At the end of this piece you say we are much more like Elves than we used to be, but that's not really true. Elvish magic works the way it does because in classical/Tolkien-esque fantasy, the natural world is friendly to elves: they live forever, they're immune to disease, they heal quickly from injuries, they bound effortlessly across treetops or walk over snow banks, etc. They develop a symbiotic relationship with nature because it's kind to them.
Nature isn't kind to humans. Sure, we've acquired many of these elvish capabilities: we can live longer if we use fire to scare away hungry bears, we can heal faster if we have some bandages or build a hospital, we can travel fast if we sit in a vehicle. But our relationship is fundamentally with our technology, not with nature. We've developed a symbiotic relationship with technology. Nature is still a deadly Other.
So unless we someday genetically engineer ourselves to be more elf-like and resilient out in the forest, I don't think we'll ever adopt an Elvish outlook. We fundamentally improve ourselves via that which we create, and defend ourselves from the hostile environment which existed before us. In fantasy everyone's made by a benevolent creator, in reality we've evolved under the rule of survival of the fittest. The elves didn't dominate their environment because they didn't need to.
(PS: In Tolkien, there actually is someone who's out of harmony with the natural order from day one, and has to go engineer his own world as a response. Complete with orcs and trolls and enormous fortresses that keep nature out. He's known as Morgoth and when they finally catch up with him they throw him in eternal jail!)
There's a quote I quite like from Peter Watts which I think encapsulates this "technology implies belligerence".
He expanded this to "Tools exist for only one reason: to force the universe into
unnatural shapes. They treat nature as an enemy, they are by
definition a rebellion against the way things are. In benign
environments technology is a stunted, laughable thing, it can't
thrive in cultures gripped by belief in natural harmony" [1]
Nature isn't kind to anything. I completely agree with you, but that needs to be said better since the root concept here is how humans, but nothing else, has fallen out of line with nature. Bullshit. Yea, it's pretty to see a monarch butterfly and how peaceful it must be... except it's probably the lone survivor of its swarm after a flock of swallows decimated all the other butterflies it was with just 20 minutes ago. Animals and plants went extinct pre-humans. All. The. Time. They get slaughtered or diseased without us.
The only difference between humans and everything else, we as a species collectively said, "no" to nature ruling our lives. I mean, for fuck's sake, we're such assholes about it, we setup animal sanctuaries and clinics to rescue wild, injured animals. Any other form of nature would have called it "lunch".
I'm going onto a soapbox now. I blame modern animal/nature shows for this gradual misunderstanding of "nature". If you're old enough, you remember old school nature programs showed how metal, destructive and viscous wildlife actually IS. All the shows I see my nieces and nephews watch... they haven't watched footage of a bear tearing into a still kicking deer or wolves taking down a screaming baby bison or moose. They need to know if they see a bear, wolf, snake or cougar in real life, it's not going to be cuddly or do a song/dance number. It's going to fuck them up and they need to keep their distance. Going to stack one more soapbox for me to stand on... and this will get me flamed... koalas and pandas deserve to go extinct. Mono-food source creatures are asking for trouble and need to evolve to diversify their diet to properly outpace extinction.
The plant kingdom is almost entirely mono-food-sourced. They almost all rely on the sun, which, pending a nuclear winter, might indeed become a scarce resource. Do plants deserve to go instinct?
You do realize plants are far more complex than that, right?
I mean, there's water, nutrients in the soil and the importance of mycelium in the dirt. Most plants you can throw in a dark closest for like a week or two easy, then take them out and they'll come back to life. Don't forget, ground level plants in a forest or jungle barely get shit for sun. I'm a cheap bastard that buys "dying" clearance plants from Lowes and Home Depot, then bring them back to life. My dumb redneck green thumb has a lot more respect for plants.
Shit, watch some wild bonsai collectors on youtube. They massacre small trees to bare wood, purposely put them in too small pots, under nourish them and the fuckers still grow.
Plants are no where near as fragile as a koala and panda. Hell, there was an oak tree on my parents property that was struck by lighting some ten some odd times in a five year period (Florida). We cut it down to a 2 or so foot stump since it seemed too dangerous to keep up with all the damage. Fucker started brand new shoots and refused to accept death. After 10 years from cutting, it grew three solid trunks about 10 feet high or so. A bit taller than a house, never measured it.
I've only been into mycology for a few years now, but I think oak forests may be somewhat rare in that regard. An oak tree is more like a whale, orchids are koalas.
Orchids are my guilty pleasure. I'll say this, they die way too easy in Idaho (personal experience). Florida, not so much. In my buddy's neighborhood here, someone put orchids on an outdoor palm tree. Like, they just plopped them into the crevasses of the trunk. They grow and thrive just fine. You don't "water" orchids, you "humidify" them. They're jungle, swamp plants. Along with being slightly parasitic. They do grow best on wood matter than anything else (my experience). Moss and other crap is just too much of a pain in the ass. So yea, in the wrong environment, orchids are a goddamn nightmare to keep alive and honestly, not worth it. But for the most part, most plants in the "wrong" environment are a pain in the ass.
oh, I didn't expect you to have experience with them. kudos and shimmy. I know that there are plenty in greenhouses, but not having grown them I have been under the impression their fungal relationships are so misunderstood that there must not be many varieties in circulation. I know most are endangered in my area in the appalachias. If you'd ever like to grow an odd one and need help finding mycorrhizal fungi or substrate I could probably help. Orchids and and fungi together are akin to sophonophores in my mind, floating around the woods like a man of war waiting to sting the right tree.
And... what has happened in the past billion some odd years of life on this planet? If any organism does not adapt, especially due to fragility it... gets a participation trophy? There's no deserve. It's simply a fact of the circle of life. Why are you throwing morality at this? Is there morality in physics or math? No grandstanding will alter that reality. It's neither sad nor good. Just is.
"Going to stack one more soapbox for me to stand on... and this will get me flamed... koalas and pandas *deserve* to go extinct." -Fern_Blossom, 2 hours ago
"There's no *deserve*.... Why are you throwing morality at this?" -Fern_Blossom, current comment
This was an exercise in friendly ribbing. I think we should save the koalas and the pandas, if we can. We've destroyed enough already. And c'mon, they're cute.
> The only difference between humans and everything else, we as a species collectively said, "no" to nature ruling our lives.
Indeed, it's not kind to anything.
However, even by saying "no" to nature, we're still transforming it (or it transforms itself through its parts, of which we are one type) and part of it; we're not extracting us or whatever from it, in the long term.
This. We can be more elfish with a personal force field allowing us to sleep in the woods without freezing to death or being eaten. Or we can achieve the same with genetic/genomic manipulation. And we will learn to become immortal over time.
In any event, it's technology that will make us more elvish. When we choose so, and some people will. It's also technology that will give us access to huge amounts of energy without destroying nature and it is technology which will allow is to live out in space leaving our original world as pristine as it can be.
If you ask me this piece is about optimism vs pessimism wrt technology.
Following along with your reply and the essay, who is to say that the elves are not simply humans with force fields?
One for beauty, one for immortality, one for grace, one for safety...
With enough force-fields, delicately interwoven with the art of the mind of a god and the skill of the hands of a god, who is to say that the gap between the humans and elves is anything other than a sheet of silicon?
At first I was going to agree... then I realized we're neither like Elves or Dwarves and its the reason Tolkien included Men in his metaverse.
Men are culturally diverse and capable of building great cities and societies. We are adaptable, industrious, but not particularly loyal. We tend to be fearful and vengeful. We don't form a symbiotic relationship with the land (Elves) or have a single-overarching purpose to acquire wealth (Dwarves). We conquer our natural environment and bend it to our will as best we can.
The Elves and Dwarves are very one-dimensional in Tolkien's work and they sort of represent specific things.
Multiple races in fantasy settings always struck me as just different aspects of human nature.
We are all humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, goblins, orcs, whatever, each race just highlights one of the facets of complex human society and behaviors.
Also much like Dwarves we don't live in harmony with nature, but for our environment to our liking. And occasionally we are too greedy and cause some disaster or another.
I think you missed the idea that immortality is the inflection point. What you say is true so after technology brings us to a certain point then we can adopt more Elvish ways.
The same inflection point is reached in Diamond Age when technology advances sufficiently to allow for "seed" tech to displace "feed" tech.
I agree with you, nature is hostile to humans. I recently bought a house in a village and first day: I was bitten by a mite. There's danger of encephalitis, so I had to visit a hospital and get some injections to protect. No hospital? Few percents of chances to get ill and die.
There are wolves in the forest. They're not generally dangerous to humans, unless you're doing stupid things or you're child, but they're dangerous enough and they'll kill dogs.
Finding clean water is a challenge. Mosquito can turn your life into hell without modern repellents.
But still I think that it's a worthwhile movement to bend a nature towards human and fill a missing pieces. Because despite all the dangers and inconveniences I just love being in nature compared to the city.
Probably the technology and science is not here yet. But imagine that we develop ways to eradicate mosquitoes completely. Eradicate infected mites completely (issue with viruses and bacterias, not with mites, of course). Find a ways to generate clean energy (hardest thing is to generate heat in home, it requires lots of energy). And so on. My dream is to live like an elf in the forest, but without all the negative consequences. It's impossible or too costly atm, but I don't see it as impossible in principle.
Sorry, I think it was tick. More specifically, Ixodidae tick. It has few mm size, but it gets much bigger when it drinks blood. It's easy to spot visually.
The world isn't unrelentingly hostile to us though and we have a much closer symbiotic relationship as the world is both the cause of our existence and our life support mechanism. So in that sense we should care a lot more about looking after it. Whereas Elves live apart from it and have no reason to care necessarily which we see in other depictions of Elves in fiction as malevolent forces.
The problem is that we much prefer convenience now in our comparatively short personal lives than thinking about the long-term consequences. The view that our relationship is with tech rather than the world and the view of the world as basically a negative thing is a strong part of that.
> But our relationship is fundamentally with our technology, not with nature. We've developed a symbiotic relationship with technology. Nature is still a deadly Other.
Lots of interesting viewpoints here, but i think this one's missing: We have a symbiotic relation with our technology, but we make the technology, there's room to adapt it to have a symbiotic (or at least sustainable) relationship with nature.
The fundamental divide between us and nature is this: we care about the fate of an individual. Nature doesn't.
We are from nature, and every one of us is thus destined to die, most likely painfully, and our deaths will most definitely inflict pain to other members of our species. Until we can bridge this gap, be no longer bound by the short lifespans we have, humans and nature will remain enemies.
Only after the gap is closed, there can be talk of peace - and then, still, we will need to become immune to nature's other trappings, because most of humanity can't survive in a purely natural environment anymore. Once heat, cold, pathogens in water and hungry predators stop being a threat, we can finally start living in respectful symbiosis with the natural world.
Alternatively, we could just learn to abandon all our morality: stop caring about suffering and death, treat ourselves and each others as just an ephemeral phenomenon, appearing one moment, gone in another. I don't think any one of us is ready to go to that extreme, and it would require extreme degree of self-lobotomizing anyway. Our survival instincts and our capacity for empathy are built into our firmware, we can't just shut them off for the sake of "being one with nature".
>Only after the gap is closed, there can be talk of peace - and then, still, we will need to become immune to nature's other trappings, because most of humanity can't survive in a purely natural environment anymore. Once heat, cold, pathogens in water and hungry predators stop being a threat, we can finally start living in respectful symbiosis with the natural world.
Well done. That's a Tolkien Elf. They are immortal, which is the first part of your declaration. Yet they are not immune to "natures other trappings", rather they are more resistant to it, but it seems that crucially, this is not viewn as a threat. This may be due to elves having less selfish natures than humans and more willing to "become part of nature". So it turns out having the right mindset (or nature) is also important. Also, Tolkien elves care deeply about their own kind, so i'm not sure how to reconcile that with what i just said.
Nature is not "an enemy", it's where you're coming from and what you're made of and what you're living in.
It's something to deal with, for sure. However treating nature as "the enemy" is precisely the model of thinking that brought us here and now, on the verge of being erased by the consequences of our own actions, human-as-a-conquerer.
Before talking of nature's trappings, we might as well better talk about human's owns. Our survival instinct saved us within a specific frame in which we could act. When our whole biome disappears or stops working for us, being part and dependent of it, we disappear as well.
What do you mean, Nature isn't kind to humans? Because we aren't immortal?
Humanity has spent much more of its time on earth living with a very low technology level than that we enjoy today. If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years?
It is really only since the industrial revolution that we have become crazy-reliant on tech. Tolkien's works were very much about the 'war' between the pre- and post- industrial revolution worlds. Hint: the bad guys are the industrialists (Morgoth being one example).
> What do you mean, Nature isn't kind to humans? Because we aren't immortal?
Something like 90% of Earth's surface is outright deadly to humans: about 71% is covered in water, in which humans cannot survive; then there's deserts (both hot and cold) as well as high mountains, which also don't allow for human habitation without technology.
But it's not just geological features. There's also deadly diseases, lots of predators (humans wiped them out completely in most of their habitats), weather and poisonous plants.
The average urban human wouldn't survive long in nature. Heck, there's a good chance they would catch a serious disease just from drinking contaminated water from a pond or a small brook.
> If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years?
For hundreds of thousands of years there's only been very few of us. In pre-argicultural times, no more than 10M humans lived on the planet [0], probably even almost going extinct in the wake of the Toba supervolcano event 70000 years ago. Indeed several genetic bottleneck events have been identified (ice age, weird cultural shifts [1]) suggesting that the survival of our species wasn't a sure bet throughout history.
I don't know if that's what GP meant. Elves also suffered from the ravages of cold, famine seas etc. It's just that in general they were tolerated and treated infinitely better by the natural world then humans. And almost anything else living, actually. But the truth is, even in Tolkiens world, Nature is hostile to all living things. Arda conspires with time to sap the powers of even the mightiest of the Lords. It kills countless elves. So your interpretation of "nature isn't kind" is clearly wrong.
It even goes both ways: most species change their environment to better accommodate their needs (beavers dam rivers, termites build mounds, forests modify the soil and create their own microclimate, etc.).
So it really is a complex system of adaptation to external conditions, modifying inanimate aspects of the environment to meet our needs and interactions with other species.
Human technology and -activity is not unmatched in scale (cyanobacteria are still the champions - completely remodelling Earth's atmosphere), but no other other species had the means to do it so quickly. We seem to strife for a mixture of artificial (houses, streets, technology) and versions of nature that we're fully in control of (from fish tanks and zoos to parks and gardens).
This need to "tame the land" even extends to other parts of the universe, hence the concept of "terraforming", even though adaption even if by artificial means would be much less complicated, quicker and "more natural".
But Nature also has given us everything we need to survive. Just because it's also deadly doesn't mean it isn't kind. Compare the Earth's hostility to Mars. Despite all its dangers, Nature seems downright cuddly by that measure.
This argument might be missing the distinction between humanity as a species and individual existence. No doubt humanity has thrived, but most individual human lives face significant struggles and hardships. We are here because we've been able to adapt and survive in relation to the rest of nature, but nature doesn't make it easy for us, and everybody dreams of having it easier. We continually fantasize about having greater power to protect ourselves from nature.
It’s a mistake to view nature as “good” and technology as “bad”. The only similarity between them is their complete and utter moral neutrality.
Only a few of your fellow humans care about you, for sure, and only your technology is fully disposed to your orders; nature does not want you here anymore than it wants you gone.
Anthropomorphizing nature is a good way to end up disappointed, it’s not a being - it’s a composition of very complex systems, to quantify its “kindness” is not possible.
Humanity as we know it, has always had an incredible technological advantage, even just fire is orders of magnitudes higher advantage than something evolution can give you in a similar timeframe. In fact it’s so powerful, the first technology, that it literally modified our evolution to give us larger brains and closer societies - in some respects highly developed language owes its existence to fire.
> If Nature wasn't kind, how did we make it for those hundreds of thousands of years?
The majority of humans died. Sometimes almost to the point of extinction. The ones who got lucky or got the right genes survived at least long enough to pass their DNA on to the next generation. Which is the one thing natural selection optimizes for. When you say "we" made it across hundreds of millennia, you're excluding the countless evolutionary dead ends that far outnumber the rest.
Nature isn't kind to us, and we aren't immune to many of its dangers because on average it's not enough to kill us before we can create offspring.
We rely on technology to handle the rest. Like avoiding sickness because even when not deadly it's not pleasant.
Because nature spends 100% of its time trying to kill and eat everything including humans. The only reason we have either the ability or the desire to romanticise nature now is that we've so effectively emancipated ourselves from it.
As someone who's done a bit of survivalism, I'd challenge you to go spend a few weeks in nature, living off the land. By the end, you'll be hoping that you can fix problems from the previous disaster before the next one strikes. Humans adapted quite a bit in order to survive, but a vast majority were killed by mother earth long before their natural deaths.
>>It is really only since the industrial revolution that we have become crazy-reliant on tech
"Tech" is a fairly undefined word, and we subconsciously draw lines where it makes sense / suits us. I will however postulate that:
1. Yes, humans spent a lot of time without technology; but it sucked and we died and suffered a lot
2. Technology isn't just iPhones - it's fire and clothes and clean water and toilets.
I don't know if this is a self-evident or hugely controversial or even politically incorrect thought, but hoping I'm in safe-enough space to explore it: I wonder how much of very definition of "human/humanity" has to do with tools we use.
> The first kind of magic, which we shall call “Human”, is driven by the desire to extend one's power over the world, while simultaneously minimizing one's dependence on the world ... The second kind of magic, which we shall call “Elvish”, is driven by the desire to extend one's understanding of the world, while simultaneously minimizing one's intentional interference with the ways of the world.
Both of these ideas seem based on the assumption that consciousness is separate from the material conditions which give rise to it. The classical philosophy of the stoics, that humans are the means by which the universe observes and understands itself, seems to resolve the dilemma.
If we subscribe to the philosophy that humans are both part of the natural world and are interested in understanding the natural world, this might lead us to conclude it is in our interest to pursue capital intensive advanced research projects such as building orbital telescopes or high energy super colliders to probe the deeper mysteries of the universe.
If that is the case, then it is self-evident that we also need to possess a large mastery over the environment in order to understand the environment, to pursue progress towards such ends in a sustainable and resilient manner. Household, industrial capital, shared infrastructure, and common environmental stocks have a physical cost of maintaining and replacing. A low surplus society which is incapable of generating a net product or economic surplus above the cost of maintaining itself or keeping its population from starving is not going to be able to sustainably fund such advanced projects.
So understanding the environment requires interacting with the environment and shaping it in a manner which maximizes our ability for future understanding.
In the same vein, if you want to help the poor and the weak, be rich and mighty — else you won't have the resourced to share with the poor, or strength to help the weak.
The poor need an environment that isn't drained by, milked by and/or owned by the rich.
The poor need an environment where those with more wealth cannot influence the outcome of political processes irproportionally.
The poor need an environment where the invisible hand of the market is not the fiscal equivalent of a one-way-valve, where the "free" market is praised as long as the employee wont use their work as a bargaining chip.
Hiring employees is not the only way to create an environment you can thrive in. There are plenty of examples in all cultures (maybe not the US?) of co-operative arrangements that were successful.
Without benefactors providing large amounts of capital how would we advance our knowledge and thought? Without some form of inequality of wealth we would never have had the enlightenment, industrial revolution, and health systems that we have today. The poor today are better off in almost every measure than the poor of 300 years ago. Heck, the poor today are better off than the wealthy of 300 years ago. This is all due to large amounts of capital being invested or donated into science and technology. To an extent wealth inequality is a necessary evil. It's certainly exceeded it's beneficial point at the moment, but that doesn't mean we should throw capitalism away, we only need to rein it in some.
> Regarding handouts, ask whether those who receive food at soup kitchens, or free meals for their kids at school, find the practice useless.
I'm sure if given the option of an intervention that actually addressed the underlying causes of poverty (i.e. socialised housing, UBI, or so forth), they wouldn't choose the gift of soup
Have you quit your job to live off handouts? Why not?
Humans have a natural drive to be self sufficient, and it is unpleasant to rely upon the charity of others. We wish to be masters of our fate, not slaves.
Further, it is dumb to structure a society in a way that depends on significant numbers of its members routinely going against their own self interest.
This is equivalent to saying everyone must work to earn their basic livelihood. Unless you're doing something funky with your definition of "handouts" here such that doesn't include unemployment benefits or other publicly subsidized welfare.
Unemployment and social safety nets are not handouts. You pay into these systems in good times so that you can take advantage of them in bad times. Would you call receiving a check from your insurance company after you are in an accident a handout? You might by chance get out more than you've put in, but you are still entitled to what you receive.
A handout is when someone gives you something you are not entitled to of their own free will. They can stop giving it to you at any time. If you are reliant on handouts, you are at their mercy.
That's the difference. With an insurance contract you are entitled to a payout when the conditions are met because the insurance company agreed to that as part of the contract. The only things you are entitled to are yourself, whatever you can homestead with your labor from unclaimed land, and what others voluntarily agree to give you. Insurance payments and every other form of voluntary contract fall into this last category.
> A handout is when someone gives you something you are not entitled to of their own free will. They can stop giving it to you at any time.
"Social safety nets" are not something you are entitled to. The government grants or denies them of their own free will (albeit using others' money). They can be reduced or revoked at any time, or extra conditions can be imposed for claiming them, and you would have no grounds to sue for compensation over those changes, despite having paid taxes to fund prior payments to others.
Social benefits are not a 'handout' if they are enforced through law and democratic agreement. Everyone in most democratic societies agrees that human life has inherent value, and so they agree to pool their resources and make sure everyone has some kind of basic livelihood.
A handout normally refers to some rich individual giving money to someone or of the kindness of their heart.
What's wrong with it what's left out. Handouts from whom to whom? The term usually implies "from the rich to the poor", meaning that the rich have the power to give or to withhold as they please. But it doesn't ask why they are rich in the first place. If I bring in 1000$ of revenue for my company but am only paid 100$ in wages, am I giving them a 'handout'? No, the term 'handout' implies that that is fine and normal; but when it comes to giving money back, well, that's charity. People should have to work for it! Nevermind that they ALREADY DID.
If you feel that you could bring in $1000 without involving the company and keep it all for yourself, why don't you just do that instead? Might it be that you actually value having someone else manage the capital and legal compliance aspects, decide how resources will be expended, and take all the investment risks associated with running a business so that you can focus on your area of expertise and collect a guarantee salary?
1) Possibly, but getting an organization going where all those different tasks are taken care of often requires substantial up-front costs, i.e. "barriers to entry", which a person or organization who already has a lot of resources can afford, but a little guy like me can't.
2) New guy is unlikely to succeed in a market where there's a natural monopoly already filled by someone else. I'm not going to try to start a competitor to facebook.
3) Entrenched businesses have an interest in eliminating competition. Sometimes this happens naturally (walmart can take advantage of economies of scale in a way that 'mom and pop' down the road can't), and sometimes they go out of their way to prevent competition (e.g. big telecom bribing politicians to pass rules against municipal internet).
The resulting trend being large companies become more and more powerful over time, making it more and more difficult for an outsider to compete. This should be plainly obvious to anyone living in the USA, but it's theoretically the case even under completely non-corrupt circumstances (see https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...).
Therefore, no, I don't feel I could bring in 1000$ without them, but I am still being ripped off. The handout I give my employer is non-consensual.
I particularly liked: "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature".
I don't entirely agree that nature is efficient by our definition of the word. It takes A LOT of wrong turns, it's just that it has infinite time to correct them.
A side note on the CSS of your site: I found the text entirely too dense. I had to zoom in to 175% and then go into the CSS and manually change the line-height from 1.15 to 2 to make the text readable. (And I've OK vision.)
Thank you so much for your kind words. To be clear, I stole the "indistinguishable from nature" thing from Karl Schroeder, as marked in the footnotes. You should check out his talk, it's great.
Also sorry for the css and readability. I just used the default Google docs html export formatting which is a bit shit... Will try to get something better next time.
"sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature"
Yeast, Chickens, and Dogs are the most developed technologies we have. (Brassica oleracea gets a runner up) Everything else we have is an unsustainable fad by comparison. Should something even count as technology if it can't reproduce almost without bound in the care of the average person? (settlements and factories count as reproducing technology!). I worry that production of computers is too complex and requiring of rare resources to be long term sustainable, but then I think the same of everything invented past the Bronze Age.
I have to do the opposite on some pages that are posted here. This page looked so much better than most others on the iPhone and still ok with Firefox on Windows.
Are you familiar with reader mode by the way? In Firefox it is available via an icon that resembles a text document in the address bar (or if it is stubborn and does not show the button, by directly going to about:reader?url= + the url you want to view). The customizations are available from an unobtrusive menu on the page and include font-size, line height, serifs or not and light, dark and a sepia mode.
I got the feeling from the styling of the text that the author had purposefully chosen a presentation that closely mimics that of a dead-tree book. I thought it was a nice touch, and fit well with the overall atmosphere of the piece.
...but yes, it was also rather heavy on the eyes on my 4K display.
>"In Chinese alchemy, elixir poisoning refers to the toxic effects from elixirs of immortality that contained metals and minerals such as mercury and arsenic. The official Twenty-Four Histories record numerous Chinese emperors, nobles, and officials who died from taking elixirs in order to prolong their lifespans. The first emperor to die from elixir poisoning was likely Qin Shi Huang (d. 210 BCE) and the last was Yongzheng (d. 1735 AD). Despite common knowledge that immortality potions could be deadly, fangshi and Daoist alchemists continued the elixir-making practice for two millennia."
I'm a bit sad to see (nearly) no discussion of indigenous peoples in this article. I think it would have fit in quite nicely, and added a less fantasy-world based angle.
The author hints at them twice though, but very lightly:
> Both kinds of magic are partially known to humans [...]
and
> Humans (at least, us in the modern West) are obsessed with their own sense of agency.
I'm personally about as far from "indigenous" as can be, but from what I've learned through various readings & watching interviews, the idea of "becoming one with" or "being inseparable from" ones surroundings is very much part of many indigenous peoples' lives. Not to romanticize them, but this angle could really serve as a reminder in this particular discussion: the "elvish" notion of thinking is not limited to the fantasy world; some of it is very much anchored in real humans' world views.
One thing I've taken to - to spur thought, mostly - is likening the fire situation in California to the difficulties of securing the detritus of nuclear power generation. We have evidence to suggest that Californian Native Americans practiced a sort of semi-passive land management, including controlled burns, which helped to prevent large fires and kept natural areas sufficiently cleared for their uses. This practice would have steered the ecological evolution of those areas towards requiring such maintenance. Then those caretakers died (admittedly, this is putting that situation VERY shortly), took the knowledge of how to maintain their land properly with them, and European pioneers settled the same areas.
And now, California suffers from massive wildfires every year (worsened, of course, by climate change). Essentially, modern Californians are living in a sort of post-apocalypse, suffering from ancient technology run amok, which they do not understand and so which afflicts them with impunity.
Just a note, the fire management techniques were employed by indigenous people to mimic how the world already worked with natural fires. Your not wrong in saying it was a technology but it was not the cause of the current situation as they did not practice that tech long enough to impact the ecosystems reliance on it.
All the species in that environment already relied oh fires. Small example, sequoia trees who's seeds only germinate after a fire. This evolution occurred millions of years before indigenous peoples where even around. Not to take away from the brilliance of the tech but it was discovered from how the world already worked it did not create a new niche.
> sequoia trees who's seeds only germinate after a fire.
Maybe trees are the real elves - naturally long lives, incredible technology/magic that we barely understand, if we see it at all (e.g. mycorrhizal networks between trees [1]), adaptation and harmony with their environment, etc. The Overstory by Richard Powers is a wonderful exploration of this idea in fiction.
I would like to push back in the spirit of inquiry: ecosystems surrounding rivers that are dammed are shaped over millions of years by the presence of an estuary, and then modified nigh irrevocably by a few years of human intervention. That is to say, even after the destruction of the damn, the landscape will be permanently affected, and by extension the ecosystem. I can see human adoption (and modifcation) of natural annual burn patterns having a similar effect. We have a habit in the West of undue skepticism of indigenous peoples' agency and ability (see: 100 years of Egyptologists denying that Egyptians actually built their ancient structures).
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan (1967)
I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
This is part of something I had been thinking about and looking around for a while. In my own search for this, I found that there is a flaw in this kind of thinking.
It likens “Human” and “Elvish” as to the degree of interference with the world, as if interference is the only way to interact with the world. But I do not think that human “interference” is the issue. Rather, it is the worldview in which we come to this dichotomy that is the problem.
That worldview is one where the world is understood in terms of inert, non-living mechanisms. That things happen from clear causal chains. That actions undertaken to change something in the system are forces to act upon components within that system.
So of course, from that worldview, the only way _not_ to unduly interfere is by withdrawing actions that perturbs the system.
However, this is not the only worldview. In a different worldview, the world is comprised of living systems. The whole cosmos is alive, as are every human, animal, plants, organization, polity, etc. Living systems are wholes unto themselves, capable of growing on their own, adapting, participating in their ecosystem (which in turn forms a greater living system).
Change doesn’t occur by applying force into a component within a dead, mechanical system. Rather, changes already happens within the living system because it is inherently capable of change and growth. Rather, improvements come in the form of helping the living system to grow and participate in its unique niche within the ecosystem.
Within a living systems world view, technology is either synergistically a part of a living system, or it is itself a living system. It is not something separate from the ecosystem.
From this worldview, there is no such dichotomy of “Human” vs “Elvish”, or even a notion of minimizing “interference”. Rather, it is living systems participating within and contributing towards an ecosystem.
This is drawn mainly from Carol Sanford’s work on regenerative paradigms and living systems worldview. Most of her work is applied towards business organizations, but it is applicable to technology’s place in our civilization.
This was a refreshing write-up. I admit I went in being ready to cringe at some bad metaphors, but the author pulled it off.
Overall, the whole piece gave me quite systems thinking vibes. For example, this part (well, and also the other 2 of the "three high-level features" the author lays out) towards the end:
> But in a more “Elvish” paradigm, however, the moment the house is built is not the end. How will this building grow? What other purposes will it satisfy in the future? When and how will it be deconstructed? What would happen with the earth on which it is built? All these “Elvish” questions[20] (and many more) can help develop a deeper understanding of both the problem and the solution spaces, and reframe (re-timeframe) both. The moment when the house is needed is not the end, but it is also not the beginning. How did the need for the house emerge? Where did the materials for it come from?
Edit:
actually, on second read this hits so close it's almost spooky:
> the relationship between action and understanding is more symmetrical: we act so that we can learn, as much as we learn so that we can act
I've lost the count how many times I've had the discussion in my organization lately about "starting the implementation already so that we can learn more, as currently we know less about the problem than we will ever know".
Granted, to maximize learning there must be some, usually non-trivial amount of effort at understanding and learning before the initial direction is sufficiently correct for the "act" part to provide actual learning and insight. But in my experience that's most of the time much easier to achieve than one would initially think. The amount of effort also tends to scale rather well with experience, so more experienced engineers are able to start acting into the broadly right direction with much smaller initial effort (which, in essence, is probably the definition of "experience").
There's multiple types of learning: intellectual and muscular. Latter often called "training". Former is "understanding".
You learn chess by playing chess. You learn riding by riding. You learn from mistakes when you learn by doing. But you can also learn by listening to a teacher or reading a book.
So perhaps the big dichotomy is self-acquired-learning vs. passed-on-learning.
Sooner or later, every beauty-builder and oneness-seeker will run into fundamental unpredictability of nature. You laboriously grow a house only for it to suddenly vanish in earthquake, flood or fire.
Were you immortal, or at least in a timeframe of thousands of years, this is going to happen often. "Don't be attached to outcome" or "just stay in oneness with everything" feels like philosophical cop-outs here. Is it possible for such a mind to exist that can stoically shrug off everything for thousands of years?
> Is it possible for such a mind to exist that can stoically shrug off everything for thousands of years?
That's the Human-centric way of thinking as described in the essay, where you care about the outcome of the solution - "having a house as shelter".
If you care about the understanding, then seeing how natural processes reclaim everything will increase the knowledge on the mechanisms of nature, so it feeds the "elvish" side of solutions/magic.
There isn't a hard physical reason why prolonging lifespan would be impossible. Maybe it's philosophical wankery but I do think these questions have some meaning for us:
1. whether human mind would remain stable on such timescales, or how to alter it
2. whether elven approach to nature as described is feasible and sustainable and how (separately from eternal life considerations)
A single human mind won't do it, but we have a way to record information for successive generations, AND now we also have a method to validate information and tell it apart from myths and superstitions.
Provided the mechanisms are discernible. Maybe it's possible to do it in thousands of years of pure observation without resorting to hypotheses and experiments. But I doubt human mind is capable of discerning individual variables and relationships behind natural phenomena just so, without seriously disrupting them.
A single human mind won't do it, but now that we have computers and the scientific method, we can build models to study how those variables behave; and reduce intervention to well chosen interventions to check the quality of the model.
But there's the paradox, the more accurate model we have, the more bigger interventions we do. Because we can and because there's too many of us.
Also, our models, no matter how accurate, tend to exhibit butterfly effect and can't account for external influences. These can swamp out minor interventions.
Why does there have to be a dichotomy? There can be a diverse range of optimizations of technology visions. What is a Hobbit vision for technology? Or an Orchish one? Why is a United States view of technology the "Human" technology? Is this the same approach taken by Native tribes?
Dare I say, portraying this as a one or the other, to follow the authors analogy, a "human" way of thinking about this. It doesn't have to be a this vs that narrative. We can pick and choose our optimizations. Not everything must be about power and purist intellectual pursuit. Where would a long term legacy focus while lowering of dependency lay? Or a long term desire to increase power, but reducing an impact on nature?
In an era where knowledge is power, how do you distinguish the two? Is a deep knowledge of the inner workings of nuclear science, or the biology of pathogens elvish?
Possibly, but having a good story or metaphor is way better for spreading an idea than having abstract terms defining it with utter precision; so this kind of "romantization" is valuable for debate.
I've just read a great and trippy book which resonates a lot with this kind of thinking, Geometry for Ocelots (https://amzn.to/3jQeVxt), it's a sci-fi which basically attempts to deal with how intelligent species accelerate their demise by owerusing, and over-spending resources in their natural environment. A big part of a proposed solution was "moderation" -- but never specified how it would be done.
This article kind of starts thinking about that "moderation" bit in real-world terms.
Exurb1a is great, and if you haven't yet you should check out his youtube channel[0] as well. He doesn't talk that much about this sort of systems thinking but he does talk about many other interesting things.
Pretty fun read, didn't go in the direction I thought it would (guess an essay can only be good if it goes off the rails like that at some point). Often get similar trains of thoughts but relying on slightly different concepts.
"Power"/Agency/Technology vs. "Understanding"/Meaning/Purpose is definitely an interesting dynamic dichotomy/2x2 to explore.
I’ve never thought like this, but I definitely acted like this.
Feels like these two approaches are both part of human nature. From what I understand before agriculture people actually considered themselves as animals, being part of the bigger system.
Nice article. I think part of the reason why things are the way they are in this 'human v elvish magic' dichotomy is largely due to our capitalistic society where there's always a boss to bully others into accumulating more wealth for the boss even if it hurts the land and the people under them. Capitalism with its absentee ownership norm always is at odds with Nature whereas you can compare the more communal/mutualistic lifestyle of the Hobbits in Tolkien's work as the more sustainable/healthy lifestyle comparable to that of the Elves who've master that lifestyle from just living longer as a race. I bring this up because Tolkien always seemed like someone on the edge of saying they were a Christian Anarchist by the way he spoke of power and leaders (being that Aragorn didn't have to bully the people of Gondor to follow him, he simply led by example).
Nature isn't kind to humans. Sure, we've acquired many of these elvish capabilities: we can live longer if we use fire to scare away hungry bears, we can heal faster if we have some bandages or build a hospital, we can travel fast if we sit in a vehicle. But our relationship is fundamentally with our technology, not with nature. We've developed a symbiotic relationship with technology. Nature is still a deadly Other.
So unless we someday genetically engineer ourselves to be more elf-like and resilient out in the forest, I don't think we'll ever adopt an Elvish outlook. We fundamentally improve ourselves via that which we create, and defend ourselves from the hostile environment which existed before us. In fantasy everyone's made by a benevolent creator, in reality we've evolved under the rule of survival of the fittest. The elves didn't dominate their environment because they didn't need to.
(PS: In Tolkien, there actually is someone who's out of harmony with the natural order from day one, and has to go engineer his own world as a response. Complete with orcs and trolls and enormous fortresses that keep nature out. He's known as Morgoth and when they finally catch up with him they throw him in eternal jail!)