Echoes Underground

What do we learn from a museum? What knowledge is conveyed when you look at an object? Put a bunch of school children in the Egypt room at the British Museum… are they gaining any propositional knowledge about Ancient Egypt? Or are they actually gaining something more valuable, more visceral?Inspired by a recent day out wandering around some of Oxford’s more random museums (Museum of the History of Science! The Weston Library! The Pitt Rivers!), our co-host proposes that a well-curated museum can epistemologically produce more than the sum of its parts through good presentation and the juxtaposition of different objects. Being confronted by an object is completely different to reading a book. It’s a vibe, it’s inspiring, it’s an aesthetic experience. The muse descends in a museum.The Weston Library had an interesting exhibition on oracles and soothsaying, very minimalist - an old papyrus, an astrological almanac and an iPhone lined up side by side, all the same size, and the thing was that this was different ways that people have interacted with astrology over time. Make u think. The picture they had of a chicken oracle, and the story of Evans Pritchard using it for several years as his primary decision-making method with a good amount of success, makes one think.This is in contrast to the Pitt Rivers, which is a small dark room completely packed with random objects from around the world, grouping exhibits by what they’re for rather than geography or time. A Hawaiian spear next to a Macedonian spear, two objects far apart in space and time, have similarities and differences - something you only see by having them side by side. Why are they similar, why are they different? It’s not scientific, but you get the germ of a thought that can flourish into philosophy. We should Return - but why don’t we?We also spend a lot of time rhapsodising about a 10,000 year old handaxe one of us found in the Eye of the Sahara in Mauritania. It’s still sharp, still as useful as the day it was crafted by a human being long turned to dust by the desert wind.Here’s a link for the David Abulafia article we mention on the Benin Bronzes: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-danger-of-returning-the-ghanaian-crown-jewels/

Artem, guest extraordinaire, is back. He made us read Martin Heidegger’s essay The Age of the World Picture, and in this episode he achieves the impossible. Under his patient tutelage what had previously been an impenetrable, fastidious German hallucination became clear, meaningful, even actionableHeidegger’s work does not stand alone - he’s building on millennia of philosophical tradition, most recently Hume, Kant, Nietzsche and Hegel, and on top of that he is reacting to his mentor Husserl. The Age of the World Picture, however, can be read independently of all that. There’s very little phenomenology, the subjective viewpoint and intentionality are not mentioned, and instead we get a straightforward discussion of what modern thinking is, how it differs from the ancients and medievals, the institution features of modern science, and how all this relates to our view of what is in the world and how we interact with it.We did, however, want to understand a bit of what phenomenology is. A bit of intellectual context helps. Phenomenologists want us to stop thinking of senses as passive receivers. Instead our senses are reaching out into the world and constructing phenomena, applying pre-existing structures (redness, squareness) to help us make sense of what’s there. Our brains are modelling the world and checking that model against the input of the senses. We come to the world with a bunch of assumptions, and think about the world through these assumptions.The Age of the World Picture describes how the modern way of thinking about the world is just one bunch of assumptions, but crucially a bunch of assumptions that is compatible with the notion that there are other other bunches of assumptions that could be used instead. This idea that there can be different worldviews, that your own view is just one and it is different from the views enjoyed by the Greeks and the medievals, is a key aspect of the modern world view. We are even able to use different ways of thinking about the world, different ground plans, to do different things. The way you approach a physics problem, the ground plan you apply to understand it, is completely different to the way you approach a biological problem, not to mention a historical problem. We shift how we think about the world depending on context, and as a result we’re fragmented, splintered, alienated from having to constantly context switch. We become relativist, and try to reintroduce normativity by creating “values” as objects in themselves that can give us some moral grounding. But as Heidegger puts it, “nobody dies for mere values”. We need to find a new way of thinking about the world if we are to move forwards.

Our co-host has experienced the first stirrings of a desire to become a bird watcher. How did this happen? He looked out of the window, and saw what he now knows to be pied wagtails. They were flitting around the bins, darting around, wagging their tails, and he thought they were very charming and fascinating and lovely. They were quick, their quickness was mesmeric. He looked them up, found that they were wagtails, and he found this whole experience very satisfying. Now, whenever he has a lazy morning with nothing else on, he’ll go out into the garden with a cup of coffee, and sit there watching (and identifying) the birds.He’s at the start of a long journey, but is wary about what this says about him. We can reassure him with tales of Victorian excellence, or Jim Corbett or Gerald Durrell, or Stephen Maturin of Master and Commander fame. But still, what’s going on here? There’s certainly no practical application of this (as there may have been a century ago).There’s an innate satisfaction in being able to classify the world around us (a common British affliction) and to be able to name things. It’s a good excuse to get outside and go on a walk - or even to sit outside in silence without your phone, which is unquestionably healthy but difficult to give yourself permission to do. And, actually, humans are predators and we rarely get the opportunity to exhibit the hunting behaviour that is innate to us all, if suppressed. Bird watching gives us a harmless outlet for our ancient instincts.But above all, they are hypnotic, entrancing, bewitching. There’s a sense of the magical about birds. They live in a world apart from ours, navigating the world in a different way to us, free in their flight, brightly colourful. It’s no surprise that birds are often used as omens and metaphors in literature - especially metaphors of thought and the mind.

Why is Pilate the only normal human being to be mentioned in the Nicean Creed? It’s an interesting selection of detail in a short and technical statement of theological belief to focus on the colonial governor who, under substantial local pressure, sentenced Jesus to death by crucifixion. For 1,700 years, Christians the world over have repeated every Sunday the words “crucified under Pontius Pilate”.A solid explanation is dating. Rather than using numbers to construct a timeline, Romans dated events through reference to who was in the locally important office that year. This reference in the Creed to Pilate can therefore be seen to situate Christ’s Passion firmly in the historical timeline - both the precise date, and the more general fact that this took place in the historical timeline at all, in the world of men. This isn’t abstract theology, this actually happened.More importantly for ritual purposes, however, this reference also sucks us into the narrative. It places us at the moment where Pilate has to make a difficult decision, where matters of spirit have suddenly intruded on his daily struggles in matters of state. It’s clear that Pilate did not want to execute Jesus - he did his best to come to a compromise, give Jesus a way out, pass on responsibility, and generally fudge the issue. In the end, though, killing Jesus was the easy option, preventing a rebellion in a generally difficult imperial province, maintaining relationships with local power structures, avoiding failure in Tiberius’ eyes.To help understand the situation Pilate faced, we dig into the evidence for his period as Prefect of Judea under Tiberius - the Pilate Stone, coins, references in Roman texts - and try to think through the events of the Gospels from a Roman point of view. Pilate comes across as a military man, both a result of his position in what was certainly a military post and due to his nickname Pilatus, meaning “skilled with a javelin”. We know he initially intended to rule with an iron fist in the manner Tiberius would expect before coming face to face with the Judeans’ stubbornness and thereafter having to take a more crafty and pragmatic approach. He was in post for ten years, a long time indicating a high degree of competence, before being recalled to Rome having brutally put down a rebellion.Albeit reluctantly, Pilate ended up putting temporal concerns above the spiritual. He took the easy, pragmatic way out, kept the peace, but committed an enormity at the same time. Who among us can say with confidence that we would have done differently?

What was it like to live in a culture where blood sacrifice was a part of everyday life? Sacrifice was ubiquitous across all human cultures until very recently, but we have lost that visceral knowledge of how it felt and what it meant and as a result have a gap in our models of how people in the past experienced the world. Why were people in the ancient world cutting the throats of bulls, digging into their guts, catching their blood?Nobody sacrifices fish or dogs - it’s always a domestic animal, a cow, an ox or a goat, bonus points for it being a magnificent specimen in its prime. You wash it, decorate it then lead it to the altar in a procession. The altar is in front of the temple, whose doors are open so the god can see. There will be a priest, perhaps a flute player, some burly attendants who maneuver the animal, a butcher and perhaps an augur. You throw some grains over the head of the animal, cut some hair from its head and throw it on the fire. Finally, you need the beast’s consent, so you pour some water over its head so it nods. Then you’re ready. An attendant bashes it over the head, a priest removes a small knife from its hiding place in a bushel of wheat, and he cuts the victim’s throat the women in attendance ululate. The blood is caught in a bowl, some is thrown on the fire along with the entrails and the thigh bones smeared with fat - the god’s share. The meat is boiled, and shared among all those present.We don’t do this anymore, but it is interesting that the word “sacrifice” comes up quite often in the contemporary discourse beyond the weaker meaning of “giving up something now in return for a future benefit”. When we talk about the sacrifice made by the young during the COVID lockdowns, or the ultimate sacrifice made by so many young men during the Great War, when something is serious, extreme, we consciously or unconsciously find ourselves tying it back to the tradition of blood sacrifice. They died so that we might live.The central insight of all mystical traditions is that life is death and death is life, and the ritual that represents this insight into the true nature of reality is sacrifice. It allows you to experience the union of life and death, and without experience, without embodied knowledge, your understanding of anything is no better than if you had taken a correspondence course. “We establish a connection with the unknown through the act of giving something and, paradoxically, the act of destroying something.” So writes Roberto Calasso in the Ruin of Kasch. What you destroy in a blood sacrifice is life itself. You are sacrificing the cow, but the cow is you - representing the surplus that sustains your life.Through his crucifixion, the willing sacrifice of literally a God, Christ completed the sacrifice quest for mankind. With focused intellectual engagement, the ritual of the Eucharist takes the congregation through the ritual of blood sacrifice. But Christianity’s grip on Western culture has been loosened, and for those not going to church regularly there is a sacrifice-shaped hole in their psyche. That visceral understanding that life is death has been lost, and without it we are flapping in the wind.We refer to the Stalingrad Madonna - see it here, it’s worth a minute of your time.

How do we know that the fall of Rome in 479 AD was 1,546 years ago? Empires have risen and fallen since then, a dark age took place, historical records are fragmentary, not continuous, and they are often politically motivated or even fabricated. Do we really have any confidence that the Earth has gone round the Sun 1,546 times since Rome fell? Can we really trust the historical timeline?There are some compelling arguments that there are a couple of hundred to even a thousand extra years in our timeline - years that didn’t actually exist. One version is that Holy Roman Emperor Otto III and Pope Sylvester II conspired to add 279 years to the Anno Domini dating system in order to place themselves in the year 1,000 AD and strengthen Otto’s claim to the throne.The more interesting version, however, comes from Anatoly Fomenko, a Russian professor of mathematics who wrote History: Fiction or Science? He argues that the known physics of the moon orbiting the Earth disagrees with the historical timeline’s account of when solar eclipses happened (which imply a position of the moon at that moment in time). For example, the series of three eclipses that take place during the Sicilian Campaign according to Thucydides could only have happened nine centuries ago, not the 2,400 years ago the standard timeline places this event at. Physics and the historical record can only be reconciled if you accept that the historical timeline has hundreds of extra years added - either by accident and inaccuracy or via a grand papal conspiracy.We go over Fomenko’s main arguments, and the obvious defences of the status quo - radiocarbon dating and dendrochronology, Occam’s Razor, or an analysis of who benefits geopolitically from the promulgation of this theory. But there’s enough uncertainty to leave a non-zero chance that perhaps there is something badly wrong with our understanding of the historical record. And even if it is rubbish, it’s an interesting idea to play with. Conspiracy theories, even at their worst, force us to examine the foundation stones our knowledge systems are built on, and it’s worth investing some time every now and then to check that they are indeed sound.

Did life develop on Earth, or did it come from the stars? Is outer space actually teeming with life? One of our hosts spent the week down the Chandra Wickramasinge internet rabbithole and has some Opinions. The idea of panspermia is that life is everywhere across the universe. More specifically, if abiogenesis did happen, it probably happened elsewhere, and there is life on Earth simply because life is widespread. Fermi’s Paradox makes this feel unlikely - if there’s so much life out there, why haven’t we seen it? Well, the leading exponents of panspermia argue that in fact we have, in fact the world is being hosed down by protein chains all the time, driven across the void by the solar winds. We don’t notice them because they’re the same as the protein chains that are on Earth already. Obviously. More intense exponents - Sir Frank Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinge - go further and argue that interstellar medium is not just filled with protein chains but is in fact riddled with bacteria and viruses. They’re everywhere, and the massive dust clouds we see in those beautiful false colour space telescope images are their desiccated corpses. Alarmingly, this seems to be backed up by spectrographic analysis (although we’re ill-placed to verify this), and high altitude weather balloons do get covered in bacteria. Now that SpaceX are getting Starship up and running and will be hitting Mars soon we might get some even stronger evidence about this soon - that will be the real test.Why are scientists so against this? It’s nothing to do with the data, apparently - this is bias, an medieval Earth-centric prejudice. We used to believe that Earth was the centre of the universe, but then the Copernican Principle emerged and we now understand that from a cosmic point of view Earth is not particularly special. Nowhere is. Why can’t we apply this idea to life itself?

Why are so many rocks in the Arabian desert covered in ancient graffiti? And why is so much of this graffiti lists of ancestors? We coincidentally both read the same paper by Michael C.A. MacDonald, a complete legend, and it sparked an interesting chain of thought. An oral society is not less sophisticated than a literate one. You lose a lot of value when you switch to literacy. In particular, you lose flexibility - in oral societies, poems for example change constantly with each retelling. New bits are added, the fat is cut, the themes are updated for the audience being addressed. The Iliad shows the power of what this process can achieve. As a desert nomad, hospitality and cooperation between strangers is crucial. In a series of one shot prisoners’ dilemmas in a hostile and remote environment, how do you make this happen? You need to link your identity to a wider body, a clan. When you establish this link, your clan becomes accountable for your actions, and you for theirs. Furthermore, individuals far from home can establish how their two clans relate to each other by looking back up the chain and using this to establish a basis for cooperation.Then you add the flexibility of an oral society, which enables cooperative fabrication - aha, that Diogenes in my family tree must be the same Diogenes that’s in yours. A link is established, the record updated. We can see genealogies shifting over time as the relationships between clans shifted, the record updated as a result of thousands of interactions and negotiations.We propose that this is a proto distributed ledger, an ancestor of today’s blockchains. There is not a single source of truth, but instead thousands of nodes all holding part of the overall database. The power is in the overall consensus, the agreement between all the players in the system. In fact if you can get enough nodes to agree to change the record, they will outvote everyone else and the change will become the truth.While a centralised database has enormous benefits to productivity, we lose flexibility, the ability to change and forget and collaboratively create an updated reality. This ability to be inconsistent, to develop and change, is part of our human advantage, and a permanent central record of everything we’ve done means we’ve lost something.