Copyright: Anne Frütel

A Second Third Culture

For W

An excerpt of this article was published on Heterodox STEM.

A Marsian in the Humanities

“Wonder is the first of all the passions. “
— René Descartes, Passions of the Soul

As an individual quite far from the knowledge collecting side of the human population, who, thrown by the storms of life, happened to find herself making a professional home in the field of theatre and acting, I got used to stand stunned, disappointed, often lost and sometimes shaken by doubts in my own rights and wrongs in front of the fact that this project of human civilization had actually become 150 years retarded in relation to progress in knowledge about humans and that, even worse, no one actually seemed to care. 

Acting trades phrases like “intensity”, “being in it”, “dreams of passion”, “authentic feeling” and “letting go”, all quite on the intellectual level of condom advertising. These words are not only non-operative, the concepts behind them also fall into pieces of sheer non-existence as soon as you start to palpate them. One cannot help but get the impression that using these words might actually serve inferior purposes, as to sell the illusion of communicational consent (which will work better the blurrier the language is), disguise the ignorance of the teacher and blame it on the student’s lack of talent if things don’t work. 

Acting has no epistemics, it has no common language, it has no theory that would be anchored in the overall human knowledge project, it has no agreement on the processes of how knowledge is obtained, and not on how something deserving the label “knowledge” would actually have to qualify. The knowledge that exists in acting has neither a significant influence on changing the knowledge grounds of the field itself, nor is any knowledge generated that would become relevant as a contribution to the overall human knowledge project, this great endeavour of us humans that began thousands of years ago, when we, the folk of the hunter-gatherers, started to hunt and collect knowledge and began to share and trade this new resource as we had done with collected berries and hunted deer before.

I can’t help but find that astonishing. Acting is the artistic building of human behaviour after all. Couldn’t one expect that the knowledge of our time from behavioural biology or from evolutionary psychology or from the mindblowingly unfolding field of the neuro- and cognitive sciences would be enthusiastically and gratefully welcomed, and the delightful task would be taken up to implement it into the very practical work of the actor? Wouldn’t it be clear to everyone that the in such way generated better knowledge would produce better outcomes? Couldn’t one also simply expect that these things would have to be considered as indispensable for a time-adequate reading of the world? How would anyone manage to think of oneself as able to design an image of the human of our time, based on some helpless wishy washy 19th century terminology of the human? How would not everybody feel at least a tiny bit of intellectual non-integrity by that? And how come the veil of consent on this looked so strong that a more conspiracy theory prone mind than mine could easily suspect some sort of high effort common silent agreement among all the minds involved, to intentionally leave vast parts of the human realm unknown unknowns? And why the hell wouldn’t the field simply inhale this knowledge for the most simple reason that there would be a sufficient number of people who would want to know? We live in the twenty-first century and my plumber enjoys knowing quite a lot about chemistry. Acting could be somewhere completely else. It could be something else. 

“It could be different, but also this way. “
— Bertolt Brecht, Pimp Ballad, Threepenny Opera

We can ask why things happen, but we could also first ask why they actually wouldn’t. Things tend to go down all the time, simply because they are possible, probable by how the world is composed, with no special effort required. Acting is basically not the most difficult thing to do, we tend to recognize humans in clouds and trees, why should it require high-end knowledge to make people recognize humans in humans? The professional market is small and can easily be equipped by talent, which is only to minor degrees dependent on knowledge formulated above the individual procedural level. Appearance of the actor, especially in the all-else-obscuring variants of beauty and sex appeal, sets knowledge down to minor order relevance as soon as talent and skill surpass a certain threshold. The business of teaching acting is to a large part selling dreams, not knowledge. The average educational level concerning humans is so low that students are not able to distinguish between knowledge and non-knowledge. The all-encompassing aura of the acting guru will additionally blur the sight for factuality and functionality. And acting is no airplane, it will not go down and kill people if built from bad knowledge. I guess even a sexually non compos mentis like Harvey Weinstein would not have chosen the surgeon to do his heart transplantation with the methods he chose his actresses.

When I started to teach acting, I went down the path of my personal preference, not completely elsewhere than others, just a bit more down the knowledge alley. This brought me years of an intellectual loneliness that I would clearly assign to not completely unconsiderable degrees on the scale of human suffering. But it has never been wise to make the absence of pain the determining parameter for a good life. It would also become the work I turned out to having dedicated my life to.

A Priori Finality

“The obscurest epoch is today.”
— R.L. Stevenson, Across the Plains

I had always found that humans do a lot of rubbish, so there would be no particular surprise in discovering one day, that they would be once again rubbishing on. But, a few years ago, I couldn’t help but find that a new sort of strange occurences would with increasing regularity stand out in my perception, occurrences that seemed above the common rubbish level. A new type of ideas seemed to claim relevance by the loudness of their appearance. The ideas had strong resemblance with the common type of everyday spontaneous ill-thought-out exclamation we all make when the world, in a moment of feeling all too right, seems all too clear to us and which we usually, if a person takes up the responsibility to function like a real friend, confronts us with it, and tells us to think about it a bit better, are able to differentiate and reconsider in our personal range of differentiation and reconsideration, which usually suffices to not get us going for stupid stuff. This immaturity of the new ideas, and the degree of conviction they were ongoingly stated with, were quite disproportionate. The vehemence of how others, that would object them with more or less reasonable arguments, were not proven but decided to be wrong, was impressive. The scary thing about them was though, that in contrast to the ill-thought-out exclamation outlined above, they were not made by individuals of whom one could think that what they lacked was a friend. Quite the opposite: They were never claimed by mavericks, but always stated by groups or by people who claimed to speak for groups. And although one could get the impression that they obviously felt like knowledge to those who uttered them, there was something like an a priori finality about them, a thinking from ends, that seemed like a point symmetrical twist of the processed preliminarity of knowledge obtainment.

It started to look as if these things were becoming stronger all around me. They seemed to be highly functional in terms of how easily they would contaminate brains. Like some sort of brain virus, with lines of infection that are difficult to track, they started to appear everywhere, in public discourse, in politics, in advertisements and movies, in the personal social environment down to friends and family. It also seemed as if the academic arts and humanities were an extraordinarily hot spot for infection, some sort of measles party of the ill-thought-out ideas. I had settled quite at the edges of my field, so these ideas arrived late in my class, but they arrived. An acting student went completely unprepared to an audition, failed, and managed with the effort of a snip to set half an acting school in righteous outrage that he had become a victim of homophobia. Young females prided themselves on courageous feminism, because they had very detailed instructions on how men would have to behave although they had no similar instruction set for themselves. A student spent a whole lesson on psychohygiena about his semester at theatre studies, where he had learned a lot about a non-measurable concept called „gender“, but actually not much about theatre. A class asked me if I would do some sex-and-violence-on-stage training with them because actually nobody else would do that. After the first rounds of this training, all eyes were shining, but the men of that class reacted reserved when I suggested making it a part of their practice to ask a female acting partner to do the etudes together, if they would have to play an intimate scene. They told me that males could not suggest such etudes anymore. A class was astonished to hear me argue against a skin colour quota for movie castings. These are just examples, all of them are harmless, and actually some good conversations came out of them. My point is that such events have become normal, and that they weren’t normal only a few years ago. The degree to which people arriving in my class already seemed to feel with not unconsiderable degrees of conviction, as if somebody had taught them, that they knew how things are, and that the world should be measured by their minds and not, as required in learning, the other way round, was rising. I started to wonder how many people would have to be infected by that sort of thinking in order to make a whole class tip. A speculation about the further growth of the problem was not undisturbing, the story of the boiling frog warns us, that reacting to something might keep on seeming too early until it is too late.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
— not by Mark Twain

As a person with proven unshatterable dreams of how the world could be, it doesn’t make me exactly happy that I often feel as if I as an acting teacher have to close knowledge gaps that should obligatorily have been filled by the regular school system, particularly given its cost. But I also don’t see that as much of a problem. These new things were of a different quality though, because it was not that students didn’t know. They “knew” things that were wrong, and they looked at the human world in a way that would already start to do it no justice on the most basic level of perception. Acting is the art of the human to be seen. I try to teach my students to perceive, to think, speak and act about humans in a differentiated and anti-simplistic way, in a way that accepts the human as a biological creature, in a way that appreciates the difference but searches for the human universal across all differences, and that thoroughly tests if it is possible to see the other as a person probably as averagely idiotic and as averagely bad as all, including we ourselves are. I teach them to maintain the factor of the unknown variable in their assumptions. I insist that intellectual ruthlessness towards oneself has to be learned before daring to apply moral ruthlessness to others, and that if humans live, they will make mistakes. This is not non-judgement, it is slow judgement. It is the basic heuristic of not jumping to low-cost coherence before you have gained an image. This makes it possible to get to know dramatic characters, get in dialogue with them, learn from them and to discover what truth about humanity, and therefore also about ourselves, they, by their existence, speak to us. It is what makes it possible to tell stories, these grasps of our all humanness, that slowly, chain link after chain link, reveal the human being along the axis that will bring it all to light, time. So, as soon as these new problems arrived in my class, they were no irrelevant side events. They became a task that I would have to integrate in my teaching and I would need a working hypothesis based on a clearer image of the problem. I have since then started quite some scrutinizations and the following texts are what has, preliminarily and always a bit in motion, built in my mind so far. It is some sort of a network of thought. The smart reader might notice that I will never come back to the terms apriori finality and processed preliminarity. This is not because I dropped them. It is because they underlie the whole text, they reoccur all of the time, in different shapes and disguises, but always in the same basic dichotomy of pattern. We must stay humble with patterns, detecting a pattern is actually always also imposing a pattern. It is a lense that might provide some insight or not. That is why I leave it to the smart reader to detect them on his own. He will or maybe he will not, and we will gain a second look.

65 Years “Two Cultures” – Time for a Celebration?

” ‘Oh, those are mathematicians! We never talk to them.'”
— C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution
“I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups. When I say the intellectual life, I mean to include also a large part of our practical life, because I should be the last person to suggest the two can at the deepest level be distinguished. (…) Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, who, incidentally while no one was looking, took to referring to themselves as ‘intellectuals’ as though there were no others. (…) Literary intellectuals at one pole – at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension – sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding. They have a curious distorted image of each other. Their attitudes are so different that, even on the level of emotion, they can’t find much common ground.”
— C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

In 1959, Charles Percy Snow, known as C. P. Snow, held a public lecture as part of the University of Cambridge’s Rede Lectures, a tradition of annual public lectures dating back to the 17th century. Snow, physical chemist by profession and writer of novels by vocation, described a social phenomenon that he, of the rare type of a human that was standing with one foot in science and the other one in literature, had, both by personality and by what his social environments would tell him, probably more chances to recognize than others. Working his days in a lab, but spending many evenings invited to literary circles he was astounded by the alienation between the two groups of humans, the ones from science and the ones from literature, and by the disregard they showed for each other’s field.

“Once or twice I have been provoked and asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”
— C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

Snow formulated his observations on an experiential level of party room vs lab. But then he broadened the image to the whole Western world and went so far as to call the two groups two different cultures. He painted a dark image of potential bad outcomes of such a crack through the human knowledge project and he considered the Western civilizational project at high risk if it would not insist on broad education of its inhabitants. Snow’s “Two Cultures” had all the qualities of a serious warning. 

Change on a societal level probably needs longer timespans to become observable. We are now in the year 2024, 65 years after his “Two Cultures” lecture. So, let’s have a look. Did we, smart as we are, listen to the warning, improve things, so is it time for a celebration?  I don’t think so. We are in the midst of what many have called a cultural war. We see a deep ideologization of the Western society and the abyss that divides our society sometimes seems close to reaching iron curtain magnitudes, only this time, it is simply built into the heads. Overtly anti-scientific claims about human nature have become part of the political decision making process. “Social justice” claims by name to be a subset of the category of justice, without bowing to its elaborated rules, first of all its judgemental humility. The deeply anti-scientific claim that people would all have similar life outcomes, if there weren’t “unjust factors” has produced a political victimhood market, where people compete who will get more advantage as a compensation for being more disadvantaged. It is of no relevance that the “unjust factors” have been completely arbitrarily picked from the vast ocean of human inner and outer disadvantages. It is of no relevance that first of all a definition of how the amount of personal disadvantage would have to be calculated in order to make it comparable to other disadvantages would have to be developed as a condition for all further discussion of the topic. The underlying narrative, the narrative of victimhood, is actually a non-narrative, it tells the story of the human social systems as a non-story of somewhat crystallized power states. And it divides the world into victims and oppressors in such a convincing way that one might easily overlook that it contains a third party involved: Those who tell that non-story. They, although usually claiming that they themselves are the victim or at least that they are fighting on the side of the victims, are clearly in power position in the realm of the narrative, where their story has come close to a paradigm and can not be questioned without severe loss of reputation.

We should not forget that every political claim, independent from its legitimacy, is always also a claim for power and influence, and a part of the all time ongoing human status game. We could, just testwise, for a moment, assume this and not some nobler motives to be a first cause of behaviour. We could then ask for a technical description of how this would be done in this case. Victimhood politics then reveals itself as the reinvention of a very old strategy: Batch your power claim on something that nobody wants to attack, because it is somewhat untouchable, precious or even holy.  This will make every attack on the claim, even the most knowledgeable one,  feel, in the most practical sense of what brain areas it will involve, like an attack on the untouchable-precious-to-holy “some thing”. This “some thing” used to be gods for long times of human history and kings would reign by having batched their power claims on them. It is no surprise that the “some thing” of our days is the most untouchable and precious-to-holy we have: It is the human itself. Nobody wants to be perceived as being rude to humans, it simply doesn’t feel good and one doesn’t win sympathies that way. Victimhood politics is the application of the strategy of a living shield. It is a status game as any other, but this one inhibits the scrutinization of the substantiality of its claims by a perfidious and, due to the elusiveness of our own sociality, almost transparent way of social control. That might be why the whole “cancel culture” debate is, surprisingly consensual from both sides involved, dressed up as a moral fight. This is not honest. If people were serious about feeling responsible for preventing harm done by harmful content, they would long have started to put thorough effort in showing and measuring it. In the age of the internet knowledge can also not be easily suppressed by a weak entity like a university. People could, as some who are smart enough have done, simply go and work somewhere else.  It is obviously not easy to admit that it is all also simply about resources, about who will sit in the academic money pots. It must be named though, because people might, due to the economical irrelevance of their field, not so easily find equally paid jobs outside of academia, and might have existential reasons not to take off their ideological glasses.

But, stop, couldn’t one find all these developments surprising? Couldn’t it have come differently? After all, we also see an astonishing rise of popular science if we let our eyes wander over the last 65 years. Couldn’t one expect that if you can buy a reader-friendly written book on biology by Richard Dawkins for the cost of a lunch, a lot of rubbish of how our image of the human is constructed would simply vanish? These books have sold quite well, there are bestsellers among them and editor John Brockman in a book from 1995 went so far as to enthusiastically welcome this development as the arrival of a  “Third Culture” that would solve Snow’s “Two Cultures” problem. It is true, the grounds for knowledge that is accessible for all have been built, and not only by books, also the internet has become a crucial part of it. ”Youtube University” has actually become a player in the human knowledge project (and, I cannot resist to add, might not even reside among the worst universities in the ranking). One cannot emphasize enough on the fact that this is not only a new step in the human knowledge project, but actually quite the realization of an utopia, which many people who suffered for the progress of the human knowledge project might have considered worth suffering.

It is basic knowledge of the craftsman that if you remove an assumed origin of a problem and the problem remains, the assumption was obviously wrong and the origin of the problem must lie somewhere else. It was the hypothesis of the enlightenment, namely of the philosopher John Locke, that humans come to life as “blank slates, eager to grasp for knowledge and reason”. The conclusion from this was that they would become smart as soon as we would be so fair to offer them knowledge. Well, they can have the knowledge now, it is for free. Unfortunately this does not at all seem as if having much changed the scientific educational level at the other pole of C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures, the field of literature parties, the field of those who call themselves our “intellectuals” or conceptualized a bit fuzzier, the knowledge field of non-math (or anti-math?), that begins somewhere in the field of the social sciences and conceptualized a bit sharper can also be simplified to everything that clusters around the opposite pole of STEM, which we for simplifying purposes will for now call “the humanities”. Looking at these two poles, one cannot but acknowledge that the knowledge field of STEM has made astonishing advances. The humanities have far less. Or what of its achievements of the last 65 years would we consider on a par with a mars rover, the decoding of the human genome or artifical intelligence? The human knowledge project has conquered the world via tech and the values of the enlightenment have been applaudingly welcomed by humanity and become an essential and beloved part of every household, packed into the brain extension devices of our time called smartphones and computers. I also think that it is not wrong to say that STEM has actually started to take over the humanities. Machines are able to make translations of literary quality, can write texts and produce pieces of visual art. The art they produce might not be of superior quality, but come on, what percentage of art produced by humans actually is?

C. P. Snow’s two cultures have further developed apart. Surprisingly enough they still share one roof in higher education, although one might wonder what the “uni” in “university” would meanwhile actually stand for. We now have whole academic fields that are grounded in antiscientific claims and protect themselves by demanding the rights of academic freedom without submitting to the obligations that would legitimize their claim, beginning with the basic agreement that they must take part in the processes of mutual control that constitute the human knowledge project and build its hierarchies. Their descendents, people with a diploma in “Weltanschauung”, exit university and enter post-educational life with the reputation and the self-esteem of having passed what we keep on calling our “higher education”. 

Contrary to an airplane, a society that goes down doesn’t wiggle too much, so people that don’t look out of its windows might remain unaware until it hits the ground. If overtly anti-scientifically acting people regularly start to appear in middle to high power positions of society, one is, from the point of view that a society who wants to move healthy to the future must have the mechanisms to act on the best approximations to truth that are available, almost obliged to say that this society might have a problem. If these people are backed up by carrying a university degree and university still is upheld as the homebase of the human knowledge project, this puts in question whether this society even has an agreement on what knowledge actually is. If these people then start to dominate the public debate in a sense that can be measured by the calories and time they consume in terms of attention expenses, one might start to think that things have started to go quite the wrong way. If their worldviews befall the language centres of the brains of the majority of people one might get nervous. If they usurp the brain extension technologies of our time they would have never been able to build themselves, and ride on them for their own purposes like Game of Thrones’ Night King on the dragon Vyserion, one could get scared. And if applicants for jobs in academia will not even pass the online application form if they don’t make a so called “diversity statement”, which can, by its nature as a piece of language not of observable deeds, contain no other information than their obedience to conform with whatever bullshit will be required next, one could get quite horrified of the things that are yet to come. This leans heavily towards the totalitarian. So why does that not scare the hell out of everybody?

Ballpeople or Plato the Non-Engineer

“When the earth was still flat, and the clouds made of fire
And mountains stretched up to the sky, sometimes higher
Folks roamed the earth like big rolling kegs
They had two sets of arms, two sets of legs
They had two faces peering out of one giant head
And they could watch all around them
And they talked while they read
And they never knew nothing of love
It was before the origin of love”

— Mitchell/ Trask, The Origin of Love, Hedwig and the Angry Inch

The Ancient Greek philosopher Plato doesn’t make the impression of having been much of a fun guy. Still it is not completely clear how serious he was when, in his “Symposium” let the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, who, on the other side, became not known for his unfunny approach to the relationship of the human sexes, tell the story of the “ballpeople”. It is a mythological story about the attraction of the sexes to each other as a long-term consequence of having once been a holistic ideal one, a ballperson with two sets of arms, two sets of legs and two sets of each human sensory device, that would move happily and obviously teleology-able through the world by doing cartwheels and that was then cut in two by Zeus, who feared the cartwheelers would become too powerful. It is clear though that Plato was not the most practical man under the sun. He was so kind to tell us himself, when he, introducing his system of how a society should be organized, didn’t put himself in the caste of the engineers, but humbly only to the philosophers, who would content themselves in ruling and leave the real work to the others. So maybe he simply didn’t waste any thought on the very practical question of how such an “ideal” cartwheel apparatus would actually have to work. What mechanisms would that ballperson need to have inside to negotiate the relevance of the incoming sensory signals? Two pairs of eyes, looking in opposite directions and therefore seeing completely different things. Two centres of visual attention. Or only one?But which one when? By what values (not in the moral but in the most mathematical sense, but keep it as you like, it might anyway turn out that this is basically the same) would the incoming signals be weighted in order to be able to decide into what direction the carthwheeler should cartwheel next? The story provides no answer. Plato did the old holistic trick, he left the inside of his story hollow and can therefore be rightfully considered a legitimate first of our philosophers. 

Looking at the two cultures problem through the lense of the ballpeople story and imagining the allegorical figures of STEM and the humanities, both blood on their faces and in their eyes, finally wrapping their arms around each other in a heartfelt impulse of reconciliation, and then starting to make love to each other as further sung about in the musical song above, is just very much my sense of ironic utopianism and I spent days laughing about that. But we can’t escape the question of functionality. Even if our sweet two cultures wouldn’t have to talk in advance, they would have to find their ways of negotiation by the complex loops of exchange of physical forces that constitute a sexual act. At least as long as one of them would not simply lie down and let itself get fucked by the other.

Social peace is not something that can be upheld, it is something that has to be rebuilt again and again by solving conflicts. It is usually the one with the worse arguments that will put the moral value of social calm above that of negotiation. The ballpeople narrative catches us in our longings for peace, in our preference to be nice people, in our interest to maintain relationships and also simply in our minor virtues such as laziness and cowardice. It expresses in claims as such that there can be a peaceful not-to-be-negotiated co-existence of knowledge and non-knowledge under the roof of the human knowledge project. It expresses in ideas as such that “everybody is basically up for something good”, that talking to each other is a panacea, that one can be for something without being against something and in the horrible idea that it is possible to be either for truth or for justice. This can not work. Besides the fact that justice is immensely difficult to do and only has a chance if its processes are based on the best approximations to truth possible: Those who claim to be for justice will not change their slogans to “No truth – just justice”, they will keep on claiming truth for themselves, even if it should be only their one “truth” that there are many truths. And they will keep on distorting the meaning of the word.

One can of course blame all this on the stupidity of the people who fall for the wrong ideas. I find that difficult, we don’t know if many of them might not even have the means to notice. The claim that people ought to behave differently is also neither wise nor the most scientific and also a complacent one as long as oneself has not accomplished everything oneself ought to. One can’t credibly reproach people who don’t care for the human knowledge project, that they don’t care, meanwhile oneself, who claims to care, obviously doesn’t care as well, because otherwise one would try to stop them. It is the task of the human knowledge project to offer people the tools for noticing if they go wrong. If the educational system does not know how to provide people with these tools, it should make that official and stop pretending that it can. Otherwise it is actually a betrayal and people will of course assume that, after having spent at least one tenth of their life in super expensive school education, they are on secure grounds of how to conduct themselves through their own humanness. 

“There are many ways to escape responsibility; escape into death, escape into illness and escape into stupidity. The latter is the safest and easiest, because even intelligent people are usually closer to this goal than they would like to think.”
— Arthur Schnitzler

It should be clear that a problem of such magnitude will probably not solve from itself. But it seems to me that most people don’t see it as their problem. But who exactly should we expect to change it then? Those who profit from it by legally achieving social status positions due to academic pseudo-merit they would otherwise probably have no chance to achieve? What exactly do we expect to happen if we allow the establishment of an academic reward system for producing bullshit? And no, expressing contempt is no problem solving, it only testifies to the arrangement with a situation by exploiting it for a minor personal status gain.

“If those who know why and how neglect to act, those who do not know will act and the world will continue to flounder.”
— Alfred Korcybski, Manhood of Humanity

Acting has its portions of wisdom to offer. One of them is that the king is always played by the others. Neither those who don’t understand the problem because they can’t or because nobody has taught them how they could, nor the few activists that push things forward for their undecent purposes are the main culprits of what is going on. The main culprits are those who despite better knowledge let it happen. It is those who have both the intellectual capacities and the education to see how wrong these things are. These people have at no time in the history of humankind been many and they have never been everybody’s darlings, so it can neither count as an excuse that they are too few nor that the crowds won’t take delight in flocking around them today. That is simply how it is, a sharper mind can’t, by the simple rules of probability, expect to find too much of a similarity with the minds of the many. That doesn’t relieve the sharper minds of their task. We can of course make the pursuit of our personal interest to maintain our own university job or the interest of maintaining a human relationship an argument to mute ourselves, but we should be very clear then that it is also us who help to build totalitarianism, because this is exactly how totalitarianism works. As I use to say: The Nazi movement was built by the Nazis and by those who slept with them. Totalitarianism can only work because it meets prepared grounds in our all sociality. All those who succumb to the passive opportunism of avoiding disadvantages by muting themselves at their workplaces, in their personal relationships and above all under the roof of the human knowledge project and there particularly at the places still called “uni” -versities help to build it, we are all responsible for how things have gone down and will be responsible if they go down further. Hoping for some sort of top-down regulation of these problems that would spare people the task of speaking up for themselves is quite a totalitarian idea itself. There is no such thing as “I am actually courageous, the others would just have to let me.” The self-pitying fashion term “self-censoring” deprives the individual from the obligation which is a precondition for a liberal society: to take up the responsibility for himself. It is nothing more than a euphemism for good old cowardice and it should be named as such because otherwise the value of courage will cease to exist.  

“It is simply a question of whether we are all really able to take full responsibility for our words to the last, whether we are really able to stand up for ourselves without reservation; to stand up fully for our proclamation with our practice and with its continuity and never – even if with the best intentions – to be driven into a corner by ourselves, be it through our own vanity or our own fear. This is not a call for calculation, but for authenticity.”
— Václav Havel, Attempt to Live in Truth

The unquestioned acceptance of an underlying “ballpeople” narrative has allowed the intrusion of anti-knowledge behaviour under the roof of the human knowledge project and it conceals the fact that the intruders deny their submission to the procedural rules that, one cannot put too much emphasis on, are what constitutes the human knowledge project, are what the human knowledge project is. It cannot be declared, it can not be labeled, a stamp on a certificate can not create it, it is solely defined by its processes. Distort them and there will be nothing left.

Maybe it is time to re-accept that finding resistance against the human knowledge project in the basic human condition is quite a stable property of the human knowledge project, it is basically its history. Maybe it is time to reconsider that as an expectable that must be dealt with as a natural part of the process. The human knowledge project might be about open-mindedness but it is for sure also about rigour. There can be no knowledge without disciplining brains into high-level cortical control processes most of them will have no automatic preference for. Rigour and sociality have always been in conflict, there is nothing new in that. “Letting five be even” is a German idiom that we use to describe the social ability to step away from one’s own rigidities if sociality requires it. But five is not an even number and we cannot allow people to fly airplanes for social reasons. This does not imply that we have to become less social. We have to become more social. We need a mature form of sociality, a knowledgeable sociality, instead of the ad hoc sociality of empathy, this preferably publicly displayed basic mammalian wagging tails function that has somehow managed to become the ethical gold standard of our time. Maybe we also feel all-too-safe, so maybe it is also time to re-acknowledge that the human knowledge project can lose its fights. There is not much comfort in the observation that it uses to lose them only temporarily. Thirteen years were sufficient to kill millions of people 80 years ago, they could, considering the advancements in technology, be highly sufficient to kill us all nowadays and there is also quite an amount of possible horrors far below that level of outcome.

It has never been smart to agree on a fight in which the opponent determines the weapons. The human knowledge project has unwisely done that, when it agreed to the fight of knowledge versus non-knowledge by the means of felt opinions in what we today call our public “discourse”. But politics will not be able to act if the human knowledge project fails to provide them with the means by which they could. In the realm of the dry-nosed monkeys that we are, social status is no irrelevant factor for deciding whom to follow. That is why knowledge hierachies must be kept intact. How should a politician credibly oppose an antiscientific claim if there are people who have written their PhDs about it and have built whole university careers on it? If the human knowledge project puts its authentification stamp under every sort of rubbish, one must not wonder if all sorts of rubbish come on the political agenda, bring rubbish people into power positions and finally constitute rubbish law.

It might be time for the human knowledge project to remember its own weapons. Instead of wasting time in entering moral discussions, which is what the opponents of the human knowledge project want and where they will win, because, as I have written before, objecting their claims on that level will feel for everybody who observes it as if one were attacking innocent people, anti-knowledge claims must be dismissed on the level of the processes of how knowledge is obtained. The human knowledge project must fight the opponents of the human knowledge project with the means of the human knowledge project: with better knowledge. The human knowledge project must find out what is actually going on and then find out how to do it better. It is clear that this work has to be done by those who are able to do it. Because the others can’t. The human knowledge project must return to its original story. It is the story of light versus dark.

A Space Dive Into Neural Sludge

“I have already pointed out that the devil whom the scientist is fighting is the devil of confusion, not of willful malice. The view that nature reveals an entropic tendency is Augustinian, not Manichaean. Its inability to undertake an aggressive policy, deliberately to defeat the scientist, means that its evil doing is the result of a weakness in his nature rather than of a specifically evil power that it may have, equal or inferior to the principles of order in the universe which, local and temporary as they may be, still are probably not too unlike what the religious man means by God. In Augustinianism, the black of the world is negative and is the mere absence of white, while in Manichaenism, white and black belong to two opposed armies drawn up in line facing one another.”
— Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings
“The presence of a feedback loop, even a rather simple one, constitutes for us humans a strong pressure to shift levels of description from the goalless level of mechanics (in which forces make things move) to the goal-oriented level of cybernetics (in which, to put it very bluntly, desires make things move). The latter is, as I have stressed, nothing but a more efficient rewording of the former; nonetheless, with systems that possess increasingly subtle and sophisticated types of feedback loops, that shorthand efficiency becomes well-nigh irresistible. And eventually, not only does teleological language become indispensable, but we cease to realize that there could be another perspective. At that point, it is locked into our worldview.”
— Douglas Hofstaedter, I am a Strange Loop
“It is not chance that the cleavage between natural and social sciences is greater than that between the sectors of natural science; it is a cleavage between substance and action, body and soul, the objective and the subjective. Inquiring man scans the universe with his sensory end organs, orders and classifies the information thus obtained, and so imposes a structure on the world he recognizes.”
— R.W. Gerard, Units and Concepts of Biology
“Perception is what we do.”
— György Buszáki, The Brain from Inside Out

Only the naive will assume that the questions about the structure of reality he is able to generate are independent from the filters through which he looks at the world. But even the smart reader will probably be not too fond of perceiving himself neither as an entropic piece of physical nature nor as a willful opponent of the scientist, and particularly not if the supposed image contains a number of devils. But we are in a moment of history when machines, who had already taken from us the major amount of work dependent on hands, actually start to overtake work that was till now dependent on brains, and might, similar to how it happened with the hands, do this work in many cases better than these. So I think it is a good moment to acknowledge that the struggle the human knowledge project once took up with nature includes the struggle with the human structure itself. 

Let’s do a hell of a space dive. Let’s start somewhere outside of our galaxy. We would see the galaxy, that somehow organized-unorganized looking something within nothing, we would enter it and aim towards our solar system, also somehow structured but not too structured, we would find our blue planet with its orderly-nonorderly distinctability of land and water, we would dive further and then start to see human settlements, that would suddenly seem much more organized to us than everything else we have seen before on our dive, one might even dare to say, that would look as if they were built on purpose and with meaning. Then we would start to see the humans and get the secure impression that they as well act on purpose and with meaning. It would now be a good moment to remind ourselves that not too long ago large parts of humanity had  the secure impression that the world around the human settlements, the earth, the solar system and what they thought was beyond that, was also acting on purpose and with meaning and this might give us a slight hunch that the sense of purpose and meaning might be more of a phenomenological category, a perceptual simplification, than something considerable on the level of a fact. Because if we continue our space dive, even closer to the human, into the human, we would see these self-replicating molecule chains as purpose- and meaningless as a solar system and coming down to the very same few basic laws of physics that organize a galaxy and being moved around, through all these human settlements on the surface of the planet by stuff called neurons, built upon their instructions with the only goal-non-goal to continue the self-replication process. The perceptual simplification down to “purpose” and “meaning” is done by our brains, which are themselves just built from neural sludge that is organized only sufficiently enough for seeking the necessary subgoals for the next self-replication. In that sense a human is perceivable as acting on purpose and acting in confusion at the same time, as teleological but also as a machinery that has built from confusion in a way that is by structure and function only to a sufficient degree able to oppose confusion and therefore also a piece of nature in all its entropic tendencies. The teleological and the entropic devil meet in the only-good-enoughness of the human apparatus. It has often been said that there can’t be a derivation of ethical principles from the facts of what is, but there is some logic in seeing this as a substantial call for mercy with us humans, one both rooted in the grounds of physics and in our own selfishness: We humans are badly built and even our most solicitous stretches for the better will always tend to be maximally good-enough. And as we only differ in degrees and not substantially, this applies to all of us and if we condemn the others we would also have to condemn ourselves.

Two Clinics, Applied Unity of Knowledge and a Neurosociological Hypothesis

“Physics rests on mathematics, chemistry on physics, biology on chemistry, and in principle, the social sciences on biology.”
— Robert Trivers, The Folly of Fools – The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life
“The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the first law of psychology.”
— John Tooby, Leda Cosmedes
“The social sciences need to take seriously their status as divisions of biology. As such they need to recognize the central role of Darwinian processes in all the phenomena they seek to explain.”
— Alex Rosenberg, Why Social Science is Biological Science
“The new knowledge that geneticists and neuroscientists are providing conjoined with the kinds of analyses we do best will enable us to take giant strides in understanding how societies, polities and economies really function.”
— Charles Murray, Human Diversity
“The subject of essential sex differences in the mind is clearly very delicate. I could tiptoe around it, but my guess is that you would like the theory of the book stated plainly. So here it is: The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.”
— Simon Baron-Cohen, The Essential Difference
“Each of us thinks we know what reality is. But different people have different perceptions of it. The sociologist is forced by the very logic of his discipline to ask, if nothing else, whether the difference between the two realities may not be understood in relation to various differences between the two societies.”
— Peter L. Berger, Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality
“Why the resistance? Because the social sciences have been in a grip of an orthodoxy that is scared stiff of biology.”
— Charles Murray, Human Diversity

As an acting teacher who doesn’t shy away from building complex multiple agent social scenes with beginner students, I might become easier aware than others that our highest social interactions are always built in material that will sooner or later start to rot, and therefore also on the instructions from the genes that built this material and on the organizational state of the nervous systems that have to conduct the material through the behavioural patterns from which a social scene is built. But we will hopefully soon all come to the insight that the human knowledge project has reached a point when a theoretical explanation of a social phenomenon should include a description on the level of the nervous systems that interact and the genetic structures that built them, we have acquired sufficient knowledge to start to try that. In that sense I am convinced that we neither know what a “group” actually is, nor what terms like “sociality”,  “ideology” or “functionality of the scientific community”  actually mean. We humans can learn high-level social skills of individual-to-individual cooperation. But it is also us humans who tend to walk despite red traffic lights if others walk and we don’t have to learn to do that, actually we have to learn to not to do that, to inhibit it. This is not individual-to-individual, it is across individuals, it is a larger whole that acts here. It might be worth asking if our so highly praised sociality might not also be settled on a primitive, subpersonal, neurological level as that of fish swarms and bird flocks. We were social before we were intelligent. Fish in swarms changing directions don’t cooperate, they exploit the others’ alarm systems and reactions because their own alarm systems and reactions are tied to theirs. And they don’t do that voluntarily, it is just how contagion is built into their systems. There is no decision to be made, it simply happens. This “do like the others do” might also be an aspect for human group behaviour and it must be clearly distinguished from a high skill like cooperation, because it is x levels lower in the hierarchy of how human behaviour builds. It might be worth to have a look at that. The “do like the others do” could be searched for across all sorts of groupish human behaviours. We could also ask questions as if there would be different patterns for what I would for working purposes like to provisionally label as a “subscientific neurological predisposition” than for “group behaviour neurological predisposition”. Again: A sharper mind might not be able to do sharp-mindedness in cohesion with a group, or said otherwise: Following questions will bifurcate people to individual paths, while having agreed on the meeting point in advance will keep a group together. No moral claim here, just probabilities. Also: No fact stated here, just analogy attempts in order to start to test-see something. Asking further: Would it become observable that different humans have different preferences? And what meta-processes would emerge on the group level if those more similar in these basic structures would group, and be left without external control, only exposed to the processes of within-group-regulation? And what would happen if whatever they did would be enforced by some sort of ongoing incentive? How would that look like? Has it ever happened? Do we have any data on that?

When the Viennese physician Ignaz Semmelweis made the unexpected discovery that gynaecologists would save mothers from dying from childbed fever if they washed their hands before helping them to give birth, he started his investigations in a very simple way. He was at that clinic where things were particularly bad, the deathrate for childbed fever was particularly high. He chose another clinic, where things were signficantly better. And he compared. That is how he found out, that at the other clinic, where it was midwifes that would help give birth, these midwifes did not, like the physicians in his clinic, spend their time in the corpse cellar obducating corpses, and did not walk upstairs and enter the labour room with corpse slime on their hands. Investigating our two cultures problem we could do the same. Because we actually have two clinics, the one where it has become actually pretty bad and the other where it is better (one might add “still”, because, as I’ve said, as long as you let things grow, they will come for you). It is the humanities and STEM. 

In a speech at Duke University 2016 social psychologist Jonathan Haidt spoke of the “two incompatible sacred values truth and justice”, that in his view divide the academic field. I have a personal bias against all sorts of axis symmetrical assumptions for ongoings among humans, because to me they always look as if the one that makes them mainly wants to appear as just without investing too much of investigational effort. “Both have their share” is the justice system of kindergardeners after all.  Also from all I have understood about humans (, we are not that unsimilar, ) it should be expected to find some “more A and less B versus more B and less A” structure, which is point symmetrical. Maybe that is why I don’t understand Haidt’s statement on the very basic level of language. If justice actually were a sacred value for the one side it would be clear that they would invest their finest and broadest effort in doing it right, which would of course mean that they would have to thoroughly work on the basis of the best approximation towards truth achievable. If on the other side “sacred” would mean more some sort of dance around a golden calf, I don’t see how the other side, holding truth as their sacred value, should have managed to build a mars rover or decoded the human genome by dancing around a calf. And if “sacred” means one thing for the one side and another thing for the other, it actually does not mean anything. 

Instead of constructing symmetry assumptions about our two clinics we could also simply have a look at data. Do we know of any differences between STEM and the humanities? I know of three.

1. Evaluations based on “systemizing-empathizing” theory show a higher density of so called systemizers in STEM.
2. a higher density of females in the humanities.
3. It that shall not be named (the I-word/ I*gence) is higher in STEM.

One can of course consider it as a pure coincidence that each of these three points touches on either a golden calf of our times (empathy! females! ) or at its negative equivalent, a taboo (sex differences! It that shall not be named!). But one can also not completely exclude that once again in the history of human problems it could turn out that the problem is exactly where we want to question the least. The systemizing side of the human population has been considerably questioned in terms of their special needs concerning human sociality. Maybe it is time to start asking some questions about the empathizing side of the human population in terms of their special needs concerning the human knowledge project. (I leave point 2. and 3. as probably somewhat correlated to point 1. aside for the moment. I’ve put some related articles at the end of this text. This is unfinished thought.)

Systemizing-empathizing theory is not the strongest theory under the sun, it is partly based on magical assumptions as that empathizers can read inner states from facial expressions. But we have to start somewhere and it could keep us awake that another theory behind S-E theory, the theory of autism, a behavioural image that has its historical origin in children who wouldn’t integrate socially in Nazi Austria and Stalinist Soviet Union, claims individual differences on the neurological level that resonate quite well with the ideas outlined above.

Who knows what it might lead to if we manage to know a bit more? It could lead to an image of the human that shows an all-humans-encompassing spectrum of diversity of the neurological apparatus. A whole range of adaptational variants for what we all have to cope with: The minimization of confusion in a confused world by a halfways non-confused apparatus, for whom uncertainty reduction might be of higher value than truth, where the ability of a brain to let five be an even number in order to be able to do what the others do might have been a survival condition, and where the neurological less-ability of a minority to do so might turn out as a significant contributing factor for what made the human knowledge project work. And it can, at the present moment, also not be excluded that it might turn out that the uncontrolled clustering of those more similar to each other might lead to such different group behaviours that somebody of the rare type of knowing both groups from inside could rightaway describe them as “Two Cultures”.

A Second Third Culture

“Show people how they are and they will change.”
— Anton Chekhov

The claim that you would have to show people how they are and that they then would change does usually not rise above levels of naivety, and this is true for both, its application and in its dismissal. But this is not a simple claim. In order to show people how they are one would first of all have to know how they are. Even more crucial, one would also have to know how to show something to somebody. The operation of “showing” does not end at the fingertips of the one who claims to show. It ends if the yet unseen arrives in the neurons of the other in the intended way, which means in a way that it unfolds into being of use there. That and only that is teaching, everything else is, although major parts of our educational system might function that way, nothing more than mock teaching. Not confronting this deep hidden demand in Chekhov’s claim, the ones are trapped in a lunatic loop of repeating the same sort of mock teaching over and over and the others watch them and base their judgement on seeing how things don’t work. There would also be a third option: to take Chekhov’s claim seriously. I don’t think we have tried that yet. I have some hunches why we haven’t.

We would have to radically stop lying to ourselves about ourselves. We would have to acknowledge who we humans are. Acknowledge that we are creatures whose brains like to do as the others do and that sociality might have its dark sides. Acknowledge that we will always be prone to ideology and that, as it fits so well with our sociality, our tilting there might feel like we are up to something good. Acknowledge that we are so social that our sociality might decide on what we take for truth. Acknowledge that we are just semi-conscious landmammals, that we are the dry-nosed monkeys with a little bit less of a fur. Acknowledge that the human brain is the most unreliable machine in the human knowledge project and that NI risks might be at least as relevant as AI risks. Acknowledge that we are not all the same by birth and that there are innate differences in the capabilities of people. Acknowledge that many people are lowly receptive to the model, the graph and the equation and in general to scientific knowledge. Acknowledge that we as a species are not particularly interested in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Acknowledge that not everybody might be equally suitable for the human knowledge project, that we can not allow unreflected behavioural preferences that distort its processes invade its core, and that it might be an act of responsibility to protect it from harm. Acknowledge that there might be people who will not be able to understand this necessity. Acknowledge that it might be difficult to make clear to somebody that something in his head is missing when the only thing by which he could understand that is the thing that is missing. Acknowledge that the assumption that knowledge would only have to be offered to people to make them smarter is wrong. Acknowledge that, although it is good method not to draw conclusions until one hasn’t collected a proper amount of data, after an observational period of 300 years we might carefully dare to conclude that John Locke was wrong when he stated that humans were blank slates eager to go for knowledge and reason. Acknowledge that it might actually testify of the darkness of an epoch that somebody would have had the idea to think up a term like “enlightenment”. Acknowledge that the enlightenment ideas themselves were ideas of their time and contained light only to the degree possible in actually still profound obscurity. Acknowledge that the Western educational project might have reached an impasse. Acknowledge that, if we want to maintain, or might even once again want to raise civilizational standards, we might have some questions to answer. Acknowledge that we don’t exactly know how to move on. 

With this ackowledgement, we would, in slight adaptation of a speech figure by Martin Luther King from 1963 maybe become able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. As somebody who has lived maximally half her life in what others call “reality” I am the last one to deny the existential necessity of dreams. But every sculptor knows that in order to express the quality he bore in mind in the real material of the stone, he will have to slow down and use his hammer to delicatelly negotiate with the thousands yet unknown rules the structure of the stone will object to him, because otherwise he will quickly break it. This process contains a dream as well: It is the dream, built out of the million subdreams called hypotheses, that it will be possible to find out how things are, and that we will then be able to make something that is good. It is the dream of the human knowledge project. Putting the image of a hammer on a banner is a human action of much more inferior quality. 

If we want liberty we need individuals that can do liberty. We need, at least, an agreement on a necessary minimum of voluntarily inbuilt mistake avoiding habits that will provide the sufficient degree of individual self-control that is necessary to let us live in freedom. The question of how this can be done is maybe the crucial educational question of our time. We would need an education more potent to “show” people how they are. It should probably be an education that would not or only to minor degrees require the model, the graph and the equation. And maybe we could find something to offer to those brains who will not grasp too much for the pop science book but would maybe eagerly grasp for something else? Could there be a second “third culture”? One that would be grounded in science, but would at the same time acknowledge the relevance of the means of the image, the narrative and the analogy, because this would allow access for many more minds? It should be social, incentive driven and part of a social structure that would give merit to the one who does it well. It should not be preached but ongoingly tested and re-tested on the grounds of reality and in interaction with other people. And it would be good and in the end also a question of accessiblility if it would contain no “ought to”, but instead be fun. It would have to be a game people would want to play.

I don’t think that it is a coincidence that ancient Greek theatre came to birth approximately at the same time as other organizational systems for above village size societies (democracy, the human knowledge project, trade, wisdom teachings, education, legal systems, sports and games) slowly started to emerge from human interaction. I think that acting could, if understood as a practical inquiry of human action and its improvement,  practiced with a sufficient degree of rigour in the application of its rules of the game and if keeping up at least with the low hanging fruit of the scientific knowledge of its time, be one among the contributors to fulfill the function of a second third culture of the knowledge of the human. This has, besides all the other unproven claims I have made in this article, become my own personal practical working hypothesis and my little attempt to contribute to an improvement. We will see.

The collectivist origins of theatre have been unduely praised. The theatre that interests me though came to life in the moment when one human dissolved out from the body of the Ancient Greek chorus, and suddenly found himself as the first proto-antagonist of theatre history, opposing the chorus that only then became visible as what it was, a bunch of humans in unison declaring the will of the gods. It was the moment when the one, by his pure emergence, would force the others into earthly dialogue, into the radical encounter of the human with the human at the marketplace of open questions. It was the artistic birth of observability of conflict. It was the artistic birth of mutual control. And it is immanent in the structure of that event that it was the artistic birth of the individual as well. 

Rust: You’re looking at it wrong, at the sky.
Marty: How’s that?
Rust: Once there was only dark. When you’re asking me, the light’s winning.

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