The Seneca Cliff of Rhetoric: Just say no to Powerpoint

"The orator" (l'arringatore), an Etruscan statue probably made during the 1st century BC, presently at the Archaeological Museum in Florence, Italy. Surely, he had no idea that his descendants would have used PowerPoint slides!

At the time of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, not only PowerPoint didn't exist, but not even such things as books or paper. For Seneca, a "book" was something written on parchment scrolls and when he took notes he probably used waxed wood tablets. Presenting one's ideas in public was part of the art of rhetoric, nearly completely based on words and gestures. 

Rhetoric is a term that has acquired a negative ring in our times, but that was originally understood as a skill that a learned person should study and practice. Unfortunately, today rhetoric has been gradually replaced by the barbaric method of droning on while reading written words appearing on a lighted screen. If Seneca is looking at us from the Elysian fields, he can only gravely shake his head at seeing how rhetoric went down what I call a "Seneca Cliff."

That had been clear to me for a long time, but it appeared painfully evident with the diffusion of on-line seminars. The latest on-line lecture I gave, a few days ago, was attended mainly by ghosts. Theoretically, 21 students were listening to me, but only three or four of them were gracious enough to show their faces on the screen. The others simply refused to appear, even when I explicitly invited them to do so. I don't think this behavior is understood to be bad manners. Apparently, it is believed that it is perfectly legitimate for a student to lurk in the shadows while a teacher speaks. That wouldn't be so nice in a real classroom: imagine that your students were to appear wearing hoods hiding their faces! 

But I can understand the defensive reaction of students. They are used to the well-known phenomenon of the "death by PowerPoint" -- your consciousness slowly drifting away while someone speaks reading from a nearly infinite series of slides.

 

But too much is too much. Enough with death by PowerPoint, now it is the time of the death of PowerPoint. With the advent of virtual lectures and virtual classes, there is no reason to continue to use a tool that's by now obsolete. I think it is time to say NO to PowerPoint. 

And that's what I did for that lecture: I had a PowerPoint presentation ready, but I didn't show it. I just spoke, and when I needed an image or a movie clip, I opened up the browser, I searched for it on the spot, and I showed it on screen. Easy, flexible, and interactive.

Did it work? I think so. Not that it revived all the ghost-students (maybe they weren't even there!), but at least a few more showed up and engaged in a discussion with me. I am planning to move away completely from PowerPoint, even though I still have to use it because a lot of my data and images are in there. I don't think I will ever become an orator as good as Seneca must have been in his times, but I am exploring this new way of presenting. And maybe old Seneca himself would approve!

 A brief history of how rhetoric fell down the Seneca Cliff.  

Image Source

When I was in college, it was traditional that teachers would use the blackboard as their only classroom tool. Occasionally, some of them would organize demonstrations of chemical reactions in front of the class but, mostly, they were supposed to go on for 1-2 hours writing mathematical and chemical formulas on the board. In the figure, you see Richard Feynman teaching in the 1960s.

When I started teaching, in the 1980s, that was still the standard way you were expected to do your job. You would keep writing formulas on the blackboard without ever resorting to written notes. It took quite some work of memorization and a certain ability of juggling numbers and symbols, but it was the way it was supposed to be done. It was not different from the way professional actors would learn to play their roles on the scene.

An alternative was the slide projector, loaded with 35 mm photographic slides in carousels or straight trays. I remember that I used it for my first presentations. It had the advantage that it could project images, but it was inflexible. Once you had loaded the tray, you could only show the slides in a pre-ordered frequency, just as you would fire the bullets from the clip in your automatic pistol. If you wanted to insert one slide in the middle, you had to unload all of them, and then reload the whole tray. Just like automatic guns, these things would sometimes jam. A couple of times, I saw the tray being spit out of the machine, spewing out the slides all over the room. But you had plenty more problems: slides appearing upside down, slides not belonging to the presentation, missing slides, and more.

Somewhat later, there came the overhead projector. It became standard equipment in the 1980s and was still in use in the 1990s. The projector used transparent sheets to project pre-printed text and images, usually only in black and white because color photocopiers were rare and expensive. It was also possible to project the silhouette of whatever you placed on the projector table and that could be used creatively to perform small on-screen demonstrations. You could even write with a marker on the sheet while presenting. You could draw arrows, symbols, and text.

Unlike slide projectors, the overhead projector was flexible. You would carry with you a folder with a number of transparent sheets and arrange them according to what you needed. Even while presenting, you always knew what the next image was and could decide to skip it or present another one. 

It was practical, yes, but also the harbinger of things to come. Once you had your transparent sheets ready, you didn't have to engage anymore in the mental gymnastic needed to memorize the formulas to write. For a while, I tried to resist and I kept making a point not to use projectors in the classroom. But, eventually, I gave up, just like all my colleagues. So many things to do, and how to resist the temptation of making life a little easier?

And then, there came PowerPoint. You see in the figure (from Google Ngrams) how Powerpoint came to dominate the narrative.

  

Apparently, the slide projector existed already in the 1940s, then it was slowly overcome by the overhead projector. Then, both were supplanted by the onrush of Powerpoint. In turn, Powerpoint seems to be declining, nowadays, but it is still the most mentioned method.

In many respects, Powerpoint is like the slide projector, but without the risk of jamming or seeing your slides flying in the room. But it was inflexible, too. Once you had your presentation loaded, you couldn't change it anymore on the spot. I remember an occasion when I was the chairman of a session at a conference and I invited one of the speakers to shorten his presentation. He looked at me with a sheepish expression and he said, "how can I do that? I use PowerPoint." Speakers were becoming slaves of their software.I don't know how it became the standard that the speaker (or the teacher) was supposed to do little more than reading whatever she had previously written. It was the triumph of bullet lists. University lectures never were supposed to be fun, but the whole thing became an exercise in futility. The students would just look at you with vitreous eyes and then ask you the PowerPoint file so that they could study it at home. With the advent of online teaching, the students don't even have to look at you with vitreous eyes anymore. They can sleep or just pretend that they are there.

 

And here we are. It is the curse of living in a decadent period, just like when the last Roman poets, from Ausonius to Claudian, lost the skills of their predecessors and couldn't do anything better than aping them. That's what we are doing with these curious rituals we call "webinars" or "on-line classes" that consist of reading from bright images on a screen. Maybe it is because, really, we don't have anything relevant to tell people anymore. We see it everywhere, especially on social media where the attention span is of the order of a few seconds, the insult is the communication standard, and nothing relevant is ever discussed. 

But never despair, if rhetoric went down a Seneca Cliff, there is always a Seneca Rebound after you hit the bottom. And we can improve. Down with PowerPoint!!

The Problem of the Shipwrecked Sailor: When Money Becomes Useless

 

The Covid crisis highlighted an already existing problem: that money is useless if you can't buy anything useful with it. It is the problem of the shipwrecked sailor on a deserted island. (image from Wikimedia): money won't help him survive. So, lockdowns and restrictions gave us a taste of a future where money may be worth nothing simply because there is nothing you can buy with it. It is a problem ultimately connected with the unavoidable depletion of the fossil fuels that form the basis of our economy: with less energy, we cannot keep making the stuff that makes it possible to indulge in conspicuous consumption. So, after the Covid, society will never be the same. Taking into account that history never repeats itself, but it does rhyme, here I examine the situation starting with a parallel with the history of the Roman Empire.

The Roman Crisis: When Money Couldn't buy Anything

Imagine living in Rome at some moment during the 1st century AD (the time of Lucius Annaeus Seneca). At that time, Rome, with perhaps one million inhabitants, was the largest city in the world and probably the largest emporium ever seen in history. Through the Silk Road, one caravan after the other were bringing to Rome all sorts of goods from Asia: pepper, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, sandalwood, pearls, rubies, diamonds, and emeralds. And then ivory, silk, glassware, perfumes, jewels, unguents, and much more: exotic birds, special food, slaves to be used as workers and as sex objects. Then, there was the entertainment: in Rome, you had theaters, chariot races, gladiator games, fights among exotic animals, and all sorts of performers with their magic tricks, their songs, and their spectacles. 

You could enjoy all that if you had money. And the Romans had money: they minted it. They had control over the richest precious metal mines of the ancient world, in the northern region of Hispania. There, tens of thousands of slaves, perhaps hundreds of thousands, were engaged in a work that Pliny the Elder described as "the ruin of the mountains" (ruina montium), the process of crushing rock into sand to extract the tiny specks of gold and silver it contained. 

With the gold and the silver they mined, the Romans paid their legions. Then, the legions would invade regions outside the Empire and capture slaves that would mine more gold to pay more legions. And, as long as the mines were producing, the Romans had gold aplenty, even though a lot of it was sent to China and to other regions of Asia to pay for the luxury goods they imported and that kept the economic machine of the empire working. For an empire to exist, money is everything.

Of course, then as now, not everyone had the same amount of money. In Rome, the rich took most of it, but some money trickled down to the artisans, the performers, the employees; everyone from cooks to prostitutes would get a share, maybe a small one, but still something. Even the slaves, destitute by definition, could own a little money. It is possible that, occasionally, their masters would give them a few coppers to buy a cup of Falerno wine or admission to the chariot races.

But the rich Romans were truly rich. And their lifestyle was all based on showing off their wealth. Read this excerpt from Cassius Dio about a wealthy Roman patrician, Vedius Pollio.

. . . he kept in reservoirs huge lampreys that had been trained to eat men, and he was accustomed to throw to them such of his slaves as he desired to put to death. Once, when he was entertaining Augustus, his cup-bearer broke a crystal goblet, and without regard for his guest, Pollio ordered the fellow to be thrown to the lampreys. Hereupon the slave fell on his knees before Augustus and supplicated him, and Augustus at first tried to persuade Pollio not to commit so monstrous a deed. Then, when Pollio paid no heed to him, the emperor said, 'Bring all the rest of the drinking vessels which are of like sort or any others of value that you possess, in order that I may use them,' and when they were brought, he ordered them to be broken. (Roman History (LIV.23))

This story must have been well known since is reported also by Seneca, Plinius, and Tertullianus. That makes me suspect that it is false, or at least exaggerated. Apart from the "lampreys" that were probably "morays," it may well have been a fabrication by Octavianus, aka Augustus, who was truly an expert in self-promotion. But it doesn't matter whether the story is true or not. The ancient Romans found it believable, so it gives us a hint of their way of thinking. 

Probably, the Romans didn't see the moral of the story in the same way we see it nowadays. For them, it was perfectly normal that slaves could be put to death by their owners at any moment, for any reason. The point of this story is that it shows that the Romans were practicing what we call today "conspicuous consumption." Pollio was filthy rich, and he loved to show off his wealth. Surely, he was not the only one: there are other examples of rich Romans displaying their wealth with sumptuous villas, lavish entertainment, fashionable clothes, jewels, and entourages of slaves and hangers-on. Then, the Emperor was the richest person in Rome. It was traditional that he would show his wealth and power by distributing food for the poor, and entertaining citizens with extravagant games and spectacles. 

In short, Imperial Rome was not unlike our age: the rich were enormously rich, but something of their wealth trickled down to the rest of the people. Surely, on all the steps of the social ladder, people played the consumption game in order to keep up with the Joneses. It was always the same story. Money is a tool for commerce, of course, but also a way to establish the social hierarchy. 

Then, things started going wrong, as they always do. For the Roman Empire, controlling a territory that stretched from Britannia to Cappadocia required an enormously expensive military apparatus and it was becoming more and more difficult to find enough money for the task. We have no records of the output of the precious metal mines in Roman times, but from the archeological data, it seems that depletion was already biting during the early centuries of the Empire. It is typical of mining: you don't run out of anything all of a sudden, but the cost of extraction keeps increasing.

Surely, enormous efforts were made to try to stave off the decline of the mines. But the Seneca Cliff is unavoidable when you deal with non-renewable resources. The cliff started approximately at the beginning of the 2nd century AD. One century later, the imperial mines had ceased producing anything. They would never recover.  (image from McDonnell et al.)

No gold, no empire. The mining collapse nearly brought the empire to its end during the 3rd century. It was a series of reciprocally reinforcing effects. The gold that was sent to China couldn't be replaced by mining. Then, less gold meant fewer troops, which meant fewer slaves, and that, in turn, meant even less gold. The result was a series of civil wars, foreign invasions, general turmoil, and overall economic decline.

The Roman Empire could have disappeared by the end of the 3rd century. In practice, it managed to survive for a couple of centuries more in a much poorer version. For one thing, the Romans couldn't afford anymore the luxuries that they once would pay with the gold they mined. As you would expect, the poor were the first to be hit, while the rich tended to maintain their extravagant lifestyle as long as they could. But the whole society was affected.

For the late Roman Empire, the problem was not just that the system had run out of gold. At some point, the Romans must have stopped, or at least greatly reduced, the flow of luxury goods from China. At that point, the rich Romans still had some gold. See this gold solidus coin minted at the time of emperor Constantine the Great, in mid 4th century AD.

But what could you buy with these beautiful coins? At that time, all the Western Roman Empire could produce were legions and tax collectors and, without imports from abroad, Rome had become a grim military outpost, not anymore the greatest emporium of the world. 

Those who still had gold found themselves in the position of a shipwrecked sailor on a deserted island. Coconuts aplenty, perhaps, but no way to play the game of conspicuous consumption. Already with Augustus, the first emperor, we see a legal trend that aimed at limiting the excesses of wealth that the Romans could display. It was a gradual process that was completed only with the diffusion of Christianity in Europe and Islam in North Africa and the Middle East. It was unavoidable, and it happened.

So, in these late Roman times, gold had lost much of its luster. Those who still had it started burying it underground, with the idea of keeping it for better times. Modern archaeologists are still finding gold buried at that time. That was the probable origins of our legends about dragons living in caves and sitting on hoards of gold. People knew that plenty of gold had been buried but, unfortunately for them, they lacked the metal detectors we have today! In any case, that was the end of the Roman Empire. As I said, no gold, no money, no empire. 

Creative money: the relics of Middle Ages

When the Roman Empire faded, it was replaced in Europe by the era we call the Middle Ages. Then, people found themselves with a big problem: how to keep society together without the precious metals needed to mint money? And, even worse, without much that money could be spent on? The Middle Ages were a period of fragmented petty kingdoms and scattered villages, but there still was a need for a commercial system that would move goods around. But how to create it without metal money?

Our Medieval ancestors creatively solved the problem with a completely new kind of money. It was based on relics. Yes, the bones of holy men, meticulously collected, authenticated, and issued by the authority of the time, the Christian Church. Not only relics were rare and sought after, but they could also provide a service that not even the Roman gold could provide when it was abundant: health in the form of divine interventions. (In the figure, 18th-century relics owned by the author. They look like coins, they feel like coins, they are shaped like coins -- they are coins!)

These relics were a form of virtual money but, after all, all money is virtual. Even a gold coin promises something (wealth) that in itself cannot guarantee unless there is a market where you can spend it. And the fact that money can be spent depends on people believing it to be "real" money, mostly an act of faith. In the same way, a relic is a virtual object that has no value in itself. It promises something (health) that can be delivered if you believe in it. It was, again, an act of faith based on the belief that the little chunks of bone that the relics contained were actually coming from the body of a holy man of the past. 

 

The beauty of the relic-based monetary system was that relics were not "spent" in markets. You could own relics, but you could grant their health benefits to others and still keep the relics. In other words, you could spend your money (eat your cake) and still have it!. Relic-money was managed mainly by public institutions such as monasteries and churches. They owned the most prized relics and were the places where pilgrims flocked to be healed by the powerful holy aura that these relics emanated.

 

The commercial system of the Middle Ages evolved in large part around relics. Travel was encouraged in the form of pilgrimages to the holy sites, and that would create an exchange economy based on charity. Conspicuous consumption was simply not possible in the relatively poor economy of the Middle Ages. Consequently, the Christian philosophy de-emphasized consumption and condemned social inequality. The highest virtue for a Medieval person was to get rid of all their material possessions and live an austere life of privation. Of course, that was more theoretical than practical, but some people were putting this idea into practice: just think of St. Francis.

 

The system worked perfectly until new precious metal mines in Eastern Europe started operating in late Middle Ages and that brought back metal currency to Europe. A new period of expansion followed that eventually led to our times of renewed conspicuous consumption. And that's where we are.

 

The Romans and us: the same problems. 

We know that history never repeats itself, but it does rhyme. So, where do we stand now? The money that keeps the Global Empire together, today, is not based on precious metals and we don't risk collapse because our mines cease producing gold. Indeed, there is clear evidence that gold production and economic growth decoupled worldwide in the 1950s. So using gold as the basis for a monetary system went out of fashion in the 1970s. 

Our money is not linked to anything, nowadays. It is something that floats free in space, a ghost of what once were heavy gold coins. But we still have it and our rich men are so filthy rich to put to shame the Roman ones (even though our multi-billionaries don't have the right to throw their servants into the pool of the morays, not yet, at least). 

Apparently, we are more clever than the ancient. They didn't have paper, didn't have the printing press, they couldn't print paper money. And they couldn't even imagine what a cryptocurrency is. We can do much better than anything they could invent. So we will never face the same problems, right?

Not so simple. Yes, we do have paper money, cryptocurrencies, and the like. But don't think that the Romans didn't try to replace gold with something else. Even without paper, they could have used earthenware, papyrus, parchment, or whatever. But if they tried that, it didn't work. The problem is always that of the shipwrecked sailor. You may have money in one form or another, but if you can't buy anything with it, it is useless. Even if you have gold, there is not much you can buy in a collapsed economy. 

And there we stand: we are all shipwrecked sailors and that has been shown most clearly by the Covid pandemic. Think about that: you were locked at home, you couldn't go to a restaurant, take a trip, get a drink, go to the beach, go dancing, nothing like that. Not that commerce disappeared: we could still buy anything we wanted from Amazon and have it delivered home. But, as I already noted, money is not just a tool to buy things. It is a tool to establish the social hierarchy by means of the game of conspicuous consumption. That's a game you can't play alone, at home, in front of a mirror. No more than a shipwrecked sailor, alone on his island, can gain a higher social status by eating more coconuts.

In the end, the pandemic simply brought to light something that we should have known already: that we can't indulge in conspicuous consumption for much longer. Running out of gold is not a problem for us. The problem is that we are gradually running out of fossil fuels, and it was those fuels that allowed us to consume so much and waste so much. The pandemic has given us a taste of the things to come. Because it is so functional in pushing the economy in the direction where it must go in any case, it may never end.

So, can we think of a creative solution for the future that awaits our civilization as it runs out of the energy sources that power it? Maybe we can find inspiration from the Middle Ages. As I said, history never repeats itself, but we may be moving toward a historical phase that rhymes with the way the economy of the Middle Ages functioned. So, the Christian Church may be replaced by the entity we call "Science" (with a capital "S"), supposed to be able to dispense physical and spiritual health to its followers. And that may generate trade and movement of people and goods, as well as establishing a new hierarchical order.

We may have already seen hints of this evolution. First, the Covid has heavily damaged the universal health care system of the countries that had it. With the fear of being infected and with hospitals being converted to Covid care centers, now good health care is not for everyone: it is a new form of conspicuous consumption for those who can afford it. The ancient pilgrimages to holy sites could be replaced by trips to the best hospital and health care centers. 

Then, would there be an equivalent of holy relics in the future? So far, nothing like that has emerged, but we may see the coming vaccination certificates as "tokens of virtue" that separate the "haves" (those who are vaccinated) from the "have nots." (those who don't want, or who can't afford, to be vaccinated). But that's hardly a functional hierarchy creating system. Eventually it could be replaced by a "point system" not unlike the shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì, the social credit system being developed in China. By all definitions, that's a kind of monetary system that establishes a hierarchical system not based on conspicuous consumption. That may well be the future.

And, as always, history keeps rhyming. 

 

 

The Death of Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the "Oil Sheik" who Understood Everything

Ahmed Zaki Yamani, oil minister of Saudi Arabia until 1986, died in London last week. In memory of the "oil sheik," I reproduce here a comment that appeared on the ASPO-Italia blog in 2006. The interview of Yamani by Oriana Fallaci in 1976 is a good example of how the oil problem is misunderstood in the West and of the many lies told about it. Yamani, despite all the accusations and insults he received, was always a moderate who sought compromise. He managed to prevent his country, Saudi Arabia, from the disasters that befell all oil-producing countries in the Middle East.  

Unfortunately, Yamani's legacy has been somewhat lost over the years, but it is only now that Saudi Arabia is seeing bombs falling on its territory -- a destiny that so far the country had avoided. Now, things are going to become very difficult as Saudi Arabia faces the unavoidable decline of its once abundant oil resources.

Yamani is remembered, among other things, for having said that “The Stone Age did not end because the world ran out of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.” And, with that, he demonstrated that he had perfectly understood the concept of "EROEI" and the consequences of gradual depletion. 

 
 

http://aspoitalia.blogspot.com/2006/11/fallaci-intervista-yamani.html 

(Fallaci's interview is available in full at this link.)

Fallaci interviews Yamani: thirty years later
Di Ugo Bardi - September 2006 (slightly edited for publication on "The Seneca Effect")

About thirty years ago, at the height of the first "Oil Crisis," the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci interviewed the Minister of Oil of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani. The text of the interview appeared in the newspapers and can be found today in the book "Interview with History" (BUR 2001).  

The interview with Yamani is just one of the many interviews that Oriana Fallaci had obtained from the various powerful men of the 1970s (among them Henri Kissinger). Somehow, being interviewed by her seems to have been fashionable, or perhaps it was something that they could not avoid. According to what Fallaci herself tells us, Ahmed Zaki Yamani hesitated for a long time before agreeing to be interviewed. In the end, however, he invited Fallaci to his home in London, then in Jeddah, and received her with great courtesy, and introduced her to his wife Taman and his daughters. 

Fallaci's interview is interesting because it reproposes the elements that have characterized the debate on oil from then until today. On the one hand, the political interpretation of the crisis, as due to a conspiracy with ideological or religious roots. On the other, the pragmatic interpretation of the crisis, as due to the impossibility of production to satisfy demand and maintain a low price. 

There was also a human side of the interview and, from what she writes, it doesn't seem that Fallaci was particularly grateful to Yamani for his kindness. On the contrary, her antipathy towards him is evident. You see it in all her questions and her comments, but also when she describes his eyes as "Only his eyes alert one to his true self: brilliant, darting, crafty. Eyes that know how to lie, to caress and pierce one with ruthlessness." Fallaci, evidently, thinks she has supernatural telepathic powers. 

She defines Yamani as, "The man who can take us back to the days when we traveled on horseback, who can close our factories, make our banks fail ..." Or consider when she bluntly tells him: "You wanted money and you got it: ruining us." Then, she accuses Yamani of blackmail, of wanting to buy an atomic bomb, of being " diabolical," and things like that. Later on, Fallaci accused Yamani of having attempted to seduce her while she was in his house, although this accusation does not appear in the interview.

It's not so much a question of insults. What is striking about this interview is how Fallaci had not even minimally prepared herself on the subject of crude oil. She was unable to ask questions that were not simply based on the various legends of the time (the same as today). To illustrate how the interview looked most of all as something in the style of a gossip magazine, here are some excerpts.

"Where is the money? I see many gold watches in your shop windows and gold lighters, gold rings, I see big cars in your streets, but I don't see houses, I don't see real cities."  Fallaci apparently believed that the Saudi were still living in tents in the desert

"We know very well that the emirs use the money to buy golden water closets" Again, Fallaci doesn't seem to be bothered by the need of verifying her assertions.

"In Saudi Arabia people dig for water and find oil." If you think that it could be true, note that the oil fields of Saudi Arabia are typically located at depths of a few kilometers, far more than the depth of water wells.

Throughout the interview, Fallaci revolves around the concept that the Arabs were plotting against the West using oil as a weapon. Several times he tries to get Yamani to admit that, yes, there is a plot against the West to ruin us and to establish the world Islamic dictatorship. If possible, she would like to make him admit that it is him, Ahmed Zaki Yamani, who is the leader of the plot. It is as if she saw the interview as part of a Hollywood movie, where the villain usually confesses his crimes out of pure bragging.  

In partial defense of Fallaci, it must be said that, in those years, almost everyone in the West believed that the crisis of the 1970s had purely political origins. Today, we clearly see from the data that the crisis was instead caused by the US peak production, which took place in 1970. But the vehemence with which Fallaci attacks Yamani in the interview does not seem to be based on any data.

Yamani, for his part, always replies without losing his temper. It is clear that he considered Fallacy as a kind of time bomb, to be treated with caution and handled with gloves. It must have really taken a lot of patience for him to answer the series of questions that came to him: many were simply silly, some offensive, and others indiscreet. An example of the last kind is the one about the feelings he had experienced witnessing the execution of the killer of King Feisal. But Yamani is always courteous and answers without ever dodging the question, even though in his heart he must have wondered more than once what was that led him into such a situation. Fallaci, instead of appreciating that, accuses him, saying that "spontaneity was forbidden."

In the end, what makes the interview interesting is not Fallaci, but Yamani. Despite the lack of knowledge evident from the questions he received, Yamani manages to give a complete and organic picture of the oil situation of the time, which already foreshadowed today's world. At the time, Saudi Arabia produced three and a half million barrels a day, but Yamani said it could have produced 11. In fact, Saudi Arabia has managed to produce nearly 11 at certain times.  

Yamani was clear about the strategy that Saudi Arabia would adopt in the years to come: that of "swing producer" or needle of the balance that would have stabilized production and avoided further crises in the future. He had perfectly framed the world oil situation as it would be for at least three decades to come. Fallaci was unable to appreciate the value of what she was told but, reading the interview, one is struck by the clarity with which Yamani had predicted the events of the next thirty years and even more.

Are Yamani's considerations still valid today? Overall, yes, but they won't continue to hold for very long. Today, Saudi Arabia faces a very difficult future. It is said that the country will still be able to increase production, but it is also said that the current fields have reached their limits and that the decline is about to begin. Sooner or later, Saudi Arabia will no longer be the tip of the balance it has been since the time of Yamani. The exhaustion of resources is the real problem and not the "emirs who buy water closets of gold" as Fallaci said, perhaps really believing it.

Oriana Fallaci is gone today. Yamani has no longer been oil minister since 1986, today he is an elderly gentleman who lives in London and deals with Islamic studies (n.d.a. this was written in 2007, Yamani died in 2021). The world goes on, the events of the past always present themselves the same but in always different forms. One thing changes, however: there is less and less oil to extract).

 

Seneca and the Virus: Why does the Pandemic Grow and Decline?

 

Seneca, the Roman philosopher, knew the term "virus," that for him had the meaning of our term "poison." But of course, he had no idea that a virus, intended in the modern sense, was a microscopic creature reproducing inside host cell. He also lived in a time, the 1st century AD, when major epidemics were virtually unknown. It was only more than one century after his death that a major pandemic, the Antonine Plague, would hit the Roman Empire. 

But Seneca was a fine observer of nature and when he said that "ruin is rapid" he surely had in mind, among many other things, how fast a healthy person could be hit by a disease and die. Of course, Seneca had no mathematical tools that would allow him to propose a quantitative epidemiological theory, but his observation, that I have been calling the "Seneca Effect," remains valid. Not only people can be quickly killed by diseases, but even epidemics often follow the Seneca Curve, growing, peaking, and declining. 

Of course, the concepts of growth and collapse depend on the point of view. In many cases one man's fortune is someone else's ruin. What we see as a good thing, the end of an epidemic, is a collapse seen from the side of the virus (or bacteria, or whatever). But, then, why do epidemics flare up and then subside? It is a fascinating story that has to do with how complex systems behave. To tell it, we have to start from the beginning. 

One thing that you may have noted about the current Covid-19 pandemic is the remarkable ignorance not just of the general public about epidemiology, but also of many of the highly touted experts. Just note how many people said that the epidemic grows "exponentially." Then, they got busy extrapolating the curve to infinity, predicting hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of deaths. But, to paraphrase Kenneth Boulding, "Someone who claims that natural systems grow exponentially has to be either a madman or an economist." It just doesn't work that way!

But how does an epidemic grow, exactly? The basic shape of an epidemiological curve is "bell shaped" (yes, just like the Hubbert curve for petroleum extraction). 

 

The reason for this shape is easy to understand in qualitative terms. Initially, the virus (or the pathogen) has a whole population to infect, so it grows rapidly (nearly, but not exactly, exponentially). Then, as it grows, its number of targets decline. Eventually the virus can't grow any longer for lack of targets. It reaches a peak and starts declining. 

These considerations can be set in a mathematical form: it is the model called "SIR" (susceptible, infected, removed), developed already in 1927. You may be surprised to discover that the SIR equations are exactly the same that describe the growth of the oil industry and the phenomenon of "peak oil." They are also the same equations that describe the behavior of a trophic chain in a biological system. I won't go into the details, here. Let me just tell you that, with my colleagues Perissi and Lavacchi, we are preparing a paper that describes how these and other physical systems are related to each other. 

Of course, modern epidemiological models are much more complicated than the simple "bare bones" SIR model, but it is an approach that tells us what to expect. No epidemic grows forever and even if you do nothing to stop it, it will eventually fade out by itself. After all, pathogens have the same problem we have with crude oil: they are exploiting a limited resource (us).

Now, back to the Seneca Effect, we said it implies that ruin must be faster than growth. In other words, the shape of the "Seneca curve" should be something like this:

 

 

There are such cases in the history of epidemics.

 

 

Let me show you an example: the cholera epidemic that struck London in mid-19th century (data from Wikipedia Commons)

 

And here you clearly see the Seneca shape. The decline of the cholera burst was significantly faster than its growth. The data for more recent cholera epidemics show the same shape. 

Yet, that "Seneca shape" is not common in epidemics. Often, we see the opposite kind of asymmetry. Here is an example: Hepatitis A, with data taken from Wikipedia. You see how the curve declines more slowly than it grows. 

Here is another pre-Covid example: the acute respiratory syndrome of 2003 in Hong Kong. 

There is no fixed rule in these historical cases, let's just say that this asymmetric shape is rather common. So, let's go to the current pandemic, and here are some data for the first cycle of 2020. (Image from "The Economist"). Also here, the trend is clear: decline is slower than growth.

 

 

 

 

It is a common trend all over the world and we could call it the "Anti-Seneca" effect. But, apart from giving it a name, why this shape?

The answer is not univocal: there are several factors that may affect the shape of the curve. In this case, the easiest explanation has to do with the parameter that describes how fast infected people cease to be infected, either because they are healed or because they die. If they heal/die fast, the curve goes down fast, otherwise it is the opposite. It makes sense: cholera may kill affected people in just a few hours, if untreated. Instead, people infected by the Sars-Cov-2 may go through one or two weeks of agony before their demise. That would explain the different shape of the curves.

 

But, be careful! As I said, there are other possible explanations. For instance, if you compare Sweden with Italy, you see that the mortality curve is more asymmetric for the former. Why is that? It is hard to think that sick Swedes would take more time to die than sick Italians. More likely, it is a question of geography. The Swedish population is concentrated in the southern regions, where the pandemic hit first. It took some time for the virus to spread northward and that explains the "tail" in the mortality curve. In Italy, instead, the first pandemic wave was confined to the Northern regions, which are relatively homogeneous in terms of population. Probably, geographical effects account for the commonly observed asymmetric curve shapes of the COVID-19 epidemic in other regions of the world. 

 

With vaccinations, the SIR model shows that we should see the epidemic curves falling down fast, at least if the vaccinations are started before the peak. So far, this effect is not seen anywhere, it may be too early. As vaccinations progress, we should be able to say more on this matter.

As for everything in science, epidemiology takes a little work to be learned, a virtue that's difficult to find in the discussion on social media. Even experts in virology and diseases don't really study epidemiology, their job is to heal people, not to make mathematical models. That's the reason why the behavior of the virus is so widely misunderstood. But, as Einstein said, "The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not." Epidemiology may be subtle, but it is not impossible to understand how epidemics grow and spread.

 

The Collapse of Rhetoric. Can Economists and Ecologists Talk to Each Other?

 

In ancient times, the standard way to deal with different opinions was found in the fine art of rhetoric. At the time of Seneca, rhetoric was perhaps the main skill of a man of culture: the capability of debating was valued and practiced. 

The use remained for a long time, even in scientific matters. At the time of Galileo Galilei, it was still the standard way to discuss. Galileo wrote his "Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo" in 1632 as a fictional dialogue among three savants. (see image above).

But rhetoric has completely gone out of fashion nowadays. Did you notice how in the media or in the socials there is no more debate? There are only insults. There has to be something deeply wrong in the way society is functioning that makes it impossible for most of us to discuss with people who don't fully agree with us. 

Nevertheless, the art of the fictional dialogue has not disappeared. Here is how it was recently interpreted by Kathy Shields, republished here with her kind permission. Note how you could see the dialog she presents as a sort of crescendo in which the protagonists, the ecologists and the economists, sort of play a musical duet that grows in tone and volume, ending with a final bang: "who put these people, (the economists) in charge?" 

There are many ways to describe a Seneca cycle, this is one.

A completely made up story about the history of economics and ecology

 Published on February 11, 2021

By Katy Shields



1970s

ECOLOGISTS: Hi, economists, we've been thinking: all this economic growth, looks like it could be setting us up for some pretty major problems. We're destroying nature at break-neck pace-

ECONOMISTS: But that's just a small price for progress surely! And it's not like we're going to run out of anything any time soon!

ECOLOGISTS: Oil is getting pretty dear…

ECONOMISTS: True, but you see, once resources start to get scarce their price rises and we'll be forced to conserve, look for alternatives. So, it's a good thing! Don’t underestimate human ingenuity!

ECOLOGISTS: Don't you worry about the impact?

ECONOMISTS: Of course, no one wants to have to breathe in smog or drink filthy water! But here in the rich world, we've already started cleaning things up. You see, when people get richer, they start to demand better from their politicians. We need to help other countries to grow. Then we can fix all of the problems…

ECOLOGISTS: Well, if you're sure….

 

1980s

ECOLOGISTS: Hi, economists, it's us again. So, about that growth…

ECONOMISTS: Wonderful, isn't it! We think we've really cracked it this time. Financial liberalisation! We can grow our economies much faster now! Especially now we've fixed the oil crisis

ECOLOGISTS: Yes--but we're pumping out more than ever now. Do you remember when we talked about the problems? The greenhouse effect-

ECONOMISTS: True, that is a worry. But as we said, as incomes rise people care more about the earth and will demand better. It will trickle down to all the poor folks!

ECOLOGISTS: You don't worry about rising inequality?

ECONOMISTS: How so?

ECOLOGISTS: Well, if you have more money to begin with--it's easier to get more, so the gap will widen--it's a feedback loop

ECONOMISTS: Sorry, a what?

ECOLOGISTS: A feedback…wait, don't your models integrate …?

ECONOMISTS: Er….

 

1990s

ECONOMISTS: Hey, ecologists! You must be pleased--that agreement to fix the ozone layer

ECOLOGISTS: Yes, amazed actually…

ECONOMISTS: How so?

ECOLOGISTS: Weren't you the ones that said we just need to increase the price, implement a tax, not get rid of the gases entirely?

ECONOMISTS: Oh… anyway, we're super-busy actually, working on a global trade regime. Globalisation. You should be pleased. It's going to help all the poor countries out of poverty, clean up the environment

ECOLOGISTS: By cleaning up do you mean you're going to require those who trade with you, or your companies investing abroad, to meet standards, like on pollution?

ECONOMISTS: Don't be silly! We couldn't possibly enforce that! Anyway, it's not our job. That's a matter for national governments, we have to respect peoples' personal preferences, after all.

ECOLOGISTS: We really ought to sit down, show you some of our numbers. The problems are mounting. Greenhouse gases, deforestation, over-fishing, species loss. We could be reaching some tipping points, may even have overshot some boundaries…

ECONOMISTS: Actually, we've got our own guys working on it now

ECOLOGISTS: That's great! We should talk-

ECONOMISTS: Hmm…that's very kind but we think what we really need to do is work out the cost and benefits. Find the optimum level so we can still keep our economies growing. That's more our domain, don't you think?

ECOLOGISTS: You see, that's our point. Haven't we had enough growth now? Hasn't all the wealth trickled down? Shouldn't we be talking about a different kind of prosperity?

ECONOMISTS: What and leave all the poor countries high and dry! Shame on you! Anyway, once all the manufacturing shifts abroad we're going to have to think of new ways of employing people in rich countries too. Can't have people sitting idle--we need to fund our deficits somehow! But you needn't worry: services like retail, travel, technology and so on use far fewer resources so growth and environmental damage are going to decouple. We'll fix the problems soon enough!

ECOLOGISTS: Uh, really….?

 

2000s

ECOLOGISTS: Hi economists, so, about the climate problem-

ECONOMISTS: Right, yes, the climate! Good you mention it. Globalisation has gone even better than we could have imagined! Wealth at all-time highs, growth, rocketing all around the world. We reckon we've finally got enough money to clean up the environment

ECOLOGISTS: Good, because things really are looking serious. Temperatures are rising more rapidly than ever-

ECONOMISTS: Yes, funny how for a while there it looked like the problem had gone away…

ECOLOGIST: No, it hadn't. It was the volcanic eruption in the Philippines. We told you that. Enough sulphur released to cool the atmosphere for a few years. Seems some people found it convenient to pretend otherwise, though…

ECONOMISTS: Look, does it really matter? We said we're looking at the problem now. And with the marriage of finance and technology we reckon boom and bust cycles are gone for good. Green investment is going to go up, not down

ECOLOGISTS: So it's just going to be growth from now on? Even with all the debt we're storing up?

ECONOMISTS: Exactly! Wonderful, isn't it. Whoever said you couldn't have your cake and eat it? Now, we just need to calculate the optimal level of warming that will allow us to keep growth going while cleaning up the environment…

ECOLOGISTS: About that—don't you find 3 degrees a bit much? Last time it was that hot on earth sea levels were metres higher! 

ECONOMISTS: You really do underestimate the human capacity to adapt, don't you? And they say ours is the dismal science! Anyway, we're not totally agreed on the level of warming. It depends on the discount rate

ECOLOGISTS: Hmm--discount rates. The idea that the present is more valuable than the future. We always wondered why you took that view. Surely we want our children to have lives at least as good as ours…don't you think the economy should also somehow reflect our values? Seems like it does the opposite…

ECONOMISTS: Sorry, values, what? You've lost us…

 

2010s

ECOLOGISTS: Hi, economists? Economists? Can you hear us?

ECONOMISTS: Oh, it's you lot again. Is that the time? Sorry, been feeling a bit down lately

ECOLOGISTS: The financial crisis?

ECONOMISTS: Yep

ECOLOGISTS: What are you going to do about it?

ECONOMISTS: We plan on pumping money into the system in the form of cheap debt and hoping the private sector will pick it up

ECOLOGISTS: Wait--wasn't it debt that got us into this mess? And it sounds a bit…blunt. How are you going to ensure it will go to all areas we need it to, instead of just those who already have money? We need to be fixing the climate, the biodiversity crisis. Then there's the sustainable development goals! You know estimates of poverty reduction seem to have been a bit off. When you look at the indicators: hunger, access to clean water, sanitation…we have more people living in destitution now than ever before…

ECONOMISTS: Yes and not just in poor countries! Unemployment is rising everywhere. You can't expect lawmakers to worry about sustainable development at a time like this! But look, at least governments have signed up to these goals. Even to limit warming to 2 degrees-

ECOLOGISTS: We did warn you about tipping points, feedback loops--

ECONOMISTS: Yes, yes. Well, in a few years things should be up and running again so we can start to really tackle it

ECOLOGISTS: You're not worried that people in rich countries might care less about the environment now they have more pressing concerns? Even vote for leaders that care less, if they promise they're going to give them their dirty industries back?

ECONOMISTS: Well at least the young people are taking to the streets.

ECOLOGISTS: But they don't vote, do they?

 

2020s

ECONOMISTS: Hi ecologists. Good to see you. Things are NOT going well. Biodiversity is crashing. We're taking more from the earth than we're putting back, undermining the very conditions for life as we know it! Before the pandemic emissions were still rising. In just a few years we'll have overshot the 1.5 degree warming limit

ECOLOGISTS: We did say 2 degrees was too much…

ECONOMISTS: Well, what we need now is an economy that reflects our values. Do you realise how little nature is valued? We pay people more to destroy our environment than we do to clean it up. Crazy! We need radical action.

ECOLOGISTS: Radical—exactly! It's very late in the day. But, at least you're making the right noises now. Have you been listening to what the ecological economists have been proposing?

ECONOMISTS: Ecological economists. Sorry? Who are they? Are they friends with the behavioural economists? Lovely bunch. I mean they have some useful ideas but they don't really fit into our models…

ECOLOGISTS: It's not like the mainstream can claim to have got things right so far…

ECONOMISTS: Look, we've always said we need to internalise all these externalities-

ECOLOGISTS: You're, erm, still using that word? Externality…like it's somehow taking place elsewhere, on another planet... Look, what's the plan? Shut down polluting industries? Bans on advertising, on political lobbying? A basic income or job guarantee (you can use your money printers) so people can spend time looking after nature and each other? Hard limits on material use, growth….

ECONOMISTS: Whoa there, hold your vegan lattes! When we said radical we didn't mean ending growth altogether. We reckon we can still have sustainable growth

ECOLOGISTS: Really? You sure you've talked with the ecological economists? The earth systems folks? Decoupling hasn't happened so far. Seems almost impossible to reduce emissions and prevent continued loss of nature together with all the damage climate change is already wreaking while simultaneously allowing business as usual to continue. Even if it's

gradually getting a bit cleaner, that damage is still mounting up. Face it: time's up. Isn’t it time to abandon the growth idea altogether? Think of a new way to organise ourselves if we want to stick around beyond the next few decades?

ECONOMISTS: We haven't put all this effort into creating this whizzy financial system, the global trade regime, the multinational corporation--for nothing! Our models are predicated on there always being growth. And anyway, even if we have got it all wrong--we'd look like fools to back out now… No, we'll just need to use the system we have. Just… give us a bit more time. Until now, we haven't valued nature--we admit that. So, we need to come up with a value for it. That's it! We'll put a price on it, we'll put a price on everything! Turn everything, including nature, into assets!!

ECOLOGISTS + ALL NON-ECONOMISTS: WHO PUT THESE PEOPLE IN CHARGE?? 

 



Katy Shields

City councillor / Sustainability researcher / Looking for ideas for resilient communities / Open for research or writing assignments

Honoring a Fallen Enemy: the Death of Rush Limbaugh

 

Rush Limbaugh has died at 70. Defined as "The most dangerous man in America," climate science denier, friend of Donald Trump, accused of racism and of all sorts of evil deeds. Eventually, though, a human being like all of us. 

Quomodo fabula, sic vita: non quam diu, sed quam bene acta sit, refert. (Life is like a play: it's not the length, but the excellence of the acting that matters.) Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Letters to Licilius.

 

Years ago, the vagaries of life led me to have a meal in a restaurant in Bucharest. There, I discovered that the cook was Italian and I had a long chat with him. One thing he told me was that he had been the personal cook of Dick Cheney, in the US. 

Yes, Dick Cheney, the man behind the "Project for a New American Century," of the attack on Iraq, of the fake story of the "weapons of mass destruction," and God knows of how many more dark and dire things we don't know about. I have no reason to doubt the story I was told: what surprised me was that he told me that Cheney was "the best employer he had ever had," kind, considerate, and he paid well. And I have no reason to doubt that, either. 

You see, I am fascinated by evil. It is a theme that goes deep into everything we do and we think. Does evil really exist? Do evil people exist?  An Italian writer of one century ago, Armando Vacca, noted how the Great War was fought with the people on both sides all thinking they were fighting for a good cause. And he asked himself the question: "who would ever want to fight an unjust war?" A related question is, "who would ever want to live an evil life?" Evil may be something more subtle than it seems to be.

Nowadays, our view of the world is dominated by the search for evil. We seem to have lost our moral compass so completely that we can see ourselves as good only if we can identify someone evil to be in contrast with. It has been like that during the past century or so. But who are these evil rulers? Mussolini, Saddam Hussein, Cheney, and many others, were they really evil or just said to be evil by their enemies? About Mussolini, I looked into the matter as much as I could and I arrived at the conclusion that he was not a man who had pleasure in harming others, which is a possible definition of "evil". He was, mainly, a man whose mind had aged and who had retreated behind the mask of the Duce degli Italiani. The man had become the mask and he wore that mask all the time. He had come to believe in his own propaganda and he really thought that he was doing something good for Italy. 

So, evil is not a question of someone enjoying hurting or killing other people while satanically laughing. It is a question of the mask that every one of us wears. The very concept of "persona" is related to that of mask. It may come from the Latin verb per-sonare, literally: sounding through, referred to the masks actors wore in theatrical performances. We all go through life wearing a mask, sometimes more than one. And we often identify so much with the mask we wear that we forget what we might be without it. 

So, evil people are best detected when they are in a position where they can do much more damage than the average person. My experience of when I occasionally crossed paths with high-level people agrees with what the Italian cook I met in Bucharest told me. High-level people can be absolutely charming, it is a skill that they develop to arrive at the top. Does that mean that the powerful always lie their way upward? Not really. They just wear their mask, their persona, and that's what they become. We all do the same.

So, how about Rush Limbaugh? I must say that I never heard him speak live, but I knew who he was and how he had influenced many people. For me, he was a sort of a distant bogeyman, and I am reasonably sure I would disagree with maybe 99% of the things he was saying. But does that mean he was evil? Difficult to say, unless you happened to meet his cook. 

From what comes out of a debate he had with Peter Gleick (a climate scientist), Limbaugh doesn't come out as evil, more like the typical climate science denier.  Not a person who consciously lies, just a person who lacks the intellectual tools needed to think quantitatively. That is, your next-door neighbor. 

Roy Spencer (another climate scientist, but of the heretical kind) tells us many good things about Rush Limbaugh. One stands out:

Rush was the same person, on the air and off the air.

And so, it seems that Limbaugh, like many people whom we often consider evil, didn't see himself as evil. He would just wear his mask in the scene and at home, just like most of us do. In the end, the persona, the mask, is the same thing as our real face. 

As Seneca said, what counts in the play is how well it is acted and we cannot say that Rush Limbaugh didn't play his part well. Perhaps there will come a day when we won't need to label others as evil to think of us as good. Then, we'll be able to consider our enemies as human beings, just like us. Rest in peace, Rush.

The End of the Megamachine: A Seneca Cliff, by any Other Name, Would Still be so Steep.

 

Our civilization seems to be acutely aware of an impending decline that nowadays is rapidly taking the shape of a collapse. It is still officially denied, but the idea is there and it appears in those corners of the memesphere where it makes an long term imprint even though it doesn't acquire the flashy and vacuous impression of the mainstream media. 

An recent entry in this section of the memesphere is "The End of the Megamachine." A book written originally in German by Fabian Scheidler, now translated into English. Not a small feat: Scheidler attempts to retrace the whole history of our civilization under the umbrella concept of the "megamachine." A giant creature that's in several ways equivalent to what another denizen of the collapse sphere, Nate Hagens, calls the "Superorganism." Perhaps these are all new generation of a species which had as ancestor the "Leviathan" imagined by Thomas Hobbes and explicitly mentioned several times in Scheidler's book. 

We may call these creatures "technological holobionts." They are complex systems formed of colonies of subsystems, holobionts in their turn, too. They are evolutionary creatures that grow by optimizing their capability of consuming food and transforming it into waste. It takes time for these entities to stabilize and, at the beginning of their evolutionary history, they may oscillate wildly, grow rapidly, and collapse rapidly. As Lucius Annaeus Seneca said long ago, "the road to ruin is rapid" and it is a good description of the fate of young holobionts.

The book can be seen as a description of the life cycle of one of these giant creatures, leviathan, superorganism, or megamachine -- as you like to call it. We see it growing from a tentative start, in the late Middle Ages, then finding an unexpected source of nutritious food in the form of fossil fuels that made it not just grow, but become fat, obnoxious, and cruel. Extremely cruel.

The megamachine is just one of the biggest systems that ever appeared in the history of Earth's ecosphere. As such it has follow the trajectory that's described in the concept of the "Seneca Effect."  At the beginning, it grows slowly, but the more it grows, the faster it can grow. Now, the resources that make it grow start dwindling and the giant brute starts stumbling around in search for more. In doing that, it exhausts itself and prepares for the final fall: the steep descent called the "Seneca Cliff"

That is where we stand right now: on the edge of the cliff and, probably, we have already started sliding down. Scheidler's description of how we arrived here is both impressive and breathtaking. It was a run toward the cliff that we ran convinced that we would have been climbing up forever but, alas, that couldn't be the case and it wasn't. 

Is there life on the other side of the cliff? Of course, yes! The universe moves in cycles and it never stands still. That's also the message of "The End of the Megamachine" that concludes with a look at a possible transition. The human civilization will never be as it was before, it will be based more on collaboration than on competition and with a more constructive relation with the ecosphere. And that's not a choice, it is a requirement for the survival of humankind.

On the bed of the Moldau, the stones are churning,
The days of our rulers are ending fast.
The great don't stay great, the order is turning,
The night has twelve hours, but day comes at last.

Bertolt Brecht 

Why Science is like sex. And why the virtual version is not as good as the real one

 

Some people may think that this is the way science works: a solitary genius straining his brain in order to build a spaceship in his basement (Image: Dr. Zarkov in the "Flash Gordon" series by Alex Raymond). But science is not like that. Not at all! Science is a collective exchange of ideas that assemble themselves in the memesphere. Unfortunately, with the Covid disaster, scientists cannot get together anymore (image source)

Let me start by citing from the book by Per Bak "How Nature Works" (1996) where he describes the discovery of the phenomenon of self-organized criticality (SOC), that you probably know as the "sandpile model." 

We became obsessed with the origin of the mysterious phenomenon of 1/f noise, or more appropriately the 1/f signal that is emitted by numerous sources on earth and elsewhere in the universe. We had endless discussions in the physics coffee room, the intellectual center of Brookhaven. There was a playful atmosphere which is crucial for innovative scientific thinking. There would also one a constant stream of visitors passing through and contributing to our research by participating in the discussions, and sometime by collaborating more directly with us. Good science is fun science.

This is how one of the key concepts of the science of complex systems was born in the 1980s: in the coffee room. And it is a very general point: no coffee room, no science. You can find a similar description in Norbert Wiener's famous book, "Cybernetics" of 1948, where he describes how young and old scientists would collect around a dinner table to grill each other by a friendly but unsparing discussion. It is the same story. If you are a scientist, you know that science is collective. It is born out of discussions. The concept of serendipity doesn't exist if you are alone. 

In the US, they normally understand this point. To have good results in science, you have to let people mix together and campuses are often built with that idea in mind. But it is the way science is managed at all levels. I remember that when I was a post-doc in Berkeley, we had a Fussball table in one of the labs. Some of us had become truly proficient at the game. And, of course, the lunch seminar on Fridays was a good occasion to relax and exchange ideas.

In Europe, things were often a little more stiff and formal. In some universities where I worked, you had the student cafeteria separated from that of the staff -- not a good idea, in my opinion. And in many cases, not even staff members would mix when having lunch. In general, I found that the best universities are those that encouraged social mixing among their staff and students, those which didn't were second or third rate ones. That's not enough to demonstrate a causal relationship, but you may at least suspect it. And, if you are a scientist, you don't just suspect that. You know that.

And now? Over the years, I've seen science declining from the kind of playful search for innovation that Bak, Wiener, and others describe. Science has been bureaucratized, financialized, competitivized, and bowdlerized in all possible ways to become a pale shadow of what it used to be. There are a few superstar scientists who are forced to put out magniloquent press releases every once in a while where they explain how their most recent wonderful invention will one day solve the world's problems, maybe, and only if they keep receiving money to fool around with it. The rest, the rank and file, are running the rat race just to try to survive and can't afford to innovate. They must imitate.

The final blow to science may have been the idea of "social distancing" which destroyed everything that made science fun and interesting. Once you decide that everyone on campus is to be treated as infectious, there are no possibilities of human interactions anymore. Just to give you some idea of the situation, they closed the cafeteria of our campus and they even removed the coffee machines from the halls of the my department building, the only collective spaces that existed to enliven an otherwise grim building. Now, it is just a grim building.

Yes, I know, we have been told that this is only temporary. When the idea of "social distancing" was proposed, it was supposed to be only temporary. It was to last a few weeks, and then everything was to return as before. One year has passed, and nothing has changed. It looks like distancing will be forever. Will it? 

You mean we could use virtual meetings in science? Yeah, sure. Just like doing virtual sex. It may be fun, but I am sure it is not the same as the real thing. As Bak correctly said, good science is fun. I'd say, boring science is no science at all.

But I would like to close this post on an optimistic note. Take a look at this article by Avi Loeb and the comments on it by Chuck Pezeshki. Loeb talks about the Oumuamua asteroid, but he highlights the same problems of science that I have highlighted here: bureaucratization, lack of innovation, etc. And yet, science keeps producing innovation: the example is Loeb himself and his daring description of Oumuamua as an alien solar sail. 

Or, you may take a look at this recent massive book "Large Igneous Provinces" by Ernst, Dickson, and Bekker that summarizes decades of meticulous research that solved the problem of extinctions: these large igneous provinces (LIPs) create transient warming effects that bake the biosphere and kill many species. That's what doomed the dinosaurs, not an asteroid. 

Or how an old concept, that of "holobiont," revamped in the 1990s by Lynn Margulis, is slowly revolutionizing our understanding of the ecosphere and legitimize the once heretic concept of "Gaia." Incidentally, according to the holobiontic view of biology, sex is information sharing. And, yes, it is what I said science is (or should be)!

Science still has a lot to give to humankind, but it needs a good shakeup to get rid of the multiple bureaucratic layers that suffocate it. Maybe, the pandemic is the occasion to do just that? It could even happen, who knows?