New ideas

New ideas receive their most complex formulations first. This is most obvious in intellectual domains, where the work that introduces an idea never shows how simple it can be. The first draft, being new, is labored, and being new-fangled, is cautious.

This is less obvious, but still true, in other domains, like mechanics. A late mechanical clock, though compact, looks far more complex than a room-filling medieval clock. But the new idea is not the clock; it is the escapement. The painstaking blacksmith, evaluating materials, working and reworking them, test-fitting and adjusting and re-fitting—his efforts were more complex than the industrial procedures which allowed an escapement to be made by someone who had no idea what one was. Likewise the modern computer looks far more complex, though compact, than the room-filling Cold War computer. But the new idea was not the machine; it was the transistor, and now Shockley's circuit, which took days to build, is printed by the millions in fractions of seconds.

Of course, as an artifact, the industrial clock is far more complex than the medieval, and the post-industrial computer is far more complex than the industrial. But artifacts are not themselves ideas. Indeed the shortest definition of an idea is to distinguish it from the other kinds of constituent thought as the part that gets simpler over time.

Ideas seems to obey a kind of conservation principle, one of complexity. In order for an idea to stand on its own, it must be complex in itself. In order for an idea to be simple, it must be inside in a complex system. This is easy to understand for clocks and computers—as escapements and circuits get simpler, they get smaller and more fragile, and must be embedded in more complex, larger, more robust objects.

But this appearance is misleading. Consider guns: as the idea of propelling a projectile with expanding gas got simpler, guns did get smaller—a path runs from the gun that destroyed Byzantium's walls to the concealable pistol—but they also got bigger—guns have been built to launch payloads into space. Or consider the internal combustion engine, which powers motor scooters as well as container ships.

This conservation principle holds for all sizes of artifacts, and for all degrees of abstraction. Few people understood the phrase the electrodynamics of moving bodies; most people understand the phrase mass warps space. But the simpler formulation implies an entire profession whose job it is to define exactly what is meant by mass, by warps, and by space.

Let me suggest some practical consequencs.

1. By the time an idea has become simple enough to be generally understood it has usually ceased to be independently useful. Sometimes this is tautological: when everyone understands democracy, democracy already exists.

2. Few improvements are due to ideas; most are due to realizations. Someone realizes that step B could be eliminated by an alternative method of step C; someone has the idea that the entire process is wrongheaded. To equate realizations and ideas both neuters useful but limited realizations by turning them into abstractions, and suppresses ideas by simplifying them prematurely. Treating the elimination of step B as an idea is how we get the anti-ideas of management. Losing real ideas among false ones is how once-great company X is bankrupted by startup or foreign competitors whose ideas inevitably turn out to have been screened as babies from company X's torrential bathwater.

3. When an idea is new it may be unclear which part of the initial formulation is the idea. Often you must proceed with no more than a sense that your line of research contains a new idea somewhere in it. And even when the initial formulation is ready for use, use must sometimes be widespread and pratical before the idea stands out.

Consider guns again. A submachine gun is a sort of hybrid of the rifle and the pistol. It uses pistol rounds in a rifle-sized frame. Since the gun is relatively heavy and the rounds are relatively low-powered, a single man can control the recoil when the weapon is fired on automatic. (Assault rifles work the same way, using a special class of rounds intermediate between pistol and rifle.) But the first submachine gun—the Thompson, that is, the tommy gun—was not designed with this idea in mind.

One of its inventors had observed in his time on battleships that under the conditions of high pressure in the firing of a naval gun different metals would stick to one another. He called his observation (after himself) the Blish Principle of Metallic Adhesion and patented it as a way of dissipating recoil. In fact what makes recoil manageable is a heavier gun. But not only were the first Thompsons built with Blish's bits of brass in them, they continued to be built this way until the scale of wartime production eliminated the extra step. The gun had been in service for two decades before the idea behind it became clear.

But enough complications. Surely I have given this idea enough complexity to start on.

Three Horror Stories

I.

"Hello? I'm still down here. Open the door. Can you hear me—hey! Put the lights back on! This is a joke, right? Very funny! Open the door! Wait—I know you're down here somewhere. I can here you moving around. That is you, right?"

II.

"Well, yes, we have received the test results. There's really nothing to worry about, sir. The guard? Oh, he's always here. Hospital policy. Let's get this over with. Have you experienced an increase in appetite recently? Have you experienced hardening or discoloration of the fingernails? How about any strange shapes or colors that recur in your dreams? Hmm. Well, no, the problem isn't your eyes exactly. Have you recently been to Africa? South America? Oh, the specialist's on his way, there's nothing to worry about. One more question, and this one may sound a little strange, but I need you to answer it honestly. Sir, when was the last time you defiled something?"

III.

"It's great to meet somebody else who's not afraid of heights. Do you come up here often?"

"Every once in a while. I love the view. It gives me a sense of freedom. Like I could do anything up here. Like I can see the world but it can't see me."

"It's a great view. It's great until you look down, yeah? I mean I'm not afraid of heights, but that a helluva drop."

"Close your eyes for a second. I want to show you something."

Technology

The history of technology is the history of human weakness. The rest of history is what happens once human weakness has been compensated for, or accepted where it cannot be. But most things that happen, happen in the sub-history that technology implies.

Banning plagues and famines are not its substance. Consider glasses—consider that a hundred years ago or less every person whom you see wearing glasses would simply have lived with crippled eyesight. And bad eyesight is not experienced as such until it becomes severe. It presents as headaches, tiredness, irritability, helplessness. They lived in bad moods, cursing their fate, cursing their own weakness, cursing their own temperaments—all for a trick of the light.

It seems plausible that the most significant freedom which artists acquired in the 20th century was not freedom from patronage but the unknown freedom of safely assuming that the public had good eyesight.

For the diffusion of political authority, the gradual rise in test scores, and other trends of the 20th century which suggest the human race is becoming smarter, the most parsiminous explanation is simply that the human race is seeing better.

Consider something less conspicuous: consider bread and water.

Billions of people having pure water on tap shouldn't signify only as a victory over worm and germ. Since civilization begans our is perhaps the first time the majority of mankind has been sober.

As for bread: enriched bread (or enriched rice, or that wonderful component of bread, iodized salt) does not signify only in the banishment of diseases like rickets or scurvy. Invert your perspective. Consider pregnancy—consider the dietetic demands of scientifically managed pregnancy. Number the sheer diversity of the nutritional concerns to which a conscientious mother must now attend. We are overcautious, of course, but not in every precept. To be born as a peasant—and most people who have ever been born, were born peasants—was to be born pre-maimed by the neglect of every one of these precepts.

Aristocracy, perhaps, is simply the social order that results when only a small proportion of people can be kept well-fed enough to think clearly. Democracy, perhaps, is simply the social order that results when the majority of human beings are not born a little brain-damaged.

Consider lead. To the horror of posterity, somewhere in his Anatomy of Melancholy, Burton, in the early 17th century, wrote that if lead were indeed poisonous, then all the nobility would be poisoned with it, for they all brought their water in by lead pipe. (Hand-worked pipes, mind, not machined.) Centuries later his fellow apprentice printers thought young Ben Franklin laughably fastidious for wearing gloves when he handled lead type. Suppose he had not.

Then consider our recent century of lead-based paint and leaded gasoline.

The easy way to deny such fragility and uncertainty in the human condition is to propose that tougher lives made for more rigorous selection—that people with weak eyesight or inefficient metabolisms just died off, so that the average human being then was as healthy as the average human being now, when technology coddles our softer stuff.

But look to the mountains. Mountainous areas, their soil washed sterile with rain, have always subjected their residents extreme malnutrition. Yet there they have lived, worked, built, written, sung, and bred, even as their thyroids swelled and poked goiters out of their necks.

Human beings are very tough. What doesn't kill us, we can work around. Anthropological study of ancient remains observes that our forbears were largely healthy. So they probably were. The idea that the villages and cities of the past looked like hospital wards is the fancy of a super-realism that confuses ugly with true. Yet their health was not costless. The parts that survive to us—bones and teeth—are the parts with first claim to the benefits of food. For their strong bones, strong teeth, and strong muscles, they traded things of lower priority. They were all they had to be; they were not all they could have been.

Human weakness is not in sin and not in absurdity. We are not bad and we are not silly. Human abilities, if fully developed, are unstoppable, unlimited, and unquestionable. But we are weak. We are weak because we are fragile. We can do everything except save ourselves. All our abilities are so easily prevented, so easily unseated, that it may be done unnoticed. Being born and being fed are enough to rob us of them.

A diamond is (nearly) the hardest thing that can exist. Edge to edge, it can always wins. Yet a single well-placed tap can shatter a diamond: just because a diamond is so hard, the slightest flaw affords the leverage to cleave it through and through. We are all such diamonds. Just because we are strong, we are fragile.

Yet though we can be broken as human beings—we break so easily and in so many ways—still we cannot be broken from being human, from each other. Diamond dust is still diamond. The things my blind, starved, poisoned, crippled brethren made and created reach me in transcendence of their particular frailties. When they wrote, I can read. What they sang, I can hear. What they pictured, I can see. What they made, I can use. What they learned, I can know. History is just what we do despite human weakness; and culture—which is technology seen from inside—is just what we are despite it: what, as it passes from one generation to the next, combines our strengths, omits ours weaknesses, and represents us to ourselves whole—whole as we should be, whole as we can never be.

Solitude

The appeal of solitude may be as simple as the dislike of repetition. To be gregarious implies infinite patience for retelling the same anecdote, confessing the same weakness, counting over the same favorites, relating the same background. Identity becomes a matter of performance and habit, not expressed in but being the routine of self-introduction. Just to avoid this explains why people may chose to be solitary; just the time won from having avoided it explains how people can find pleasure in something apparently so unnatural.

But is there a positive definition of solitude—is there something that solitude is? Certainly if one ventures a bracketed solitude, and another commits to a prolonged solitude; if one is solitary by choice, and another is driven to it—each gives a different thing the name of solitude.

And surely what solitude is has changed and is changing? Surely technology is banishing solitude as it banishes loneliness?

Distinguish two measures of solitude: quantity of social interactions, and quantity of people interacted with. Eliminate repetitions. By the first measure the most gregarious of our ancestors was more solitary than the most solitary of us. The lines of communication were so few, so thin, and so uncertain that to pursue them itself required solitude—to write a letter is a solitary act. But by the second measure we are freakishly solitary. So many people once had to be dealt with to do the things we do by mail, message, and machine—so many butchers, bakers, candlestick makers, so many drivers, porters, draysmen, all to do what takes us no more than a few words with a cashier! (And the cashier is sometimes dispensable.) The two measures of solitude do not vary together—to be solitary in both senses is possible and perhaps defines loneliness—but to lessen solitude by one measure is to increase it by the other. Thus we are all solitary.

This sounds like a curse; but in truth it is a homeostasis. Life adjusts to provide us a minimum of solitude as the body adjusts to provide us a minimum of warmth. Solitude is a thing, not a state; it answers an appetite, not a purpose. Something vital, something necessary, something catalytic, some nutriment or vitamin of the mind, something as ambient and replenishing to human beings as light is to plants—this something is found, it falls, everywhere, except where other people obstruct it.

Yet the dullness and rigidity of repetition can be avoided, and the vigor and fecundity of solitude can be protected, without isolation. All it takes is to be all things to all men, which is the same skill as getting along with all sorts of people; an easy thing if you are willing to be lead and not to lead in talk, to let people think of you what they want to, and to lie to give simple answers to simple questions when the truth would be obstructively complicated. In this way people can be read almost like books—like old books that fall open to certain pages.

This approach is too habitual with me. Why I write the Ruricolist is uncertain—my reasons change every week—but surely one reason is to take cross-sections of myself without any particular sense of audience. The Ruricolist does not represent me in full; many of my interests go unrepresented here; but here I set the topics, pursue their complications, and claim the right to confuse. In writing about solitude I abandon it. But that is the kind of contradiction that essays live on.

Mirrors

There were mirrors of natural reflections before there were eyes to see; there were signs and similitudes before there were minds to see them. Eyes themelves are but incomplete mirrors, keeping the images that mirrors return. The world before us was full of mirrors, as the world beside us is full of mirrors; but perhaps eyes had never seen something endless until a human being faced mirror to mirror; until a human being adjured into matter that same substantial recess of mirrors in mirrors reflecting inside his own skull; until mind represented mind. We are made of mirrors; perhaps this is why we are so easily trapped by them. It is easier to turn the eyes from glaring in hate or staring in lust than from preening in mirrors. The ancients gazed on clear water and black glass in search of mere shadows of themselves; but we have opened the secret of the silvered mirror. Our backhanded images follow us everywhere. Before we can even speak we are entangled with mirrors. First they show us our selves, then they show us our self-awareness, then our self-awareness of our self-awareness, on and on, back and forth until we are wound up in our selves yet we have no selves without the mirror, until self and mirror are foci of an elliptical orbit around the fact of reflection, until mind and mirror combine into mind—one mind whose parts are all men and all mirrors. Mirrors are our masters; but who minds serving masters who look at us with our own eyes?

Selfishness

Foolish love of self is yet more mysterious than foolish love for others. Loving others is patently an adaptive trait; but self-love is neither necessary nor helpful to survival. Our species that must raise its young for a decade or more must set strong social bonds; but the conditions of individual survival are the same for human beings as for other animals. The snake, the squid, the scorpion, fight as hard to live as we do, but they do not love at all.

This implies that loving at all serves some purpose. With questions of behavior such judgments should hesitate. In animals so complex and compexifying as we, the best that can be proved of a behavior is that it is not maladative. The capacity to love does not harm the survival of the race. Beyond that, the fact that the brain supports love may be no more significant than the fact that the brain supports solving crossword puzzles.

But the brain does not perform crosswords as it falls in love. Love lights up the pith of the brain; crosswords only stir the bark. But this is no argument: it only moves the question from human beings to mammals generally. And if the outcome of a crossword puzzle decided your success in life, if you had bitter rivals in it, if it promised to bring you loyalty and attention, if it could console you and reconcile you to life, if entailed ecstasy—then a crossword puzzle, too, would illuminate everywhere. All these things are possible to a human being without love. And as for social cohesion, insects exhibit forms as strong or stronger than ours without need of love.

If love is so mysterious, why should one object be more mysterious than another? But the symmetry by which you could love yourself is a distinct mystery. How can the self present itself to itself as an object of love? The introspective mind can think about itself only as a sort of mirror image that corresponds to it at every point yet is not it. Of course self-love as narcissism works this way. But selfishness is cognate to narcissism, not collateral: a self-image of sainthood may produce narcissism with selflessness.

Selfish people are not self-centered. They do not pride themselves on their selfishness; they do not even see it. Indeed their most repellent trait is that they resent the selfishness of others without seeing their own, even when it is a double to their own.

The poets are wrong. Foolish love is not blind—that is, it is blind only as the eye is blind, with a blind spot. The beloved may be ugly or stupid or cruel, but the lover who overlooks all these things in one person does not fail to see them in others. Lovers of ugly people do not surround themselves with ugliness; of stupid people, do not surround themselves with stupidity; of cruel people, do not surround themselves with cruelty. But their judgment is not intact. It is usually disappointing to meet someone whom you know only through their lover's description; in these cases it is shocking.

The impairment of the selfish is the same, only self-directed. But this is no answer—only another mystery—how does the blind spot happen? In observing the parallels of selfishness and foolish love we avoid the easy and wrong explanations of each. Chemistry, charisma, propinquity, neediness, passive aggression, codependence, pity—these cannot come between you and yourself. They cannot explain the blind spot. Conversely we learn how incurable selfishness is when we compare it to foolish love. You can no more convince someone of the absurdity of their self-regard than you can convince someone of the unworthiness of their love. No logic will dispell it, no shock will unseat it, and the more absurd it is, the more intervention will be resented.

This long analogy is the preparation for a brief and severe conclusion: there is no way to prevent selfishness and no way to cure it. Perhaps in refusing to tolerate selfish behavior, in avoiding selfish people, you may nudge some cases away from the brink. But the pit is bottomless and those who fall in cannot be rescued. Their very sin is its own contrapasso, its own poetic justice. They lie in darkness where they eat their own hearts. Leave them there. May it not be one you love.