Philip Sugg | Blog

I’ve sometimes thought that the humanities are best positioned to show their worth in times when the irrational, the inexplicable and the absurd are at their most conspicuous. And if there were any doubt about whether this is one of those times, the war in Ukraine has ended it.

I am talking about the big-tent humanities here: both the creation of arts and culture (the work of artists), and the study of these activities (i.e., the work of professional critics, audiences, and academic humanists).

The humanities may not help us make sense of the irrational (that would be a contradiction in terms), but they do give it form, maybe even transform what is frightening about it into something briefly beautiful.

Still, the humanities may not be useful with respect to the irrational, because they do not reduce the presence of the absurd. But I would argue that a culture that embraces the humanities is healthier than one that devalues them, because a culture with a rich humanistic tradition is likely to have a more expansive appreciation for its own dark side; that culture is in greater touch with its own irrationality.

The British art critic John Berger spent the last 55 years of his life–from 1962 to 2017–living in rural France. During this time he wrote a fictional trilogy of short stories, collectively entitled Into Their Labors, about people who live a life of subsistence in the countryside, and their relationship to modernity and the city. In his introduction to the trilogy’s first volume, Pig Earth, this is what Berger had to say about the normalcy of upheaval for this way of life:

Each day a peasant experiences more change more closely than any other class. Some of these changes, like those of the seasons or like the process of ageing and failing energy, are foreseeable; many–like the weather from one day to the next, like a a cow choking to death on a potato, like lightning, like rains which come to early or too late, like fog that kills the blossom, like the continually evolving demands of those who extract the surplus, like an epidemic, like locusts–are unpredictable.

In fact the peasant’s experience of change is more intense than any list, however long and comprehensive, could ever suggest. For two reasons. First, his capacity for observation. Scarcely anything changes in a peasant’s entourage, from the clouds to the tail feathers of a cock, without his noticing and interpreting it in terms of the future. His active observation never ceases and and so he is continually recording and reflecting on changes. Secondly, his economic situation. This is usually such that even a slight change for the worst–a harvest which yields twenty-five percent less than the previous year, a fall in the market price of the harvest produce, an unexpected expense–can have disastrous or near-disastrous consequences. His observation does not allow the slightest sign of change to pass unnoticed, and his debt magnifies the real or imagined threat of a great part of what he observes. (xxi)

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A few photos from last year’s partial lunar eclipse, which lasted for several early morning hours on November 19th, 2021.

From the observer’s perspective, the strangest thing about this event was that I could see all of the moon, but in a state of halfway illumination. On an ordinary night, it might be possible to see the part of the moon that is in shadow, but you have to look quite hard for it. Here the shape of the whole moon was obvious.

In any single photographic exposure I also found it difficult to capture both the intense reddish color of the moon and the well-defined “terminator line,” the division between region of the moon in partial shadow and the region receiving unobstructed light. Each photo shows a different aspect of the impression the moon made on my eye.

Banking is probably the most regulated activity in the modern state. The U.S. Constitution contains a “commerce clause” (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3) giving the federal government the right to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”–arguably the closest the original U.S. Constitution comes to creating a federal agency or department. There is no official justification for the special regulatory status of banks, but the scrutiny they get can be traced to the idea that banks are the keepers of money, the facilitators of exchange, and one of the most basic intermediaries in public life overall.

Has the time come to grant computers–and the algorithms they instantiate–a similar special status? Computing is just as “everwhere” as money–arguably more ubiquitous. The substance of modern money is not gold, coin or printed bills, but entries in a computer ledger held on hard disks and electronic memory. Social media has shown us that computing is just as foundational to non-commercial activity. Like the financial system, computer logic is also incredibly obscure to outsiders without specialized knowledge and permissions. Indeed, one of the most shocking things revealed by recent technology whistleblowers is how little oversight there is over computing, and how often computers are used to achieve a goal exactly because, when you translate human action into computer action, it avoids understanding and legal scrutiny. The workings of computing power are easily as systemic (destabilizing) as money. Doesn’t it deserve a special regulatory status, too?

Traffic on the internet is concentrated. I needn’t tediously spell out where. You’ve probably been to all of these places, maybe in the last 24 hours. Here the idea of the the internet as a directory is fading fast in memory, and faster in practice. The “web” structure of the internet, the internet that is an open-ended set of servers and landing spots that are conceptually and physically distinct from one another, and which are only linked through the deliberate efforts of individual people to make a connection between Point A and Point B–this notion of the web is endangered.

Let me explain by example. The directory aspiration is still alive on the more artisanal parts of the internet. A few that are not too hard to find:

The WWW Virtual Library

Curlie

Jasmine Business Directory

When you enter these open-ended labyrinths, it becomes more obvious why they are out of sync with the internet’s modern cadence. These are unabashedly textual and qualitative documents; their lists are usually anti-hierarchical, making no attempt to describe which site is the best among all the others, or to put them in any kind of ranking. The directory is an aggressive reflection of one person’s opinion and efforts. What is conspicuous in its absence are metrics that shape or reorder these lists on the fly: no upvotes or feeds with hidden logic.

The directory also ignores the most mundane organizing principle of the modern web (this blog included): chronological ordering. The cruel reality of pushing “the new” into the default is that almost everything seem old (It’s been a month since you’ve posted something to Twitter? What’s wrong? A Wordpress blog without any activity for three months? Must have been abandoned!) Only the most labor-intensive, exhaustingly rational, grim commercial ventures have a real chance of meeting the daily demand for something new.

There ought to be a word for geologic processes that happen on a human scale. Maybe the most ready-at-hand word for that right now is “climate change.”

When the Pacific Ocean volcano known as Hunga Tonga-Hunga-Haʻapai erupted in 2015, it created a new landmass by fusing two islands together. When it erupted a month ago, it mostly destroyed them.

Compare the instant generation and pulverization of land to the timescale that created the Grand Canyon: on the order of millions, if not tens of millions of years. Or the time it took the Appalachian Mountains to be raised and then lowered to their present height: over a billion years. When it comes to lengths of time, geology is second only to cosmology. But you can’t touch the stars, or dig them up.

Most of the coal that created modern industry came into being several hundred million years ago, during the “Carboniferous” Period, when carbon was being pulled out of the atmosphere on the scale of mountain ranges. Now–this is the “now” of the recent past–a good percentage of that coal has come out of the ground and back into the air.

There ought to be a term for this, because the main byproduct of a geologic event on human scale is energy release–unbelievable quantities of energy, over barely longer than a human lifetime: the razing of mountains, volcanic explosions, enough heat to raise the temperature of an entire planet.

Thinking more about weather and meteorology, ancient and modern. Aristotle:

[Meteorology] is concerned with events that are natural, though their order is less perfect than that of the [stars and the heavens]. They take place in the region nearest to the motion of the stars. Such are the milky way, and comets, and the movements of meteors. It studies also all the affections we may call common to air and water, and the kinds and parts of the earth and the affections of its parts. These throw light on the causes of winds and earthquakes and all the consequences the motions of these kinds and parts involve. Of these things some puzzle us, while others admit of explanation in some degree. Further, the inquiry is concerned with the falling of thunderbolts and with whirlwinds and fire-winds, and further, the recurrent affections produced in these same bodies by concretion. When the inquiry into these matters is concluded let us consider what account we can give, in accordance with the method we have followed, of animals and plants, both generally and in detail.

(Book 1)

Sources

Aristotle, Meteorologica, translated by E. W. Webster. (~350 B.C.E.). Text at Internet Classics Archive.

The archaeoastronomer E.C. Crupp:

For the ancient Egyptians, the circumpolar zone was the realm of immortality, the home of the Imperishable Stars. In following their circular paths around the north celestial pole, those that never rose and never set became synonymous with eternal life. (Echoes of the Ancient Skies, 104)

Sources

E.C. Crupp, Echoes of the Ancient Skies. Dover, 2003.