A 2010 amendment to Thoreau’s 1849 original: “The number of men leading lives of quiet desperation is matched only by the number loudly trying to convince themselves that they aren’t.”

Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, two of the only newspeople who get it, have been covering the BP spill consistently and Maddow especially doing a great job. My only complaint with their characterization is that the spill is the worst environmental disaster in US history. My concern is philosophical: What constitutes a disaster? More to the point, how focal or acute must be the cause for us to recognize it as a cause?

It seems plausible that in terms of “single events,” the BP spill has probably resulted / will result in more environmental damage than other single events, but in my view, the biggest environmental disaster in US history is the consumerism that has driven our economic engine for the last 200 years. The biggest environmental disaster is our attitude toward nature. Because the BP spill, as a cause, is so clearly circumscribed by the explosion and the decisions of a few people, it’s easy to conceptualize as a single causal event itself. Our attitudes toward nature, on the other hand, are more distributed, have more complex origins and are harder to think of in this way.

I especially want to prevent people thinking along lines like this: “If we could just eliminate these big horrible events — BP in the Gulf, the Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, DDT, etc. — things would be fine.” No, they wouldn’t. We have been unsustainable since the industrial revolution. Even if we achieve a 100% safety record and eliminate all the “big bad events,” there will still be small wetlands filled to make way for shopping malls, small (or not so small) sections of forest cleared for new apartment complexes, subspecies silently exterminated as their habitat disappears under a new subdivision. That, I think, is the more harmful, the more insidious disaster.

The objects in my living room are greater evidence of sin than any oil spill.

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men…
[And] This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”
– T. S. Eliot

Update 21-Jun-2010: CNN is also now characterizing the BP spill as the “worst environmental disaster in US history.”

Green, adj.: Less black.

At a talk I gave this weekend, a man in the audience (a pyschiatrist, actually) took an interactionist view of the mind: he said that while the brain could certainly influence the mind, the reverse was also true: mind can causally influence the brain. I failed at the time to convince him otherwise. I realize now that what I should have said was this: Can the wind influence air molecules?

Obviously, the wind IS air molecules. Nothing more. If one says that the wind influences air molecules, all one is really saying is that if a whole bunch of air molecules happen to be moving in some direction (that’s what we mean by “wind”), this motion will influence other air molecules. That is to say, air molecules influence each other, which is obviously true. Wind itself doesn’t have any existential status, let alone causal power, over and above its constituent parts.

To prove his point, the psychiatrist said that things like counseling can work better in some psychiatric conditions than medication. Fine. QED for top-down causation, he thought: a non-biological intervention influences biology. But how does counseling work? It involves talking. How does that talking make a difference to the listener and his or her brain? The sound from the talking goes in their ear, and that produces electrical activity in the auditory nerve, etc. If that sound is organized just right, the neurons processing it will influence other parts of the brain in such a way as to change emotion, or thought processes, or whatever. But at the end of the day, it’s neurons influencing other neurons. Moreover, what PRODUCED the talking, on the part of the counseling therapist, is their vocal apparatus, which is also controlled by their brain. So all we’re really seeing here is neurons affecting other neurons. (And neurons, of course, are similarly reducible into their constituent parts. Predictability, of course, is another matter, mostly because of nonlinear dynamics.) If one wants to refute that, the burden is to document a mental event that has no neural correlate (see also supervenience).

This whole episode reminds me strongly of the time a graduate student in English told me that Shakespeare was so much more that a sequence of letters. (She was railing against my delivery of the infinite monkeys scenario.) Excuse me? Shakespeare IS so much more? IS? What the hell are you talking about?

All aboard the non sequitur bus!