Big History & Moving to the Water

I came across something called Big History.

It's a field of study, as founding Prof David Christian explains in this TED Talk, that aims to understand history in its totality. Not just starting with civilization, or the evolution of Homo sapiens, or even the beginning of life. It includes everything in the story of the universe, from the Big Bang to today, the Big History.

To better explain our world and how complexity has arisen from an entropic, empty blackness, these historians study subjects normally separated in academia; physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, philosophy, archaeology, paleontology, all of it. They’re trying to re-conceptualize history as not just a slightly-aloof pursuit of primary documents and chains of events, but as a grand, macro-level telling of everything that has ever happened.

It’s ambitious, clearly. And it goes against what we think of with academics; that research needs to specialize to truly grasp a piece of the complex universe, that dedicated submersion within a well-defined topic is how individuals can add to the shared body of human knowledge.

I don’t know if Big History will ever become mainstream, or if it should. From what I’ve seen, it seems to gloss over details (as something this grand in scale must inevitably do) and also approaches human history deterministically, which brings up its own ethical/philosophical dilemma. 

 

But with the help of Bill Gates, the Big History Project was made as a high-school level course free online. I like the potential Big History has to stimulate general intellectual activity in teenagers--it seems like it could show students how fascinatingly connected everything is, sparking exponential growth and linkage of their interests.

 

I came across this concept through one of the Great Courses called The Big History of Civilizations (free through your public library!). A disciple of Prof Christian, Prof Craig Benjamin, uses the interdisciplinary framework of Big History to examine human civilization.

Something he touched on is how water availability drove the establishment of ancient settlements in the Middle East. Jericho, which is the longest continually-inhabited city in the world, has had groundwater gushing from the Ein as-Sultan/Elisha spring for the more than 10,000 years that humans have lived there. That's amazing and totally logical. 

Life and water are intertwined by fate, so it isn't surprising that most human development sprung up right around ample freshwater. 

But compare that ancient, basic, most-obvious line of thinking with a modern dilemma. 

 

The Colorado River, flowing across the arid Southwestern U.S., is the water source for around 40 million people and millions of acres of agriculture in 7 states and 2 countries. The green lawns of Beverley Hills, the spewing fixtures of the Vegas Bellagio, Lake Mead and Lake Powell and 15% of all the crops grown in the United States (as of 2012) all come from the Colorado.

But there isn't enough water in the river for all this. And everyone knows it. 

Demand has outpaced replenishment rates for 20 years now, during which most of the basin was in a historic drought, yet the thirst gulps insatiably. Nevada, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona have been among the fastest growing states population-wise for the last 3 decades. Miles of aqueducts and dams divert the flow to such an extent that the river rarely even reaches the ocean anymore, only through concerted effort. 

On top of all that demand, supply is waning as the Rocky Mountain snowpack that feeds the river is shrinking under a warmer climate. Flow in the river has already declined notably and is predicted to drop off even more dramatically. The reservoirs are shriveling up before our very eyes.

When I told my friend about the impending water shortage out West, how insane it is that more and more people continue to move to a region with a contracting water source, he simply replied 

"Yeah, no one thinks about water when they move."

 

What a wild time we live in.

Side Note on Myself

I've been stagnant for the last week or two. The culprit for my idle frustration, I believe, is a multifaceted one. Getting into my personal details isn't the point, though. It's the upwelling of the frustration I want to focus on.

 

I'm finding compartmentalization difficult nowadays. It's like everything in my life swirls into one irreversible concoction. I can't pinpoint specific origins anymore, or limit aspects of my life to their own little boxes. 

 

Part of this has got to be work from home. I have no physical separation between personal and professional, so even if I work 8 hours, I tend to feel in the same mode as I did before and do after. 

The spillover is also exacerbated by the loosening of my schedule. I don't have a stated block of time for a specific class or a specific class for a semester block. Things in general are much more fluid and self-motivated, like I mentioned in my previous post. 

I do like the freedom I get in this more integrated lifestyle. I can better transfer positive energy from one thing to another, compounding the impact and efficiency. When it's negative energy, though, the same properties of transfer and compounding apply. A canyon can form.

That's what I think happened with me over the last few weeks. I got bored and lethargic in one manner, then the feeling escaped confines and infected everything. 

Oh well. I guess it's through these instances that you learn to pull yourself up off the ground and back on the horse. The flip side of the downward slide is that finding an inspiring motivation in one part of life can be the stimulus that rights the course for the rest of it too. 

There's a double-edged blade out here. Got to use it the right way or that cut will sting.

On Ambition

Ambition has taken new meaning in my life. In transitioning from school to work, the definition of that word, ambition, has changed. It has become an entirely different entity; a fundamental one nearly unrivaled in its intersectionality. 

 

Within the educational framework, ambition can manifest clearly. Do well and succeed in school to express that urge to thrive. Get good grades, excel in extracurriculars, score high on standardized tests. Direct effort and desire into this channel for a positive outcome, a straightforward, worthy, beneficial, rewarding, agreed-upon path in every sense. Not the only one, but a definitive one. 

Now, outside school, ambition has morphed into a more malleable, individualized force. There isn't such linear validation for achievement. Pursuit has become far more of a private affair, almost entirely self-motivated and self-disciplined. 

Down which endless avenue to travel? How to express this complicated emotion against the wide expanse? When is it too far, not enough, when is the time to change course, when to know if it's too late? How long to postpone these questions?

The future nags at my mind, always pestering, lobbying, for a seat at the table.

~~~~

Though not usually discussed in this way, I believe ambition is a foundational characteristic of people. It's based on everything in a life and it molds everything in a life. In the web of neurons that make the soul, ambition must be somewhere near the centre, a filter through which every little spark flying across the cortices must traverse. 

 

You can see it, or the lack of it, instantaneously. In body language. In the minute facial muscles. In the eyes, too. It's written all over everybody. 

 

But what exactly is ambition? I'm not sure any questions can be answered without knowing this one. What does it mean? What is its nature? Why does it take the forms it does?

~~~~

 

In The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie, a character named Saladin has ambition rooted in inferiority. His greatest desire is to escape India, not just the physical place but from the land built into his DNA too, the core self that can never be escaped, the identity that must be eventually reconciled. He fetishizes England as the superior alternative. Everything he does is cloaked underneath suffocating intentions.

The more he tries, the more the world rejects his dreams, his pleas, his gnarled ambition guarded by thorns of hatred and repression. Like Tony Montana in Scarface, Saladin struggles against a Karmic world that laughs at his feeble thrusts. The futility of unchecked drive is shown at every turn. We know of its dangers.

But on the flipside, to have ambition, I think, one must have great hope. There must be true belief in a brighter tomorrow, a purpose worth working for and towards. Ambition is often cast as a destructive vice, but it's optimism too. Finely balanced, the ambitious person might be the one with the most faith. 

Ambition is also far from sedentary. I think it is a learned behavior, not just something ingrained in personalities at birth. It's something that can be developed. Which means everyone has a chance to see a better life ahead. Perspective is everything, and perspective can be changed.

History musings

Certain things stick in history. They can be framed in the moment as defining of a time and place. A singular flash-bang event, or maybe a powerful individual, a monumental struggle, a movement. Things can also gain historical status after the fact thanks to later occurrences, having initially been not so obviously deserving of space in the pantheon of the human story. Only in hindsight may the pieces of a larger picture come to the fore.

I've been reading a collection of short writings by Hunter S. Thompson a few entries at a time. They're consistently filled with creative insults and sardonic insights on the world of the 1980s. 

At the time Thompson was deep in the Beltway covering politics even though he lived in the mountains of Colorado. A big topic he writes on for months in the late 80s, during the run-up to the 1988 GOP Nomination, is the Iran-Contra Affair. Thompson describes the scandal as equal or more damning to Reagan, his legacy, and his party, as Watergate was to its perpetrator, Richard Nixon. 

Now we know Iran-Contra had nowhere near the impact to Reagan that Watergate did to his sleazy precursor. At the time, though, it seems people misjudged the Reagan scandal as more historically significant than it has turned out to be (at least, so far). Today, Iran-Contra hardly makes high school history textbooks, much less general knowledge. And Reagan's reputation is definitely not tarnished by it. 

In case you don't know about Iran-Contra, it's basically this: 

The Reagan administration was secretly selling weapons to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran (who, by the way, we opposed in the horrific Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 by selling weapons to his opponent, Saddam Hussein in Iraq (the one we later killed to bring freedom and peace to the Middle East), but only for a bit, because we could make even more of a killing (haha get it) selling weapons to both Iraq AND Iran), a country which we had an active embargo against, using Israel as the go-between money-for-missiles launderer, which is a country definitely not recognized as legitimate by the Iranian Revolutionary government, to fund a gang of human-rights-abusing Nicaraguans called the Contras who were rampaging across the land with American-taxpayer-funded assault rifles to destroy the Sandinistas, a Leninist group of human-rights-abusers that took power from the dynastic dictatorship of the Somoza family (don't worry, also human-rights-abusers) in 1979 in the shitshow that was 20th century politics in Central America. Classic Cold War America stuff.

It's complicated. Brown has a good database on the whole thing if you really want to get into it. I digress. 

I was recently reminded by this Ted talk on confirmation bias of another event that has taken a roundabout route to infamy: The Dreyfus Affair. It was taught in my school as a sign of the ingrained European anti-Semitism and continent-wide persecution, oppression, and inequality of Jews that continued past the Industrial Revolution. 

 

(I'm not going to get into the details of this one. One rant per post is my self-imposed limit).

At the time of it happening in the late 19th century, the trial of Alfred Dreyfus was big news in France, and probably some other countries too. Big enough for Emile Zola to publish a letter about it that got him some jail time. 

But the Holocaust is the headliner in history that the Dreyfus Affair is a piece of context for. That's the reason teenagers in Texas are taught about it 120 years later; a genocide that happened decades after, an event that, like everything in the future, could not have been predicted with precision, defines The Dreyfus Affair in historiography. 

This makes me wonder whether something like Iran-Contra could become a more notable historical marker because of some future event. Or maybe the future event has already happened, but only later will people deem it important enough to highlight. It almost makes me want to place no historical judgement on anything. 

Then, I guess, I would be isolated from the process of creating history. That seems fundamentally un-human. Despite the ever-changing content of our remembered past, it still has to be a rock for society. I'm just curious how it will look long after I'm gone.

Irish Lit

The image that engulfed my mind from James Joyce's semi-autobiographical A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is that of a droplet of water plopping onto a still pond; that sound, so pointed and specific you can hear it clear as day, so quiet, subtle. Or the light crinkle of a page when turned in a silent room, the fickle tear through a cloak of invisible fabric.

 

Karl Ove Knausgaard calls it "Mood" 

As a reader I felt I was repeatedly dropped beneath the surface tension of the protagonist's life, a boy named Stephen Dedalus. I popped in and out of his childhood to observe his actions, follow his thoughts, see him grow. The novel is a remarkable piece of self-analysis, a delicate and intimate look that feels nearly intrusive at times. 

The narrative is layers of implied context, symbolism, and imagery hidden between the lines. Near everything is hinted at rather than explicit. There is tranquil depth to this novel.

I found it to be quite daring as well. Especially in the opacity of time, and the manner in which Joyce toys with the English language like its his clay to mold. At certain points I literally had to stop reading for a moment, in awe at the crafting of a sentence, re-reading it for further appreciation. The vocabulary and tone, often rhythmic like a rap, experimental even a century after publish. 

The story is ultimately about the creation of a young man under heavy influence of the Catholic Church, late-19th century aristocratic Ireland, industrialization, social masculinity, nationalism, and all the other domestic, interpersonal, and internal chaos we all live with regardless of setting. I found the role of religion in Joyce's life similar to its place in James Baldwin's life as detailed in Go Tell It on the Mountain: a deeply rooted pillar with divine proportion, an icon that must inevitably be confronted in a process that will fundamentally change life. 

They both tell their stories, swarming with the details of a life now gone, yet still universal at its core.

It's also beyond impressive when a writer can encapsulate the viewpoint of a child in their work. To build a cohesive narrative and transfer it, convincingly and accurately, via a child's eyes to an older reader without either side getting lost, that takes a special understanding. Like Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury. 

 

The copy I have is a jacket-less blue hardback printed in the 90s. Its pages are sharp white and fresh, and the smooth front cover has a black rectangle with the following centered between its borders: 

 

James Joyce

-------

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

 

I felt like this book, more than probably anything I've read, touches down like a landing spacecraft in another person's life. It's like opening a portal to a soul. 

Worldwide Localization

What is far away, the mysterious unknown exciting, has a natural allure. Having been denied the freedom to pursue this urge in geographical terms by the pandemic, the vast swath of humanity has been forced to instead stay, and engage, local. 

Professor Malhi at Oxford is one of those many. He recently wrote an essay about his shift to studying the nature of his English surrounding instead of distant tropical rain forests. So many have similarly obliged, in various creative and intellectual ways, and I think the experience has been revelatory. 

It almost feels like the world has reached a level of global entanglement that is just too much. Like we stretched the elastic of ourselves until it could stretch no more, and now we're furling back into a more relatable size. 

I don't say this solely because the pandemic is distinctly of the time, its spread and reactions and aura exclusive to the Internet Age. I think it's been relatively clear that a point of satiation had been reached even before, but culminating, now. 

All the major political trends point to a rupture. Resurgent nationalism. Economic largess and inequality. Impending climate doom. The technological coup of society. The origin and facilitator of these widespread turmoils is clearly the modern lifestyle.

The obviousness of what's happening hit me when I read this article that explained how global health is no longer, and will never again be, centralized and dominated by the U.S. Power is dispersed, the world more equal and accessible than ever before, trudging through a radical newness. The paradigms of the 20th century are failing. 

I am realizing the value of local, less sprawled living, and from what I can tell I am not alone. Life is so much easier and more in depth this way. There ends up being greater connection with the world around you. Focusing on the details, which takes time and familiarity and a smaller sample size, is the best way to truly know something. 

And people are in sore need of connection these days. It's now evident that grand notions of global linkage don't really bring us closer together ideologically, and definitely don't alleviate our loneliness. We yearn for tangible bonds to the ground underfoot, the matter we can touch, hear, see and smell. 

 

Without mooring, without embedding an anchor in the seabed, we drift in a chaotic haze, isolated and unable to escape meaninglessness.

I think a smaller, more personal world is a necessary reaction to unprecedented globalization. I think it will not only help on an individual social level but on a planetary scale. It's so consuming to live the way we have. We all know we need to use fewer resources for long-term survival. The Swedes, even before the pandemic, were flying noticeably less for this very purpose. 

Maybe, with greater appreciation for what's directly around us, we could start along the path the world needs to go on. Isn't the air rife with possibility?

Change and Loss

I've talked with my sister recently about the human tendency to bestow meaning in the things surrounding us, animate or not. It seems a natural way to navigate through the complex world. We create placeholders to orient life amidst chaos. 

When through unrelenting, inevitable change, the familiar surroundings leave our lives, it feels like part of our very being is lost. It hurts so bad when the manifestations of our memories and identity are taken away. Sometimes the deep meaning these symbols of our creation have goes unrecognized until the weight of loss begins its heavy tug. Left hollow, lost, confused, our shape-shifting nature is unveiled as a series of layers that can never be ordered in the same way again.

I maintain that the worst part of death is how the absence gradually becomes normal. The presence is no longer present. It is forever a thing of the past. The tragedy is not only that which is gone, but so too that which is left behind by the living; the slivers and chunks of a fragile self that is buried with the dead. 

One of the defining themes characterizing my entrance into adulthood has been the loss of what once was. Aging is tangible now, and I have lived long enough for it to show me its mighty grip. Coming to terms with the ultimate reality is, in a way, what adulthood seems to essentially mean. 

As much as change makes the bad better, it takes what is good, too. Therein lies the trouble. It's a cruel setup that the greater something is, the more devastating, the more piercing its demise and disappearance will be. Even what is inside, protected by mass, mental barricade, and the shadows of the soul, is not exempt.

The highest challenge we the conscious face, the most insurmountable, crippling monster bearing down on every waking moment, is reckoning with change. For change is life and life is change, and refuting its authority is a losing, self-destructive war of attrition. 

To find peace is to accept change. It is a clear yet unbelievable taxing, emotional journey that seems to require the stuff of gritty fortitude and caring embrace. Loss makes me want to hate the unjust world, to lash out in a futile tantrum that forces the hands of time backwards so that I don't have to ever deal with it. I guess accepting it all means filing those reactions away and, instead of ruminating on the loss of what was, welcoming the creation of what is. And having faith that what is, and what will be, is worth a damn. 

Lastly, a song I heard again after many years: Dust in the Wind by Kansas

2.17.21

A grey haze shines tepidly into my room from between drawn blinds. It's still cold, wet, murky out there. Only the occasional rushing car or blaring siren breaks the silence. My apartment is at a total standstill. The water pipes dry, the wiring electron-free. As if the world outside is going by and I'm stuck, trapped. 

 

Everything had stopped the previous morning. Lights, fridge, stove, heater. The faucets, with their drip drip drip of still-liquid water, gave my ears something to hear, until that too stopped. Then the real solitude began. It seeped into the imagination, nipping the heels of the cold that pushed against my walls like the ocean does to a steamer, searching, prying for any way in. 

 

It was truly frigid outside. Two days earlier, when I had power, I walked a few blocks on the icy sidewalks. It was around noon. Within minutes my ears were piercingly cold---and I was bearing a beanie. I've never felt those temperatures this far south. I scurried inside to take advantage of the few hours of artificial warmth I had left. 

I began making preparations that day. I filled the bathtub with water. Charged the devices. There was plenty of food because I had moved in just the day before, and my parents bought a load of groceries for me (God bless 'em). But once the utilities shut off, everything seemed sparse. 

I watched my battery life tick away with each use. I felt the air becoming colder by the hour. When I moved my food from the fridge to the balcony, I realized the apartment was fast reaching equilibrium with the outside. At least the food wouldn't spoil. 

I walked into the black hallway outside my apartment door in search of a warm, lit place. Noises echoed through the dark corridors like in a horror movie. A stray laugh, footsteps, sounds my mind conjured up. I barely knew which direction to go in this unfamiliar building. I stumbled around with my phone flashlight, searching for affinity. 

Luckily, I didn't have to go far. The downstairs lobby of the building had power and heat and water. It reminded me of an airport gate. Everyone huddled around the outlets, glued to screens, strangers gathered in modern solidarity. I thought, if this were a movie, these would be the cast of characters the protagonist now must survive with. Luckily, life isn't really so. 

 

In the lobby and my muted apartment, I found lots of time to think. After all, the internet does reach a point of repetitiveness after some time. The only book I had with me was dense philosophy, which didn't really suit my mood. I wrote. I wondered what people in olden days did to keep their active, searching minds stimulated (I can't bring myself to believe their minds were that different from ours). 

I tried to keep note of my thoughts on the circumstances. At times it was scary, funny, annoying, disheartening, eye-opening. It was boring. It kept me on my toes. 

Soon enough, though, I realized this was the world testing me. Seeing if I had the grit and elasticity to trek on even when there was no flicker of light to walk towards. I had to prove myself, to the omniscient and to myself. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~

I was greeted with a slap of cold breeze from the vent and a beeping alarm system at 7:20pm on 2.17.21. A full 35 hours after power went down. I told my mom I felt, in that moment, like a King.

The Alone

There's something alluring about the solitary, introverted character. Yes the independence and freedom, the most radical and obvious of reasons, but so too the mystery of selfhood and pride to defy the crushing universe single-handed.

These are the romantic lonely. Those more connected to themselves than the outside world. Unplugged but tuned in. 

Haruki Murakami seems to simultaneously get the appeal and contribute to it. These types are his bread and butter protagonist, from what of his canon I've read. His stories are emotional at core, very powerful, but the writing is crisp and simple, muted to reflect his stories' inhabitants. The melancholy draws you in, as does the riveting hope for a deserved ending that sometimes comes, sometimes not; for the most part, you are left in a confused state eerily similar in its odd absurdness to the real world. 

The humanity he explores often teeter on the edge of dreamlike and damnable--a challenge to the motif of vicious anger offering instead a resigned, internal reaction to the urbanized, globalized, stratified world. 

I think Murakami's perspective is necessarily created in a Japanese culture where this individual is more common, more a prominent member of society, active in art, than elsewhere. 

This article updated in Jan 2019 says "over a quarter" of people in the US live by themselves. In Japan, this rate has trended downward since the 1980s, with 34.5% in single-person households in 2015. The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research estimates this will hit 40% in 2040. 

 

Artistic expressions of hitorigurashi (living alone in Japanese) seem to create this unique melancholy, a down, bittersweet tone like that in lo-fi beats. It fits in nicely to the depression vibes that Soundcloud rap rides on. 

 

I've only read short stories by Murakami. They feed off the fleeting energy of nostalgia. My friend told me he got 1Q84 recently; turns out it's 928 pages long! I wonder it if tries to sustain the same aura as the short stories for the long haul. Wild that someone can publish both a behemoth like that and thin snippets like After the Quake.

On true isolation: Winter's watch 

On long books: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust is 4,215 pages

Becoming accustomed to Liberties

I think it is nearly impossible for people like myself, the lucky few born and raised in and lifelong residents of nations with robust civil liberties, to understand what it is like to live somewhere without these entrenched rights. 

 

The option to defy the established order, whether religious or political or artistic or historical, is inseparable from our national identity. The existence of that option is our defining characteristic; it is who we are. Imagining ourselves without that option is an exercise in fiction, for it is to imagine a wholly different human being. 

 

I can't begin to describe the ways in which this right influences my life. Everywhere I turn I see others, and thereby myself, taking a stance in the multiverse of ideas. You can make a show like Good Omens that spits on Abrahamic mythology, you can dive deep enough to drown in UFO conspiracies, you can make fun of the most powerful people around, and no one will stop you. There is no grand, overarching force to keep you in check. To reasonable extents, and sometimes even unreasonable (e.g. hate speech cesspools on 4chan), we can get away with thinking and saying whatever we want. 

 

I know this isn't news, and it's all extremely obvious because it's kind of the whole point of "liberal" countries. I just think here, within one of the countries that values free speech, we forget how novel our experience is. 

 

Not only is granting these expansive liberties to the common man a new development in human history, but it's still rare today. I read the news and see a place like Myanmar where millions have been dominated for generations by misinformation, civil war, and a military stranglehold. I watch Putin's Palace (Дворец Путина), the viral film uncovering rampant corruption, and then see the man who made it get nearly three years in a prison camp for his disobedience. 

 

The Human Freedom Index, published by the Cato Institute, uses a measure based on "personal, civil, and economic freedom," to rank countries by respect for human dignity. Their 2020 report found that 15% of people live in the top quartile of countries, while 34% live in the bottom quartile. (The datasets they have online are really extensive, if you want to explore the details more.) Out of 210 countries analyzed by Freedom House for political rights and civil liberties, only 84 were considered "free." 

None of this is to say that progress isn't being made, or that "free" countries truly respect every individual's rights, or that things are necessarily better for everyone in certain parts of the world compared to others. 

I'm not sure what exactly I'm trying to say. But when I think of the North Korean woman born into a cold bubble as far from me in every respect as the Moon, I imagine, futile as it may seem, what I would be like if I was her. And this painful mental exercise affirms in me that she, like me, deserves to take her own stance in the multiverse of ideas. For everyone to have that option, when I think about it, is really the highest of high ideals we should be striving for.