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.
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.
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