But Wait, There's More

There is new evidence in The Journal of Geology which suggests the origin of the catastrophe discussed in the previous post--the Younger Dryas big freeze 13,000 years ago--was not volcanic but "extraterrestrial", that is, an impact by something from space, an asteroid or the like.

The evidence comes from that same thin layer of stuff which is found a few yards down all over the world.  The initial small, random sample set did suggest volcanic debris, but over the years a larger sample set has been accumulated which shows differences among regions, and further study found a region--roughly including most of North America, some of South America, and some of Western Europe--which included in the layer an increased abundance of materials such as melt glass, carbon nano-particles, and nano-diamonds, all of which discount the volcanic theory, and suggest the impact theory.

Once again, when we think we have it figured out, we don't. But now we do. This time it is different.

So, now we attribute the sudden extinction of the great fauna to an asteroid.  We used to think it was due to a volcanic eruption.  Before that, we used to think it was on account of predatory paleolithic hunters; the self-righteous used to beat us up about that. So, yay for volcanoes and asteroids. Let's see you blame Men for those!

The warp and the woof-woof-woof

Tracing threads of intellectual thought in the tapestry of history.

Twelve thousand nine hundred years ago (about 11,000 BC) there was a massive die-off of the great fauna of the Pleistocene era— the wooly mammoths and giant bison and saber-toothed tigers and great bears and giant sloths and such-like, as well as vast teeming herds of other things, the ancestors of deer and elk and caribou and all the other smaller animals that co-existed at that time.  In North America, these were the great animals that the migrating hunters from across the Bering land bridge depended upon for their living, and they all died off in a relatively short space of time, all together. 

                                                                                                                            

In the 1980s, archeologists speculated that the migrating humans killed them all off, since everybody knows human beings are the rapacious ones who destroy their own environment, pollute the atmosphere, cause entire species to become extinct, and create global warming.

Could this be right?  Or was this just political correctness in academe?

The fields of archaeology and paleontology (not to mention history) seem to suffer more than their share of political correctness.   For example, there was a period of time during the 1970s and ‘80s when archaeo-paleontologists claimed the evidence demonstrated that human cultures had once been matriarchal and consequently peaceful, and that at certain times and places identifiable by archeological debris human societies became patriarchal, and at the same time became violent towards themselves and others, and toward the environment.  This field-wide assumption lasted for over a generation, nearly the entire academic careers of some of its advocates.  It is no coincidence that this interpretation came at the flowering of the feminist movement in this country.  If modern men were under assault from feminists, ancient men were, too. 

Finally, the practice of peer review revealed the error, and there was a great deal of denial, gnashing of teeth, bitter recrimination and upheaval within the universities among these scholars but finally as time went on the error was left behind and it was replaced with a more rational set of assumptions and a more informative and intellectually viable analysis regarding patriarchies and matriarchies and social relationships among cultures.

What had happened was that a generation of paleontologists had grown up, been educated, and took their degrees in an era of American culture that placed social responsibility above rational thought; that found ultimate value in an ideal concept of human society—and this ideal was not only something toward which a society might strive in the here and now, but it was also something from which the human family had once strayed (or so these academics wished to think).

It replicated, if you think about it, the Biblical myth of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.  One does not have to be a Christian or to believe in the Bible to recognize that this story when taken at face value describes the greatest catastrophe of all human history.  Never mind the putative threat to the human soul; the Garden myth describes two things: first, it describes Mankind’s natural and proper state as existing blissfully in a condition of innocent non-violence; and second, it describes Mankind’s separation from that state.

There has developed in European culture since the Enlightenment and in American culture since the end of World War Two an intellectual following that describes and seeks Utopia as a secular version of The Garden.  Lately, this trend blames either human beings generally, or Western Civilization itself, or even more specifically the United States of America as the wretched culprit that is to blame for either causing this separation from innocence, or for keeping all of humankind from achieving that desired state here and now.

The influence this general utopian view has on contemporary thought processes can be traced easily--from PETA to Fritjof Capra’s movie version of his book The Turning Point to Al Gore’s championing of Global Warming.  And it was demonstrably found among the practitioners of the scholarly fields of Paleontology and Archaeology.  It should be of interest to us how long this influence lasted in a field allegedly partaking of scholarly rigor, and how long it took for that very same rigor in the form of peer review to overcome the error. 

We should, I suppose, be grateful that the error was overcome at all.  The persistence of such an egregious error in a scholarly field attests to the strength and power of its underlying cause—political correctness and a general loathing of American culture by American academe—but more to the point for us here and now is just to have an awareness that such things can actually happen.  One must be a bit more alert than usual in order to spot it, however.  Academics tend to be convinced of the rightness of their analyses, to write persuasively about them, and to defend them vigorously among their colleagues.  When these ideas emerge into the popular culture, they take on the appearance of something that Always Has Been True.  

Let us return now to our original thesis regarding the die-off of the Pleistocene-era fauna.  This group of animals was terrifically varied, included some very large, vigorous and dangerous animals.  They populated the North American Continent in much the same way that the buffalo did in later centuries—in unbelievably vast numbers.  Paleolithic humans hunted them in the same way the pre-Columbian Indians hunted the buffalo—on foot.  Modern scholars of this field felt they could prove that the ancient humans hunted those animals—all of them—into extinction.  It never occurred to them to wonder why, then, if mankind was so rapacious, that the Native American Indians in their turn had not hunted the buffalo (American Bison) into extinction.  The answer to that, if you think about it from a practical standpoint, is that primitive cultures could not exterminate entire species let alone all the fauna on an entire continent.  They simply did not have the numbers or the mechanisms with which to accomplish such a feat, even if they had wished to.  Of course, the scholars never quite made that claim—that the Pleistocene humans wanted to wipe out their source of food.  No, they just did it [so the argument went] because that’s the way they were—rapacious and thoughtless, the ultimate conspicuous consumers of the Earth’s bounty, the ultimate mindless killing machine.

As it turns out, this thesis was wrong and eventually the error was corrected.  But it was neither common sense nor peer-review that brought the field around to an evidence-based reality.  It was another science entirely.  Just a few years ago, geologists discovered a peculiar layer of dirt sandwiched within the innumerable layers of dirt interleaved one upon the other all over the planet.  Such curious planet-wide layers are not unknown.  There is another, more famous layer which is found everywhere, and wherever it is found is reliably dated to about 60 million years ago—the time the dinosaurs disappeared.  That thin layer contains iridium, and is now seen as evidence of the impact of a great meteor which wiped out the dinosaurs in a meteoric equivalent of a nuclear winter. 

The younger, similar layer just recently found consistently corresponds to the time frame we associate with the great Pleistocene die-off—about 12,900 years ago.  Research into the composition of this layer now indicates that it records an event of terrestrial volcanic origin, and it is clear that the event was of sufficient magnitude that it very likely caused the die-off of the great mammals, rather than over-hunting by primitive tribes of humans.  A big volcanic gush filled the atmosphere with ash, dimmed the sun, brought on a sudden planet-wide cooling event which killed the animals.

Yet, paleontology had insisted for years that it was the rapacious cave-man that was the culprit.  Once again, paleontology led us astray, and the rigor of other sciences has forced the peer review process to bring us around to the right path.

Careful thought here will suggest that the description of ancient man as a rapacious predator is actually a contemporary commentary on present man.  It ceased to be archaeo-paleontology and became modern social commentary.  That it wrongly describes ancient man should also help us to entertain the possibility that it also wrongly describes present man, although the jury is still out on that one.

That conception of mankind was part of an intellectual thread which is found first in the 19^th century Utopians’ analysis.  Now we’ve traced this thread to other fields of study.  Now that you know what it looks like, you can look for it elsewhere as you study the tapestry of your own world, if you wish. 

Literacy and its absence

The problem with literacy is that the poorly educated do not automatically revert to a pre-literate state.  On the contrary.  A pre-literate person was obliged habitually to exercise his memory and imagination.  An illiterate person has neither skill.  I’ve just spent several hours correcting the assignments of semi-literate high school graduates who are now college freshmen.  It is late.  I am discouraged.  My own institutions—a small state university and  a considerably larger community college—have demonstrated once again that their primary entrance requirements are a pulse and a credit card.  I am beyond discouraged.

Failure of conventional wisdom

This dialog from Serenity illustrates the failure of conventional wisdom:

OPERATIVE:  It’s worse than you think.

MAL:  It usually is.

Today’s lesson: It is worse than you think.

It is worse than most observers think.

In fact, conventional wisdom has underestimated this economic problem from its beginning.  To wit: in 2007, Ben Bernanke asserted that the subprime mortgage crisis was contained.  Events demonstrated his error.   In 2009, Moody’s Investor Services claimed that investors’ fears that Greece was in a liquidity crisis were misplaced.  Events demonstrated their error.

During most of 2011, European leaders, most notably Sarkozy of France and Merkel of Germany, put forward plan after plan whose purpose was to solve the European debt problem.  Events proved each inadequate.  Each reassured the major markets, but only for a few weeks or days; each in turn failed to resolve underlying market issues.  Whereupon the European leaders would meet once again, devise a new plan, with similar results.  This has happened about a dozen times this year[1], and the only result is that stability has been sustained, but just barely.  We may rejoice that there has only been rioting in Athens and London, and that it has not gotten worse so far.

Two lessons emerge: conventional wisdom is not wise, one, and two, plan after plan after plan is not a plan. Or to put it in other words, keeping the rioting down to a dull roar is not success.  Or, to put it in still other words, if the success of today’s plan is measured by how it limits social unrest, then we must not have unreasonable expectations that tomorrow’s plan will actually address underlying systemic problems.

So, what next? For me, I must shake my well-entrenched conviction that “it will all work out in the end, as it has all my life.”  After all, I used to worry that nuclear war was possible.  It was and still is, but so far it has worked out.  I worry now that economic catastrophe is imminent.  My inclination is to say, “it will work out. I personally won’t be inconvenienced very much, let alone endangered.”

This is wishful thinking, a category of thought which has gotten many people killed. History demonstrates that repeatedly.

Congress has failed as well. The failure of the “Super Committee” triggers automatic budget cuts to the tune of $1 trillion.  That seems large, but it is stretched over nine years, which means in actuality cuts of a little over $100 billion a year. And they won’t begin until 2013 (after the election).  Meanwhile federal debt increases that much every month.  And one last remark about this—curiously, and in the face of evidence to the contrary—the plan also expects $169 billion in savings from lower costs of borrowing, which under the circumstances of near-zero interest rates is a laughable assumption.

Therefore, we must accept that Congress is not capable of being effective about this.[2]

One historical example of a democratic representative body being incapable of effective action on intractable problems may be found in inter-war Italy, with the consequences you should have learned in your world civ class.  I can elaborate if you wish. The short version is that it created a vacuum of power into which stepped the man on horseback, the strong man, Il Duce, Mussolini.

This is not necessarily always the consequence, however.  A wonderful line from Robert Merle’s novel, Malevil, illustrates this: 

“I do not believe for a moment that a group, on whatever scale, always produces the great man it needs.  Quite the contrary.  There are moments in history when one senses a terrible void.  The necessary leader has not appeared, and everything goes lamentably wrong.”

Thus: It is worse than you think. 

Or as expressed in Serenity: 

RIVER TAM:  Things are going to get much, much worse.

For further reading, see http://lewrockwell.com/goyette/goyette21.1.html

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[1] As of March 2013, that number amounts to precisely 20, and the result is the same.

[2] As of July 2013, the dreaded automatic budget cuts have occurred, even though they were not supposed to happen because they were so terrible to contemplate that the Congress which sat after the Super Committee’s work was done was supposed to fix the systemic problems which the Super Committee only kicked down the road.  Well, the subsequent Congress did not fix the problems, the budget cuts occurred to great wailing and gnashing of teeth, the administration fiddled with them enough to make them seem oh-so-terribly painful to the public, and now some months later nobody is talking about them.  It was all Kabuki Theater -- Congressional failure and Executive spitefulness.