what can be done to cure the disease?  Hippocrates would say that every disease has a prognosis. A. J. Brock, translates one of the ancient physician’s primary questions: “What will be the natural course of the disease, if left to itself?” 
 
Brock says, “Observation taught Hippocrates to place unbounded faith in the recuperative powers of the living organism—in what we sometimes call nowadays the vis  medicatrix  Naturae. His observation was that even with a very considerable ‘abnormality’ of environmental stress the organism, in the large majority of cases, manages eventually by its own inherent powers to adjust itself to the new conditions…And accordingly his treatment was mainly directed towards ‘giving Nature a chance’” (xi). Should we patiently “give Nature a chance” to heal the many patients afflicted with political violence syndrome? Are we in the midst of a new pandemic? 
 
Do you think the malady of political violence, given the stresses of the current environment, can be healed? Hippocrates, as Brock writes, believed that “in pathology, it takes two (organism and environment) to make a disease.” Did both the organism and the environment produce Hodgkinson and Sayoc? Can there be a natural healing?
 
If one watches the current attitudinal and intellectual environment across much of the planet, one realizes that the disease of political violence isn’t localized, it’s not, for example, a “tropical disease” like Dengue fever, Ebola, African Trypanosomiasis, or Cysticercosis. No, we appear to be in a pandemic, one not yet as bad as world wars, but certainly one that threatens many individuals. Such a pandemic isn’t new. It has persisted intermittently through every civilization. And because of its persistence through the centuries and across all geographic borders, there appears to be no permanent cure, only some temporary abatement. 
 
The question for us is whether or not there is a prognosis that ends in a cure. If we let Nature run its course, will the disease temporarily die out as the bodies pile up? As we run out of organisms to infect? Or do we look for some cure that makes the patients multiply, a cure based on the hypocrisy that it is always a disease that infects “the others”? We can’t be carriers, can we? After all, all that we do on “our side” is for the well-being of the species. “The others” are the carriers. And we know that one way to eliminate a disease is to eliminate the carriers or at least to isolate them.
 
Brock makes the following comment based on a quotation from Horace: “Political domination, the occupation of territory by armies, does not necessarily mean real conquest. Horace’s statement applied to medicine as to other branches of culture” (xiii). Does that apply today? 
 
Do we hypocritically hold that the disease of political violence is a malady present only in those with whom we disagree? If so, then the prognosis is probably not good. Sure, there might be some temporary abatement in the intensity or spread of the disease, but it will, like every disease, mutate and recur. And if the natural course of the recurrence isn’t our destiny, then some will make it so: Consider those who today seek to manufacture biological weapons. 
 
There are both willing and unwilling carriers of the disease of political violence. The environment persists, sometimes subtly and at other times overtly. Watch the news, read the papers, listen to the speeches. Talk to others. Be Hippocrates; be clinical. Take his advice. See clearly.  
 
 
*Brock, Arthur John, M.D. Galen : On  the  Natural  Faculties. London William Heinemann, 1916. p. xi. 

“In his introduction to Galen : On  the  Natural  Faculties, translator Arthur John Brock writes of Galen’s predecessor Hippocrates, “Hippocrates stands for the fundamental and primary importance of seeing clearly—that is of clinical observation” (p. xi).* That might seem to be a commonsense approach to medicine, but remember that Hippocrates lived c. 460 B.C. to c. 370 B.C. when observation wasn’t very popular. Seeing clearly then meant adhering to the dogma of the time and to intuition about the way things work and how they came to be. We all know what happened to Socrates when he questioned the prevailing dogma and authorities. 
 
“Darn! I wanted to say something about the significance of Hippocrates and Galen, but now I’m distracted: Don’t you find it interesting that in the previous and current centuries political correctness and fear of mentioning anything that has to do with ‘religion’ meant the replacement of ‘B.C.’ with ‘B.C.E.’ in just about all scientific literature? ‘Before Christ’ seems to have been interpreted as some adherence to religion while somehow being either unscientific or highly subjective. In their effort to secularize time, researchers made ‘Before the Current Era’ a label for all time prior to last two millennia. However, that designation didn’t change the reverse counting system. The originators of the term ‘current era’ still use the birth of Christ as Year One.** Point? It’s still a starting point at the birth of Christ, even though we don’t call time before his birth ‘before Christ’ or the time after his birth “Anno Domini,’ or ‘in the year of [Our] Lord.’ What changed? The counting system remains the same. Julius Caesar still died 44 years (less or plus 4) before the birth of Christ.”
 
“Oh! You’re so insensitive,” you say. “What about Jewish scientists who don’t think Christ was significant?”
 
“All right, then eliminate him as the origin of the counting. Replace the current numbering system with one based on some “secular” event, such as the demise of the dinosaurs, the rise of Australopithecines, the formation of the Second Triumvirate, the birth of Maimonides, or the October Revolution. That will make a difference, won’t it? Right. It won’t. Choosing any date by which we say ‘before,’ and running the numbers in the opposite direction, is arbitrary. In the wake of the assassination, I don’t think anyone said, ‘March 15, 44 B.C., a date that will live in infamy’, even though the Ides of March that year initiated some five centuries of Roman emperors with absolute power.” 
 
“A minor matter,” you say. “We simply use two millennia ago as a starting point for our calendars. I was born,” you continue, “one thousand nine hundred some years after a Middle Eastern guy around whom a religion formed, and everything after his birth can be lumped temporally into a ‘current era.’”
 
“But what’s ‘current’ about two thousand years ago? What do we do with the classification of an era as ‘Medieval’? Are the ‘Middle Ages’ part of our current era? And if we’re talking historical civilizations, then why not go back to the time of the first runes or the first hieroglyphs to designate a beginning to ‘current’? Why not start the counting with the cave artists of Lascaux? Those were humans as we understand our species. Why not designate a separate time-keeping system as ‘D.N.’ (During Neandertals), and the ‘current era’ as ‘A.A.’ or ‘Anno Anthroporum,’ (In the Year of Men), or ‘Anno Sapientis’ (In the year of the Wise)?
 
“Sorry for that distraction. I’ll address the matter of ‘seeing clearly’ at another time.” 
 
 
*Brock, Arthur John, M.D., London. William Heinemann, and New York. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1916.  
 
**Though we know that both B.C. and B.C.E. have an identical Year One—as have A.D. and C.E.—and that both start the same numbering system, we also know that both have a beginning year that might be off by four years if Dionysius Exiguus made a mistake.

You sang the song in preschool, kindergarten, or first grade: “The wheels on the bus go round and round….” It’s, as I am wont to say, “a Heraclitean refrain.” I’ve mentioned him before because snippets of his writings have endured the centuries. Here’s one of those fragmentary thoughts, this one given to us by Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor-Philosopher: “The death of earth is to become water, and the death of water is to become air, and the death of air is to become fire, and reversely.” Before you object, recall that for Heraclitus and Aurelius, there was no periodic table of elements; just earth, air, fire, and water. For Heraclitus, the chief among the four was fire, or as he thought of it, the Eternal Fire. It keeps, for him, manifesting itself. It’s that “reversely” in the fragment that is germane here: The current time is, I find, curiously like the 1930s. There’s a recurrence of incivility in every society, and we’re currently in that part of the cycle. Call it an eternal lack of manners and good will. 
 
So, today, we have questions about civility, as though this is the first Age of Incivility or the first Age of the Uncivil. Has there been little history in the curricula of schools? Are we really in a period that has more incivility than past periods? Or, have the wheels on the bus always gone round and round… “All through the town”?
 
I mentioned the 1930s, that pre-WWII decade dominated by the Great Depression. It was the decade that saw the completion of the Empire State Building, but also saw the dissatisfied gathering in Union Square, often engaged in uncivil arguments over society and politics. For many, the times couldn’t have been worse; yet, for others, the times couldn’t have been much better. Not everyone was out of a job. Not everyone was without resources. There were those who recognized that economies are cyclic, and they just happened to be at the bottom of Fortune’s spin. The wheel would eventually go round to greater prosperity after the coming war.  
 
Jobs weren’t the primary focus of many in Union Square though some who gathered there daily were among the unemployed. No, some of them had their focus on societal change, big societal change, truthfully, the change from capitalism to socialism or its extreme form, communism. They railed against the forces that they perceived had conspired against them. They sought “equality” while equally dreaming of their own rise above the ordinary, possibly even of playing golf five days a week and owning a yacht. You’ve seen such a wheel turn: In every “socialist” or “communist” society, there are those who occupy privileged positions with power and money, leisure and adoration, and clothes and houses to make every “jones” envy. To keep power, those in charge need angry masses, need to stir the kettle of disenchantment by mixing in promises based not on realities, but rather on theoretical ideals. 
 
During the 1930s, some writers took to the streets to discover the tone of the times. One of those writers was Leonard Q. Ross, AKA Leo C. Rosten. Ross went to Union Square to mix with the locals, most of them Left-leaning.* Here’s a fragment:
 
            “A young man, very thin and intense, ranted against ‘Hearst’s lies.’”
 
An older person in the crowd, observed Ross, told the young man to read another newspaper; in response the young guy said,
 
            “What paper? The capitalistic Times ? The Fascist Herald Trib ? The Post, I suppose? That’s a hot one. The Post  puts up a fake labor attitude because they’re tryin’ to get circulation from the masses, that’s all.” And then, as the conversations continued, he said, “You can’t change people!...What if everyone has a job? O.K. Next they wanna play golf five times a week, that’s what. So then everyone wants a yacht! That’s what they want next—a yacht.” That comment, reports Ross, stirred more argument about those who have and those who have not, with some arguing for the opportunities afforded by capitalism and against the oppression of the individual by communism. 
 
Anyway, Ross continues, “I heard men referred to as ‘counter-revolutionists,’ ‘White Russians,’ ‘deviationists,’ ‘opportunists.’ A serious young man in glasses called someone a ‘confusionist.’ All these labels were uttered with contempt.” 
 
“With contempt.” Yes, it was long ago, a different America you might think, one suffering from a great economic downturn while building skyscrapers and factories. Still, the tone was the same as it is in many places today, including Union Square. The wheels on the bus go round and round. As it was then, so it is now, with ad  hominem and ad populum arguments and condemnatory and excessive labeling: Those are the wheels on the social bus filled with the irate and the uncivil. As it was then, it is now, incivility based on labels loosely pasted onto intellectual opponents: If you belong to the opposition, the thinking goes, you deserve labeling and expletives.  
 
One might think that Heraclitus got it right when he said, “It is better to delight in the mire than in the clean river” (Frag. 13). But maybe he was incorrect when he said that one couldn’t put his foot in the same river twice (Frag. 12); apparently, we’ve been stepping in the River of Incivility over and over again. A turbulent cloudy river is the social and political norm. And, by the way, the mire of extreme positions sells papers and provides dramatic news coverage.  
 
Is it the nature of many to complain regardless of their circumstances, to blame because scapegoating is easier than accepting personal responsibility that enables one to relish the good while attempting to correct the bad? When you hear the shouts and imagine the rage behind the people in black masks, you need to think, “Wait a minute. Haven’t we been through all this before? Haven’t the angry ones always made their voices heard in shouts, curses, accusations? Haven’t we had recurrent fights over capitalism and socialism and over Left and Right?’’
 
Ever notice how people tend to run to extremes, and that’s when civility falls into the abyss of prejudice and hate? Fifty shades of gray are not usually part of the political scene. It’s most often black and white, a deep chasm separating the two, and on either side, the black side or the white side, adherents can only shout across the divide. 
 
It was also in the 1930s that one writer reports his cult-like adherence to the promises and ideals of communism before becoming disillusioned, particularly after Russia invaded its relatively peaceful and nonthreatening neighbor Finland. The communists of the time were a rowdy bunch, stirring up controversy wherever they could. Milton Hindus wrote about them from inside the movement he joined. But he was an independent thinker, and he realized that extremists don’t tolerate nuances and questions. He writes, “The quarrels between the party and me began about small things. I disagreed at first on matters just to see what would happen. The rudeness with which they slapped down these tentative efforts enraged me…They tried to silence me—first by persuasion and later by threats.” Ah! Milton Hindus could be writing that today in the context of mobs shutting down speeches by those with whom they disagree. 
 
But the point here isn’t the history lesson as much as it a lesson in the general nature of societies. The dissatisfied will always be with us, always offering us some theoretical ideal as a model for the world, and always angrily shouting down those who oppose their views.  The incivility that the media report is nothing new. The shouting on TV pundit programs or in gathering crowds is a recurrent phenomenon, and maybe not just recurrent, but permanent, only slightly abated by brief moments of civility in small segments of society.
 
One last passage from Ross. He stopped to talk to a policeman assigned to Union Square. “How long do these arguments go on?”
 
     “Jeeze,” he said, “They start in the morning around ten, and they don’t even begin to break up until eleven at night. The last ones aren’t over until one or two in the morning. That’s when there’s an occasional cuttin’-up match. You know—arguments, fights, razors. Then we gotta run ‘em in….” 
 
All those arguments, all that shouting, all the fights of the 1930s and yet, here we are in the second decade of the 2000s witnessing the same goings on. Can you see why Heraclitus said, “It is better to delight in the mire than in the clean river”? We seemingly find delight in incivility because we keep introducing it into every generation. Contrary to Heraclitus, we do seem to be able to put our foot in the same mire twice--actually, more than twice. The wheels on the bus…
 
  
*Leonard Q. Ross. “Union Square.” The  Strangest  Places. 1939. Copyright Leonard Q. Ross.
**Milton Hindus. “Politics.” Twice  a  Year. 1938. Copyright Dorothy S. Norman.

Unintended consequences are the consequences of almost all group decisions. Take dams, for example. They make good sense. “Ya blocks your stream, you gits yer water.” You take control of your environment: No more floods, plenty of water for irrigating, drinking, swimming, and boating. Seems like a good idea. And then, years later, “Oh oh! What’d we do? The salmon numbers are falling and with them so are the whale numbers.”
 
Damned dams! The number of orcas off the northwest coast dropped to just 74 individuals in 2018. Researchers at the Center for Whale Research say that hydroelectric dams are largely to blame. The dams and overfishing have diminished the chinook salmon numbers, an orca staple. So, the push is on to breach dams like the one across the Lower Snake River. Breaching would save the fish and consequently save the whales. Of course, breaching would also mean the loss of the electric power for which the dams were built. It’s one of those “dammed-if-you-do-damned-because-you-did” moments. The four dams in question seemed a good idea at the time they were built, but pressure to damn the dams arose in groups concerned about whale numbers. Governor Jay Inslee appointed a task force to solve the problem, but the federal government says “the dams provide benefits to the region in low-cost hydropower, navigation, and recreation.”* 
 
In medieval Cambodia, Angkor Wat, a city that covered 1,000 square kilometers (386 square miles), grew prosperous for almost a millennium because of an extensive dam and irrigation system. And then. “Oops! Wadrwe goin’ to do wit all this extra rainwater?” The dams damned the city, or at least, that’s the conclusion of researchers.**  Apparently, the system supported rice cultivation for the enormous population, but when the rains came in excess of irrigation ditch and pool capacity, floods overwhelmed a system that had suffered centuries of sedimentation that reduced holding capacity under a lack of dredging.***
 
Controlling Nature is what we do. Ancient Egyptians learned that lesson, as did other ancient people. Unfortunately, those in the distant past who had the technology to control rivers for irrigation, didn’t realize the downside, that eventually, even fresh water’s miniscule salt content adds up to “poison” the soil. And without long-term forecasting, people then—and really, also now—build systems that can’t account for temporary weather changes that might last years, a few decades, or even a few centuries like the droughty conditions that seemed to have affected the Pueblo and the Mayan civilizations. Yes, we can build a city like Timbuctoo near a water supply, and that city can grow to over a 100,000 people, but we can live there in those numbers only as long as we can control the use of water. Today’s population is much lower. Let’s just see whether Las Vegas is the equivalent of medieval Timbuctoo. Lake Mead’s 2018 level reveals that we can build dams, but we can’t make rain, just as the flooding streams after a hurricane reveal that we can account for an average rainfall, maybe even a little excess rainfall, but can’t lessen the quantity of a large storm like  2018’s Hurricane Florence.  
 
And one of the reasons that dams eventually damn is that we are a greedy and selfish lot. Given the ample water supply of a reservoir, we find ourselves consuming without thinking about the consequences of our actions, and we forget that streams are systems—and that all Nature is a system. Do something upstream and you do something downstream, whether or not you are aware of the consequences. We use what we have. It’s our nature to overuse Nature. 
 
Maybe the lesson in damning dams is that we lack sufficient perseverance to educate those who follow the dam-builders, that next generation that grows up with the convenience dams afford: Abundant water and electricity for the region. When there’s no commitment of time and effort, of money and emotional capital, there’s no reason for caution and conservation. Try this: Go to a casino, get lucky at a slot machine, say by winning $500 on a single play, and then get up and leave the casino happy with your good fortune. Don’t replay. Just leave. That’s tough for most people. Given their newfound wealth, they replay, saying, “Well, this is found money. What can I lose? I’ll just gamble a little of it.”
 
That’s what we do with just about everything we have won in the slot machine of Nature. We are addicted to our winnings even though we know that we can’t control either the randomness of a slot machine or the random changes in Nature that indifferently occur. Civilizations have come and gone; species have gone extinct or been decimated; people have fought over the control of local or regional resources. La Nina and El Nino are Pacific processes that determine whether or not a region thousands of miles away gets more, less, or average precipitation. Chance eruptions of super volcanoes change weather patterns. Solar output can vary sufficiently to alter weather patterns. All the while we build with an eye on our present needs while not realizing that we can’t foresee natural changes.
 
We’ve attempted to control Nature since we could. In every instance, our control was very temporary. And that points to a flaw in my usual advice. When I say, “What you anticipate is rarely a problem,” I might be giving a false hope. Try as we might, we cannot anticipate much beyond our short-term forecasts, both personal and social. We know the pendula of ideas swing, but we fail to recognize that sometimes they get caught up, stuck, so to speak, or sometimes they lie still until some external force like a new social movement renews the swing. If we look at the 1930s, we see that in America the conversations, the anger, the hopes, and the reasoning on both the Left and the Right, all were foreshadowing of the 2010s. It was in the Hoover era that we began to build one of the world’s great dams. We had hope. We accomplished much in building that dam. And now only less than a century later, the reservoir we made has a falling level because of natural phenomena beyond our control—and supposedly the cement deep in the dam hasn’t finished curing. 
 
We might argue that Angkor Wat lasted about eight centuries, saying that such a civilization is not to be sneezed at. Eight centuries is a long time—relatively speaking.  And we might argue that the Mayans had similar success in conquering Nature and controlling water. But it doesn’t take long for Nature, on its time scale, to undo what we do. A few years of excessive rainfall or excessive drought can decimate human and animal populations. That’s not an argument to just give up and let Nature have its way, but it is an argument against our being too proud in confidence that we know what we’re doing in attempting to control what is ultimately beyond our control. 
 
We’ll continue to build dams, and either Nature or social changes will eventually damn us for them. What do you think? Are you on side of the dam-builders or on the side of those who damn the builders?
 
 
 
*Le, Phuong. Breaching dams to save Northwest orcas is contentious issue. Phys.org. October 19, 2018. Online at https://phys.org/news/2018-10-breaching-northwest-orcas-contentious-issue.html
 
**University Of New South Wales. "Angkor -- Medieval 'Hydraulic City' -- Unwittingly Engineered Its Environmental Collapse." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 12 September 2007. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070905145001.htm
 
***All dams undergo sedimentation-filling as inflowing water slows upon entering the reservoir, where without the energy of flowing water, transported sediments settle out and pile up, reducing reservoir capacity just as you reduce tub capacity of a tub by settling in tub water. By the way, water impoundment in the last and in this century has actually changed Earth's rotational speed. We have built dams behind which enormous amounts of water are stored. In a small state like Pennsylvania, where there are 50 natural lakes, people have constructed about 2,500 artificial ones. Start adding up the water impounded artificially on every continent behind   more than 800,000 dams, and you will understand how much an effect dam-building can have.

Big todo in the news. Seems that Stephen Hawking’s posthumous book criticizes people on political matters. There’s a point to make on that, but I’ll come ‘round to it later. Bigger focus for me was his funeral in Westminster Abbey, a “rest in peace” ceremony in an “abbey” with a man in a chasuble presiding, choir music, candles, and people in their “Sunday best.”* Hey! Wasn’t Stephen an atheist? What’s with all the pomp and circumstance in a place with daily religious services, services it has held for hundreds of years? And the plaque in the floor? It reads, “Here lies what was mortal of Stephen Hawking 1942-2018.”** 
 
“What was mortal of”? Is there an implication of something else that was Stephen Hawking, avowed atheist? Something immortal? His books maybe? His ideas? Surely, not his soul. The books, of course, will live on as long as no one finds a way to negate his evaporating black holes and other work. But, again, call me a dolt if you want. I’m having trouble with the “buried in the abbey” in a floor above which echo the voices of choirs and priests, all, I assume, of an opinion different from Stephen’s, all of them thinking, “There is something more than ‘what was mortal of.’” And the man in the chasuble? Some sort of “high priest,” I’d guess, maybe a bishop, reading a passage to the assembled, all bowing their heads as he solemnly says, “Heavenly Father, yadablahyadablahyadablah…[something about committing the mortal remains to the ground]” after which not only choir boys sing, but everyone sings a hymn. Hmmnnn.
 
As a famous scientist who endured decades of debilitating disease to continue his work, Stephen had his fans. I’m one; I admire both the man for his courage under the attack of ALS and for his work. The guy was very bright, and he had more insight into the working of the universe than I will ever have. Yet—I know, here comes the bad stuff—I have trouble with his certainty that there is no God. If a deity is beyond proving, beyond science, then on what ground other than belief does Stephen declare with surety? Isn’t belief the stuff of anti-science? If one has no proof for or against, then what, save belief, is left? Of course, Stephen has an argument in his writings that supports his position, and it’s based on the universe, in a sense, creating itself and/or on the universe as an eternal recurrence, kind of a modern view of Heraclitus’ cyclic pyr  aeizoon, the Eternal Fire. 
 
Stephen argues in one of his books that the universe originated from nothing because of natural laws. And he has some really good ground to stand on because of the apparent springing into and out of existence by subatomic particles. Plus, as he might argue in idiomatic British, the maths argue for it. But “natural laws” imply Nature, that is, the universe we know. I suppose for Stephen the “natural laws” existed in the “nothing.” 
 
In that statement I find a circularity little different from any other circular argument (A is true because of B; B is true because of A). In Hawking’s argument there is no God because natural laws are responsible for the makeup and operation of the universe, and they are the reason that the universe formed from nothing. So, before there was a universe in which natural laws operate, natural laws were part of the “nothing.” It’s tough not to make this a teleological argument: Did they (the laws) decide to include themselves in the universe they made in spite of Hawking’s argument that there is no role for Providence? What principle was behind the “law” of gravity that made it capable of pre-existence and existence?  
 
My yard initially had no grass. Seeds formed my lawn. My lawn has grass. My grass produces seeds. Seeds are the reason for my lawn. If there were no seeds before I had a lawn, I would not have the lawn I have with grass that produces seeds. Of course, all analogies fail, and this one relies on seeds being equal to natural laws. But then again, think about their role. They don’t really exist in the pre-lawn state, in the nothing, so to speak. Seeds and grass are metamorphically similar to the proverbial chicken-and-egg dilemma and not to a Nothing  versus a Something. Seeds are already part of the universe. Give me some slack here, however. Are natural laws also part of the universal lawn? The point is a simple one. Hawking’s natural laws “demanded” before the Big Bang that the universe come into being. Nothing, that is, The Nothing, apparently has the energy of creation in it. But here language fails us, doesn’t it? If there is a pre-universe that is nothing, is it an “it”? That is, in what do the laws exist? I thought the definition of nothing is the absence of things, forces, processes—and don’t get me started on Heidegger’s “no-thingness.” Hawking’s “nothing” has a process, the process of creation. But even if Hawking is correct in proving the probability of a self-creating universe, he really can’t be sure, save for his faith in that probability, that he has disproved the existence of a Creator.
 
Hold on. Remember that Hawking gives us a metaphor. Essentially, he argues that there’s nothing south of the South Pole. That’s how he pictures the Origin that he follows to the present like lines of latitude toward the Equator, though in his thinking, it is imaginary time that operates like a spatial dimension. As Hawkingites (my word, not theirs) argue when they say the universe is eternal, the universe in imaginary time “looks” like a shuttlecock. Think of putting a “South Pole” on the rubber end and its feathers as the universe’s expansion (or inflation) in imaginary time. So, how did the South Pole come into existence if the universe might be eternal? Well, there was a previous shuttlecock in reverse, butt against our universe’s butt end, one that collapsed and then expanded into ours. And in the shuttlecock image, you have a cone that has “smooth” cross sections on which lie all the universes in the multiverse. Whoa! Am I wearing you out? You know you can take a break and come back to this later, but now you’re going to walk around with this universe-as-a-shuttlecock image in your brain, asking yourself what lies on the outside of the feathers or why there wouldn’t be many shuttlecocks trying to collapse and squeeze their rubber butts into a single South Pole. Just keep in mind that the “maths” work. 
 
Fine-tuning, or the anthropic principle, says we exist because the universe is just right for us to exist. And Stephen didn’t like the anthropic principle. I think I understand. The principle is a declaration that all the forces are just what they need to be: Gravity, the weakest of the four fundamental forces (10^-41 times weaker than the strong nuclear force, for example), couldn’t have been much stronger without collapsing the early universe; the strong nuclear force is “just right” for fusion; if weaker, it’s a no-go for carbon, you, and burned toast. Now there’s some fine-tuning for you. Hawking says ignore the fine-tuning. Fine-tuning is just like winning the lottery. Yeah. Maybe there’s a one in 180-million-chance of winning, but someone eventually wins. And in a multiverse with untold billions of other universes (or shuttlecocks), one of those universes becomes life’s lottery winner, and on top of that, not just life, but conscious life. This is suspiciously similar to eighteenth-century optimism so famously satirized by Voltaire in Candide. 
 
So, for Hawking, because there are more universes than one can identify, ours exists in that lottery, and it’s just right for us. But that brings us back to the nothing which Hawking acknowledges as the pre-multiverse condition, the south of the South Pole chaos. And, here we are, back to belief. We’re also stuck on a principle of exclusion. Just because a universe can theoretically form without God doesn’t mean that it did form without a Creator. (I told you that you should consider taking a break. This thing reads on)
 
In The  Grand  Design, Hawking and Mlodinow adopt “model dependent realism: the idea that a physical theory or world picture is a model (generally of a mathematical nature) and a set of rules that connect the elements of the model to observations” (42,43).*** In explaining “model-dependent,” the authors tell of two views of reality, one by a goldfish in a fishbowl and the other by a person outside the fishbowl. The perspectives of both differ, but from either’s point of view, the model of reality that they hold works because it “matches observations.” So, as long as models match observations (or observations support models), the perspective is valid. But then we have to ask whether the “model” for the quantum world is actually a “model.” Right now the “standard model” works, and according to Hawking and Mlodinow, a version of string theory called M Theory gives the big picture. Yet—here we go again—the authors say, “The brain…builds a mental picture of the model” (47). 
 
It’s interesting that for a long time we have known that observing and measuring tell us something about, say, photons, telling us how they behave. But point or wave? Well, the wave function isn’t a wave like a wave on the ocean. It’s a mathematical construct that tells us something about probability. That’s not going to sit well in anyone’s brain as a “mental picture.” And there is in the maths a wave function for the universe as a whole (Don’t bother; I’ve already tried to picture it in my feeble brain). With regard to subatomic entities, we are not like fish in the bowl or people outside the bowl. Those are macro experiences and the models are large and clear. What model-dependent realism can account for natural laws before the advent of a nature that contains them? And how can the brain make that into a mental picture. Go ahead: Picture nothing with a process of creation in it. You’re going to need “the maths” because, as Morris Kline informs us, “All proofs consist in transforming collections of symbols into new collections by rules for the transformation of symbols that replace the verbal laws of logic” (231).**** Kline argues that modern mathematics is about the non-visualizable—save for shuttlecocks and imaginary time, right? 
 
Now back to Hawking’s last book and his comments on political matters. Who cares? If there is nothing left of Stephen—remember that his “what was mortal of” is ash beneath a stone in the floor of Westminster Abbey—and Stephen has returned to the nothing, then literally nothing in this world is worth a concern. Conscious beings, however fine-tuned their universe, might as well adopt some existential nihilism. Did Stephen not know how many political changes have occurred since humans formed societies? How many people must have said, “The world is changing for the worse” or “Things today just aren’t what they used to be”? Haven’t we all heard some form of “the end of the world is near,” especially when social turmoil prevails? Can you imagine the opinions of people in a medieval village overrun by Huns? Can you imagine strikers battling Chicago police in 1930? Can you “feel” the news that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in a manner similar to your reaction to the 9-11 terrorist attack? Those alive during those incidents probably felt their world was never going to be “the same.” It’s the nature of political and social worlds to form new shuttlecock universes, all of them expanding into new multiverses. Why should Hawking have cared to focus on the temporary condition of a world not only in flux, but also the product of random quantum fluctuations? Was he envisioning an ideal moral condition of love and peace and all those other non-vizualizables? 
 
Maybe the atheist in Hawking might have believed that there is in consciousness a drive toward ethics—as he defined them. No one needs to postulate the existence of God when humans have their self-interest at heart. If I’m nice to you, and you’re nice to me, then in this brief meaningless existence inside one of gajillions of universes, we prolong our brief stay comfortably. We don’t go to war. We get along harmoniously. It’s a utilitarian thing independent of any “higher” law. It’s the Age of Aquarius without belief in astrology. Natural law somehow accounts for brains that consciously demand our getting along or we annihilate one another. Humanism springs forth from being human just as a YouTube video shows a leopard care for a baby baboon. Hawking would probably say, “See, we don’t need God. Even the brain of a big cat has a model of morality built into it.”*****  
 
Now we’re talking humanism, but Hawking mentions the election of Donald Trump and Brexit in his “the-world-ain’t-what-it-used-to-be” moment. No, Stephen, the world is never what it used to be. Look at you. You were here, and now you’re not. Those of us who are still here are certainly happy you gave us your insights about physics. You did much to advance our knowledge. And you certainly gave us a model of a human who could accomplish much in dire circumstances. But, if your vision of the non-visualizable universe is correct, you’re nothing now except for some formulae and books that, in some future society, might meet the same fate as the books in the library at Alexandria. We can’t know the future, can’t scientifically predict it, but that library’s fate seems to be a possibility in this and other doppelganger universes. Look what ISIS did to Palmyra and ancient statuary for an example. 
 
“We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe,” Stephen and a co-author write in The  Grand  Design. That might be true, but it is “in the very early universe” that the fluctuations occurred. They occurred “in something,” not “in nothing.” And right now, we are part of an unfolding universe that can be scientifically measured according to natural laws. Yet, regardless of the determinism on which science relies, here we are still incapable of knowing the future and incapable of predicting that Stephen’s books will be treasured or burned, whether Brexit, a concern of his, will be of any consequence a thousand years hence, whether or not the election of an American president will be significant when the sun turns red giant and scorches Earth. 
 
We can’t get around belief. We start by believing in our axioms. We use the axioms to establish proofs. We verify the proofs repeatedly, but nothing changes the fact that we believe in the efficacy of the axioms. As I have said before, we think Greek. Euclid and others way back then set the pattern of thinking that Hawking and you and I use to justify our interpretation of the world. Belief at the most rudimentary level of any thought runs us up against the “nothing” that Stephen, if he could be—he says he isn’t—conscious, is currently (but outside of time) exploring. 
 
Once again, in my ignorance, I seem to be missing something, and that, I’m guessing, is the nature of the “nothing” from which all “somethings” came. I can’t imagine a “nothing” that contains “laws” for the formation of something. Hey, but what do I know? I wish I could talk to Stephen about it. 
 
After reading all this, you say, “Well, if your purpose here was to prove there is a God, you missed the mark.”
 
I, in response, say, “You’re right. I haven’t ‘proved’ the existence of God. But I believe I have shown that Hawking’s argument against God’s existence is flawed and that his model-dependent realism that rejects a Creator doesn’t negate a two-model model like the two ascribed to the fish and human inside and outside the fishbowl. Belief appears to operate in both realities. The one Hawking ascribes to a model-dependent realism that starts with axioms and relies on observations that are mathematical constructs like wave functions and the one that the guy standing in the chasuble in Westminster Abbey constructs as he intones prayers that a celebrity audience politely follows with bowed heads in deference to 'Heavenly Father,' who, in Hawking’s view, is some fictional character irrelevant to the formation of the universe in which 'what was mortal of Stephen Hawking' now lies." 
 
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLerGQOxJMs
 
**https://www.google.com/search?q=pic+of+Hawking%27s+burial+stone+in+westminster+abbey&client=safari&rls=en&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=T9rRnPSHFF1_nM%253A%252CAQU_oLRSO-OwFM%252C_&usg=AI4_-kQQew4Usih7oqKwVpaFpfwL9y42Jg&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiwjbXn2JfeAhVPj1kKHavWDNYQ9QEwC3oECAYQGg#imgrc=T9rRnPSHFF1_nM:
 
***Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. The  Grand Design. New York. Bantam Books. 2010. p. 139.
 
****Kline, Morris. Mathematics: The  Loss  of  Certainty. New York. Fall River Press, 1980.
 
***** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugi4x8kZJzk

Ever get the feeling that you are helpless? I’m going to exacerbate that briefly before offering some minor relief.
 
You know how you like variety? How you get bored with the same-old-same-old easily? Well, all life is unconsciously like that in a sense, what with ecological diversity and what-not. The variety-thing has an ironic side. Life as a driving force, teleologically speaking, seems to want diversity, at least until the current era, the one we have been, are now, and will be continuously shaping. And that irony? As much as we personally like a diverse environment to keep us from reaching the flatline of boredom, we also, for whatever reasons—very diverse—seem to want an Earth with a single species: Homo sapiens sapiens. To that effect, we kill to the point of extinction our fellow earthlings, Dodo birds among some hundreds of others just during the past half millennium. Yeah, we spread death around; and before we learned to record what we killed, we were in the business of ecological reduction. And don’t say, “Don’t blame me; I wasn’t around to kill the Dodo.” Collectively, we’re still in the business of extinction; we’re doing exactly the opposite of diversification. 
 
When we look around and try to add up the number of life-forms on the planet, we have to estimate because every once in a while, someone discovers a previously unknown species: Life really is both diverse and plentiful as evidenced, for example, by bacteria found by drilling in rock miles below the surface. Life’s life style is making more kinds of life and finding new places to inhabit, like the hypothermophilic enchytraeid annelids, the ice-worms that spend their entire lives in glacial ice at and below the freezing point and the hyperthermophilic archaeans that live in hot springs at and above the boiling point. Extinctions quash that diversity, obviously. 
 
We’ve had the Big Five, including the Great Dying 252 million years ago and that more famous one that made the dinosaurs kick the bucket 65 million years ago. We can label all extinction events before the rise of humans as “natural,” but that’s a bit of cheat. Humans are in the process of killing off species, and though we might label our actions as  “anthropogenic extinction,” the reality is that we are one of the planet’s life-forms, making us, regardless of our hubris, “natural agents.” Our hubris can’t be disregarded, however, because we have invented new ways to kill off those less technologically capable than we are. I don’t know how elephants or whales could shoot guns even if they invented them, and certainly chainsaws are more efficient than beavers’ teeth just as cement dams blocking the flow of big rivers are more efficient than beavers’ piles of felled trees. 
 
Two recent studies, one of current extinction and the other of past extinction, focus attention on the long road to ecological recovery after mass death events. A study of life before and after the Great Dying indicates that life took its time regaining diversity it lost during the extinction. Apparently, it took about five million years to reach an ecological diversity that matched pre-extinction life.* And almost fifty million years after the Great Dying there was still an imbalance in the trophic levels compared with those prior to the event. Simply put, recovery can be a slow process. The organisms lost are lost, and the ecological niches emptied by an extinction have to be filled with entirely new groups. 
 
So, what would you expect to find with regard to recovery from an extinction event? Here’s a finding from the study of Permian and Triassic life: The trophic levels seemed to form an upside-down food pyramid with relatively short food chains. The nekton, the swimmers, seemed to recover, diversify, and multiply faster than the benthos, the bottom dwellers. I don’t know about you, but I would have guessed the opposite, that the lowliest (there’s my hubris) critters would multiply and diversify faster than the higher life-forms, such as the predators. 
 
So, for example, in today’s extinction event, which some have termed the Sixth Mass Extinction, we see the elimination of giant sloths, mammoths, mastodons, and many other large mammals and the endangerment of many others. But what if we wipe all large mammals and reptiles off the face of the planet? Wouldn’t those “lower” life-forms dominate? Wouldn’t they diversity and multiply in the absence of larger organisms? Should we see a “bottom-up” recovery of life? Maybe the slow progression of some sea life to land?
 
Right about now you’re asking, “So, what do you want me to do about it?” Or, “What am I supposed to do about it? I can’t roam the Serengeti looking for poachers who care little for wildlife or human life.” You’re right. You can’t do anything about it with regard to saving elephants if you don’t have the financial or physical means to protect them from poachers. You don’t have the ability to control whatever stresses people in some foreign land place on wildlife or ecological diversity. And you probably don’t even have the wherewithal to change much in the ecologically damaging lifestyle of your neighbors. Sorry to be pessimistic, but I have to say that even if you were to convince your entire community to preserve a local ecology, you have no guarantee that the next generation will do the same. You and your contemporaries are the continuation of human conquest of the planet, one that has been going on irregularly for more than 200,000 years with some interruptions.
 
Here’s the pessimistic view from the study of current extinction in the context of ecological recovery: “An Aarhus-led research team calculated that if current conservation efforts are not improved, so many mammal species will become extinct during the next five decades that nature will need 3 to 5 million years to recover.”** The study’s suggestion: Figure out what’s endangered and concentrate conservation efforts. Sure, that’ll do. Well, at least you’ll get to “pick and choose.” 
 
Ever get the feeling that you are helpless? You realize that the feeling comes from your perception of the world as you think it should  be. You have a concept: I understand how the world’s components should  work and even what components should belong to the system.  Maybe you are like many people who have little concern for the survival of rats, spiders, and snakes. If you live in India, you live where conservation efforts have been directed to save tigers. However, almost 100 people a year die in tiger attacks. Basically, all tiger victims are Indians. So, if you are a villager living in tiger country, you probably aren’t too concerned about saving tigers from extinction. You’re probably more concerned about saving humans, especially you, from death by tiger. And that’s probably the same kind of feeling that humans have had for hundreds of thousands of years to the detriment of wildlife. 
 
Given the dangers posed by some wildlife, what do you choose? The world that you believe should exist or the world that actually does exist? Sorry, I said at the outset that I would offer some relief to the feeling of helplessness. I guess I didn’t do a very good job because I believe I would probably opt for extinction of many life-forms and a five-million-year recovery over my own extinction. Both extinctions are forever, but I would choose a world in which I exist, regardless of how it impacts an ecological balance. 
 
Is there some lesson other than one about my innate selfish desire to live? Yes, and it rests in the word should. In our hubris, we believe we know the shoulds that apply not only to all aspects of life of any kind, but also to the universe at large. We’re largely motivated by shoulds. Adult feelings of helpless derive from adult dependence on a world of shoulds. 


 
*Jaijun Song, Paul B. Wignall, and Alexander M. Dunhill.Decoupled taxonomic and ecological recoveries from the Permo-Triassic extinction.Science  Advances . 10 Oct 2018:
Vol. 4, no. 10, eaat5091 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aat5091 . See also the article on the article:
Miles, Matt. Extinction is forever—and ecosystem recovery takes a long time. Phys.org, October 17, 2018, Online at https://phys.org/news/2018-10-extinction-foreverand-ecosystem-recovery.html
 
**Aarhus University. Mammals can’t evolve fast enough to escape current extinction crisis. Phys.org. October 15, 2018, Online at https://phys.org/news/2018-10-mammals-evolve-fast-current-extinction.htmlSee also, Matt Davis, Søren Faurby, and Jens-Christian Svenning PNAS published ahead of print October 15, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1804906115, Online at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/10/09/1804906115
​

“The gods made me do it.”
“It’s my destiny.”
“I couldn’t avoid the accident.”
“Circumstances were beyond my control.”
 
Or, consider this one by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow:
 
            “Since people live in the universe and interact with the other objects in it, scientific determinism must hold for people as well. Many, however…make an exception for human behavior because they believe we have free will.”*
 
And they go on to say:
 
            “Recent experiments in neuroscience support the view that it is our physical brain, following the known laws of science, that determines our actions, and not some agency that exists outside those laws” (32).
 
Hmnnnn!? You buyin’ that? Maybe. Anyway, the two authors argue further for an “effective theory” (I’d say, hypothesis). Their argument is based on the lack of a mathematical framework to predict human behavior precisely the way we can predict that a collision of two masses with a certain velocity will result in an identifiable spread of debris and final resting places. Newton didn’t seem to have any answers for why people do what they do. So, according to Hawking and Mlodinow, “we use  the  effective  theory  that  people  have free  will ”[ltalics mine]. I suppose you might want to argue that as we learn more about the brain and accumulate more information for further refinement of the Diagnostic  and  Statistical Manual  of  Mental Disorders –5, we’ll approach a Newtonian-type of analysis for humans. 
 
The problem, of course, is that we do stuff just because we can. All of us have the potential to be James Dean playing our own role in a personal remake of the movie Rebel  without  a  Cause. Or, we might all play Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Dostoyevsky’s protagonist in Crime  and  Punishment, deciding to do something like murder just because we can. However useful the DSM—5 is for counselors, psychotherapists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, its focus is “disorders,” and not on “orders,” not on what might be called “normal” behavior. If we assume with Hawking and Mlodinow that determinism rules, then we can easily look for that set of formulae that describe and predict abnormal “disordered” behavior. And maybe we’re close with DSM—5, though the numbering system indicates that we’re still refining. What will be the number for DSM in two decades, in a century, in a millennium? Will we be at DSM—1,033? And will that refinement some thousand years hence be mathematical? Will we finally have pinned down the brain’s inner workings and tied it to its outward behavioral manifestations?
 
If the time comes when DSM—1,033 fulfills the goals of a deterministic science, will we finally acknowledge that we have no free will? Or, even in the distant future will we struggle in arguments between behavioral scientists and neuroscientists on one hand and theologians and philosophers on the other. Hawking and Mlodinow argue that philosophy is “dead.” Are they correct? Has an objective science overtaken the roles of theology and philosophy? Are we, for example, on the verge of declaring as a corollary that there is no “sin” because no one is responsible beyond mere obedience to neurons, neurotransmitters, the molecules that make them, the subatomic particles that make the molecules, and the quantum effects on quarks in the head? 
 
I guess the nature of the quantum world prohibits us from ultimately resolving the question of free will since we cannot know both place and momentum simultaneously, cannot know what is and is not entangled deep within our brains, and cannot keep track, regardless of our developments in super computing, of a potential quadrillion synaptic connections among a hundred billion neurons each with 10,000 connections. Is the effective theory of free will the best we can hope for until we get a super computer that can not only mimic the human brain but also explain in real time to those neurons the nature of their interactions? 
 
Probably not. As any computer is in the process of keeping track of the brain, those neurons keep firing or pulsing. It’s an unending job until death parts brain from behavior. 
 
Hawking and Mlodinow are good physicists, but can they explain “scientifically” (deterministically) why they like physics or why they pursued careers in physics? Maybe they are just reincarnations of David Hume, the philosopher. He wrote, “Though our thought seems to possess [an] unbounded liberty, [we find] upon a nearer examination that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience.”**
 
Wow! Now there are three guys who doubt you have free will, and they are all well respected thinkers. Wait! Thinkers? Thinking? Does that presuppose “mind.” Do they believe they have “minds”? Would they argue that “mind” is simply a definition of “working brain”? What do you think? 
 
Are you merely a working brain? 
 
Is one of the costs of free will a relinquishing of observation and determinsm in favor of an effective theory? Does accepting the concept of free will come at the price of science? Or are we in an endless cycle of circularity in an unprovable argument? Are we like Descartes arguing for the existence of God saying in effect, “I am finite. God is infinite. I can’t have an infinite thought. The thought of God must have been put in me by God. God, therefore, exists”? Thus, I have free will because I can choose to explore whether or not I have free will. I have the free will to question my free will. It must be free will that enables me to question or affirm its existence.”
 
Are you free to think about free will? Or does your brain demand it at the cost of true freedom?  
 
 
 
*Hawking, Stephen and Leonard Mlodinow. The  Grand  Design. New York. Bantam Books, 2010., p. 30.
 
**Hume, David. Inquiry Concerning  Human  Understanding, 1748.