Black holes belay bird Bentleys

Following that marvellous Aeon piece on how Phineas Gage didn't suffer a horrible personality disorder after taking a bolt to the brain (see previous post), here's a couple more from them.

.... what, TWO ? Yes, two ! On related topics, obviously. But one of them isn't much good at all, so I'm going to reduce it to the bits I found interesting and ignore the rest.

This first piece is a bit of a meandering rant about how humans learned culture from animals. I mean, yeah, sure, maybe, but how do we know we wouldn't have figured it out anyway ? Being animals ourselves, surely we evolved with a much greater tendency to act on instinct rather than reasoning and therefore didn't start off as such "blank slates" as modern babies are. So we'd have had animal-like tendencies because we were, well, actually animals.

The main problem with the essay is that the author seems hung up on an earlier bias against the idea of animal cultures. I don't think this is nearly such an issue today; it's obvious to anyone watching nature documentaries that many animals possess something akin to culture (even if we might not usually use the word). But there are a couple of interesting points. One is highly specific :

In several caves in France, such as Bara-Bahau, Baume-Latrone and Margot, human-made finger flutings or ‘meanders’ follow earlier cave bear scratches. Some of these long lines of finger-combed grooves are superimposed directly over claw marks. Others are located near the bear-made traces, echoing their orientation. 

In Aldène cave in the south of France, human artists ‘completed’ earlier animal markings. More than 35,000 years ago, a single engraved line added above the gouges left by a cave bear created the outline of a mammoth from trunk to tail – the claw marks were used to suggest a shaggy coat and limbs. In Pech-Merle, the same cave where Lemozi mistook cave bear claw marks as human carvings of a wounded shaman, a niche within a narrow crawlway is marked by four cave bear claw marks. These marks are associated with five human handprints, rubbed in red ochre, that date to the Gravettian period, about 30,000 years ago. 

For Lorblanchet and Bahn, the association between the traces of cave bear paws and human hands is no accident: ‘It is remarkable (and the Gravettians doubtless noticed it),’ they wrote, ‘that a rubbed adult hand, with fingers slightly apart, leaves a trace identical in size to that of an adult cave bear clawmark.’

And that's a very interesting case in which humans may indeed have been directly influenced by animals. Still, it doesn't mean that the claw marking were the bears attempting to do line drawings* – the innovation here is all human (unlike, say, the bower bird). I don't find the other examples nearly as persuasive, however.

* If you go down to the woods today....

The second interesting point is more conceptual. When the author talks of "culture", I think they're really referring to history. That is, remembered culture, a transmitted knowledge of how things used to be in the past : specific events, old traditions, different mindsets of what the ancestors believed. The author does imply this sort of definition, but more by accident than anything else :

This is based on a well-established belief: humans make and do things because only we have culture, and when those things we make and do change over time, we call it history. When animals make and do things, we call it instinct, not culture. When the things they make and do change over time, we call it evolution, not history. Anthropologists have pointed out that this is an unusual way of thinking: at what point did we stop merely evolving from our long line of hominid ancestors, cross an irreversible threshold from nature to culture, and kickstart history ?

... as the British anthropologist Tim Ingold argues, we never speak of ‘anatomically modern chimpanzees’ or ‘anatomically modern elephants’ because the assumption is that those species have remained entirely unchanged in their behaviours since they first took on the physical forms we see today. The difference, we assume, is that they have no culture.

And surely it's interesting to think of animals as having this kind of historical culture. So far as I know, no animal shows evidence for this kind of thinking – episodic memories and old knowledge, sure, but nothing approaching human history.

The second article is very much better. It asks the provocative question as to why other animals don't possess a culture as rich as humans – that is, in the Pratchettian sense of extelligence, of highly complex physical objects like Bentleys and nuclear reactors. Specifically, birds. Plenty of animals are intelligent and even have culture, but many have other factors which readily explain why they don't have sophisticated devices (short lifespans in the case of cephalopods). But birds, quoth the author, appear to have an awful lot of the basic necessities :

• Large brains with strong intelligence and learning capabilities
• Long lives, so that understanding of the world can be learned and refined over time
• Highly overlapped generations, so that information learned can be transmitted through time
• Meticulous rearing of offspring, for the same reason
• Refined intra-species communication, so that high-fidelity transmission of information can be communicated.

So why no Bentley-driving birds ? For this the author develops a very nice metaphor of evolution. They imagine a 2D landscape where the x, y position represent general parameters of a species and the height is how well they're adapted to current conditions. Then we can think of evolution as a blind mountaineer, only able to react to the local gradient and never to make any long-term plans at all :

This is why evolution can get ‘stuck’ at the local maximum – the blind mountaineer will never go ‘down’ in the service of getting to a higher peak on the other side of a valley, because he doesn’t know the peak is there; he senses only that in that direction lies a valley of death.

Now the neat trick is to invert this and make the troughs, not the peaks, represent local suitability. Instead of a blind mountaineer, imagine a ball rolling under gravity – something like the old physics classic of a rubber sheet deformed by a heavy ball, but with the sheet much more complex. The ball itself can deform the sheet but it can also change in response to external stimuli : for example, a cheetah evolving to run faster than its prey sinks the trough a little deeper, but a changing climate may either deepen the trough or fill it in. And since most local minima won't be all that deep, random chance mutations or external changes (both of which happen continuously) usually ensure that animals do keep evolving; only a few get stuck in such extreme minima that they're not likely to change any further.

The useful bit about this for the lack of bird culture is it helps to show that birds aren't a case of a cultural near miss :

Unlike objects flying through space, an evolving species isn’t rapidly whizzing by in a straight line – it is wibbling and wobbling about in evolutionary space, taking a drunkard’s walk in the general vicinity of its current landscape. If birds were simply almost-cultural, with all the predispositions they have, they wouldn’t ‘miss’ cultural evolution and sail off into the distance, they would continue to wobble about the rim, always one small deviation away from falling in to join us in the valley of cultural plenty [i.e. they'd fall in and evolve culture eventually].

Instead, they fell into a black hole called flight. Once birds as a group had flight, their future was sealed – flight would be their defining trait, and would delimit the futures available to them. Flight resolved a huge amount of the pressure that drove humans to seek cultural efficiencies in feeding themselves, fighting predators, hunting prey, transmission of information, and all of the other complicated things that we do to be successful. Birds, by comparison, live on Easy Street – they fly away. They fly away from predators, they fly away from food shortage, they fly away from environmental change. There is no pressure on them to evolve the means to establish agriculture. They can fly away instead.

Flight, says the author (developing this in more detail in the essay) is such a powerful advantage that it removes most of the selection pressure. A bird with culture wouldn't have a significant advantage over one without, because the solution to all its problems would still be the same : fly. It would even have a substantial disadvantage, because the extra intelligence would be biologically expensive. And of course, it would need to have grasping hands, which bird's wings are ill-suited to providing.

Conversely :

It is probably the case that our cultural abilities are also a black hole in evolution. Everything that is true about flight’s incredible selection benefit is true about human culture. We have also fallen down an impossibly steep slope of selection to arrive at the incredible complexity of human life today. I cannot fathom what set of circumstances would cause us to evolve away from this complexity. But at the bottom of our two black holes, we and the birds are separated.

We will both meander about the infinite space of our black holes but will not leave them. They will not play canasta, and we will not fly. Our futures are expansive, but point interminably to our respective singularities – theirs to flight, and ours to culture. For each to have the other would be splendid, but evolution doesn’t aim at splendid. It rolls, unthinkingly, away from pressure, and our respective pressures have been released by our respective all-defining traits.

I think this is an extremely clever and well-thought-out piece, but I still think the picture is incomplete. The author mentions flightless birds as evolving due to exceptional circumstances (e.g. lack of local predators), but what's prevented flightless birds from developing culture ? After all, flightlessness has been a thing for tens of millions of years, possibly longer. I can't believe the wing structure is that big of a deal-breaker.

Of the other apes I suppose the situation is more complex – clearly some of them did develop human culture ! And even human-like culture, considering we know of Neanderthal art and the like. I think we still don't know enough about how our own thought processes really got going to say exactly why the other great apes aren't driving motorcycles, let alone why birds aren't reading Shakespeare. 

Still, it's thought-provoking stuff. I remember many short stories by Stephen Baxter in which humans of the far future, trapped in specific circumstances, lose intelligence as a result of selection pressure and biological expense (often, amusingly, while retaining a level of advanced technology). But one thing he never explored though are the evolutionary consequences of jetpacks. Give everyone a cheap, simple, reliable jetpack, let them simmer for about half a million years... what would the result be ? A whole new expanded way of thinking, or just the opposite – idiocracy but in the clouds ? If the Aeon logic is correct, giving everyone a jetpack should mean the end of history.

... nah, I still want a jetpack, dammit.

Head injuries won't necessarily turn Jekyll into Hyde

I already shared this on my social media feed, but it turned out to be rather long. And I find it so interesting I want to keep it here as well as a go-to reference. This version has some very minor editing and additions. It's a lot more "quotes from the article" and a lot less of my own commentary than usual, but if you're already familiar with Phineas Gage, it'll save you a long read on Aeon (if you're not, I suggest you just use the link immediately below instead).

This is an absolute belter of piece from Aeon ! I haven't kept up with them much of late (there's just not enough time) but I immediately went to the site and downloaded a few more articles to get back into the swing of things. Aeon do have the occasional utter dud on an article, but when they're right, they're right.

You've probably heard of Phineas Gage, the 19th century railway worker who survived a horrific brain injury only to come out with a changed, ill-mannered personality. Well, he did survive, but the evidence for a changed personality is next to non-existent.

There are three primary sources written about Gage by people who met him. Harlow wrote his first report in 1848, limited to an account of the recovery, and a second in 1868, which reproduced the first and added further interpretations. Another physician, Henry Bigelow, wrote a paper after meeting Gage the year following the accident. 

Of the two, only Harlow mentions Gage’s personality change. His total word count on the subject is just over 300. [My emphasis] At no point does he ask Gage about it or offer any quotes from him – Gage was dead by the time Harlow wrote the second paper. Nothing written by anyone who knew Gage before his injury survives, only paraphrases noted down by the two doctors. 

So, the sources are scant to begin with. And, according to the psychologist and historian Malcolm Macmillan in 2008, most of those who have written about Gage since the primary sources were published do not appear to have checked them, promoting some aspects of the story, ignoring others and embellishing liberally. Macmillan’s conclusions were echoed in a separate 2022 review of more recent Gage literature, which found that half of the 25 papers analysed gave negative descriptions of Gage that were not based on the primary sources.

It really is quite concerning how often widely known stories turn out to be based on almost nothing. The unfortunate part is that because everyone repeats it, it's easy to assume that this is because it's well-verified. But this, unless the reports are all independent, is circular : more repetition sounds like ever-greater credibility, even when it's just literally repeating what someone else said. Now a lot of independent verifications do constitute powerful evidence, to be sure, but a lot of people repeating the result does not. The difficulty is that the brain doesn't instinctively understand this.

Hanna Damasio’s claim that Gage ‘began a new life of wandering’ seems to be extrapolated from a single use of the word ‘wanderings’ by Harlow, in context of the difficulty he had in tracking down Gage in later life. Nowhere did Harlow or Bigelow suggest that ‘wandering’ was typical of Gage’s post-injury existence.

Of the various falsehoods written about Gage, perhaps the one most clearly contradicted by the primary sources is the Damasios’ claim that Gage ‘could not be trusted to honour his commitments’ and that he ‘never returned to a fully independent existence’. In fact, the sources make no mention of Gage being dependent on anyone from the time he recovered from the injury until the last year of his life when he succumbed to illness. They also clearly state that, after he gave up his public appearances, he worked at a livery stable for 18 months and then he moved to Valparaíso in Chile where, according to Harlow, he worked for nearly eight years, ‘caring for horses, and often driving a coach heavily laden and drawn by six horses’.

As Macmillan pointed out, the available facts about Gage fly in the face of claims made about his transformation and reduced capacities. Macmillan gave a carefully sourced description of the demanding nature of Gage’s job in Chile: the dependability required of him in rising in the small hours, loading passengers’ luggage and possibly handling fares; the high level of dexterity and sustained attention necessary for driving six horses; the foresight and self-control involved in navigating the unwieldy coach along the crowded and sometimes treacherous Valparaíso-Santiago road. He also pointed out that Gage, at first a stranger to Chile, would have had to learn something of its language and customs and ‘deal with political upheavals that frequently spilled into everyday life’.

So really, little or no credible evidence for his supposed changed personality from mild-mannered worker to whoremongering brute. It just didn't happen. He became an expat working in the hospitality industry, for all intents and purposes.

The other case is of Eadweard Muybridge, the photographer famous for those early time series photographs of running horses and the like. I'm never heard that there was a claim he had a changed personality, even though he did something much worse than Gage after surviving a stagecoach accident :

...he discovered that his wife, Flora, had become romantically involved with a local theatre critic and, by one biographer’s description, ‘swindler’ called Harry Larkyns. Soon after that, Muybridge came to suspect that his infant son was in fact Larkyns’s child. Muybridge travelled to the town of Calistoga, 75 miles north of his home in San Francisco, and knocked on Larkyns’s door. When Larkyns appeared, Muybridge shot him in the chest with a pistol. Larkyns died at the scene. Muybridge did not resist arrest, freely admitting to the murder, and was held in custody until his trial the following February.

If the testimonies of his friends are to be believed, it was the instability brought on by the brain injury that led Muybridge to kill Larkyns. ‘The killing would have surprised me much before his accident but not much after it,’ said one defence witness, according to the Sacramento Daily Union. The brain scientists take it at face value – labelling the murder as Exhibit A in their argument for Muybridge’s disinhibition.

Why, then, don’t we find Muybridge alongside Gage in neuropsychology textbooks or Wikipedia articles about frontal lobe function? The simplest answer is that neither the testimonies about his personality change nor the retrospective assessments of the clinicians are believable. Some of them amount to very little even on paper – the mention by his friends of Muybridge’s hair changing colour and his idiosyncratic approach to business, for example. But, more pressingly, the testimonies were given in support of an insanity plea submitted by Muybridge’s defence council, in the hope of saving him from the death penalty. How sure can we be that his friends would have said the same things without the urgent stakes of the trial hovering in their minds?

Even if we accept the testimonies as the whole truth, it’s notable that the jury present at the trial roundly rejected the insanity plea. In violation of the law and of the judge’s instructions, when they acquitted Muybridge, it was on the grounds that Larkyns’s death was not a murder committed by a mad person but a justifiable homicide committed by a sane one. Perhaps they’d read the interview with Muybridge published by the San Francisco Chronicle while he was in prison awaiting trial. He is quoted as saying:

"I objected to the plea of insanity because I thought a man to be crazy must not know what he was doing, and I knew what I was doing. I was beside myself with rage and indignation, and resolved to avenge my dishonour.I objected to the plea of insanity because I thought a man to be crazy must not know what he was doing, and I knew what I was doing. I was beside myself with rage and indignation, and resolved to avenge my dishonour."

Fortunately for him, his photography had made him famous. And so the results were quite different from Gage, who was blamed for doing nothing, whereas Gage was excused murder :

The forces of social status and uncritical trust in professionals that worked so well in Muybridge’s favour did the opposite for Gage. During his life, he may well have had friends. People were willing to employ him. He was cared for by his family towards the end. And there’s no suggestion in the primary sources that he ever became isolated or spurned from any community. However, without powerful or wealthy friends to defend his reputation, the story told about Gage by Harlow operated in isolation after his death. In the absence of dissenting voices, it was treated as fair game by commentators with their own professional agendas.

Finally, the main point of the essay is against the notion of "disinhibition", or at least that this shouldn't be used as an easy explanation for all psychological changes or disorders :

Among those who have accepted the revision of the Gage story, the consensus seems to be that his character probably did change but that any disinhibition that did occur was temporary. But it’s important we subject even this claim to counter-proposals, that we ask what else might have provoked such a temporary change, assuming we believe in it. Some have suggested that psychological trauma might have played a role... But maybe Gage was just pissed off.

On a modern case :

Callum was clear that both examples were out of character but that they still held meaning. ‘In the first instance, even though my family were a bit surprised at what I was saying, it also reassured them that I was still the same person. I was suggesting doing things that demonstrated I remembered my friends, even if my family didn’t want to hear about those things.’

This persistence of self was something Callum also emphasised about the apparent disinhibition. Disobeying doctors’ orders by wheeling himself out of the hospital may have been atypical for his pre-injury character, but this behaviour still belonged to him rather than to some mysterious new identity ‘unveiled’ by the injury. ‘I’m not a different person,’ he said. ‘I’m me after something traumatic has happened to my brain. It was still me doing those things. It was me who was disinhibited.’ And he also insisted that the behaviour held value.

Personalities vary all the time. The difficulty, I guess, is in deciding when a change is legitimate or valid. One person can be excused murder because they lost their temper; another can become a textbook classic because maybe they felt a bit grumpy one morning after taking a bolt to the head. As Cicero said (In Defence Of Milo) :

If our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right. When weapons reduce them to silence, the laws no longer expect one to await their pronouncement. For people who decide to wait for these will have to wait for justice, too – and meanwhile they will suffer injustice first.  

And motivation does matter. But Cicero was explicitly referring to self-defence, not premeditated murder (though he had no qualms about this when it came to tyrants and the like : "to end the life of a man who is a bandit and a brigand can never be a sin"). 

Yet when someone respected does something abhorrent, we're all too apt to assume they must have had a good, valid excuse and it doesn't represent their true character. When someone of lowlier standing does something considerably less problematic, we assume that they must have had some horrible psychological problem; we view their character and agency as somehow less valid than that of others – even their trauma must reflect some deep flaw rather than their making a real choice. The tale grows in the telling indeed.

Liberalism And The Sealt Belt Probelm

Every once in a while, I come across a meme that's more provocative than the usual self-righteous bullshit that pervades my social media feed. Now, this one certainly does feel like the typical holier-than-thou variety...

... but that last one got me thinking. The others are straightforwardly due to self-interest. But it's maybe less obvious why the media should be uninterested in providing the truth. 

One answer comes from the underrated Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies, in which a newspaper editor tries to instigate World War III (through careful misinformation and manipulation) to drum up sales. It's very silly, but good lord has its main theme aged well. Still, surely in reality plenty of interesting stuff actually happens which ought to sell copy easily enough. "Lack of interesting stories" doesn't seem like a credible motivation for lying, still less in starting a war.

A key component of the meme, though, is "a world run by". This is different from the real-world situation in which the various components of society are roughly in some sort of balance. It suggests instead a weird, top-heavy power structure in which one group has become uniquely privileged. This is a big difference to reality. If the media is not unduly powerful (and is independent of other power groups), it's in their own interest to provide the truth because there's more than enough corruption for them to report on anyway.

Or at least, we might naively assume so, at least for the purposes of what I want to explore here.

Clearly if the media themselves were in charge, or more pertinently if they had undue influence, it would not be in their own interests to report on the truth (not the whole of it, any rate). As the movers and shakers, reporting on their own corruption would do them little good – it would commit the cardinal sin of harming sales and ruining their bottom line.

So a media-heavy power structure would indeed "never know the truth", in a sense. I think it would be more accurately be described as being drenched in perpetual bullshit : a media-ocracy would have no problem reporting the truth when it served the journalist's interests, but would equally have no scruples about barefaced lying when that was more to their advantage.

The optimal structure of society is much too big an ask for this post, but I would also briefly refer to this meme as well :

True, the specific economic realities aren't really directly comparable, but the point of the meme is surely the moral intention rather than fiscal policy...

STOP ! I don't want to go down that road. Instead, what the first meme mainly got me thinking about was.... seatbelts.

Yeah, seatbelts. See, this to me has always seemed like a possible weakness in classical liberal theory. If the idea is that we should allow everyone to behave as they wish so long as it doesn't interfere with others*, doesn't that mean we should allow people to ignore their own seatbelts ? How can we fine people or take away their driving licenses for only putting themselves at risk ?

*Excepting that we're allowed to discuss with them and to try and persuade them of right action when we disagree with their choices.

Well, if they really do only put themselves at risk, maybe we can't. Similarly, we don't generally suggest outright bans on smoking, only on smoking in public areas where others are affected. The restraint afforded by a seatbelt, on the other hand, can also help drivers maintain control of their vehicles and thus make their own driving safer, thus helping protect other people as well.

That's were the media comes back in. Here the consumer has to bear a measure of responsibility as well as the producer. Sure, we can rant and rave about the manufacture (and it often is manufacture, not reporting) of clickbait and ragebait, but we can also choose not to consume it. The problem is that we don't. Lots of people actually enjoy this kind of content : if they didn't, the market would have self-corrected by now. Markets are far from perfect at this, but it does happen.

Excessive consumption of garbage media by a lone individual does little direct harm to anyone except themselves. If they want to be an idiotic dumbass, one might think, then that's on them. The problem is that true hermits are nearly non-existent, and one stupid person has to interact with everyone else. The old adage that bullshit takes more than an order of magnitude more effort to refute than to produce is correct, so one person sinking into the addictive clickswarm of useless prattling articles is doing more than just harming themselves. Like a virus, they afflict everyone they come into contact with : to bring them back to sanity requires a protracted effort of their community, if it's even possible.

The tragedy is that the media production of these articles is not entirely the result of cynical profiteering. It's because we really do enjoy them. It's not all corruption and exploitation – it's also just human nature.

So, maybe, what we have to do is treat this deleterious effect on mental health in the same way we treat physically harmful activities. Suppose that someone is in a situation where removing the seat belt really would only risk themselves and no other. There, we would still protest that allowing rare exceptions does more good than harm. It's easier, and better overall, to make wearing seatbelts a blanket rule : it inflicts only the most minor of inconveniences on a tiny minority for the sake of the (much more valuable) effect of protecting a large number of lives.

And we might even go further. We might allow ourselves to say, "this is for your own good -– we don't want you to die, so we won't allow you to take this pointless risk". People simply don't always know what's best for themselves; we might also take the angle that an injury suffered as a result of ill judgement requires resources we aren't prepared to utilise when we could have prevented it instead.

Managing the media as component of mental health would also allow us to control a public health crisis. A few smokers are something we can handle; an epidemic of lung cancer is clearly something we want to avoid. A few stupid people are entertaining; a horde of them are one of the most dangerous forces on the planet.

This is perhaps an illiberal position. The problem is that relatively few people are interested in, or have the time to, consider detailed reports and the full context of a story. Bad journalism thrives in part because people don't want good journalism : they want the emotion-inducing nonsense instead. And just as the odd cigarette or two won't do anyone much harm, but the risk of addiction may be deemed too great (certainly we accept this for some drugs, at any rate), so too may it be for crappy journalism. There's a sort-of "tragedy of the commons" about the whole thing, in the sense that one person reading one bit of celebrity gossip causes zero harm, but the cumulative effect can be seriously hazardous to community health. 

If we are prepared to ever say, "we can't allow you to do this enjoyable thing – we've found the consequences for society outweigh the benefits for the individual", then surely the ability to think clearly and rationally is something to which we should apply this reasoning. 

Obviously, we cannot regulate intelligence, nor prevent stupidity. But we can take action to make it becoming worse than it otherwise could be. And following another liberal principle, we can also minimise these interventions, making the smallest restrictions for the greatest gain. So this doesn't mean running wild with regulations or banning everything left right and centre, which would just replace one problem with another. We proceed on a case-by-case basis : this is problematic, apply what regulations are required to restrict it (using outright bans only as a last resort, the goal should more be a realistic minimising of bad behaviour than utter prevention); this is truly harmless, let everyone go nuts.

Finally, in order to improve any ability it must be operated at its limits. Consuming and analysing every piece of media clickbait, or more to the point, every bit of verbal effluence that spews from Trump's anus – sorry, mouth – is unhealthy. It is, I suggest, literally weaponised incompetence, designed to keep people stupid by having them exercise their brainpower in utterly unproductive engagement. Even if it doesn't actually degrade critical thinking skills, at the very least it becomes a pointless distraction. Endlessly proving that the latest thing that Trump said is wrong is counterproductive. We know he's a moron ! Saying it a thousand times for a thousand different reasons is unnecessary, fucking exhausting, and worse – every moment spent analysing the latest bit of garbage is a wasted opportunity from working out how to overthrow this deplorable fascist monster.

Rant over. I do not believe in maintaining a liberal society through illiberal means, but I trust that this is not what I'm suggesting. Rather, if we know that an activity leads away from our goal, we have to take steps to avoid it. If an activity is seemingly harmless and only affects an individual, but actually turns out to have provably harmful effects on the whole of society, then we don't ignore it. We rarely ban but frequently regulate to keep things from spiralling out of control. Sometimes, we surrender our own judgement as being inferior to that of experts, and allow them – under proper accountability -– to save us from ourselves.

Review : Impossible Monsters (II)

Time to conclude my breakdown of Michael Taylor's Impossible Monsters, which looks at the discovery of dinosaurs from the perspective of science and religion. In part one I covered how the boundaries between the two were often fuzzy, especially in the early part of the Victorian period. Individuals, too, were the proverbial rich tapestry : some clergy were tolerant and liberal, some agnostics were nasty little bastards. Here I'll look more at how the theory of evolution itself developed, and some of the conflicts that occurred between theory and theology.

Sometimes, a harmonious coexistence of science and religion prevailed. But there were lines which, if crossed, could lead to psychological violence with serious consequences for those involved.

At the start of the period this was almost entirely in favour of the religious, who held all the cards and pulled all the strings of society. By the end, the roles were in no sense reversed, but a critical tipping point had been breached. No longer would every atheist routinely fear for their job security, let alone their social standing and still less for their basic freedoms. It wasn't that there was no longer disagreement by any means. But it was now possible for the outwardly atheist and agnostic to receive the highest honours society could bestow, even to get away with deliberate provocation against the more hardline religious elements.

Philosoraptor Continues

Britain had advanced considerably along the road to liberalism. Like the scientific discoveries that accompanied, and perhaps assisted, the progress of society, it was sometimes slow and grinding work but occasionally punctuated by moments of sudden and decisive change. As a case study, Taylor shows how the theory of evolution came about largely due to decades of painstaking work, building from smaller parts of the main idea, rather than due to lone geniuses or a flash of inspiration. 

Rather than making this end result less dramatic, the exact reverse is true – but it's only clearly visible when we take a step back. For the kind of change of thinking this necessitated affected nothing less than our understanding of time itself, a reshaping of thought so profound that simply couldn't have happened overnight.

Such radical ideas witnessed no small amount of outright hostility, and if the supremacy of religion was waning, it wouldn't go down without a fight. Continuing a theme from the first post, some of this was in fact a result of perfectly legitimate scientific doubts about the strength of the evidence, which initially had literally dinosaur-sized holes in it. In no way did evolution, at first, meet the standards of "extraordinary evidence" required of extraordinary claims. But some of it was due to purely human, emotional fallacies. Ideologies could run rampant on both sides, but ultimately, this was a fight in which there could be only one winner.

Incremental revolutions

But let's begin with a gentle look at how the theory of evolution itself evolved. A variety of social factors shaped how people accepted or rejected the same evidence, or interpreted it differently to each other. Just as the sociological situation was nuanced, so too was the state of the pure evidence itself. The final conclusion of evolution by natural selection was, undeniably, a scientific revolution, but it was not the work of a singular genius. 

One of the most famous building blocks is that of Thomas Malthus, who thought that population growth would eventually lead to consumption of finite resources and thereby catastrophe. Malthus crops up a few times in Impossible Monsters, not for his economic gloom-mongering, but for the more basic principle of natural change implicit in his theory. Keith Thomas' view that medieval paintings show classical antiquity in then-contemporary styles becomes easier to understand when you remember that they genuinely thought the world was just a few millennia old : there just hadn't been enough time for significant changes. 

Malthus' extrapolation to the future was a small but important contribution to reshaping our view of time and thus our own place in the world. Rather than placing us at the summit of creation, we were now at the threshold of a deep and fearful pit – with no obvious mode of escape.

A second, more direct component came from Charles Lyell and James Hutton. Hutton had proposed the idea of slow, continuous geological development and change – deep time and uniformitarianism ("the present is the key to the past", as my geology teacher used to say... because he stole it from Lyell) – as far back as the 1790s. This was certainly religiously shocking and evinced no small amount of harsh invective, but intellectually it was something of a damp squib. It lay all but ignored and forgotten until Lyell more successfully resurrected it in the 1830s, in a larger, more careful work with a greater body of evidence.

Biologically, too, the idea of change was not unprecedented. Already in 1809, Lamarck had proposed that animals could change their individual characteristics over time in response to their environment. The implication that man could have been the descendent of monkeys had not gone unnoticed, but there was little evidence for Lamarck's idea of transmutation at the time.

Overall, the development of Darwin and Wallace's theory of evolution was the end result of a series of incremental developments unregarded by the general public. It was punctuated by moments of sound and fury signifying breakthroughs, but even those came out of work of the most extraordinary levels of painstaking tedium. Darwin himself conducted some pretty horrific experiments (especially on pigeons), and spent so many years studying barnacles that he hated them "as no man ever did before". He applied equally diligent efforts to a study of plants.

This is not to say that the Origin of Species didn't mark a watershed moment in scientific progress : it did*). But it did not spring forth from the head of Darwin fully formed in a flash of genius. It came from a stupendous amount of specialist work by both himself and a great many others – not just Hutton, Lyle, Lamarck, but a host of others as well. Essentially all of the major concepts were already in place for Darwin's big moment, just as so many pieces of the puzzle were ready for Einstein to assemble his theories of relativity. 

* Interestingly though, an early talk shortly before the more famous debates failed to gain much attention from anyone. Taylor makes it clear that the subsequent debates, however, did play out much as in the lively fashion which popular history records.

Darwin, though, gave a plausible mechanism* for how Lamarckian-style changes might come about –  one species changing into another – together with a wealth of meticulously-detailed evidence for it actually happening. Both Wallace and Darwin formulated their ideas only after global voyages lasting years, collecting their own data by hand because nothing else suitable existed. It was physically exhausting, gruelling work to come up with an idea we now take for granted. Not that it was by any means complete at this stage : the lack of a theory of genetics would remain a difficulty long afterwards. But the force of the arguments and evidence were, slowly, becoming irresistible.

* Oddly, initially he seemed a bit confused as to how natural selection related to animal husbandry, only later realising that it provided solid support for the idea.

In short, scientific advancement isn't without moments of important breakthroughs or paradigm shifts. But those owe at least as much to dedication, specialisation, and an awful lot of hard graft as they ever do to innate genius.

One side can simply be wrong

The distinction between early science and religion was nowhere near as stark as it appears today. But a difference was emerging, gradatim ferociter, into a form that many would eventually come to see as irreconcilable. 

Conflict was present right from the earliest days of modern geological investigations. Hutton's work was described as "contrary to reason and the tenor of Mosaic history, thus leading to an abyss". But disagreement was by no means unrelenting. It was, for a while, possible to frame geological discoveries so as to support scripture, and when this happened there was no problem. This did not even necessarily mean acquiescing to Biblical literalism. Catastrophisim was popular not just because everyone knew that local catastrophes – even extinctions – did happen from time to time, but also because they allowed a metaphorical but acceptable interpretation of the Bible. 

The basic idea was that there could have been multiple catastrophes on a par with Noah's Flood, with God remaking the world multiple times over. If any of the clergy objected to this, it wasn't on a significant scale : there seemed no problem interpreting Biblical "days" of creation as firmly metaphorical. And on the academic side, Buckland, Mantell, Anning, and very nearly all the great and the good of the early fossil hunters and geologists were devout Christians, with Buckland in particular keen to emphasise the harmony of geology and scripture. 

More interesting is the case of Charles Lyell. Whereas the others were actively trying to support scripture, Lyell explicitly declared he wished to "free the science from Moses". Yet his epic, 1,400 page Principles of Geology, though he regarded it as a "deliberate strike against religious dogma", did little to provoke anything nastier than mild criticism. Unfortunately Taylor doesn't go in to why this should be : religious institutions were largely praiseworthy of the Principles, sometimes profusely so; specialists gave it really no more than the most modest of rebukes. How Lyell managed to avoid this, despite resurrecting Hutton's shocking ideas, isn't clear.

EDIT : On reflection, part of the reason might be the following. Hutton explicitly drew attention to the extreme conclusions of his theory, i.e. infinite time, which was believed to be contrary to scripture. He also lacked evidence and didn't present his arguments well. Lyell was more accessible, there had been at least some movement towards considering longer timespans by the time he published, and he didn't rub anyone's nose in it. That is, he didn't make any specific claims with regards to the age of the Earth, but instead tried to let this flow naturally out his prodigious and very carefully argued body of evidence.

Things did eventually turn ugly though. When geology was used to support scripture there was no problem, but when the roles were reversed and the Bible made to be subservient, it was another matter entirely. The clergy had no problem with science giving way before faith, but, especially in America, they had no truck with the opposite. Notably, the same could not be said in Europe, and it was a paradox of the age that while Britain initially led the world in dinosaur research, it did so from a much more conservative position. The whole idea of liberalism and European-style rationalism was openly regarded with something approaching horror.

To cut a long story short(er), Darwin was afraid of publishing his ideas for very good reasons. True, sometimes radical positions had gone largely unpunished save for criticism, but the consequences could be serious. Manuscripts were burned, authors fined, imprisoned, and socially ostracised – no small punishment for academics who weren't in the Old Boys club. Deviants could be publicly humiliated, some police offers were recorded as wishing they could still burn heretics at the stake. Frederik Maurice was hounded from academia merely for debating the meaning of the words "endless" and eternity; only through a protracted struggle did he manage to return. Others, such as Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Beasant, would suffer prosecution and – in Bradlaugh's case – lengthy imprisonment for the right to atheism and socially progressive views.

The conflict between science and religion was, then, real and it did happen. And while in some ways many of the scientists were equally belligerent in their approach to debate (Huxley in particularly must count as the most aggressive agnostic of his age), ultimately it wasn't a fair fight. Scientists were arguing from a position of evidence : imperfect and incomplete, but progressively improving. The faithful, increasingly, clung to their views only out of... well, faith.

Religious literalism was ultimately dealt a mortal wound with the discovery that reptiles preceded birds, contrary to Genesis; even the most metaphorical interpretation of "day" simply couldn't make the ordering work. Attempts to compromise were, in the end, futile. 

To be fair, many changed their minds in response. The majority of religious believers today aren't Creationists. But a scientific world view and one which adheres to the literal truth of the Bible are inevitably at odds. Taylor's major point here (backed up by Keith Thomas where he strays into this period) is that literalist beliefs persisted far longer than we like to think – they were absolutely normal in Victorian Britain, and hadn't been overturned by previously findings.

There are many ways in which science and religion can and do happily coexist. I personally find some of the Biblical metaphors useful : the loss of innocence of Adam and Eve, the magnitude of the cosmos expressed to Job, and of course the markedly socialist tracks of some of the teachings of Jesus. In no way does this mean I believe in any of it, but for those who do, there is no reason for any sort of anti-science attitude. To me, to believe that an ancient text of any kind must be on unimpeachable Truth is just not sensible, but to deny that it contains any truths at all is equally crazy. There are innumerable straw man arguments raised by New Atheists (and indeed by Victorian atheists, as Taylor shows !) that I have no sympathy with, the sort that tar all believers as Six Day Creationists – as though you could reduce the awesome complexity of the human condition to a box-ticking exercise. You can't and it's silly.

But, Richard Dawkins was dead right when he said that one side can be simply wrong. Even a couple of centuries ago, there was no good scientific evidence for an Earth billions of years old. Early objections did not proceed entirely from religious devotion, though that was part of it. But nowadays any position against the scientifically-determined age of the Earth or evolution is untenable. Despite protestations to the contrary, that debate has been long since won.

---

How exactly did religious literalism develop ? Even Greek mythology alone contains different explanations of the same thing : different creation stories, different explanations, different actions by the same heroes, different moral interpretations. It would be difficult indeed to have any sort of devotion to any one particular story in that system, which is innately flexible and versatile.

The Biblical stories are much simpler. They state unequivocally what happened with no room for alternatives. Yet even the earliest Church grandees realised that contradictions pointed to metaphorical interpretations, and theological debates raged incessantly (a very nice SMBC illustrates how taking things literally is itself fraught with difficulty). From Keith Thomas I never had the impression that a Creationist view was especially widespread in the late medieval/early modern period – and he gives pretty good direct evidence that many ordinary people both hated religion. They neither understood it nor saw it as especially important; it was really understood that the practise of going to Church was what mattered, not what one believed.

Something had clearly changed by the Victorian period, but as to how this came about would surely take another book. Whether this represents an error or only an incompleteness on the part of Keith Thomas, I don't care to speculate. I note, though, that Taylor doesn't restrict himself to the academics, with ordinary people also being a bunch of literalist zealots in his account. 

On that point, the difference between literalists and zealots is also something not often discussed. I tend to think of them as synonymous, but in the Victorian period this seems not to have been the case : people accepted the literal truth of the Bible as their default position, but most of them changed their opinions when enough new data was presented. A hardcore of fanatics were unconvinced, of course, but the point is that type and strength of belief don't necessarily correlate. Presumably there's a selection effect at work here though : today, religious literalism demands irrational devotion, in a way it simply didn't back in the era of early Victorian science.

If there were some stark differences in beliefs of the era compared to today, there were also some interesting parallels. One of which, muscular Christianity, had suspiciously familiar emphasis on male strength and patriotic duty to certain modern day movements. How depressing that some of the stupider Victorian beliefs appear to be making such a resurgence !

There's nothing wrong with setting ambitious goals for oneself, of course. What becomes problematic is when one applies those same standards to others who might have entirely different life goals, and of course how one responds when they don't meet those expectations. This is why I harp on about the myth of lone geniuses so much (of which I go into a bit more detail on Quora, see also the comments). They give the impression that all science is done by a handful of supermen and all the work by the rest of us counts for nothing. They also pander to the crazies who believe themselves misunderstood only because they're so far above the ordinary scientists.

What Impossible Monsters shows is just how much the incremental work really matters. Yes, there were moments of genius here and there (radical free-thinking did play a part), and no small amount of luck was involved too. But far more important this was dedication to hard, tedious work by people with all the same flaws and virtues as the rest of us. Decades of their patient efforts ultimately achieved something stupendous : they changed the way we think.

Review : Impossible Monsters (I)

Michael Taylor's Impossible Monsters fits in extremely well with my recent reads of mythological animals. Here are the real monstrous creatures of the past... but Taylor's focus is not on the dinosaurs themselves but how they changed our understanding of the world. A seismic shift that had begun centuries earlier was about to come to its heady climax : from a world of magic and mystics we had shifted to intercessionary relationships with an omnipotent singular God. Now we were about to take another dramatic lurch, replacing scriptural literalism with scientific materialism. The last vestiges of a medieval mindset were, at last, giving way to modernity.

Here, then, is a philosophical, theological, and sociological history of dinosaurs – and of those who found them.

The Review Bit

There's so little to criticise about the book that I can keep this brief. The book has an excellent balance of breadth and depth presented in an engrossing, accessible way without dumbing down. Taylor gives mini-biopics of each of the major characters that greatly add to the understanding of how the discoveries came about, very carefully curated to balance the purely human, amusing side of things with informing the reader of just how different the academic process was in Victorian Britain. He covers a range of topics with sensitivity and impartiality, from the sociological situation (such as the treatment of the poor and destitute) to the theological disputes (especially the big one, over whether the Bible needed to be taken as literal truth). 

Rarely, if ever, does he get on a hobby-horse and rant at the reader about the absurdity of religious literalism. At the same time, he's abundantly clear that it's Wrong With A Capital W. He balances the attempts to harmonise science and religion with the painful conflicts that occurred between the two. The latter, he says, happened loudly and frequently. This is in stark contrast to an earlier documentary which claimed (as I remember it) that Creationism and the like never really got going until decades later, and that the initial reaction to evolution was actually fairly muted. 

Not so, says Taylor, putting forth a wealth of evidence to the contrary, and always careful to set everything in context. For example he compares the sales figures of Darwin's works with other (religiously moderate) texts*, which initially far exceeded them; he notes that when Paine's The Age Of Reason was censored, this wasn't because of the work's particular nature but part of a prevailing approach to anything deemed offensive at the time. Even so, there was no shortage of incidents of harsh invective from both sides, sometimes with severe and serious consequences for those caught up in the debates.

* Of which Darwin himself approved, despite having all but lost his own personal religious faith by this point.

In Taylor's history, science ultimately wins – but there's no unnecessary triumphalism here. He tries quite earnestly to get into the literalist mindset rather than pronouncing believers as simply idiots, and isn't afraid to criticise the scientists either. What emerges is, if you'll forgive the clichés, an extremely rich and nuanced picture, colourful characters rather than any monochromatic sort of good-versus-evil struggle. These were real people with all their foibles : Darwin's staunch social conservatism persisted despite his loss of faith; Richard Owen was highly intelligent but capable of being a Right Stupid Bastard; Huxley's agnosticism was often viciously aggressive. And to Taylor's great credit, what could have been a complex, messy narrative is always kept clear and on-point.

There is one glaring omission, however. Taylor chronicles in detail both the geological discoveries and the changing social and scientific reaction to them. But what drove those changed responses ? At the start of the 19th century, someone speaking out against scripture would certainly be socially ostracised and likely fined or even imprisoned. By the end of the period, atheist scientists were being awarded high honours. So was it the changing geological findings that drove a loss of faith, or was it the loss of faith that allowed for new interpretations of the evidence ? What specifically was different in Victorian Britain that allowed for such radically different understandings of the same sort of dinosaur bones that had undoubtedly been unearthed for centuries past ?

To be fair, this is really the only difficulty of any substance I have with the book – but it's a pretty big one. Overall, I'm giving this one 8/10. I suspect it's a book that will age well and become a lasting influence.

The World According To Philosoraptor

Taylor references Jurassic Park a couple of times, but surprisingly never uses any philosoraptor memes. Oh well, a missed opportunity. On the other hand, most of the ideas discussed in the book don't lend themselves easily to meme-format, so perhaps it's for the best. So here's my summary of the most interesting themes from the book, delivered as good-old-fashioned text rather than the considerably more popular captioned images.

In this first part, I'll look the complexities in distinguishing science from religion at the start of the period, as well as just how weird some of the major characters were. In part two I'll cover how the theory of evolution was itself, in part, the result of an evolutionary rather than revolutionary process, and how while science and religion can sometimes live together happily, sometimes they can't help but fight it out.

Blurred boundaries

Taylor promises not to go on a polemic against religious literalism and he does indeed manage to steer clear of this. He clearly views such ideas with disdain, but he makes a pretty good attempt at sympathising with the believers as people. Often they were, at the time, genuinely doing the best they could with the evidence they had at hand (the same cannot be said for modern lunatics, of course).

While most of the book covers the period of the 19th century, the prologue examines the famous estimate of the age of the Earth by Bishop Ussher. It's worth remembering that this now obviously nonsensical result was obtained a mere two centuries before the Victorian era, and while there had been other similar calculations, this was one of exceptionally diligent effort*. And it was a calculation. This was no mere quick reading of the Bible and trying to make things add up on the back of an envelope. This was a slow, tedious examination of a multitude of historical documents that took years to complete. It was a meticulous, scholarly effort – you could even call it scientific, in its way.

* Though other estimates had reached similar values. Ussher's would also have likely have faded into similar obscurity, had he not been fortunate enough to have it included in the commentary printed with certain editions of the Bible.

Without the careful, fully scientific results that would take thousands of people centuries longer to obtain, Ussher simply had no better methods available. The conceptual leaps needed to arrive at the modern value were monumental : atomic theory, thermodynamics, whole forms of mathematics... he had none of this. It wasn't his fault, the poor sod.

And if doubts about the age of the Earth were creeping in by the start of the Victorian era, they were weakly founded, and nowhere near strong enough to challenge the prevailing literalist wisdom. At most there was uncertainty and concern rather than any genuine rival theories; no alternative, self-consistent world view had yet been presented. Again, the conceptual leap needed to go from an Earth thousands of years old to billions is vast, and can't – shouldn't – be done without extraordinary evidence. Scientifically, Ussher and the early fossil hunters were on surprisingly solid ground, given what was actually known at the time.

It's a similar story with the development of the central theory in the field : the theory of evolution, the climax of Taylor's book. If the boundaries between science and religion were not always well-delineated, then evolution was by no means the self-evident notion it appears today. At least, not at first. One of the major problems was, ironically, with the fossil record. To arrive at evolution proper required a series of advancements more than a singular inspiration (as we'll see next time), but one of the problem was that animals in the past, naively, should be expected to be simpler than the modern ones. Dinosaurs, being huge and complex beasts, did not fit that pattern at all. 

Nor, with the fossil record still being hugely incomplete, were there any signs of clear progressions. It all just seemed too chaotic, too haphazard. This fit neatly with the widely-held idea of occasional catastrophes, which nobody took issue with since these demonstrably happened. But there was a huge implicit bias that any sort of slow, incremental change must necessarily be progressive. The idea of speciation, and in particular adaptation to the current circumstances (probably Darwin's biggest and most unique contribution to the field), was of an altogether different order to the kind of changes that were accepted to occur. Everyone could see disasters for themselves, but you couldn't see speciation (or even lesser developments) unless you were extremely dedicated and carefully looking for it.

So in essence, just as in the very distant past the idea of a spherical Earth would have contradicted all the evidence any sane person could see, so too was evolution on a much more rickety pedestal than it is today. You could very credibly argue that its early advocates were making nothing less than a leap of faith in adopting it, because some of its findings went against the available evidence rather than being shaped by it. Not all of evolution's (early) detractors were skeptical simply because of religious devotion : just as with Galileo, some doubts were scientifically legitimate.

The human factors should not be neglected either. Richard Owen, who coined the word "dinosaur" and founded the Natural History Museum, could be a horrible elitist snob, as could much of the Geological Society. Indeed Owen coined "dinosaur" as a deliberate way to highlight the apparent absurdity of the complexity of earlier creatures. Remember, this era was not far removed from a period where even the notion of extinction implied the heretical notion that God could make mistakes : prevailing wisdom is difficult to overcome because sometimes we're not even aware of the assumptions behind it. But try and flip it around and things become easier to understand. If today an academic were to try and claim a divine origin for all things, then the difficulties they would encounter become clear.

A few final points. Materialism (the idea that the physical world is all there is) was a problem both socially as well as theologically. Not only would it flatly contradict the Bible by leaving little or no room for God, but it would also give the lower orders... agency. Suddenly everyone's brain would become, after a fashion, equally capable of understanding and reason, or at least having equal potential. Any idea of nobility, any hint of being one of the elect*, would be gone. This was the dramatic restructuring of thought that the Victorians were being demanded to make.

* On a tangential note, the idea of God's Chosen People baffles me. Whenever this crops up, it's never clear why God made that choice – if he did it just on whimsy, then he's clearly a moron. Theologically this seems bonkers.

To give this some context, Richard Owen was progressive by the standards of his day in that while he regarded certain races as far inferior to others, he did at least accept them as human. The more conservative elements of his day... didn't. They literally believed that some people weren't actually people. So the idea of allowing them freedom of opinions was a tough selling point, to say the least.

It's worth stressing the character complexities a little more. Owen could be an academic thug, but he was also a dedicated champion of science and public outreach. He also had some experiences which were truly bizarre, involving decapitated heads and ghost stories (I give a proper quotation here). And of course, he was religiously conservative : he could accept evolution if it was pre-ordained, but the idea of natural selection was to him a step much too far. 

Other religious figures responded differently to scientific progress. While the various crises that afflicted Mary Anning made her cling all the more deeply to her faith, the loss of Darwin's daughter saw him all but lose his. The great fossil hunter Gideon Mantell refused to be swayed away from his faith, while Charles Lyell was sympathetic to the principles of evolution but couldn't stomach the idea of mankind arising from apes. And, completely independently of geology, Bishop Colenso decided that the Bible was actually riddled with contradictions* and was excommunicated for saying so (he was later reinstated despite his highly unorthodox views). 

* For example, he was required to deny the existence of witchcraft despite witches very much existing in the Bible.

Finally, the famous Alfred Russel Wallace later became skeptical of natural selection, but vigorously defended the scientific method : he was, confusingly, staunchly opposed to the Flat Earth movement, anti-colonial, pro-phrenology and pro-supernatural. Characterising anyone as simply religious or atheist or agnostic is, then, a calamitous oversimplification of the extremely complex factors that shaped their highly individual beliefs.

---

The boundaries between science and religion, the faithful and the heretical, are awfully confused. Equally, the transformation from a religious to a secular society can't be described as any single process. Sometimes there were incremental changes, one small idea leading inexorably to another small idea, with differences only becoming clear after a long series of such developments. But at other times there were sudden, lurching realisations and discoveries that brought about revolutions far more quickly and with a much more aggressive debate. And while in those slow, progressive periods, compromise and debate are often the order of the day, in the point of revolution there are usually clear winners and losers. That's what I'll look at in part two.

Review : The Golden Road

And now for something completely different.

William Dalrymple's The Golden Road : How Ancient India Transformed The World was an obvious choice as a present-list request. Not least due to its gorgeous presentation, with its wonderful illustration on the edges of the pages... 

Yes, I'm a sucker for aesthetically beautiful books. I blame Thames & Hudson.

But also, of course, I wanted it because of the subject matter. I don't know much at all about ancient India (practically nothing), but I do know that that's a gap which deserves to be filled. There was Michael Scott's Ancient Worlds, which is a superb, thought-provoking book but doesn't really cover its own remit : it presents many very astute comparisons between Europe, the near and Middle East, and ancient China, but never spends much time at all on how they were connected (and omits India entirely). Then there was Peter Frankopan's outright offensive The Silk Roads, a book which has left a permanent bitter taste and is a very strong contender for being the worst book I've ever read. Characterising the peoples of the near East as nothing but perpetual victims of Western meddling and aggression, and an outrageously cynical view of the EU that comes dangerously close to drawing comparisons with Hitler's empire... nah, go fuck yourself, Frankopan.

So yes, a book about that rather large bit in between Europe and China, and how it affected the rest of the world, is very much needed and welcome. Step forth, Dalrymple.

The Review Bit

(This section turned into a bit of a rant. Feel free to skip ahead if you just want to know what the book says.)

Overall, it's... decent. Not great, but certainly not bad either, and Dalrymple could wipe the floor with Frankopan leaving nothing but an unsightly stain. Dalrymple's work is not without its own issues, but they're of almost entirely matters of style, not substance. In terms of content it's actually very good indeed, covering exactly its objective : to demonstrate that ancient India played an enormously influential role across a vast area from East to West, without ever slipping into the classic "they invented everything" nationalistic trope.

Well... he does occasionally slip into this kind of thinking a little bit, but I'll forgive him that – he just gets carried away from time to time and makes the odd claim that a casual bit of background searching easily reveals as false or overstated*. Far more often, he remembers that cultural exchange is a two-way street : yes, India was the source of some important and unfairly overlooked contributions to world history, but it too was changed by its encounters with other peoples. Dalrymple does not forget this.

* Two examples. One is that the Green Man found in medieval Churches is actually of Indian origin. This appears to be a not crazy idea, but very far from the whole story and certainly not without controversy. Secondly, Dalrymple gets the founding date of Oxford University wrong, and gets hung up on specific architectural features of universities as being of peculiarly pivotal importance. I think this is to the miss the point that academic types have always created their own institutes, and there's surely nothing especially Indian about the concept of a university. And a third, related irritation : specifying that a calculation was accurate to seven decimal places but without specifying the units, thereby making the accuracy completely unknown.

No, the real problems are in his presentation style. For example, and this may seem unduly petty, the extensive footnotes at the back of the book quickly become a source of frustration. They're the classic mixture of bibliographic details and additional commentary, occasionally spanning multiple pages and presenting vital caveats to what's given in the main text, so you'd be ill-advised to skip them. But so much of this could, and should, have been incorporated into the main body, and separating it all just makes the process of reading unnecessarily awkward.

Then there's a lack of references to the photographic plates. This is another very common problem among history books that's so easily solved ! Being interrupted by random and meaningless images is no help whatsoever, whereas being directed to them at key points in the text would massively enrich the whole experience. Worse, he often mentions the plate images but never says which one to turn to... c'mon, just give a figure number ! Likewise, shamefully, that wonderful illustration inside the cover and on the edges of the pages is nowhere referenced.

Much the biggest problem, however, is the writing style. This takes a lot of getting used to, often falling into a strange sort of third-person passive voice. Paragraphs begin and end almost entirely at random so that reading it is like walking along an unexpectedly bumpy pavement and being constantly tripped up; really, this is downright strange and not something I've much encountered before. 

Likewise, the larger textual structure does it no favours either : he begins each chapter with a summary of what will be presented, except it's never made clear when the summary has ended and the main narrative begins. This means that you don't quite know if he's just repeating himself or going into more detail – or if he's just gone mad and forgotten himself. Or indeed, if you've gone mad and forgot something obvious. It often feels like he's suddenly resumed an earlier discussion after going off on a truly almighty tangent for sixteen pages.

And even at the level of individual sentences, reading it can be quite the slog, and I frequently found myself trying to parse it into something intelligible – this one's more subjective than the others, I guess, but it just didn't work well for me. It doesn't help that Dalrymple refuses to ever dumb down even slightly, making the extremely long and unfamiliar names excessively hard to follow. The most common problem for me was that I wasn't even sure which country he was referring to and had to keep going back through the text (or consulting Google) to check. 

Individually these aren't major problems. Collectively, they become tiresome. Challenge me with complex new ideas, not by bewildering me with an onslaught of badly described facts or by making me flick the pages back and forth every two seconds.

And yet... he does stick to his remit. When he focuses on a single simple narrative, especially the chapter on the Empress of China, he shines. He raises, sometimes implicitly, some extremely thought-provoking questions and has some important points to make, without ever screaming about it : history comes first. And the ambitious scope of the work has clearly involved a great deal of research on a whole range of topics (politics, Hinduism, Buddhism, Roman history, the far East, mathematics) for which he deserves no small kudos.

This one is very difficult to rate, but I'm going with 6/10.  It's more of a case of missed opportunity for greatness than anything actually bad, but while some sections are really first-rate stuff, others are an awful long way off that. His rhetoric fails to stick the landing, rarely delivering the emotive impact it deserves.

Stuff I Found Interesting

I'm proceeding from a position of profound ignorance here, much more than with books on European history. You'll have to forgive me if I say things which are bleedin' obvious, especially when it comes to the religious aspects.

The Scale Of The Indosphere

If Dalrymple has a central point, then I suppose it would be the vast scale of Indian influence, both materially and culturally. Not one but two great religions sprang forth from the subcontinent, and its financial output was equally prodigious. Dalrymple stresses the book's title as being somewhat literal : unlike Frankopan, he explicitly describes silk as being of relatively minor importance. No, it actually was gold, he says, that drove the economics of trade. By some estimates, at the zenith as much as one-third of the Roman Empire's entire revenue was derived from trade with the East. Ships manned by a thousand people routinely carried the great wealth back and forth between Europe and Asia.

These trade links didn't spring from nowhere. Rather they'd been developing for centuries, possibly even millennia – but it was the unification of a vast area under the Pax Romana that prompted a massive expansion in trade. And while most of the ships were crewed by Indians rather than Europeans, there is evidence for at least some Romans actually present within India* : this was not a situation of passing the wealth along sequentially or by osmosis, but directly. 

* The Romans purchased so many Indian gemstones that Pliny described it as the "sink of metals", referring to the vast amounts of gold they sent in payment. While Roman merchants almost certainly visited India, the most famous personage from the West is surely Thomas, brother of Jesus. As with Buddhism in Egypt, however, even if this did happen, there's no evidence for any direct religious influence from West to East.

It wasn't just gold though. Spices are proverbially famous, with pepper being as widely available in Scotland as it is today (though nowhere near as cheap). Gems too were widespread, with Indian gemstones even being found at Sutton Hoo – well after the collapse of the Western Empire. Rather amusingly (if you're living in the Czech Republic), when the trade to the West finally did dry up, Dalrymple notes that "thereafter Indian garnets were replaced by inferior stones from Czechoslovakia and Portugal".

I have to wonder what role, if any, the loss of this Indian trade played in precipitating the fall of the Western Roman Empire. I'm guessing there must be an obvious reason why the causal link is actually the other way around, i.e. it was the collapse of the Empire that stopped the trade. Even so, it seems strange to me that a much bigger deal isn't made of this in histories of the Empire, both for its Eastern and Western halves – the loss of this much revenue cannot have been anything less than catastrophic for the remaining rump of Rome.

Spiritual Salesmen

If the material exports – to the east as well as Europe – were vast, so too were the religious and philosophical ideas of India of comparably profound influence. These were not purely directed to the east, with Buddha figurines found even in Roman Egypt (though this says very little about the presence of actual Buddhist adherents there). But they were, by and large, much more successful in South-East Asia than elsewhere.

I will emphasise again my pig-headed ignorance of both Buddhism and Hinduism. Of the former I'm largely limited to pop culture, so from my perspective professing a Buddhist lifestyle means either being a) a Shaolin monk possibly found inside the Matrix and generally being really badass; b) a tech CEO with billions of dollars and intent on making sure everyone knows how incredibly humble they are.

According to Dalrymple the latter is not entirely the result of a modern perversion of the religion. Early Buddhists, he says, saw the need to make money as (at worse) a necessary evil, with asceticism being a later development : how could you possibly reach Nirvana on an hungry belly ? Indeed the earliest monks seem to have been well-known for all kinds of modern vices; many early stories seem to have had no problem with having merchants as the heroes. It was even possible to reach Enlightenment, much as in Christianity, through gifts to monasteries. It's all in marked contrast to Hinduism, which viewed businessmen as being on the same level as "sadists and lepers". And the Buddha himself was depicted not as reclining in passive contemplation, but as powerful and muscular – which Dalrymple describes in lurid, almost homoerotic tones. 

Buddhism also suffered from the same twisted misinterpretations and misuse as Christianity. There were Buddhist warlords and rulers who proclaimed themselves to be Buddhist deities, even the reincarnated Buddha him (or her*)self : Maitreya – which for me is interesting in explaining the name of a popular local restaurant. Early Buddhism might not have required intense physical suffering, but did demand intense spiritual endurance, with multiple lifetimes being needed to reach Nirvana. But even this relatively limited degree of... well, let's be honest, purely imaginary hardship proved unpopular : the need for tangible gods and benefits, says Dalrymple, is what led to its downfall in India**.  Even the rise in the beliefs in Buddhist equivalents of saints and angels (to whom, unlike the Buddha himself, one could appeal directly) was not enough to stop the decline. Hindu ideas went much further, with their gods not being adverse to naked bribery.

* The Empress of China is a truly fascinating figure who appears extremely bipolar. She appeared to attend lectures by scholars out of both a genuine interest in what they had to say and out of pure ego to see what she could use for propaganda. Her tyrannical crimes are likely exaggerated, but even according to her own confessions she was ruthless in the extreme. The whole chapter feels like listening to a description of two entirely different people. And it was under her regime, both enlightened and totalitarian, that Dalrymple says is when Indian influence over China reached its zenith.
** I find this a rather interesting mirror of the decline of magical, mechanical beliefs and the rise of spiritual, religious ideals in the West, as per Keith Thomas. Though of course it's more complicated than that, as within a few centuries, Buddhist monks had become widely known as devotees of self-discipline in line with the modern stereotype.

If Dalrymple sometimes gets suspiciously enthusiastic about the masculine virtues of early Buddha, he's certainly no less, err, red-blooded when it comes to the voluptuous curves of the ladies in many a Hindu temple. But there's a serious point to these opposing sorts of religious practise, the supposed spiritual enrichment through self-denial versus the apparent magical ecstasy of physical indulgence. What comes across to me here are two great rival theories of humanity. First, there's the Star Trek model : it's easy to be a saint in paradise. That is, only by reducing physical distractions can we hope to improve our minds and become better people. Second, there's the Dune model : we only achieve our best when we struggle against adversity, with physical hardship being necessary to develop our mental discipline and essential in overall self-improvement.

With the rise of AI, this is extremely topical. Will we do better when all the answers are provided to us*, or is this a poisoned chalice ? If we need some middle ground in which to truly flourish, where exactly is this ? When does struggle engender fortitude and intelligence, and when does it become destructive ? Or vice-versa, when does an excess of luxury lead to decadence and decline and when is it simply a reward or an incentive, or even a necessary condition to excel ?

* Neglecting hallucinations, here meaning when an LLM comes up with an answer which has no connection to reality.

Answering this may not even be possible, so let's move on. If the dichotomy of luxury and hardship is a common theme among religions, a more specific similarity is found when it comes to graven images. Even Buddhism, now so associated with monumental architecture, had some early adherents who were aghast at the ideas of images of Buddha : why imprison him in an image of the humanity from which he had strived to escape ? There seems to be a tension between the need to have a focus of worship – a literal icon – and the desire to escape such pettiness, the urge to think oneself above such things. Again, perhaps, the conflict between luxury and depravation is at work.  

In this very specific instance I will venture an answer : visual imagery does no harm whatever. The map is not the territory and a 70-ft Buddha statue is not the Buddha himself. Images, graphs, charts, all help the mind far more than they ever hinder it. So there, that's a major religious dilemma definitively solved for all time. Hooray !

The Sale of Spiritual Science 

If hardly presenting anything comprehensive on Buddhist or Hindu beliefs, Dalrymple certainly manages a good introduction for the likes of ignoramuses like me. It's abundantly clear that both religions had incredibly complex, sophisticated, and immensely varied beliefs and practises. Dalrymple at least manages to convey some of the basics of how different these mental worlds were (and are) from modern Western concepts.

Two examples will suffice. First, there's the practise of snake worship. The books I've read recently on mythology of European cultures make it clear that snakes were interpreted in a variety of conflicting ways. They could be seen as symbols of regeneration and healing due to shedding their skin, and also of wisdom. But they could also be seen as villainous and evil, tempting Eve in the Garden but also simply eating people (especially, of course, in the case of dragons, which were regarded as the greatest of all serpents).

But if snakes were sometimes valued, nowhere have I read of anything of actual worship of snakes in Europe. Indeed, it's hard not to view this as some sinister, Indiana Jones-style evil cult. Sadly Dalrymple doesn't go into much depth on this, really only mentioning that snake worship was sometimes widespread. The interesting, and again implicit question, is what distinguishes a cult of pantomime villainy from a real world case of misguided ideals. I suppose the former would be when believers found not only religious salvation, but actually took emotional pleasure in inflicting pain on their enemies while earnestly believing in its spiritual necessity. There's little hint of this with the snake worshippers. Which is a bit of a shame, if you ask me.... still, there's clearly a marked difference from Western traditions here.

The second example are mandalas. You see them used as decoration often enough (I've got one on a pillow), but they could also be used as visual spells. In extreme cases, temples and maybe even cities were based on these intricate patterns. In the case of a temple, at least, the idea seems to have been to induce an altered state of consciousness. Walking through the dark and twisting tunnels, with torches and drums manipulating the senses into a kind of trance, the sudden emergence into full sunlight at the summit must have been an overload. The skills to design such a structure, replete with baroque levels of overwhelming aesthetic detail in a harmonious symphony of geometry, were formidable indeed.

The idea of mechanical, ritualised magic blends easily into more rational, scientific ideas about how the world works (again, see the posts about Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic). Unsurprisingly then, the same skills needed to formulate complex magical rituals and objects also expressed themselves in more straightforwardly scientific discoveries. Science was highly prized, with several top-level diplomatic treaties making the exchange of scientific texts a key feature. Some of these included translations of much earlier foreign texts, such as those of Aristotle (Dalrymple's period is mainly c.0 – 1,000 AD); again, he does not pretend that India invented everything. 

But perhaps India's greatest contribution was the number zero*. Claims of just how profound a shift this was are, well, innumerable, but I've never found them all that convincing. To say that the absence of a thing can itself count as a thing does not, in my view, necessitate some genius-level philosophy. How many apples do I have ? No apples. How 'bout I represent that with a symbol ? Sure, no problem. This is nothing terribly difficult.

* Whether this really did come from India is, unsurprisingly, disputed.

The real achievement, as Dalrymple and others make clear, is the place value system of numbers. Once you start using the position in the written sequence to represent the size of the number – units, tens, hundreds, etc. – then the invention of zero is inevitable. This doesn't happen at all with Roman numerals, or other systems which use symbols to represent entire numbers rather than as a sequence. And that shift does require some genius-level philosophy, as great and radical as switching from base-ten mathematics to binary.

---

Dalrymple has done a hit-and-miss job of presenting material that is nearly always interesting. I recorded in my notes that "the only thing that saves it is the content", which is strange but true.

Nevertheless, Dalrymple gets his main points across loud and clear. For several centuries, India was home to some of the greatest civilisations on the planet. Its architecture, religious beliefs, scientific discoveries, and sheer volume of material output had deep influence from the Roman Empire to Java. As Indian gems can be found in Dark Age burials in England, so too are there to be found Indian-inspired temples in an active volcano in the far East.

Too much of this influence has been forgotten by the West, arguably deliberately suppressed by the colonial British in their attempts to civilise a subcontinent that had, very clearly, had its own civilisations for millennia. Those civilisations were frequently alien to modern ideals, with exotic (and unashamedly erotic) temples, worship of snakes, mythical monkey armies, and complex magical symbolism. Yet they also played no small role in influencing those same modern ideals, pointing to an ancient world more interconnected than we usually assume. In our popular histories, at least, India has been neglected and forgotten for far too long.

Review : Epic Greek Myths (II)

Welcome back to part two of What Some Nerd Thinks About Greek Mythology. In part one I looked at the differences between a selection of variants of the same myth and also looked at how Greek literature often used quite different approaches to modern writing. 

In this rather longer sequel, I challenge the view that paganism is inherently amoral. Price and Hutton were both explicit about this on the Celtic and Norse peoples, and I have to say that the moral lessons on many of the pagan stories has long eluded me. But as I'll set forth below, I think this is due to my modern liberal-lefty perspective. I think the difficulty in seeing the intended instructions arises from a combination of factors : the complexity of the stories, the fact that their gods don't directly symbolise moral virtues, and a fundamentally different outlook as to what moral behaviour actually was.

Get yerself a cuppa, then. It's a long one, but I promise it'll be better than watching the news.

Chaotic Neutral ?

So at last we come to the main event. I've gone on a lot lately about how Christianity isn't really monotheistic but it does give much more emphasis to the moral lessons of its stories than pagan writings. This is true, I think, but it probably needs needs a lot of caveats. Hutton and Price both claim outright that pagan thinking more a view of how the world works rather than why, bestowing little in the way of moral instruction. 

Building on Hamilton, I would suggest that this is not wrong or unfounded, but definitely too simple. The stories themselves don't always offer explicit moral guidance in the way Christian stories often do. But they do give... suggestions, sometimes quite overtly. It's just that the earlier morality doesn't always align with modern notions : it can often be orthogonal and unrelated to modern concepts, or even diametrically opposed to them (as we'll see). 

Nor is it anywhere near as simple as good deed => reward, bad deed => punishment, with good characters suffering and dying and bad people sometimes thriving without penalty*.  The gods inflict reward and punishment according to their own ideals, but they themselves are flawed and imperfect rather than being simple personifications of morality. As with heroes, the conception of a Greek god was very different to a Christian one : they were immensely powerful beings but in no way omniscient nor omnipotent. That bad things happened to good people was in no way a problem for Greek paganism, because that was just the nature of reality (on which more later). They would simply not have understood the idea that gods had to be perfect; our conception of what constitutes "godliness" is not necessarily any more valid than theirs.

* The question of why this should be never arises very much. Things just happen, what the hell. 

So it's not that the stories themselves are moral instructions in the way that Bible stories often are, but there are still moral lessons to be found within the stories. There's a much greater onerous on the reader to determine which behaviour is worthy of emulation and which isn't, and, perhaps most importantly, the emphasis is on telling a story first, providing ethical tutelage a somewhat distant second.

Okay, but what moral lessons do they contain then ? Chief among these is surely the overwhelming need to be kind to strangers. This is a sort of running motif of the Odyssey which is universally acknowledged by all civilised folk. The singular exception is the barbaric cyclops Polyphemus, and he's duly punished by Odysseus for this capital offence. 

While this message is so deafeningly clear as to be practically WRITTEN IN CAPITAL LETTERS, it's worth remembering that this would not be something most of us today would choose to declare as our highest principle. Just as we saw last time with the Greeks having different ideas as to what made for good literature, so too did they have different moral beliefs. I mean... "Remember kids, be kind to strangers ! Let them invite themselves into your own home and shower them with expensive gifts ! Yes, give them the WiFi password ! Hell, give them the WiFi router !"... said no-one ever, apart form the ancient Greeks.

Other cases of explicit moral messaging include the famous and dreadful Torment of Tantalus, punished for his cannibalism with an equally brutal torture. So too was Prometheus for deceiving the gods, and also Odysseus for both blinding Poseidon's son and his pride in taunting him as his sailed off. Every so often, there are consequences for actions which go well beyond simple revenge and are clearly examples of moral lessons.

Odysseus deserves at little special attention. He can be a hard man to like, being at times absolutely insufferable. He's arrogant, boastful, and on occasion brutish and unnecessarily harsh. In particular when he returns home : judging the moral worthiness of the suitors but determined to kill them all anyway, regardless of the result; even worse, however, is his unambiguous rape of Circe – amorality and moral ambiguity giving way to outright villainy. But at his heart is a clever, wily man fighting not for glory but for survival, home and hearth and family, who weeps openly at memories of better days, and his physical and mental anguish are described in detail – he feels altogether more human and far less superhuman than many of the other heroes. He was no coward, but he alone was reluctant to fight at Troy, with all the rest being a bunch of bloodthirsty and/or suicidal maniacs. 

The complexity of the character and his adventures alike surely underline the morally different nature of Greek mythology. The gods themselves, all too frequently, commit wantonly horrific acts, but I submit that this doesn't mean the Greeks thought that bestiality was anything desirable : it's just that they didn't understand gods to be personifications of virtue. Surely, they would have been much more choosy about what sort of behaviour they deemed to be worthy of imitation and which was intended as advice on what not to do.

Anyway, a flawed and imperfect human he may be, but Odysseus has much to admire about him : his lies are generally beneficial and just. Not so his counterpart in the earlier Iliad. Achilles has exactly nothing worthy of emulation because there's nothing about him possible to imitate : his strength and fighting prowess are divinely bestowed but his attitude is petulant bitching from beginning to end*. He is, in short, an absolute cunt. Yet the ancient Greeks seemed to view him as sex on legs, another reminder that their standards were not our standards. At all. They would have agreed that violence in a certain context is wrong, but would not at all have understood the concept of trying to reduce violence for its own sake. They might have viewed Achille's wrath as misplaced, but they would never have accepted that violence was innately undesirable. In this respect the tales only seem amoral to us because the Greeks had such radically different standards to modern Western audiences, not because their religious beliefs had no standards at all.

* First he won't fight at all and whines about it. Then he gets angry because his boyfriend gets killed and blames it all on Hector, who is, however, only defending his home. Achilles is a total Karen with sword and stupid sandals and I just don't like him.

Fortunately, Achilles gets his comeuppance just like most of the heroes, with few happily-ever-afters in Greek mythology more generally. Odysseus does get one but has to wait twenty years for it, Hercules dies horribly despite being the favourite of Zeus, many others achieve some fleeting moment of glory only to die badly : being heroic by itself doesn't automatically win you divine awards (and most heroes don't maintain a high ethical standard for very long, but quickly sink into corruption and vice*). Perseus is an exception**, who after many adventures slaying Gorgons and whatnot, retires to a happy kingship and is rewarded with an afterlife with the gods. 

* Whether this is supposed to have any moral implication is unclear. Generally it feels like this is just a reflection of human nature, though it could be a warning that all glory is fleeting. Either way, it means that there are attributes of the heroes worthy of imitation, but one shouldn't go the whole Agamemnon. Aggy was great for assembling an army, but one hell of a shitty military commander.
** He too can be a right little prick, insufferably full of arrogant pride. In one of the weirdest lines in this collection he declares to Andromeda, "I will win you and I will wear you." Misogyny too, sadly, would not have struck the Greeks as offensive.

All this complexity makes the stories altogether more engaging than the pure morality-tales of the Bible – with Greek mythology you can't predict anything based on the moral actions of the characters. But this doesn't mean that what the heroes did was of no virtue. Rather the reverse : in Tolkienian fashion, the true heroes act correctly in spite of the lack of reward, be it divine or worldly. 

Sometimes rewards and punishments are indeed forthcoming, however, but not always in a straightforward way. When Hercules – a character who constantly atones for his misdeeds – accidentally shots his immortal mentor Chiron the centaur with poisoned arrows, the pain is unbearable. The gods can't cure him so instead they grant him the gift of death... and if that's not a topical moral lesson then I don't know what is. This is in marked contrast to Tithonus, who was granted immortality but not agelessness, eventually decaying into a grasshopper ("whose monotonous chirpings may not inaptly be compared to the meaningless babble of extreme old age", says our questionable translator), or Echo, who fades to nothing more than a voice.

Immortality in Greek myth can be a reward for exceptional heroes like Perseus and Hercules, but it can also be a terrible punishment. Much more common, of course, is that mortals simply die, but the afterlife they receive takes moral ambiguity to the extreme. The plethora of different views make this one difficult to summarise, but it seems that the afterlife could be extremely difficult to enter – you'd have a long and difficult descent, a ferryman to pay, a giant multi-headed dog to get past, rivers of fire and giant snakes and whatnot... except even this wasn't clear. In the Aeneid :

The gates of hell are open night and day;
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way:
But to return, and view the cheerful skies,
In this the task and mighty labour lies.

So getting in could be either trivial or enormously difficult (what happened if you failed isn't stated, nor is it clear why getting in should be a challenge anyway since there's not necessarily much there). For Odysseus neither posed that much difficulty, essentially he just sails in and sails right back out again. But whether you'd be rewarded or not was anyone's guess. In some versions the shades in Hades really are phantoms, with a shadow of Hercules being present despite his true soul being in Olympus – yet their wits could be temporarily restored by an offering of blood. In some versions Elysian (and Olympus itself) comes close to a vision of heaven, but the entry conditions are unclear to say the last, and even those who don't make it in are described as "blessed". Sometimes a blissful afterlife is allowed for heroes but what happens to everyone else isn't said.

Whether good behaviour would result in a reward is, then, often totally opaque... but if good characters aren't always rewarded, then bad ones are almost invariably and savagely punished; the heroes might not win for long, but they always defeat their enemies. None of this means that many events in the stories aren't described in positive terms, clearly meant as moral guides despite the lack of reward or even suffering that would subsequently befall the characters. 

Rather than the mythology being amoral, I think this shows that it simply doesn't fit with modern conceptions of how religion and morality were supposed to relate. Our understanding is much simpler and more straightforward : reward the good and punish the wicked; lots of carrot and lots of stick alike. The ancient Greeks appear not to have shared this view, and wouldn't have accepted it because that's clearly not how the world works. All the same, this doesn't mean their mythology doesn't share some aspects of how they think the world should work.

The Ultimate Reality

The Iliad is surely the supreme example of moral ambiguity. Full of both the glories and brutalities of combat, it also presents each side very even-handedly and presents direct contrasts between good and bad characters on both sides. More than most of the other tales this is straightforward literature rather than mythology proper, with little in the way of explanatory metaphors, full of titanic armies instead of individual duels. Yet there are opposing cases in Greek myth, situations where one side is clearly evil and the other clearly good. I refer, of course, to monsters.

Like the later Norse myths, monsters spring from a different lineage than the gods. The gods themselves are hardly emblematic of virtue, but just as heroes are not always rewarded but villains always punished, so the monsters are almost entirely straightforwardly evil. Killing the monsters is never questioned : they are dangerous and deserve to die, end-of*. Although some of them are the result of misadventures by the gods – the Cyclops are, according to some at least**, the offspring of Poseidon, and thus fully part of the natural order – many are not. The Furies are born of the blood of Uranus; Hydra*** is the offspring of the mighty Typhon (itself the son of Gaia); Perseus encounters a "monster bred of slime who devours all living things". 

* A History Hit documentary provides a fascinating caveat, describing how Medusa was originally a protector-goddess rather than a Crazy Snake Lady. But this doesn't negate that in later depictions as Crazy Snake Lady, everyone thought that she needed to be killed.
** As usual there is no one accepted account. Wikipedia has a very nice overview.
*** Who is assisted by a giant crab, and I feel this needs to be more widely known.

Why does this matter ? Well, Tolkien, I think heavily overstated the case that the Greek monsters were all entirely in keeping with the natural order. They might not cause any sort of "corruption of the soul", but their narrative function is be defeated by the heroes : their only innate desires are destruction and malevolence, and many of them are literally another order of being to the gods and mortals alike. Even those which are god-begotten, like Polyphemus, are wholly villainous, and a good Greek hero has no doubt that his duty is to slay them if he can. True, the gods do not wage war against all monsters, but they certainly do fight some of them. Greek cosmology is partly dependent on the existence of malevolent beings, even if the underlying sense of doom in Norse myth is nowhere present. The future, for the Greeks, was always uncertain, and again this comes through as heroes are sometimes laid low unjustly and villains sometimes achieve – albeit usually temporarily – great success.

If the future was unwritten then the past was... confused. There's little or nothing to indicate a cyclic view of the future, no hint that things will repeat or reset – if they even ever mention the future at all. Of course, here and there is a vague hint of heroic destiny and short-term prophecy, but nothing much at all beyond that of individual lives. But myths of the past, though they vary substantially, do contain repetitive aspects. There's a cycle of overthrow and especially patricide : Gaia (Earth) is overthrown by her offspring Uranus (heaven) who is in turn overthrown by Cronos. Cronos, famously, devours his children, fearing a prophecy that one of them would overthrow him. Of course this turns out to be Zeus, but Zeus himself eats Metis who births Athena inside him, eventually springing forth fully formed from his head. Humans are even more cyclic, being created first from races of successively lower-quality metals, then all being wiped out in a great deluge only to finally repopulate the Earth from a few survivors,

What exactly is the point of all this repetition* ? Christian teachings are an awful lot simpler and easier to follow; Greek ideas (emphasis on the plural) are muddled, complex, with a sense of deep time about them that a literal interpretation of the Bible famously lacks. It's almost, dare I say it, to the sense of evolutionary change... the gods are superior to their predecessors the Titans; gods have at least a capacity for good whereas giants and Titans and monsters tend overwhelmingly to be just, well, monstrous. Conversely humans are are degenerate from their forbears rather than being improvements on the earlier models.

* And this is just a selection of the formation myths. Other aspects repeat as well : as Demeter spends half the year in Hades, so does Adonis. As Echo fades to just a voice, so does Tithonus. More general themes, such as a hero being separated from their parents at birth, or falling victim to their own hubris, are also abundantly re-used.

Perhaps the lesson is itself uncertainty and change even on the cosmic scale. The universe itself is certainly not underpinned by moral agency, but even so, nothing is ever truly destroyed – gods and monsters are much more replaced than they are destroyed utterly. The more things change, the more they stay the same; things alter, but they don't always progress. And perhaps this is a larger reflection of that vast, interlinked pseudo-history, without any clear endings even on the longest of scales.

If anything I suppose "lack of clarity" might be the defining feature of the whole edifice. Lack of clear endings and the uncertain prospect of repetition doesn't render the whole thing amoral so much as it does morally ambiguous. 

Likewise, so too is the nature of the gods uncertain. They are clearly of a different order altogether than humans, but they still require sustenance to survive (and presumably, for reasons that are never explained, the worship of mortals and sacrificial offerings). They personify natural forces to the nth degree. It's not that Poseidon is some big burly water-man with a changeable moods, it's that there are even separate gods and goddesses that personify the sea in different and highly specific states*; similarly it's not that there's a god just for the Sun, but also those for the twilight and the dawn.

* The god of Mildly Choppy Waters wasn't a thing, but easily could have been.

Exactly how this works I've not got a clue. Even the simpler cases of personification aren't clear. How exactly does Poseidon or Zeus deal with multiple prayers simultaneously ? How do they manage different parts of the world all at once ? The answer seems to be that they simply don't, that they're just singular figures who somehow muddle through, but this is deeply unsatisfactory. I have to wonder if this points to a different conception of reality – if there was some obvious solution to those who actually believed in the Olympians* – or if it's just romanticism run amok with no attempt ever made to fathom an answer. Emotions were allowed to drive the stories and beliefs far more than rational thought. 

* Perhaps the point I'm missing is the transactional nature of the relationship between humans and gods. They presented a way whereby mortals could hope to overcome otherwise hopeless situations, and that sometimes things would or wouldn't work out when bargaining with sapient deities was something easily understood. Maybe the gods don't so much represent nature itself as man's relationship to it.

Hamilton made the excellent point that human-like minds were something that humans could understand, and thus crafting the gods in their own image was a measure of progress in rationality compared to believing in incomprehensible forces. For all that, it's worth remembering that this progress was extremely limited, with no attempt or interest in understanding the nature of the gods or even imposing any degree of self-consistency over the stories. And as Hamilton herself pointed out, when this started to happen, the ancient beliefs were doomed. Varying the stories through happy accident was one thing, but actively remaking the gods according to an independent moral code was quite another.

Conclusions

Greek myths are distinctly different from Celtic, Norse, and Christian teachings, even if all share plenty of common themes. The Greek world view is one all of its own, without the underlying moral guidance of Christianity and without the overarching doom of Norse. They aren't morally fixated but they are not all amoral either. They are ambiguous about practically everything, endlessly versatile, but this can make them infinitely frustrating in trying to understand their purpose. They are somewhere between pure literature and a genuine world view, neither entirely an attempt to understand reality, nor only to provide ethical guidance, nor to simply tell a good story. They were, of course, all of these, though some stories were far more profound than others.

What's also hard to factor in is the humour. Occasionally this is obvious, such as Odysseus' famous "Nobody" ploy against the Cyclops. But what about when Athena, in human guise, prays to Poseidon – would the Greeks have found this amusing or serious ? How are we to view Athena disguising herself as a man, or Hercules cross-dressing and lounging (however briefly) in an apathetic depression ? Sometimes that which can be played for laughs can also be deeply serious.

The ambiguity and flexibility of the myths could also be a tremendous weakness. It was possible to journey to the very edge of reality; journeys into Hell could be undertaken in a numerous different ways. There was no clear cosmology and thus mingled into ordinary geography. The ideas were supposed to explain reality, but ultimately, having multiple conflicting accounts of this – many of which were testable – was unsustainable. Not only, perhaps, was it the human need for a a robust moral belief that undermined the gods (insisting they behaved with ever-greater levels of nobility), but so too it may have been that there was a need to impose order on the whole system : not just morally, but physically also. And when you learn there's actually a single and specific truth to something, a flexible and indeterminate belief cannot be maintained. 

Eeep, this has been a long one, right enough. The Greeks may have hated endings to the same level as Monty Python, but I still have to finish somewhere. I guess I'll go for this : the Greek myths are, ultimately, fascinating because of their combination of similarity and differences to modern standards. We can appreciate Hercules' defence of the weak, but not his murderous rage (though we might sympathises with his madness). We can appreciate Achilles' martial prowess but not his Karen-like bitchiness; we can embrace Odysseus' cunning and empathise as he fails to persuade his crew as they court their own disaster, but we shun his ruthlessness and pride. And we can endorse the attempt, however flawed, in seeking a comprehensible explanation for how the world worked, even as we reject the contradictory solutions.

A look at Greek myth is, then, to stare into a hall of broken mirrors at our alien ancestors. We see ourselves twisted and broken and warped but nevertheless recognisable. We continue to draw lessons from their stories, but as with all good stories, those lessons can and should change over time; that some of their behaviours are now understood to be outright wrong does not negate the value of their stories but simply changes it; we now learn what not to do rather than feeling inspired to sack cities and molest swans. We will never understand the full moral symbolism of all of their stories as the original audience perceived it, but that doesn't make our own attempts any the less valuable, and certainly doesn't devalue them simply because our own ethical teachings are not the same. On the contrary : to try and understand the shifting moral sands is intrinsically valuable, an avenue to critical thinking that is, surely, essential in reaffirming our own ideals.