THE HESCHEL-ORR PARADOX

A legend of the environmental world and key author in our introductory readings, David Orr, writes, “...philosophers have agreed with Abraham Heschel (1990) that 'as civilization advances, the sense of wonder almost necessarily declines.'” My evermore intimate sense of eco discourses is that this – and almost any assertion that now is far worse than then – comprises the essential framing. And as this is such a violation of everything I believe to be true, I feel compelled to consider why I feel that way and think through a response.

Two initial personal observations: I acknowledge I may be less than ideally placed to assess civilizational astonishment, given that I regularly have my little mind blown by the simplest and most common ideas and organisms. I’m the guy at the party who, just one and a half drinks in, declares to the room, “Sure, but have you seen mating leopard slugs!!!” or “I just learned there are likely more planets than there have been seconds!!!” *blank looks* “More PLANETS than SECONDS, people!!!” (…which is also, in part, why I don’t get invited to parties.) The other admission is that it’s bizarre to be on this side of the conversation as nobody who knows me would ever consider me an optimist or even overly positive. And yet, comparatively, I feel like I have a kind of wildly naive positivity, perhaps even one that is so far gone as to be childish. Still, my own sense of this persists and the other perspective feels closer to an indefensible nihilism that rejects so much of what we know.

So, what about this quote? Orr’s words struck me the same as Mark Twain’s account of learning to pilot a steamboat down the Mississippi. In his 1883 Life on the Mississippi, Twain notes:

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!

He goes on to suggest that he pities his doctor, who surely cannot see the woman but only her illness, and wonders whether more was gained or lost by learning his trade. My reply, in the form of a poem, was that it was a poor poet indeed who learns that the sun is not a tiny ball of fire up in the sky but an unimaginably ginormous and distant nuclear plasma furnace (one forging the building blocks of Being from its far-below-frozen home in the immense vacuum) and feels tremendous loss. How, I wondered, then as now, would such a discovery not initiate only many more questions and result in anything less than an overwhelming sense of astonishment at the beauty and magic so abundant in existence? As I’ve written elsewhere, I had somehow convinced myself that folks like Carl Sagan and Richard Fenman inoculated many of us in the English-speaking world against this kind of thinking. Sadly, no. And I feel like Heschel and Orr would love and embrace Twain while emphatically rejecting Fenman and Sagan. (Doesn't it seem like Heschel and Orr are the kind of folks who would petition to close down patent and copyright offices, having determined that everything possible has been imagined and invented already? Simultaneous and exasperated, “Surely!”, they'd blurt, “Just look around. It’s all here!”)

Well, for any of this to be a fair assessment, what would the world have to look like? To start, even if we insist the universe has an in-built throttle for the experience of wonder, I’m not sure how we land on the above assessment. Had Heschel elucidated a new law of physics – fixing a limited and non-renewable volume of wonder for any individual organism, establishing that no organism may spend more than 0.7% of its life in wonder, or deeming no more than a set proportion of any population may ever experience wonder at any time – then the explosion in population over the last few centuries alone would still mean we live in a world with exponentially more human wonder in it than just very recently. To my mind, we’d have to go so much more radical than all of this and argue both that wonder is a universally finite substance and this once abundant supply has been so exploited that it’s now rare. Needless to say, there’s no reason for believing any of this is so.

Assuming we don’t live in any of the above worlds, what if we compare any modern population with those of previous times? (Isn’t this the minimal requirement?) To do so I presume ‘wonder’ to mean something like ‘astonishment brought about by the novel or unexpected.’ And when I think about even the very recent past, it become impossible to fail to appreciate how dramatically our capacity for wonder has grown. I would go so far as to say possibilities for wonder are in such abundance by contrast to prior times that we find ourselves effectively immersed in it. Does that sound radical? Well, haven’t we collectively opened up many more universes and mysterious miracles over time?

To me, this gift of more universes seems obvious, but my perspective is still more contrary and offensive to Orr’s than this. I would suggest not merely that whole universes have been unveiled but any one of these many new dimensions is of far greater scale to any previously experienced. I mean, how can one read past descriptions of the world and life, from origin myths to daily observations, and come away with anything but clear presentations of this very smallness? And, even recently within this miniaturized world, weren’t the available experiences to inspire wonder then in so much more limited supply as well? And what is the argument or evidence brought forward to support anything different?

There's a common estimation I come across in different contexts that says most folks never traveled much beyond their place of birth. That seems fair. If I look at my modern family alone, each newer generation has traveled farther abroad, more regularly, and to more exotic locales. Short of males being conscripted into war and sent abroad, why and how would the vast majority of people leave their land or continent? And how many times are you going to experience awe at the local fruit you grew up consuming or songs you learned? Now consider modern exposure to different languages and multiply those by all our stories, songs, dances, and entire new art forms. What is the evidence that Belgium or Thailand or Peru had more music and of a wider variety in a prior millennium? Just consider this over your own lifetime. Now, relatedly, add to this the explosion of available foods and the continuous discovery, hybridization, and invention of new varieties – plants and animals, cooking techniques, and recipes). From the mustard plant we only recently developed broccoli and cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, kale, cabbage and kohlrabi. From one, six. Lists like this could fill entire books on their own. Then look to all those places not on land that humans visit and probe that were very recently entirely unavailable. From the nearest shallows, those our lungs alone wouldn’t allow us to dive to, to the deepest depths of the sea; from just up in the sky to soaring for hours or a day above the clouds, to circling in low-Earth orbit and alighting upon the moon. Each of these and so much in between are whole new worlds with alien properties, populations, and vistas no one to have ever lived had access to.

And, of course, none of those novel worlds has us changing our perceptual scale or even employs tools beyond the narrowness of the visible light spectrum, either of which yields only more of the unknown and previously unimaginable. I can’t escape feeling that if you ever considered the sky or cosmos as vast and deep as the sea – a perfectly intuitive, experiential, and sense-based assessment – you lived in an impossibly infinitesimal and depleted universe. What do I mean? Well, the difference in volume and distance between the actual vastness of the sea or one continent or the whole of the Earth and the infinite or eternal is, well, nearly everything. And in the same way this scale zooms out, from the world to the bigness of the universe, it also zooms in, from what is visible to the naked eye or a fraction thereof to, what, a Plank’s length? Therein, what is normally beyond our immediate senses, is quite nearly 100% of what’s in/out there. So, by my way of thinking, our very small and middle world of typical human experience (and thus anything available to anyone anywhere in any prior millennium, according to every story I’ve heard or read) misses out on virtually all that is possible to be astonished by. Now take all this awareness and stretch it beyond this lived moment to life forms and species of matter and energy and circumstances now extinct. Knowledge of the Devonian period or the formation of the early solar system are, by the Heschel-Orr evaluation, also not wonder-inducing? How does one miss or disregard any of the above and make such bleak professions about our capacity for wonder? I do not know.

Considering what kind of abundance and diversity existed in people’s minds ages ago, and how we might know this, I was reminded that we have pretty good documented measures for that. As recently as Carl Linnaeus (nearly 250 years ago, and very recent on the narrowest possible scale of civilization), radical estimates of life’s diversity were on the order of mere tens of thousands of species. But how off is such an educated guess by someone uncommonly aware of other continents and the many distant grasslands, swamps, forests, and reefs? What struck some as an outlandish bet at the time, a total of as many as 20,000 species (an estimate including all plants, insects, fungi, fish… everything) strikes the modern ear as an impossibly narrow evaluation. It’s a number that lands on me, someone with only the most cursory biology awareness, as something like claiming ‘there are 12 words in the English language’ or ‘the human eye is capable of resolving four colours.’ Like, wut?! Of just bees alone, we’re presently aware of more than 20,000 species, of which Europe, land of Linnaeus, is home to almost 2,000. Known land plant species (those big obvious things that don’t tend to startle and run away as you approach or only emerge in the dark of night) exceed 200,000 in number; and those in the know estimate there may be another 100,000 or so species of plants out there as yet undiscovered. To round out this still unclear picture, conservative estimates for the total number of possible species of living things on this planet presently land around eight million, plus or minus a million or so. (But other educated guesses make arguments for tens of millions or hundreds of millions of species.) Whatever that unknown total is, to date we’ve found and classified around 1.2 million. This is how far off folks actively engaged in the modern and novel project of looking for living things to count and name, and doing so around the globe, can be so astonishingly far off that, with just a little more information, it feels like they could not have even been looking or taking anything at all into consideration. (A favourite recent anecdote of mine comes from zoologist Jennifer Owens who, in just her suburban garden in the UK alone, counted 1,997 insect, 474 plant, 54 bird, and 7 mammal species. 2,673 species total in one backyard, and all that without pulling out a microscope or growing smears of soil and pond scum in an agar dish.) But now consider that even Linnaeus lived in a huge and diverse world compared to the smallness bearing down on anyone before or since who’s capable of thinking a boat, of any size, could hold just two of everything that walks and flies. Of course, from Abrahamic lore to modern Swedish taxonomists, these misapprehensions and miscalculations are as off as thinking the ocean is deep or bottomless or that the distance across it is endless or merely far.

Now notice that all the above is still largely isolated to the Western world. Hasn’t our apprehension of things grown with exposure to more languages, philosophies, songs, species of fermented beverage, and subatomic particle; and, with that, the world only grown deeper and wider, more mysterious and full of questions? In what ways is this off the mark? What would you have to believe and conceive to think otherwise? You might get away with thinking of this sort if you lived alone in the forest and knew nothing of the outside world, but how else? I don't know.

Still, in response to the above I’ve composed what I'm calling the Heschel-Orr paradox.

Here’s how it’s written:

w = i (1 - d) c

w = Current level of wonder

i = Prior level of wonder

d = Rate of decay

c = Comparative profundity of civilizational advancement: "c" (or CPCA) is measured on a logarithmic scale, from 0.03 to 97.08. (Toenails clippings being 2.76, belly button lint sculptures being 3.31, the twist cap on toothpaste being 17.42, and the works of David Orr being 88.61)

How’d I do?