Objects

• The modern place of psychological philosophy. Down a rabbit-hole that began with vulgar celebrity-philosopher Slavoj Žižek—known for his political incorrectness and unkempt appearance—I was recently reading on the state of modern philosophy. One of the theories on which Žižek has worked is Lacanianism, a contemporary movement contending “that the world of language, the Symbolic, structures the human mind, and stresses the importance of desire, which is conceived of as endless and impossible to satisfy”. I was struck by reading this at the uselessness of such assertions. Are we not at the point where science can concretely establish the workings of the human mind? Are we to listen to philosophers telling us what drives us, or ought we not instead listen to educated psychologists who could illuminate the evolutionary causes of human beavior? I wonder if there is any place for philosophers to speculate on the human mind in the modern day. Should philosophers instead be constrained to the decidedly abstract fields of virtue, theology and socio-political matters? Even in sociological philosophy, though, one finds statements of dubious value; I understand that questioning learned men usually earns one a shadowy place in history, but what is the usefulness of the supposedly profound assertion that “processes of structuration involve an interplay of meanings, norms and power”? It is an assertion so profoundly obvious—“things interact.” What practical value is to be had in it?


• A Portrait of Tenochtitlan, a collection of beautiful, strikingly realistic renders of medieval Tenochtitlan, including vivid descriptions and a depiction of the New Fire Ceremony and comparisons with modern-day Mexico City. Dutch technical artist Thomas Kole spent over a year putting them together. The Aztec Empire was an engine of oppression and conquest in Mesoamerica, but there is no doubt that they produced an urban landscape of remarkable beauty in pre-Columbian America.


• What Happens When Global Human Population Peaks?, a New York Times article with striking visuals about the demographic future of humanity. It contends that, after the projected population peak in 2085, the human population will not plateau—it will plummet. A total collapse in fertility rates will reduce the human population from 10 billion in 2085 to ancient-world levels within a century afterward. There is some basis for this. If the entire world perpetually maintained the fertility rate of the United States, it observed, the entire human population would plunge to roughly 100 million by 2200 and then cease to exist altogether in the coming centuries. A rebound in childbearing rates is sorely needed to avert this disaster, but a country has never—in the entire demographic history of the world—fallen below replacement levels of fertility and recovered. This presents an anti-Malthusian idea that the world will run out of people—quickly. The consequences of this are fascinating. While a boon for issues such as climate change, it would mean a burden on what young people are born to care for a colossal elder population. It would also mean that groups that reproduce at consistently high rates—like the Amish (whose population has tripled in the last thirty years) or Hasidic Jews (who are on track to eclipse all other Jews by the end of the century due to birth rates alone)—will balloon in their share of the population and inherit a disproportionately large share of the future. Groups who do not—who instead have, say, the 1 child per family now statistically common—will halve their population every year, resulting in an steeply sloping decline. If someone of our generation raised children who would indeed themselves have children, they would have the chance to occupy a share of the human gene pool many, many times larger than we do now.

Conclusions

Jake’s September subjects included the fascinating Hyrcanian forests of Iran—lush lowlands created in the otherwise arid country by the conditions of the Caspian Sea. They are so environmentally fascinating that they have merited designation as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and are host to several species which might have gone extinct were it not for the oasis-like conditions provided by the region. They were apparently even home to tigers until the late 1970s: a jarringly late survival for tigers in an area of the world that I did not even realize was home to them. His second subject was the oddity of the platypus and bewildered reactions to its existence. I had never given time to really understanding the bizarre form of the platypus, its implications for evolutionary possibilities, and its drawbacks. Jake noted the strangely short time for which a platypus can hold its breath: a disadvantage, indeed, to contrast with its many acquired adaptations.

On philosophy, we respected that modern philosophers do not at least contend to be scientific—as they would, of course, be offering pseudoscience—but questioned the platitudes often posed by Giddens and others. His assertion that “The realm of human agency is bounded. Individuals produce society, but they do so as historically located actors, and not under conditions of their own choosing” seems obvious enough to be a truism of questionable usefulness. As for the projected plummeting of human population, we had much to say. That a kind of reverse-Malthusian decline seems reasonably possible is shocking, as is that anyone determined enough to have children-having children today stakes out a large genetic claim in the future. It opens doors with regard to mitigating climate change, but no doubt advocates could use it to support continued fossil fuel usage (as our consumption seems fated to drop considerably). Of course, Malthus has long been proved wrong—but we have yet to see whether the antithesis of his ideas will be. If it comes to be, it could have enormous implications for the definition of the human species: perhaps collapsing fertility is the great drawback to our massive adaptability. Perhaps, as Jake suggested would be one fascinating idea, humanity is doomed to exist in cycles wherein civilization explodes and retreats.