ESSAYS
Essay
48. Motives and Opportunities
This Essay continues previous publications in simplicity and complexity, exploring the generalized chemistry of history.
PART 1: HISTORY AS COURT CASE, TASK, AND GAME
I contend that all cultures are
built on fertile fallacies
George Soros, The Age of Fallibility,
Public Affairs, NY, 2006, p. 27
George Soros, The Age of Fallibility,
Public Affairs, NY, 2006, p. 27
I respect human fallacies: they are construction scaffolds to understanding, left in place after the building is completed. A fallacy can even outlive the building. Without illusions and delusions mixing into the substance of arts and humanities the colorful world would be black and white. The hard cold truth tells us about the world around us, but the fallacy is a window into our own mind, for as long as we cannot bore a hole in each scull.
But how to distinguish between the true knowledge and the fallacy?
A fallacy constantly splits and fragments into diverging versions while truth contracts, streamlines, and cuts off its branches. A truth can wither away, a fallacy can thrive and bloom, but the truth does not call for an army to defend itself, while a fallacy is always on somebody's battle banner—or worn on the sleeve. Fierce dogs guard a fallacy, stern gardeners attend to it, and a collection can is at the entrance. The truth is a dusty roadside apple tree, from which anybody can pluck a friut.
Ideas of three modern prolific authors have attracted my attention as stand-alone phenomena of the new stage of human history: the stage of postmodernity. I have already reflected on it, but the problem of ambivalence regarding truth and fallacy still fascinates me.
Nobody knows what exactly postmodernity means because we have been living in it for a long time, but I still remember modernity as a civil religion of knowledge, knowledge as the opposite of ignorance, and honor as the opposite of shame. Moral ideals of modernity, as it looks from today, were inseparable from the concept of service (to science, humanity, beauty, nation, community) as a secular counterpart of worship. Today all that is an old man's car in the ageless culture of self-indulgence. You can drive it anywhere, but... Today is the opposite of always.
The roots of the apparently outdated modernity, never yet acknowledged as fallacy, can be traced back to the Greeks and the moral teachings of the East. The art of telling right from wrong and honor from disgrace is a fallacy exactly because it splits into contradicting schools. The question that makes me restless is whether this fallacy can lead us to any firm knowledge. Simply speaking, can we perceive and study modern history, still splashed with blood and reaking of putrefaction, without moral categories?
One of the advantages of my previous life was that the officially sanctioned Soviet Russian culture was enclosed within the classical walls of Antiquity, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Modernity and protected by the iron curtain from the inflow of contemporary Western ideas. My ignorance ensured a contrasting background to my American impressions and made my discovery of America a great perpetual joy.
The tree highly stimulating authors for wider audience, whose books have been attracting my attention, are Noam Chomsky, Niall Ferguson, and George Soros. Their positions, neither a verifiable truth, nor a provable fallacy, exemplify some problems with our understanding of history. I am in no way critical about their ideas, but this is exactly the point: I lack any firm ground for a stance.
Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky approaches modern history with a strict code of justice and announces his verdict of "guilty as charged" for the aggressive American foreign policy. I am not going to analyze his books, the texture of which is a dense net of names, dates, places, events, and references to sources spooned out, along the taste of the author, from a vast cauldron of all countless and contradicting private opinions.
One cannot argue with Noam Chomsky sarcasms unless by expressing yet another opinion, which is, of course, useless. My own opinion on a single particular issue, see APPENDIX 1, but a general question arises:
Question: how to judge history?
George Soros
I believe that George Soros, with whom I wholeheartedly sympathize, occupies a distinct and, probably, unique position among modern authors. This is how he himself describes his uniqueness:
I believe I
combine three qualifications. First, I have developed a
conceptual framework that has given me a certain understanding of
history, and, in particular, what I call far-from-equilibrium
situations; second, I have a set of firm ethical and political beliefs;
and third, I have made a lot of money. Many people have one or two of
these attributes, but the combination of all three is unusual. (The Age
of Fallibility, page x)
I would add more points of distiction. I regard George Soros as an experimental scientist in the area of "social chemistry." I realize, that memoirs of any high rank public personality can be seen as a life long experiment, but he:
(1) has been doing
his experiments in the most recent times and in new
and foreseeable in the near future environment, i.e., beyond archival
significance,
(2) experimented with the most powerful form of social energy known in that environment: money,
(3) applied private money to non-profit political ends on large scale,
(4) combined empirical knowledge with a clear cut and concise set of general ideas,
(5) as far as I can judge, left an objective record of both positive and negative results of the experiments, all of them verifiable,
(6) did all that being neither a politician nor an academic, i.e., free from the guild codes of any kind,
(7) experienced life in both closed and free societies.
(2) experimented with the most powerful form of social energy known in that environment: money,
(3) applied private money to non-profit political ends on large scale,
(4) combined empirical knowledge with a clear cut and concise set of general ideas,
(5) as far as I can judge, left an objective record of both positive and negative results of the experiments, all of them verifiable,
(6) did all that being neither a politician nor an academic, i.e., free from the guild codes of any kind,
(7) experienced life in both closed and free societies.
George Soros, the modern homo faber (see The Visible Hands: Homo Faber and the Chemistry of History ), in fact experimented with history, trying to influence it not as a king, president, or grey cardinal, but as a private person. I would compare his stance with the Archimedean promise to move the Earth with a lever, given the place to stand on.
George Soros advances two clear ideas with which I not only sympathize but consider as fundamental as principles of thermodynamics: our inherent fallibility in human matters and the principle of open to all ideas society that can at least partially compensate for the limitations of our individual judgments.
The movement of
heavenly bodies and the hatching of eggs occur no
matter what we think about them. They are the objects of knowledge.
The same cannot be said when we think about reality as a whole, or about phenomena that have human participants. When we ourselves participate in the events we think about, the complications become much more pervasive. Not only is our knowledge incomplete, but, more important, our imperfect understanding or fallibility becomes part of reality. (George Soros, The Age of Fallibility, p. 4)
The same cannot be said when we think about reality as a whole, or about phenomena that have human participants. When we ourselves participate in the events we think about, the complications become much more pervasive. Not only is our knowledge incomplete, but, more important, our imperfect understanding or fallibility becomes part of reality. (George Soros, The Age of Fallibility, p. 4)
There are two kinds of sensitive points on human body: hope and fear. Money acts on the hope points. Violence expects the response of fear. Both threat and reward have always been driving history, but, regarding the new environment that I have mentioned in my points, opulence and violence today take forms that seemed extinguished since the times of ancient despots.
Dispensing his wealth, George Soros has accumulated and shared a great experience, both positive and not less valuable negative one, with stepping on the money points of the global body and using them to leverage history toward open horizons and in the direction of hope, pushing through unintended consequences.
To summarize, George Soros has formulated one of the most productive kinds of theoretical principles: another principle of impossibility, on par with the impossibility of eternal motion (or, for that matter, anything supernatural), and the uncertainty principle. Quite naturally, such principles can be met with disbelief and opposition, especially the market society. You cannot get grant for research in impossibility. At best, you can sell an emeperor's new clothes.
Question: What does it take to turn history around?
Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson sees human history at any moment as a set of alternatives. He does not push any grand theory and never forgets to add a dash of irony to any dressing over raw facts. His speculations are always intriguing and stimulating. He seems to apply the all-encompassing syncretic approach to the long range history (long durée of Fernand Braudel) to short range events.
As a master historian Ferguson invites the lay reader to learn through playing games and evaluating one alternative against another or, for that matter, against what actually happened. Chess is the closest analogy for Niall Ferguson's vision of history and he has his own favorite gambits, for example, the imperial predestination of USA.
Question: What are the rules of the game in hiistory?
The three views of history—as court case , task, and game—serve me as a triple point of departure for my own chemical view of the short range history, i.e., events commensurable with the span of individual human life. Since Herodotus, historians have preferred this time scale for the episodes of the narrative. Regarding the time horizon of active interests, kings, commoners, and chemists differ little.
But first a few words about the long durée (long run). All which can be said by physical sciences about it amounts to very general statements of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. In short, history is, probably, going to run its course while the sources of energy last and nothing unexpected happens. Thermodynamics is mute about the nature of the course and especially about anything unexpected. It is the unexpected, however, that is mostly responsible for the fallibility of social sciences. I call the unexpected novelty.
The unexpectedness
of novelty is not absolute, but this is one of the
most tricky questions in the area of simplicity-complexity ("Does
novelty has a measure?" or "Is novelty predictable?") , to which I
still do not have a good answer. I can only distinguish between
the new
and the different.
As an example of the thermodynamic view of history, I see the entire history starting from the initial spark of the Industrial Revolution in England as a process of accelerating burning of mineral fuel and using the energy for growing the mass of man-made things. Technos, which is a form of generalized non-chemical life, multiplies along a mutating template, competes, uses enzymes in its metabolism, and dies. Our civilization of things is, from the point of view of non-equilibrium thermodynamics (partly coming from Werner Heisenberg) , a single organism in which homo sapience performs two very different and formally contradicting functions: enzymatic order as realization (expression) of the template and creative chaos as source of mutations in the template. The template (genetic material) is the totality of all stored information, including science, ideology, culture, technology, and art, i.e., the blueprint and flesh of civilization. More about it, see The Visible Hands: Homo Faber and the Chemistry of History.
Obviously, the explosive spread of the fire cannot go forever, which is the only reliably expected thing, and we are already expecting unexpected short-range consequences. In the long run, life on earth will come to equilibrium with the supply of energy, whether we want it or not, and the growth of the garbage dumps, where our gadgets end up their short lives, will slow down. Most probably, this equilibrium will break down later, although we do not know in what way.
The main meta-chemical thesis is that the most probable state in the short run is that toward which the fastest processes-small local fires, so to speak-run. In the long run, a temporary steady state is the most probable. When economists and politicians speak about equilibrium, they mean, usually not even realizing that, steady state, which for all phenomena in living systems is far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Sources of energy enter any social equation for long durée.
In the short run, however, we have much more options and the game of survival promises less gloom and more fun. Various local fires compete for the most abundant fuel and one can use various tricks to protect his own source of heat to warm hands and bring coffee to a boil. That the time of scarcity is a great business opportunity has been already noted in the press (and much earlier by Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind).
Chemistry has its own peculiar relation with the unexpected that can pop up as reality in the future. The chemist can not only anticipate a novelty, up to a point, but also forcefully push it to reality ahead of other anticipated things. The chemistry of private life, business, and politics works by the same yet unwritten meta-chemical handbook. See The New and the Different and other entries in complexity.
In short, the chemist—modern Pygmalion-first imagines a chemical structure—his Galatea-and then designs a practical way of bringing it to life, not relying on gods and chances.
Of course, this is what every inventor does, but let us remember that whoever invented life on Earth was a chemist.
PART 2: HISTORY IN THE GLOBAL FLASK
Following the
principle of impossibility of supernatural causes, human
history is a natural process and there must be some area of
consensus
about what it is, how it runs, where to, and why. But is it
possible
at all to have such consensus over something as complicated as modern
history? As a preview of possible areas of consensus-only as a hypothetical example-I can formulate the following , at first glance counter-intuitive, principles, applicable only to very large evolving complex systems (X-systems):
1. The accuracy of predicting the future of a system increases with the complexity
of the system.
2. The trend of a complex system is increasingly harder to reverse in the course
of time.
3. Nevertheless, the trend of a complex system always changes with time (a property of all non-equilibrium systems).
The meaning of all three principles amounts to emphasizing the inertia of complex systems. As soon as the system becomes stable, i.e., close to a steady state or steady growth, its very complexity supports the trend, which always ends in a relatively fast or abrupt change. The property behind such inference is rather simple: the probability of many simultaneous independent events is very low.
How low? As low as to have a
US president who is good-looking, highly
intelligent, widely educated, eloquent, tolerant, flexible, honest,
good athlete, excellent leader, visionary, and a father of an
equally
outstanding family.
A complex system tends to remain the same because each change is mostly local and many such simultaneous changes are improbable.
As an evidence that such apparently lightweight principles, regardless of their validity, can have real scientific values, I quote tree out of seven The Golden Rules of Organic Chemistry formulated by Brent Iverson, Professor of University of Texas at Austin at his web site.
2. The most important question in chemistry is: "Where are the electrons?"
3. Nature hates unpaired electrons.
4. Nature hates localized charges.
As Brent Iverson justly notes,
These simple ideas explain a
very large number of things about the way
organic molecules interact. Thus, understanding the 7 Golden Rules will
allow you to develop an intuitive feel for organic chemistry, and
things will make sense! (Warning: this means you will start thinking
like a chemist, but, of course, no one needs to know if you don't want
them to know.)
As a chemist, I testify that examination of the above deceitfully naïve rules opens to a student of chemistry, an extremely complex body of knowledge, a way down to the very depths. A student can master chemistry exactly because its underlying principles are immeasurably less complex than the immense bulk of chemical knowledge.
With great enthusiasm I cheer to the following maxim of Iverson:
How to Think
About
Reactions
A good way to
think about chemical
reactions is that they are like crimes. Both crimes and chemical
reactions need motive and opportunity to take place.
If so, then probably a good way to think about crimes, glorious and infamous human deeds, and history is that they are like chemical reactions.
The hope to find some firm and common ground in human matters seems to contradict the principle of inherent fallibility. In fact, by adjusting our angle of view and distance from the object we still can outline the limits for the fallibility itself. Let us start with distance.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ DISTANCE ~ ~ ~ |< ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~>|~ ~ ~ ~
Reading Hegemony of Survival: American Quest for Global Dominance (Metropolitan Books, New York, 2003), I was intrigued by Noam Chomsky's casual hint to a possible solution.
As an intellectual exercise, let's imagine how the "Stevenson moment" [discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962 ] might be viewed by a hypothetical extraterrestrial observer. Call him Martian, and assume that he is free from earthly systems of doctrine and ideology (Noam Chomsky, Hegemony of Survival, p.75).
"Reflecting on this distinction, Martian should recall that..." This is how Noam Chomsky begins his argumentation. What follows further in the chapter is an illustration of how anybody's, even the imaginary Martian's, interpretation of history can be bound by doctrine and ideology, but it is beyond my point (see APPENDIX 2).
I find Chomsky's Martian approach very close to that of natural sciences: compare the state of the object at a series of consecutive moments of time and remove yourself from the picture. Recurring to the Martians for help, we thus eliminate one common source of fallibility, but there could be some price to pay. Thus, the Martian could not share our yes-or-not view of formal statements and decisions, certainly not shared today by many sciences.
Consider three examples.
1. A chemical bond is either
locked or broken.
2. The nut in human hand is either screwed on the bolt or detached.
3. The candidate is either elected or not.
2. The nut in human hand is either screwed on the bolt or detached.
3. The candidate is either elected or not.
A single snapshot of all three half-way situations would not tell us anything about the direction and timing of the change. Two observations may not be of any help, either.
In real life it is quite normal that a chemical bond is in the process of breaking up but it may remain intact indefinitely or immediately snap back. The nut is half-screwed on the bolt and can move in either direction because the worker changed his mind. Two presidential candidates could be waiting for something like the Florida recount of 2000.
Looking at an airliner taking off from Boston, we cannot tell for quite a while whether its destination is Seattle, OR, or Portland, WA. Similarly, after the capture of Baghdad we could not predict either the ultimate failure of the Iraq war or a triumphant victory, although the mood in Washington was predominantly optimistic. To support Chomsky's thesis, although Paris was not as far removed from America as Mars, the pessimistic expectations in that precautious European capital were well founded. Distance certainly helps. What about time?
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ TIME ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ->
Somebody knew for sure the destination of the airliner leaving Boston. This can be confirmed by facts leading us to the whole design and mechanics of air transportation. The ancient picture of the world included somebody who knew our destination in life and sometimes could even intervene in the journey. This, however, is not supported by either facts or the mechanism. The flight is natural because the development of aviation and a particular schedule are events of larger history. Or, to put it differently, the flight—event historically minuscule but potentially momentous for a passenger and sometimes even historically critical—could be traced back to it causes.
Thus the four flights on September 11, 2001, one of them from Boston, were of historic importance not visible at the take-offs. As it turned out, the flights were a culmination of a long story and still unfinished story The Iraq war has been one of the enveloping episodes.
It took two to three years before the true direction of the change in Iraq became visible in Washington, which does not mean it could not be changed. A modern Tamerlane (see Essay 47: The War) would create a democratic (or autocratic—whatever you pay for) Iraq in a jiffy, and, probably, with less overall bloodletting than Iraq was destined to suffer in American hands. But, again, nobody could tell for how long the result would last. Strictly speaking, the American failure in Iraq is probable, but how probable—nobody can tell.
The distinction between fast and slow processes is the cardinal property of complex evolving systems. To understand what is going on, we need an ability to tune up our observations to variable time scale. Where in the long run we see a discrete yes-or-no instantaneous transition, like the abolition of slavery in America, a finer resolution shows a long a painful process. The dates of birth and death of a person in a reference can encase a long, glorious, but tortuous personal story.
The genetic template for molecular life, a particular cultural tradition, and a specific social template for a pre-modern society all developed on a time scale much longer than the individual life. The acceleration began in Middle Ages with the first medieval empires in Europe. The split within Western Christianity (Reformation) and the split within Marxism (Democratic Socialism) took less than a century. The unique Soviet Communist system was born and put to sleep almost within the time span of one human life. Modern civilization is dynamic: development of a product, tradition, ideology, and institution typically happen within a few decades at most. Major new technologies of the twentieth century were developed within one generation. Within a decade or less a technology becomes obsolete.
Chemistry has a peculiar relation with time, straddling the border fence between inanimate matter and human matters. The reason for that is that chemistry a science of transformations in complex systems. It holds the key to complexity of any kind.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ CHEMISTRY ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ A—B ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~ ~ / ~ A B ~ ~ ~ / ~ ~ ~
If the similarity between the state of a chemical bond, the fate of the bolt and nut couple, and the outcome of election looks convincing, we can take the chemical case as a kind of a model of an event, or a pattern of a transformation of complex systems.
The list of configurations under the pattern can be expanded indefinitely. The outcome of any modern marriage is as close to basic chemistry as it could be. In the same vein, presidential campaign invokes wooing the voter as if he or she were a sweetheart, the outcome being defined by chemistry as well as calculation. Finally, the war has its own chemistry, in which full of life human beings turn into a pile of corpses.
Chemical reaction would look like a suitable ideogram (a clear-cut case of a general pattern, see complexity) were it not too complex for an average reader. Unfortunately, chemistry is not yet a popular science, while an ideogram requires simplicity.
I consider organic chemistry one of the simplest (as well as complex; but both cannot be said about physics in the same breath) and most consequential sciences. It is terribly misrepresented and misunderstood at high schools and colleges (not so at the University of Texas at Austin), but I am powerless here. I can only recommend The New and the Different, and History as Points and Lines in spite of all their shortcomings, as an extended parallel between chemistry, Lego, and everything else.
I have, however, a candidacy of perfect simplicity for an ideogram of a change. The original idea comes from Ulf Grenander, who analyzed pattern properties of stories in his works. In History as Points and Lines Ulf Grenander and I gave some examples.
I had run recently into a book (Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. New York, London: Continuum, 2005) that provided me with a non-trivial ideogram for chemistry, history, and everything in between: story.
History consists of stories, fairy tales are stories, and literature is a collection of stories. Well, Waiting for Godot and intimate poetry may be not; but what are they? Manufacturing a car is two separate stories: concept and design of the model and assembling it from the parts (each part with its own story). A war and a war movie are stories, both, like making a car, with design and execution stages, although somewhat intermixed. Obviously, history is a story, but what about chemical stories?
There are two basic stories in chemistry. A typical experimental story describes a chemical reaction in the lab, beginning with the description of starting chemicals, sometimes, their origin and purity, equipment, and all consecutive operations such as mixing, heating, cooling, filtration, distillation, crystallization, etc., see APPENDIX 3. A story can be very long, consisting of multiple chapters, as it is the case for most complex pharmaceuticals. It looks more like a movie script than a novel. Its detailed description can be reproduced, verified, and possibly improved by any other chemist.
We encounter another type of a story in theoretical chemistry, in which we are interested with what actually happens with participating molecules, how the transformation starts, what bonds break up and lock in which order, what are alternatives (which usually run simultaneously in chemical reactions), what increases the speed of the transformation or slows it down. This kind of story requires a lot of imagination. In most cases we cannot see what actually happens, except for the beginning and end, and the chemist has to reconstruct a crime without witnesses.
I wish to emphasize that the chemist who works in chemical synthesis often designs a molecule that has never existed (stage 1A), designs a way to bring it to material existence (stage 1B), and then actually materializes it (stage 2). If unsuccessful, the chemist designs another way and in the absolute majority of cases succeeds. If not, the molecule is too unstable, which does not happens too often.
In the same words—design of the goal, plan of the way to it, and its realization—we can describe any human venture, whether public, or private, or personal.
In History as Points and Lines we discuss the chemistry of one of Goethe's books ( p. 258). Here I would take a different example from Ovid, a great poet of Ancient Rome. (Born: Publius Ovidius Naso, 43BC- around AD17).
~ ~ ~ ~ OVID ~ ~
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~In Book 1 of Metamorphoses Ovid tells the story of Io, a beautiful daughter of a river god,
who tried to flee from the passion of Jupiter.
But the God
called forth a heavy shadow which involved
the wide extended earth, and stopped her flight
and ravished in that cloud her chastity.
called forth a heavy shadow which involved
the wide extended earth, and stopped her flight
and ravished in that cloud her chastity.
Goddess Juno noticed the cloud and, experienced in such matters, suspected her husband.
But Jove had known
the coming of his queen. He
had transformed
the lovely Io, so that she appeared
a milk white heifer-formed so beautiful
and fair that envious Juno gazed on her.
the lovely Io, so that she appeared
a milk white heifer-formed so beautiful
and fair that envious Juno gazed on her.
A rich, intricate, and moving story follows (which I omit with regret). In the end, Juno decides to return Io to her human form.
And now imperial Juno,
pacified,
permitted Io to resume her form, —
at once the hair fell from her snowy sides;
the horns absorbed, her dilate orbs decreased;
the opening of her jaws contracted; hands
appeared and shoulders; and each transformed hoof
became five nails. And every mark or form
that gave the semblance of a heifer changed,
except her fair white skin; and the glad Nymph
was raised erect and stood upon her feet.
But long the very thought of speech, that she
might bellow as a heifer, filled her mind
with terror, till the words so long forgot
for some sufficient cause were tried once more.
permitted Io to resume her form, —
at once the hair fell from her snowy sides;
the horns absorbed, her dilate orbs decreased;
the opening of her jaws contracted; hands
appeared and shoulders; and each transformed hoof
became five nails. And every mark or form
that gave the semblance of a heifer changed,
except her fair white skin; and the glad Nymph
was raised erect and stood upon her feet.
But long the very thought of speech, that she
might bellow as a heifer, filled her mind
with terror, till the words so long forgot
for some sufficient cause were tried once more.
A parallel between chemical and poetic transformations first occurred to me while reading Ovid in my youth. About the same time I found out that the Chinese characters for chemistry meant transformation science. Most characters are the same for both languages.
CHEMISTRY: 化学 kagaku (Japanese) ,
(also 化学 ) huàxué (Chinese) NOTE: The Chinese interpretation of
the characters here comes from the
excellent site zhongwen.
It is a gateway not only to a language,
but
also to the workings of ancient but surprisingly modern human mind.
Japanese language, which uses Chinese characters, was my first contact with ideograms.
Thus, the character 化 consists of two side
by side
parts having independent symbolic meanings. The right element in huà,
"transformed," by the way, is the same sign as the "person" on
the
left, only upside down. It gives the character its pronunciation
("phonetic"). The character xué consists of three components arranged vertically.
The top part (hands) is the
phonetic component that determines the
sound. The middle component, 
means roof (cover). The
bottom part
means child. (with tightly
bound lower part). Many years later, under the influence of Pattern Theory (Ulf Grenander),
I came
to see ideogram as a tool of
understanding
evolving complex systems. In Pattern Theory it is
called template,
a typical configuration that can be transformed into other
regular configurations of the same pattern. I simply expand it over
abstract ideas—something that Rene Thom
first attempted to do. For
details, search complexity. Back to Ovid. He was very thorough in his descriptions of transformations. The story of Io is slightly irregular because Ovid omitted the description of the initial transformation when it actually happened. Instead, Ovid described the reverse transformation from heifer into human form in his usual step-by-step manner, as chemists report their stories. By the way, elementary acts of chemical reactions are in principle reversible.
I hope I do not violate copyright by presenting here a beautiful illustration to the story of Io.
It is borrowed from the site of Frank Horvat who published, among others, a series of photos along motives of Ovid.
EXERCISE: Looking at the picture of Io on the left, we cannot tell the direction of transformation. But we can always tell whether a large bridge is in the state of building or dismantling. Why?
I bring together Ovid, Chinese characters, and chemistry in order to illustrate—rather than formulate and define—my favorite idea: we might have a better understanding of the complex world by complementing the exact scientific knowledge, the less available the more complex the object, with a vertical pattern view that does not recognize borders in the cognitive plane. This cannot be achieved by presenting any comprehensive theory or, for that matter, anything considered scientific in the classical tradition of reproducibility of knowledge. Understanding is a process of movement toward a common language rather than common closed logical system: a walk toward the receding horizon.
A common language of discussion, therefore, is the necessary condition of understanding, and my three examples in Part 1 show that as far as history and humanities in general are concerned, there is no such language. To have a common language in arts would be a disaster, as much a disaster as the absence of common language in complex human matters.
The linguistics
of the use of characters in Chinese and
Japanese
languages is much more complicated than any simplistic summary.
Nevertheless, in vague terms, the origin
of the Chinese system of
writing exemplifies a kind of a tool for mutual understanding based on
visual symbols for ideas rather than phonetic signs. One possible—but
not sufficient—reason is the limited number
of syllables in Chinese
language: about 400, or 1000-1400 with tonal variations.
PART 3: CHEMISTRY OF INSTABILITY
Brent Iverson's site has a collection of animated movies portraying various chemical transformations.
One of the movies (Substitution Reaction) consists of three parts shown schematically as three lines of the following picture.
This is what happens in the movie:
1. The red and white
hydroxyl HO moves toward methyl
chloride CH3Cl.
2. The collision leads to a formation of the short-living transition state.
3. The transition state rearranges and splits chloride Cl .
2. The collision leads to a formation of the short-living transition state.
3. The transition state rearranges and splits chloride Cl .
The following very primitive animation illustrates what happens in principle, but not in detail.
The transition state in the above pictures is not directly observable, quite like a typical crime in a thriller and often in life. It was originally deduced in 1935 (Edward D. Hughes and Christopher Ingold) by examination of the entire evidence. It remains a classic detective story of chemistry, in which a pair of gloves (really!) plays a decisive role.
The process somewhat reminds a collision of a billiard ball with two adjacent others. The collision itself (line 2) is very short as compared with the preceding and subsequent movement of the balls.
On transition state see also Essay 23. On the Architecture of Change and complexity.
In comparison with the spectacular Terminator (at left) movies, the chemical transformation may seem unimpressive. It takes some preparation to see that the chemical movies show-for a short time-the same chimeras as blends of humans and wolves in the werewolf movies or a human shape and a machine (or metallic fluid) in the Terminator movies.
A typical story—variations are possible—starts with some ordinary and stable way of affairs. Suddenly, or within a short time, life becomes perturbed and confused and the colliding characters are drawn into a chain of events and configurations over which they have no power. Stress and confusion at some point reach maximum, after which the tension and uncertainty are resolved and life of the main character, if he or she survives, returns to a new or the same routine. In horror movies the viewer sometimes is warned at the very end that the quiet life will not last.
Crane Brinton in his The Anatomy of Revolution (New York, Random House, 1965) described revolutions in terms of a fever that starts out of the blue (not so unexpected with a hindsight), flares up, reaches the climax and ends up with a convalescence, not without a few relapses, guaranteed to the revolution but not all its participants.
The world wars and the subsequent Vietnam an Iraq wars have been always read as horror stories. The Iraq war, increasingly nightmarish, is the ongoing live example of a story. The only good thing is that all such stories end, not necessarily happily. Unfortunately, wars are the chain smoking of the globe.
Leo Tolstoy, long before modern historians, used the chemical metaphor of ferment to analyze the large scale historical events like the Napoleonic wars.
Similarly, a chemist takes from the shelves some liquids or crystals that could sit there for years, assembles some simple equipment, and pushes the starting chemicals into a chain of complex internal transformations and external manipulations. The chemist ends up with a new set of liquids or solids, one or a few of which are labeled and put on the shelf and the rest are discarded.
Having issued the order to invade Iraq, President Bush, started a historical chemical reaction between two very different human substances. Historians will record its outcome and put the record on the bookshelves, but today, in 2007, we are still in the middle of the long story, with many thousands of discarded human lives, wasted resources, and mangled equipment. In the language of chemistry, we are in the transition state from one stable way of life to another, more or less stable than the previous one.
What the movie Substitution Reaction does not show is the change of stability during the transformation. It looks like this:
I do not want here to go too deep into molecular matters of chemistry proper. I could not do it better than Brent Iverson's The Golden Rules of Organic Chemistry , but he addresses students of chemistry with some relatively advanced knowledge. Instead I will further discuss some aspects of history as if human matters were a chemical phenomenon with "motives and opportunities," not necessarily criminal ones, although the word criminal has already been used in references to Iraq war.
Noam Chomsky denounces American foreign policy certainly in terms of criminality, but he is not interested in the theoretical chemistry of human motives and opportunities.
Comparing chemical reaction with crime, Brent Iverson means by motives thermodynamics: chemical reaction is driven from one stable state to another more stable state. The transformations of molecules can run toward a less stable state, but less stability means that the descent to more stability is more probable than the opposite ascent.
Zillions of individual molecules come to equilibrium. As individuals, however, we do not make statistical ensembles. Thus, we constantly run into awkward and even dangerous situations in our private and professional lives, but most of the time we try to extricate ourselves from them and return to stability, whether old or new. This is why we enjoy thrillers and adventures: all the excitement without real danger.
Instability does not
last: this
is one of the basic laws of nature.
Molecular life and
human matters
are full of instabilities—this is another one.
Corollary: instabilities are visible in detail only on a fine time scale.
By opportunities Brent Iverson means the obstacles to the transition from one stable state to another. Thus, a democratic and, most importantly, America-friendly Iraq, hosting American military bases and pumping oil to America, would look like a haven of stability in the turmoil of the region. That was a theoretically possible situation. To support that vision, there was a lot of positive experience with such chemistry in the post-WW2 Germany and Japan.
The transition from the besieged but arrogant Iraq to the final vision was designed, as in many chemical transformations, in two stages: military and reconstructive.
The chemistry of military operations in America is a well developed area of knowledge and equipment. The military stage was smooth. The occupation stage, contrary to unfounded expectations, ran into great obstacles because of the American ignorance of the chemistry of the same explosive Middle East substance that the President and his confidants wanted to turn into wrinkle lotion. There were enough knowledgeable chemists regarding the motives and opportunities of the region, but they could rarely be seen and heard outside the Charlie Rose show. It became a lost opportunity.
The ethnic and religious differences in Iraq, the rise of the civil war, the insufficient American military presence, and, most important, incompetence of American civil and, probably, even military leadership, about which history has the last say, created impenetrable barrier—the lack of opportunity—between the initial state and the final vision of the leadership. That vision did not contradict any laws of nature. There had been also an auspicious regional precedent: transformation of Turkey into a predominantly secular state by Kemal Atatürk, which was done by rather forceful methods in 1923-1938.
By saying that, I express a less harsh judgment about the current (2007) presidency than many other observers. I would reload part of the blame on the modern American commercialized e-election system that, through TV, computer, and phone elects the most electable candidate instead of the best fit for service. This system, as the last years have demonstrated, has an obvious bug: the presidency can become uncontrollable under the overwhelming power of his political party—an ominous parallel with dictatorships.
Unlike dictatorships, of course, the same system periodically empowers the voters to fix the bug at least for a while. But what if the bug evolves, as some creature from space in a Sci-Fi movie?
Political chemistry is quite close to the molecular one. The leader has a vision, sets it as a goal, designs the way (strategy) toward the goal, sets the reaction in motion, and changes the strategy or tactics in case of an impending failure. The strategy cannot do much with the motive (some important chemical technologies work with low or negative thermodynamic motivation), but it can do a lot with opportunities by influencing unstable transition states.
By definition, the transition state is fleeting and ephemeral. Moreover, it is a chimera, half-Io and half-heifer—an illegitimate, feeble creation, not the Centaur who is fit for life. It is doomed to complete the transformation, rarely reversible in political matters, so that the window of opportunity is very narrow. Besides, molecules move and collide on their own, but people, equipment, money, and information have to be moved.
The election campaign of 2006, like all the other recent campaigns on my memory, had spectacular moments of irreversibility when the fate of the candidate was decided by a few thoughtless words or even a single word—an evidence of the inefficiency of the e-campaign.
Not waiting for the end of the story, I would say that the American failure in Iraq was result not only of obvious ignorance, illiteracy, narrow-mindedness, and arrogance, but also of more specific causes:
1. The military is not
supposed to do political chemistry. This was
often noted. The president, however, has an organic aversion to
diplomacy.
2. Lack of flexibility, which comes from the lack of wide and open discussion and just from intellectual laziness, results in missed opportunities. I think that the Commander-in-Chief has demonstrated this shortcoming in full measure.
3. The most important reason, however, is the almost pathological, cataleptic lack of dynamism. In chemical matters, whether human or molecular ones, it is the speed of competing processes that decides the short run outcome. As far as the long run is concerned, what will happen in twenty or fifty years is completely beyond human power.
4. The previous point has its own partial reason: military campaign was subordinated to political interests. I believe that was an unintended consequence of the Constitution. The founding fathers could never anticipate an American war on the other side of the globe.
2. Lack of flexibility, which comes from the lack of wide and open discussion and just from intellectual laziness, results in missed opportunities. I think that the Commander-in-Chief has demonstrated this shortcoming in full measure.
3. The most important reason, however, is the almost pathological, cataleptic lack of dynamism. In chemical matters, whether human or molecular ones, it is the speed of competing processes that decides the short run outcome. As far as the long run is concerned, what will happen in twenty or fifty years is completely beyond human power.
4. The previous point has its own partial reason: military campaign was subordinated to political interests. I believe that was an unintended consequence of the Constitution. The founding fathers could never anticipate an American war on the other side of the globe.
I believe that any successful CEO would do that part of the presidential job much better.
CONCLUSION
My personal goal here has been to present a program of three points, a part of the larger program Chemical View of the World , repeatedly commented at complexity and complementary simplicity , both intersecting in this Essay:
1. Complexity of the modern
world is overwhelming. The problem of
complexity is the first obstacle on the way toward solving other global
and national problems and transition to stability.
2. Sciences and humanities must keep looking for a common language not only between the two divided sides but also within humanities, where such language does not exist.
3. Chemistry—and Pattern Theory as generalized chemistry—is equipped to deal with complexity from the position of simplification. Metaphor, analogy, ideogram, pattern analysis and synthesis, and something else that we do not yet see can be tools for utilizing chemical experience in human matters.
2. Sciences and humanities must keep looking for a common language not only between the two divided sides but also within humanities, where such language does not exist.
3. Chemistry—and Pattern Theory as generalized chemistry—is equipped to deal with complexity from the position of simplification. Metaphor, analogy, ideogram, pattern analysis and synthesis, and something else that we do not yet see can be tools for utilizing chemical experience in human matters.
This program can be realized not by any grand theory or by a grand prophet, but in the process of discussion and exchange between professionals in particular areas—to whom I do not belong—who find the program worth a thought.
For my previous attempts to formulate this kind of a program, see :
TIKKI TIKKI TEMBO::The Chemistry of Protolanguage , The Rusty Bolts of Complexity, and others at complexity.
Finally, I will try to answer— half seriously— the three questions posed in Part 1.
Question:
how to judge history?
BY
MINIMIZATION OF INSTABILITY.
Question: What
does it take to turn history around?
MONEY OR
VIOLENCE, TWO PATENTeD WAYS TO MANIPULATE TRANSITION BARRIERS.
Question: What
are the rules of the game?
RISE
THE TRANSITION BARRIERS ON THE UNDESIRABLE PATHWAYS, LOWER THE
TRANSITION
BARRIERS ON THE DESIRED PATHWAYS, AND BETTER DO IT QUICKLY.
Thermodynamics tells us that in non-equilibrium systems, to which all forms of life on earth belong, including human matters, our task is to take care of order. Nature will take care of chaos.
NOTE: I omit here the factor
of temperature, which is
discussed many times elsewhere at this site.
There are also other untouched aspects to which I may return. I am interested, in particular, in:
1. Illustrations of the kinetic nature of history.
2. The practical value, if any, of the ideas presented here and in complexity.
3. "The three questions" in depth.
4. Survival chances of the American civilization in global change.
5. An amplified picture of some recent and current transition states.
6. Is a new ideology possible?
As a counterexample, I venture to present my own opinion on the subject of international justice.
Within a framework of a state or a tribal society, law or tradition defines the difference between the just and unjust. It would mean little without a court or at least a judge ant the apparatus of enforcement. There is no such international law, common tradition, and enforcement. The United Nations does not count, as its entire history testifies. Obviously, as Chomsky illustrates again and again, America violates its own declared principles, and so does everybody else. If so, to change this basic reality may be as futile an intent as to make perpetuum mobile. And yet somehow America is not the worst place on earth and it has even enjoyed long periods of stability, respect, and influence, never losing the attraction for immigrants.
Noam Chomsky's invective against America can be easily sympathized with, at least in part. The last couple decades have culminated in the shameful feast of incompetence and drastic decline of American prestige, which, of course, is in the eyes of the beholder, as anything else in the political arena. Irregular alternation of rise and decline, however, is the only law of history that knows no exception. As Winston Churchill noted, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they've tried everything else."
The precedence of universal international interests over national interests seems to me the main idea of Noam Chomsky, and as a resident of this nation I am entirely for the precedence of national interests. I am also for the precedence of the national interests of other nations with which I sympathize over the interests of aggressive, violent, and intolerant governments. I have no other choice in the absence of the world government, comprehensive world court, and world prison. It does not mean that I give a blank check to my government or to any particular party. Just the opposite, I am as disgusted by the American politics of the last six years (2001-2006) as Noam Chomsky, and probably even more because I have been sensitized to government idiocy by my previous Soviet life. I begin to understand, however, why most Americans take it much easier: to wander and stray is the natural mode of scouting the future in a democracy that always argues with itself.
APPENDIX 2
Noam Chomsky, having introduced the Martian, further writes that the Martian would not recall any "Khrushchev moment." The Soviet UN Ambassador had not made any comparable to Adlay Stevenson's (US Ambassador to UN) "moment" about the preceding placement of the American rockets in Turkey. In fact there was enough display in the Soviet Press, which I well remember, but Khrushchev preferred to made practical steps in Cuba.
About the historical episode, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis and other numerous sources. Noam Chomsky justly notes that Russia did not plan to invade Turkey. He does not recall, however, what the Martian must have remembered: the Soviet subjugation of Eastern Europe, penetration of the Third World, and the general global Communist doctrine. All that ultimately culminated in the invasion of Afghanistan. By that time the Russians had enough rockets, but it was as much a failure as the American invasion of Cuba when America had an overwhelming military advantage.
APPENDIX 3: CHEMICAL STORIES (can be skipped)
The following two stories are taken from the site Organic Syntheses , intended for professionals. http://www.orgsyn.org/ . Comments in square brackets are mine.
STORY 1
SYNTHESIS OF 6,9,12,15,18-PENTAMETHYL-1,6,9,12,15,18-HEXAHYDRO(C60-Ih)[5,6]FULLERENE
link
(attention! very long)
[COMMENT. This is the title of the story: the long word in red is the name of the product which is obtained from C60, known as fullerene. Any chemical name is a word of an artificial language. It uniquely identifies the structure of the molecule. A picture of the molecule can be reconstructed from the legitimate name] .
Submitted by:
Yutaka Matsuo, Ayako Muramatsu, Kazukuni Tahara, Madoka Koide, and
Eiichi
Nakamura [COMMENT. They wrote the
script of the story and actually performed what the story describes,
somewhat
like the playwright, director, and actors]
Checked by: Peter
Wipf and David L.
Waller [COMMENT. The story was
independently checked for truthfulness]
Published in Annual
Volume 83, page 80
[Anybody can verify, use, and improve it, but not at home]
[COMMENT. The following picture is the concise visual representation of the story. It tells the chemist what happens in a nutshell. Some main participants are shown above the arrow and the secondary ones, such as solvent and catalyst, as well as the physical conditions, are below].
; C60
stands
for fullerene
[COMMENT. Here is only the beginning of the story. I break it into scenes as if it were a movie script:]
A 200-mL two-necked, round-bottomed
flask (Note 1) connected to a vacuum/nitrogen manifold
through a three-way stopcock is
equipped with a Teflon-coated magnetic
stirring bar,
a vacuum/nitrogen inlet, and a glass
stopper.
A
microcrystalline sample of [60]fullerene (2.00 g, 2.78 mmol) (Note 2) is placed in the 200-mL flask and
the
apparatus is
flushed with nitrogen.
The glass
stopper is replaced with a rubber septum,
and
1,2-dichlorobenzene
(90 mL) (Note 3) is introduced into the flask via a syringe
under
nitrogen.
The
rubber septum is again replaced with a glass stopper.
The
reaction mixture is cooled with an ice/water
bath
and stirred under reduced pressure (1 mmHg)
for 30 min to remove dissolved oxygen.
Then the flask is flushed with nitrogen and
warmed to room temperature (approximately 23 °C).
["To be continued"]
[COMMENT. Example of the notes that record the tiniest details of the story for the purpose of reproducibility]
2. Notes
1. All glassware was dried in an oven (110 °C), assembled, and allowed to cool under nitrogen atmosphere. All solvents used for workup need to be degassed by N2-bubbling since the final product as well as the intermediate are susceptible to air oxidation.
[COMMENT. The next story is much longer. It consists of three separate episodes.]
STORY 2
SYNTHESIS OF 2α-BENZYLOXY-8-OXABICYCLO[3.2.1]OCT-6-EN-3-ONE BY [4 + 3] CYCLOADDITION
link (attention! very long)
Submitted by: María
Vidal-Pascual, Carolina
Martínez-Lamenca, and H. M. R. Hoffmann
Checked by: Timothy
E. Long and Marvin J.
Miller
Published in Annual
Volume 83, page 61
[COMMENT. The following picture presents three stages: 1 turns into 2 (Stage A), 2 into 3 (Stage B) and 3 into the final 4 (Stage C). It is similar to three consecutive adventures of the hero whose soul—or fortune—undergoes a radical transformation as result.]
[COMMENT. Here is the first episode (A) . I omit the next two].
A. 1,1-Bis(benzyloxy)propan-2-one
(2).
A one-necked,
100-mL, round-bottomed flask
equipped with a magnetic stirring bar
is charged
with pyruvic
aldehyde dimethyl acetal (12.1 mL,
100 mmol)
in cyclohexane (50 mL),
benzyl
alcohol (22.8 mL, 220 mmol)
and p-toluenesulfonic acid monohydrate (0.95 g, 5 mmol) (Note 1).
The resulting mixture is heated at reflux
for 2 h
using a Dean–Stark separator for the
removal of methanol.
When the reaction is complete
(approximately
2 h), approximately 8.1 mL (200 mmol) of MeOH
is
obtained.
The reaction mixture is cooled to room
temperature and
washed with
saturated potassium
carbonate solution (25 mL) and
water (20
mL).
The aqueous layer is extracted twice with cyclohexane (2 ×
50 mL).
The combined organic phase is dried (Na2SO4), filtered,
evaporated and
packed with 900 g silica gel (Note 2) and eluting with 2.1 L of MTBE/cyclohexane (1:20)
to afford keto acetal 2 as a yellowish oil (22.3 g, 83%) (Note 3).
[COMMENT. Example of a note]
1. Pyruvic
aldehyde dimethyl acetal was
purchased from
Acros Organics.
Benzyl
alcohol was purchased from Lancaster.
p-Toluenesulfonic acid was
purchased from Aldrich.
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