Bouquet (No. 1)
Giraffes are aliens
Well, not actually. But when I came across this photo* on Reddit, I was struck by a peculiar thought.
If we weren’t already familiar with giraffes—if we hadn’t seen pictures of them since childhood and regularly encountered them (and perhaps even fed them!) at zoos—we would find them fantastically bizarre and perhaps even terrifying. Look again at that picture and try to pretend that you’ve never seen a giraffe before…wouldn’t you think you were gazing upon some incredible alien species lumbering across its strange planet? Who are these oddly-patterned long-legged behemoths with preposterously tall necks?!
I think it’s funny how we try so hard to imagine alien life, when in fact there are any number of creatures here on Earth that are weird as hell, but we’ve become numbed to their weirdness by frequent exposure. Heck, perhaps other animals look at humans—the only (mostly) hairless and fully upright species of ape—and find us as strange and horrifying as we would find a type of featherless and flightless bird!
*Credit Simen Johan, who apparently does retouch his photos to make them more otherworldly, but in doing so helps us look at familiar creatures in a new light.
The Matrix picked the wrong era
In the movie The Matrix, we find out that the triumphant AIs, in their effort to continuously control and exploit human beings, have locked our species in a simulated world (aka “the Matrix”) based on the late 1990s. Agent Smith, during his interrogation of Morpheus, elaborates on this decision:
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.
There’s some solid reasoning behind this. Many philosophers have argued that dissatisfaction is endemic to humans—see Buddhism’s idea of dukkha—and so a utopia could never succeed here on earth. Indeed, every attempt at a utopian community in human history has failed utterly. But in addition to engendering human dissatisfaction, the AIs would have done well to also maximize human acquiescence (thereby diminishing the likelihood of people “waking up” and leading a revolt, as happens in the movie). To this point, I think “the Matrix” might have proven far more durable had it simulated the ancient or medieval world.
For starters, in the pre-modern world, there was more than enough “suffering and misery” to go around: violence, slavery, disease, famine, you name it. Of course, we still have some of that in the modern era, but as Steven Pinker and others have pointed out, our world today is far more peaceful and prosperous than any other period in human history. So if people do indeed define their reality through suffering and misery, as Agent Smith proposes, there are much better time periods for inciting that kind of distress.
But here’s the other downside in choosing the “peak civilization” of the 1990s: people in the modern era typically believe in things like equal rights and human dignity and—most importantly—science and progress. The people of the ancient and medieval worlds had no such conceptions. The idea of progress—that things would steadily get better, that our species would advance morally and technologically—was completely foreign to pre-modern societies. They regarded innovation with suspicion, and tended to yearn not for some utopian future but instead for a mythical past. Granted, many folks did believe in the idea of heaven, but that heaven was always separate from earth and could be obtained only with divine intervention, never by the works of man alone.
Which is why the modern era, especially the 20th century and beyond, is a terrible environment for acquiescence. Modern humans see suffering and misery and believe wholeheartedly that it can be eliminated, and they will strive terrifically to do so. Long gone is the fatalism of the ancient and medieval worlds, where people tended to accept their lot in life and attribute their misfortunes to the will of God or the hand of fate—forces beyond their understanding or control. In the Middle Ages, a devastating plague would be met with hopeful prayer for divine intervention, but otherwise accepted and endured sorrowfully. Such a plague in our modern era? We would fight it tooth and claw, relentlessly pursuing its source and confidently devising means to defeat it. The modern era is one of undying hope—not for a place in heaven, but for a heaven on earth. And that sort of mindset makes contemporary humans (represented in the film by Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus) extremely dangerous to any system that requires a docile population.
So yes, the AIs would have been much better off setting up shop in the 10th century rather than the 20th. Plenty of suffering and misery back then, without the annoyingly optimistic view of “progress” and the unshakeable confidence in the “human spirit.” And even if a few curious people did somehow discover the truth behind their simulated world, their more fatalistic mindset would accept it with greater ease, and they would likely try to appease their god-like AI overlords instead of attempting to challenge and overthrow them.
The danger of names
Chapter 32 of the Tao Te Ching says:
Begin to make order, and names arise.
Names lead to more names…
Know when to stop:
Avoid danger.
Naming things is tricky. Doing so can help us make some sense of our world. But as with all good things, there is danger in excess. The more we name, the more we separate ourselves from the rest of creation. A human points to another animal and says, “I am man and you are beast.” The distinction between species can be helpful, but can also give rise to unfounded value judgments, such as: “Man is separate from and superior to the beasts, and therefore we may slay them or imprison them or take their lands for ourselves.” A male human points to a female human and says, “We are different. I will be called man and you will be called woman.” But more restrictive names inevitably follow, including “wife” and “whore.” A light-skinned person points to a dark-skinned person and says, “We are different. I will be called white and you will be called black.” But more degrading names are sure to follow, including “savage” and “slave.”
Our world is filling up with names at an exponential rate. Every star or species we discover must be named (even if it’s just a string of letters and numbers, or a pair of dusty Latin words). And although bestowing these names may seem like a step forward in learning, it is also a step backward into forgetfulness, helping us to ignore that the atoms that make up our body were born in that faint old star, and to deny that we once shared a common ancestor with that strange new species. In assigning something a different name, we naturally focus more on the differences between ourselves and that thing. Taken to extremes, this fragmentation can cause suffering and mistrust. In our modern society, identity politics and intersectionality, although born from a noble quest to reclaim dignity and equality, are rapidly devolving into an orgy of hyper-precise naming, resulting in more and smaller groups that are defined entirely by differences at the expense of commonalities.
A name can represent what a thing is or does, but not why. A name can capture form but not essence. As Shakespeare’s Romeo famously opined: “What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” You can call me Jonathan, and in doing so conjure an image of my physical form and my voice and perhaps certain general behaviors or mannerisms. The name is a useful placeholder, but it does not begin to encompass the entirety of my life: my thoughts, my emotions, who I am now in this moment (as well as who I have been and who I will be). A name is merely a kind of gesture that indicates something far larger and much harder to define. To paraphrase the Buddha, a name is like a finger pointing to the moon; do not mistake the pointing finger for the moon!
As the Tao Te Ching counsels, we should learn when to stop naming things. There is a point beyond which clarity and usefulness give way to dissociation and discrimination. Modern humans have reached that point, and our fervor for naming—for categorization and classification—is convincing us that we are isolated individuals and separate from any other person or thing, when in fact we are an inextricable part of the whole and fundamentally at one with everything.
