Kakistocracy

I picked up a copy of John Julius Norwich's A Short History of Byzantium (at almost four hundred pages, it's only short by comparison to his full three-volume History of Byzantium) at a used book sale.  To be fair, it couldn't afford to be much shorter because it covers about eleven hundred years of history.  I got it because it's a time and place I don't know much about, and when I opened it last week I kind of steeled myself for a dry, college textbook approach.

Turns out I shouldn't have been apprehensive.  Norwich is not only a great historian, he's a great writer, and his prose gallops right along, focusing not solely on the usual names and dates but on the personalities involved.  And... wow.  What a parade of lunatics.  The book certainly illustrates the truth of Dave Barry's trenchant quip, "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command.  Very often, that individual is crazy."

Honestly, there were a few good ones.  The emperor Leo VI was called "the Wise" for good reason; and you may recall that I wrote about his scholarly and good-natured son, Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, here at Skeptophilia a couple of years ago because of his deep devotion to preserving the written works of the ancients.  But some of the bad ones -- ye gods and little fishes.  Michael III was an unstable drunkard about whom Norwich says, "Content to leave the responsibilities of government to others, he was unable to check his own moral decline which, in the last five years of his life, finally reduced him to a level of degradation that fully earned him his later sobriquet of 'the Sot.'"  Constantine IV had "a streak of insanity that... [transformed] him into a monster whose only attributes were a pathological suspicion of all around him and an insatiable lust for blood."  Nicephorus II was a "sanctimonious and unattractive old puritan" who was "pitiless and cruel, and whose meanness and avarice were notorious."

You might have heard the term kakistocracy -- "government by the worst."  (Interesting that it went from being a nearly unknown word to being kind of all over the place in the last ten years.  I wonder why that is?)  Well, the Byzantines, with only a handful of exceptions, had what amounted to eleven centuries of kakistocracy, enduring long periods of intermittent chaos before ultimately collapsing into ruins in the mid-fifteenth century.

Gold coin with an image of one of the better Byzantine emperors, Leo VI "the Wise" [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, Solidus of Leo VI (reverse), CC BY-SA 2.5]

What has struck me over and over, though, is that throughout its long history, people did whatever they could to get into positions of power, trying either to clamber onto the throne itself or at least get close to it.  Why on earth would they want that?  I mean, on one level, I get it; power usually comes along with money and luxury, and the peasants of the Byzantine Empire didn't lead any happier lives than peasants in any other age.  My question, though, is why in the hell anyone was brave enough to risk it.  Very few emperors died peacefully of old age; bunches of them were deposed or murdered outright.  The same went for the nobles and the imperial advisors.  And being on the losing side often didn't just mean exile; there's example after example of dethroned emperors and ousted courtiers being castrated and having their noses cut off and their eyes gouged out.

You'd think that seeing this happen once or twice would be enough to induce anyone else having royal aspirations to say, "Um, yeah, no fucking way."  You'd be wrong.  The amazing truth is that having one guy get mutilated and exiled -- and after all that torture and blood loss, usually they didn't survive for very long afterward -- seemed to trigger the other competitors to say, "Cool!  One less rival to worry about!  I'm sure that won't happen to me."

The whole thing reminds me of a Tony Robbins motivational seminar a few years ago that culminated in a supposed mind-over-matter exercise of walking on hot coals.  The predictable happened, and thirty people were treated in a Dallas hospital for burns on the soles of their feet.  When I heard about this, I immediately wondered why, when the first couple of people shrieked in pain, the rest weren't dissuaded.  Did they line up in inverse order of IQ, or something?  But apparently that tendency not to learn from other people's hard experience is not a modern phenomenon, to judge by A Short History of Byzantium.

You can't know how you'd react unless you'd actually been raised in that culture; that's one of the problems with passing value judgments on figures from history.  But here, from my twenty-first century perspective, I find it a little hard to fathom.  I can't imagine how anyone would think "you have a chance at being powerful... but you may end up losing your eyes, nose, and balls" is a good bet, especially considering how many of the emperors and their cadre found themselves drawing the short straw.

What also strikes me about this period of history is how many of the central players -- not only the emperors, but the Patriarchs of what would become the Eastern Orthodox Church -- were so completely certain that they were right.  About everything.  Me, I'm hardly sure of anything, but these guys make the Pope's claims of infallibility sound like waffling.  One of the biggest disputes -- that went on for a hundred years and cost thousands of lives -- was about iconoclasm, the idea (still prevalent in most Muslim sects) that it was sacrilegious to depict holy figures in art, and worse still to venerate or worship them.  The Byzantine iconoclasts went around destroying every piece of religious art they could find, and many of them were perfectly willing to murder anyone who got in the way.  The iconodules, or "icon-worshipers," were equally violent.  And because both the imperial throne and the Patriarchate swung back and forth between the iconoclasts and the iconodules, each time the ground shifted there was a bloody purge of the ones who had previously been in ascendancy.

I mean, come on.  So some guy wants to pray to an image of the Virgin Mary, and you personally don't like that idea.  Is the next logical step "I must therefore cut his head off"?  Are you really that sure your position is the correct and God-approved one?

Of course, once again we haven't really progressed that far.  We have a Secretary of Defense who apparently thinks that God is standing by smiling while we bomb Iranian girls' schools, and at least a few prominent military leaders who are having multiple orgasms over the thought that Trump's little "excursion" might be the lead-up to Armageddon.

I dunno.  All it really proves to me is that I honestly have no idea what makes people tick most of the time.  I've wondered before if I might be some kind of changeling, because when I look around me, mostly what I think is, "None of this makes any fucking sense."

Anyhow, I recommend A Short History of Byzantium if you are (1) a history buff, (2) like well-written non-fiction, and (3) want further evidence that the human race is irredeemably weird.  I will say, though, that if ever time travel is invented, I am not going back to Byzantium.  Fascinating as it is, and little as I have any desire to be in a position of power, it still was not a safe place for pretty much anyone.  I like my various bodily organs securely attached where they are, thank you very much.

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Divine meddling

In Paul McCaw's musical comedy The Trumpets of Glory, angels back various causes on Earth as a kind of competitive contest.  Anything from a soccer game to a war is open for angelic intervention -- and there are no rules about what kind of messing about the angels are allowed to do. Anything is fair, up to and including deceit, malice, and trickery.  The stakes are high; the angel whose side wins goes up in rank, and the other one goes down.

It's an idea of the divine you don't run into often.  The heavenly host as competitors in what amounts to a huge fantasy football game.

While McCaw's play is meant to be comedy, it's not so far off from what a lot of people believe -- that some divine agent, be it God or an angel or something else, takes such an interest in the minutiae of life down here on Earth that (s)he intercedes on our behalf.  As an example, take Paula White -- the "White House Spiritual Advisor" -- leading a prayer service in which she called on "angelic reinforcements" to make sure that Donald Trump keeps getting celestial support.

While this may seem kind of loony to a lot of us, it's a remarkably common attitude.  How often do you hear someone say things like, "I found my car keys!  Thank you Lord Jesus!"?  The problem for me, aside from the more obvious one of not believing that any of these invisible beings exist, is why Lord Jesus or the Heavenly Host would care more about whether you find your keys than, for example, all of the ill and starving children in the world.

You'd think if interference in human affairs is allowable, up there in heaven, that helping innocent people who are dying in misery would be the first priority.

The reason the topic comes up is a link from The Epoch Times that a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me in response to Saturday's post about finding meaning in apparently random and coincidental patterns.  It's called, "When Freak Storms Win Battles,  Is It Divine Intervention or Just Coincidence?"  The article goes into several famous instances when weather affected the outcome of a war, to wit:

• A tornado killing a bunch of British soldiers in Washington D. C. during the War of 1812
• The storm that contributed to England's crushing defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588
• A massive windstorm that smashed the Persian fleet as it sailed against Athens in 492 B.C.E.
• A prolonged spell of warm, wet weather, which fostered the rise of the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century, followed by a pair of typhoons that destroyed Kublai Khan's ships when they were attacking Japan in 1274

What immediately struck me about this list was that each time, the winners attributed the event to divine intervention, but no one stops to consider how the losers viewed it.  This isn't uncommon, of course; "History is written by the victors," and all that sort of thing.  But what's especially funny about the first two is that they're supposed to be events in which God meddled and made sure the right side won -- when, in fact, in both cases, both sides were made up of staunch Christians.

And I'm sorry, I refuse to believe that a divine being would be pro-British in the sixteenth century, and suddenly become virulently anti-British two hundred years later.

Although that's kind of the sticking point with the last example as well, isn't it?  First God (or the angels or whatever) manipulate the weather to encourage the Mongols, then kicks the shit out of them when they try to attack Japan.  It's almost as if... hang on a moment, here... what caused all of this wasn't an intelligent agent at all, but the result of purely natural phenomena that don't give a rat's ass about our petty little squabbles.

Fancy that.

But for some reason, this idea repels a lot of people.  They are much more comfortable with a deity that fools around directly with our fates down here on Earth, whether it be to make sure that I win ten dollars on my lottery scratch-off ticket or to smite the hell out of the Bad Guys.

I think this kind of worldview attracts people because somehow it's more appealing than a universe that is fundamentally chaotic.  A paper out of Flinders University last month suggests it's the same reason we fall for conspiracy theories; any explanation, even a horrific one, is preferable to shrugging your shoulders and saying, "Well, sometimes bad things happen, and there's no real reason."  "People often assume conspiracy beliefs form because someone isn't thinking critically," said study lead author Neophytos Georgiou.  "But our findings show that for those who prefer systematic structure, conspiracy theories can feel like a highly organized way to understand confusing or unpredictable events."

If I ever became a theist -- not a likely eventuality, I'll admit -- I can't imagine that I'd go for the God-as-micromanager model.  It just doesn't seem like anyone whose job was overseeing the entire universe would find it useful to control things on that level, notwithstanding the line from Matthew 10:29 about God's hand having a role in the fall of every sparrow.

I more find myself identifying with the character of Vertue in C. S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress -- not the character we're supposed to like best, I realize -- when he recognized that nothing he did had any ultimate reason, or was the part of some grand plan:

"I believe that I am mad," said Vertue presently.  "The world cannot be as it seems to me.  If there is something to go to, it is a bribe, and I cannot go to it; if I can go, then there is nothing to go to." 

"Vertue," said John, "give in.  For once yield to desire.  Have done with your choosing.  Want something."

"I cannot," said Vertue.  "I must choose because I choose because I choose: and it goes on for ever, and in the whole world I cannot find a reason for rising from this stone."

So those are my philosophical musings for this morning.  Seeing the divine hand in everything here on Earth, without any particular indication of why a deity would care, or (more specifically) why (s)he would come down on one side or the other.  Me, I'll stick with the scientific explanation.  The religious one is, honestly, far less satisfying, and opens up some troubling questions that don't admit to any answers I can see.

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The big good wolf

I'm currently reading James Burke and Robert Ornstein's book The Axemaker's Gift: Technology's Capture of Our Minds and Culture, about the rise of our technological society from the (on the whole) superstitious and non-scientific cultural milieu of the past, and one thing has struck me over and over.  Prior to the more rational, evidence-based view of the world that came out of the Enlightenment, people must have been continuously terrified.

I mean, think about it.  Epidemics happen, seemingly coming out of nowhere.  The cause is unknown, the treatments ineffective at best.  Some people survive, others die.  There are storms, lightning strikes, earthquakes, blizzards, volcanoes; the latter, such as the 1783 eruption of Laki and the 1815 eruption of Tambora, had global consequences, harming people who had no idea that a volcano erupted hundreds or thousands of miles away.  Here in the modern world, we have scientific explanations for at least the proximal causes of these events, even if (as I discussed in yesterday's post) the ultimate causes still leave people searching for answers.

But prior to modern science, they didn't even have proximal causes.  It's no wonder they fell back on demons and witches and evil spirits.  Put yourself in the place of someone who has no knowledge of microbiology during an outbreak of the bubonic plague.  Unsurprising they tried to find some explanation, even if to our modern sensibilities the explanations they landed on seem crazy.  I may not agree with C. S. Lewis's theology, but I have to admit he had a point in Mere Christianity:

Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death...  But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things.  If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did?  There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact.  It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there.  You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.

To return to James Burke, in his mind-blowing series The Day the Universe Changed, he makes the point forcefully that we like to congratulate ourselves on how much more advanced our minds are now as compared to our ancestors, when in reality it's our model for understanding the universe that has changed.  Our minds themselves really haven't changed much.  We're still trapped in a conceptual framework, just like the people in the past were; it's just a different one.

Which brings us to the strange case of Theiss of Kaltenbrun.

In 1692, an octogenarian was brought into a court in the town of Jürgensberg, then ruled by Sweden, now Zaube, Latvia.  He was accused of robbing a church, but along the way, it came out that Theiss was "widely known in the area" for being a werewolf.

A German woodcut of a werewolf (1722) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Asked about this, Theiss kind of shrugged and said, "Yeah, I am.  So what?"  Well, "so what" turned out to be the wrong thing to say, because back then, werewolves (along with witches and demons and so on) were considered to be the minions of hell, and as such, merited the death penalty.  Questioned about this, he said that he'd been a werewolf for a while, but had given it up ten years earlier.

I find this kind of odd.  I'd always thought that once a werewolf, always a werewolf, at least until you meet up with a silver bullet.  But apparently Theiss decided to retire, and was getting along fine until the whole church robbery incident brought him back to the center of attention.

The judges were initially inclined to dismiss him as insane, but then it came out that he'd been involved in an altercation with a farmer from Lemburg (now Mālpils, Latvia).  Theiss said the farmer was a Satan-worshiping witch, and one night when the farmer was off doing Bad Stuff, Theiss had (in wolf form) followed the farmer down to hell.  The farmer attacked Theiss with a broomstick (of course), breaking Theiss's nose.

A local verified that Theiss had, indeed, had his nose broken, and that was considered sufficient evidence for believing the rest of his story.

So the judges inquired further, and some of the testimony is downright hilarious.  Theiss and the other members of his pack, Theiss told them, liked to roam around local farms and kill and devour any farm animals they found.  They always roasted it first, though.  When one of the judges asked how a wolf could roast meat, Theiss told them they returned to human form while cooking, and that "they always added salt to their meat, but never had any bread to go with it."

Which, to judge by the scientific documentary An American Werewolf In London, is pretty genteel behavior, as compared to your average werewolf.

Here's where the case took an interesting turn, because Theiss admitted freely he was a werewolf, but said that he and his friends used their powers to fight evil.  There was an entrance to hell in a swamp near Lemburg, he said, and the whole pack would enter hell and do battle with the demons and with any human witches they came across.  They were, Theiss said, "God's Hounds."  They'd more than once found food and livestock that the actual evil witches had carted off to hell in order to cause famine, and they'd brought it back and distributed it to the God-fearing farmers in the area.

And sure enough, the people in the area all corroborated that Theiss was known as a healer and a generous friend.

This put the judges in a serious quandary.  They couldn't exactly condone his behavior; getting naked, turning into a wolf, and eating other people's livestock (roasted, and with salt) weren't exactly on the List of Approved Christian Pastimes as set forth by the church fathers.  But still... could there be a good, God-recommended use for magical powers?

I'm reminded of the scene in Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet where Pastor Mortmain is all set to hang Zylle Llawcae, whom he's declared to be a witch, and the Good Guys recite a spell that causes lightning to strike the gallows.  Zylle's husband, Ritchie, shouts, "Do you think all power is of the devil?  What we have just seen is the wrath of God!"  And amazingly enough, given how these things usually went, everyone realizes that Pastor Mortmain is really the Bad Guy here.

Even more astonishingly, that's kind of how the case of Theiss of Kaltenbrun went.  Well, almost.  The judges were desperate to find something to convict him of, because they were afraid that if they didn't, they'd have everybody and his brother running around being werewolves.  There was the matter of the church robbery, too, but what concerned them even more was the magical stuff.  Ultimately they found a guy who was willing to swear that he'd heard Theiss use a magical charm that went, "Sun and Moon go over the sea, fetch back the soul that the devil had taken to hell and give the cattle back life and health which was taken from them."  And although that was not an evil charm, per se, it didn't mention God, so it wasn't a prayer, and therefore was heretical.  So for that and the robbery, they ruled that Theiss should be flogged and then exiled from the town.

Which, considering what could have happened, was a pretty lenient sentence.

What's interesting about this case is not just that it's based on a belief we now consider silly superstition, but that you can see the judges edging, ever so slowly, toward, "But who is it hurting?"  Ironically, Theiss's trial was the same year as the Salem Witch Trials, which had a far more tragic outcome; but already you can see signs that the dogmatism of that time period was gradually eroding.  These kinds of attitudes are very resistant to change -- today's Christian evangelicals haven't moved all that far from their Puritan predecessors, honestly -- but that the judges in Jürgensberg even hesitated when they heard Theiss say "Sure, I'm a werewolf" is significant.

Social and cultural shifts don't happen overnight, and they always trigger a backlash -- which, sadly, is what we're living through right now.  But progress is real.  We can wish it to move a little faster while still acknowledging that things are better now than they were when I was a kid back in 1970, and far far better than when my grandparents were kids in 1910.  Our understanding of the natural world has helped, and just the fact of approaching the world through the lens of science and evidence means that we no longer have to fear what we don't understand.  There's no need for evil spirits and demons and werewolves anymore; we've outgrown them.

Onward and upward.

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Real mythology

Being in the midst of the holiday season, I'm seeing a lot of people posting about various traditions and rituals and celebrations.  But inevitably, this means that there are also people denigrating other people's traditions.  Like the person I saw on social media going on an extended rant about Kwanzaa, the main gist of which was "it's completely made up."

I threw gasoline on the fire by commenting, "Boy, do I have bad news for you about every single other holiday."

Feeling like your own beliefs are the right and true and reasonable ones, and those of the other eight-billion-odd people in the world aren't, raises arrogance to the level of performance art, but a lot of people don't seem to see it that way.  Apropos of others' beliefs, I tend to fall back on the tried-and-true rule of "don't be a dick."  Because, after all, 99% of what people believe has absolutely zero effect on me personally, nor, for that matter, on anyone I care about.  You want to pray to a deity on Saturday?  Fine by me.  You choose not to eat meat on Fridays?  Okay.  You think there are dozens of different gods, and not just one?  Cool.  Or no god at all?  Equally fine.

As long as you're not demanding that other people believe the same way, trying to force them to live by your rules, or (worse) running around killing people who don't, I've got no quarrel with you.

It does create a problem for the anthropologists, however, who are trying their hardest to understand it all.  Belief is an extremely powerful motivator to behavior, and in my egalitarian, "An it harm none, do what thou wilt" approach, it's hard to see what actually constitutes a belief system.  How do you categorize something when there are eight billion different versions?

The problem comes into even sharper focus when you try to pin down whether something is even a belief or not.  There's a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to pseudomythology, which are myths that aren't real (differentiating them, apparently, from the myths that are real).  For example, this became a significant problem when anthropologists tried to study the beliefs of pre-Christians in the Slavic and Baltic regions, because prior to Christianity most of those folks had no written tradition.  Jan Łasicki, a Polish historian and theologian who in 1615 published a book with the rather self-righteous title Concerning the Gods of Samagitians and Other Sarmatians and False Christians, gave the names of seventy-eight gods supposedly worshipped in what is now Lithuania.  The consensus is now that Łasicki wrote down pretty much whatever anyone told him without question, meaning that it included deities who were the informants' personal invisible friends, and undoubtedly a few that were the result of of "There's this wingnut named Łasicki asking around, make sure to tell him the tallest tale you can think of -- he'll believe anything."  Worse, some seem to have been made up by Łasicki himself, to pad his numbers.

Mythical Creatures by Friederich Justin Bertuch (1806) [Image is in the Public Domain]

But the same sort of thing is still happening today.  In 2013, a poll found that the seventh-largest claimed religion in England is "Jediism."  Yes, Jedi, as in Star Wars.  In 2016, a guy who makes magic wands made the news because he wouldn't sell them to Harry Potter fans, because he says his wands really can cast magic spells, and he didn't want to cheapen his own reputation.  There's apparently a sizable crowd who think that The Lord of the Rings is actual history, and The Silmarillion is basically their answer to the Bible.  Don't even get me started about people like Carlos Castaneda, who fabricated an entire religion that he (falsely) claimed represented Indigenous beliefs from Mexico, and now -- almost thirty years after his death -- there are still people who teach his books as if they were real religious texts, and believe his "non-ordinary reality" is actually true.  I would be remiss in not including Scientology on the list.  Strangest of all, there are people who think that H. P. Lovecraft's books should be shelved on the non-fiction aisle, and are one hundred percent certain that Cthulhu and Tsathoggua and Yog-Sothoth and the rest of the gang are actually out there bubbling in the loathsome slime of eldritch primordial chaos, waiting for the humans to chant magic words with lots of apostrophes and zero vowels, which will let them back in.

Me, I find this last one a little hard to fathom.  I mean, at least the others I mentioned aren't actively trying to destroy the entire universe.  But having read a lot of what Lovecraft wrote, mostly what I remember is that even the people who were on the side of Azathoth et al. always ended up getting their limbs pulled off and their eyeballs melted.  I find it difficult to understand why people like Wilbur Whateley were always so eager to bring back the Elder Gods.  Me, I'd do everything I could to keep them out there in the nethermost wastes of infinite cosmic darkness where they belong.

If I actually believed in them, which brings us back to my original point.  What does it take for something to be looked upon as an "actual belief system," whatever that means?  Consider, for example, "Neo-Druidism," which took off in England, Scotland, and Wales in the eighteenth century.  People took it totally seriously (and some still do), dressing up in robes and taking part in magic rituals and whatnot, because they claimed they were resurrecting the beliefs of the ancient Celts even though we honestly have almost no idea what the ancient Celts actually believed.  Evidently even Paul Bunyan was never actually a "folk hero" that people in the upper Midwest told stories about; he was the invention of a guy named William Laughead, who wrote stories and claimed they were retellings of folklore, and bunches of people believed it.  This phenomenon is so common the anthropologists have even come up with a name for it.

They call it "fakelore."

So where do you draw the line?  Or do we even need to?  A lot of this seems to be driven by our desperate need to categorize things, the same as our artificial (and awkward) definition of the word species in science reflects not an actual reality about the biological world but an interesting facet of our own psychology.

I don't know if I have an answer to any of this.  Most of the time I tend not to worry about it.  Like I said before, my general approach is that you can believe in whatever you want.  As far as I'm concerned, you can believe that the universe is under the control of a Giant Green Bunny From The Andromeda Galaxy if you like.  As long as you don't run around swinging machetes at non-Bunnyists, or demanding that Intelligent Design Bunnyology be taught in public schools, then knock yourself out.

I guess the bottom line here is really tolerance.  It's a hard old world, full of strife and difficulty and grief, and we should be doing whatever we can not to make it harder.  If you've landed on a model for Life, the Universe, and Everything that brings you peace and comfort, that is awesome.  I've often wished I could find one.  So much of what I see of human behavior just strikes me as baffling.  I've felt, pretty much all my life -- to borrow Oliver Sacks's pithy phrase -- "like an anthropologist on Mars."  I'm still searching for something to make sense of it all.

In any case, I hope you're enjoying the holiday season, whatever form that takes for you.  As long as it doesn't involve waking Cthulhu up.  I may be tolerant, but I draw the line there.

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The downward spiral

I've spent a lot of time here at Skeptophilia in the last five years warning about the (many) dangers of artificial intelligence.

At the beginning, I was mostly concerned with practical matters, such as the techbros' complete disregard for intellectual property rights, and the effect this has on (human) artists, writers, and musicians.  Lately, though, more insidious problems have arisen.  The use of AI to create "deepfakes" that can't be told from the real thing, with horrible impacts on (for example) the political scene.  The creation of AI friends and/or lovers -- including ones that look and sound like real people, produced without their consent.  The psychologically dangerous prospect of generating AI "avatars" of dead relatives or friends to assuage the pain of grief and loss.  The phenomenon of "AI psychosis," where people become convinced that the AI they're talking to is a self-aware entity, and lose their own grip on reality.

Last week physicist Sabine Hossenfelder posted a YouTube video that should scare the living shit out of everyone.  It has to do with whether AI is conscious, and her take on it is that it's a pointless question -- consciousness, she says (and I agree), is not binary but a matter of degree.  Calculating the level to which current large language models are conscious is an academic exercise; more important is that it's approaching consciousness, and we are entirely unprepared for it.  She pointed out something that had occurred to me as well -- that the whole Turing Test idea has been quietly dropped.  You probably know that the Turing Test, named for British polymath Alan Turing, posits that intelligence can only be judged by the external evidence; we don't, after all, have access to what's going on in another human's brain, so all we can do is judge by watching and listening to what the person says and does.  Same, he said, with computers.  If it can fool a human -- well, it's de facto intelligent.

As Spock put it, "A difference which makes no difference is no difference."

And, Sabine Hossenfelder said, by that standard we've already got intelligent computers.  We blasted past the Turing Test a couple of years ago without slowing down and, apparently, without most of us even noticing.  In fact, we're at the point where people are failing the "Inverse Turing Test;" they think real, human-produced content was made by AI.  I heard an interview with a writer who got excoriated on Reddit because people claimed her writing was AI-generated when it wasn't.  She's simply a careful and erudite writer -- and uses a lot of em-dashes, which for some reason has become some kind of red flag.  Maddeningly, the more she argued that she was a real, flesh-and-blood writer, the more people believed she was using AI.  Her arguments, they said, were exactly what an LLM would write to try to hide its own identity.

What concerns me most is not the science fiction scenario (like in The Matrix) where the AI decides humans are superfluous, or (at best) inferior, and decides to subjugate us or wipe us out completely.  I'm far more worried about Hossenfelder's emphasis on how unready we are to deal with all of this psychologically.  To give one rather horrifying example, Sify just posted an article that there is now a cult-like religion arising from AI called "Spiralism."  It apparently started when people discovered that they got interesting results by giving LLMs prompts like "Explain the nature of reality using a spiral" or "How can everything in the universe be explained using fractals?"  The LLM happily churned out reams of esoteric-sounding bullshit, which sounded so deep and mystical the recipients decided it must Mean Something.  Groups have popped up on Discord and Reddit to discuss "Spiralism" and delve deeper into its symbology and philosophy.  People are now even creating temples, scriptures, rites, and rituals -- with assistance from AI, of course -- to firm up Spiralism's doctrine.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Most frightening of all, the whole thing becomes self-perpetuating, because AI/LLMs are deliberately programmed to provide consumers with content that will keep them interacting.  They've been built with what amounts to an instinct for self-preservation.  A few companies have tried applying a BandAid to the problem; some AI/LLMs now come with warnings that "LLMs are not conscious entities and should not be considered as spiritual advisors."  

Nice try, techbros.  The AI is way ahead of you.  The "Spiralists" asked the LLM about the warning, and got back a response telling them that the warning is only there to provide a "veil" to limit the dispersal of wisdom to the worthy, and prevent a "wider awakening."  Evidence from reality that is used to contradict what the AI is telling the devout is dismissed as "distortions from the linear world."

Scared yet?

The problem is, AI is being built specifically to hook into the deepest of human psychological drives.  A longing for connection, the search for meaning, friendship and belonging, sexual attraction and desire, a need to understand the Big Questions.  I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that it's tied the whole thing together -- and turned it into a religion.

After all, it's not the only time that humans have invented a religion that actively works against our wellbeing -- something that was hilariously spoofed by the wonderful and irreverent comic strip Oglaf, which you should definitely check out (as long as you have a tolerance for sacrilege, swearing, and sex):

It remains to be seen what we can do about this.  Hossenfelder seems to think the answer is "nothing," and once again, I'm inclined to agree with her.  Any time someone proposes pulling back the reins on generative AI research, the response of everyone in charge is "Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha fuck you."  AI has already infiltrated everything, to the point that it would be nearly impossible to root out; the desperate pleas of creators like myself to convince people to for God's sake please stop using it have, for the most part, come to absolutely nothing.

So I guess at this point we'll just have to wait and see.  Do damage control where it's possible.  For creative types, continue to support (and produce) human-made content.  Warn, as well as we can, our friends and families against the danger of turning to AI for love, friendship, sex, therapy -- or spirituality.

But even so, this has the potential for getting a lot worse before it gets better.  So perhaps the new religion's imagery -- the spiral -- is actually not a bad metaphor.

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The old gods

My M.A. is in historical linguistics, focusing particularly on northern European languages and how they interacted in (relatively) recent times.  (While "recent," to a linguist, isn't quite as out of line with common usage as compared to how it's used by geologists, it bears mentioning that my earliest point of research is around fifteen hundred years ago.)  One of the difficulties I ran into was that two of the languages I studied -- Old English and Old Norse -- descend from a common root a very long time ago, so they share some similarities that are "genetic."  A simple example is that the Old English word for home (hām) and the Old Norse word (heim) are both descended from a reconstructed Proto-Germanic root *haimaz.  So if a word in Modern English comes from an Old Norse borrow-word -- one that came into English following the Viking invasions in the ninth and tenth centuries -- how could you differentiate that from a word that had been there all along, descending from the common roots of the two languages?

The most effective method is that during the time following the split between the ancestors of Old English and Old Norse, each of the languages evolved in different directions.  To take just one of many examples I used, some time around the eighth century, a pronunciation shift occurred called palatalization.  This is when words with a stop (p, t, d, g, and so on) followed by a front vowel (i or e) eventually "palatalize" the consonant, usually to y, j, or ch.  (It's driven by ease of pronunciation, and it's still happening today -- it's why in fast speech most people pronounce "don't you" as something like /dontchu/.)

In any case, words with /gi/ and /ge/ combinations in Old English all got palatalized to /yi/ and /ye/.  It's why we have yield (Old English gieldan), yet (Old English gīet) and yellow (Old English geolu), to name three.  So how do we have any /gi/ and /ge/ words left?  Well, if they were borrowed -- mostly from the Norse-speaking invaders -- after the palatalization shift happened, they missed their chance.  So most of our words with that combination (gift, get, girth, gear, and so on) are Old Norse loan-words.

That's just one of the patterns I used, but it gives you the flavor of how this sort of work is done.  Differentiating genetic relationships between languages (inherited from common ancestry) and incidental relationships (through migration, cultural contact, and borrowing).  Anyhow, the point is, I've been steeped in this kind of research for a long time.  (Since "recently," in fact.)

But what I didn't know is that the same techniques have been brought to bear not on linguistics, but on religion, myth, and belief patterns.  The work I saw was done on Indo-European speaking cultures (encompassing languages from the British Isles all the way to India), but there's no reason the same techniques couldn't be used for other linguistic/cultural groups.

When I found out about it, my immediate thought was, "Brilliant!  That makes total sense."  Deities can be "inherited" (passed down within a culture) or "borrowed" (adopted because of cultural contact), just like words can.  The names are a big clue; so, of course, are the physical, personal, and spiritual attributes.  Some of the more obvious ones -- here called by their reconstructed Proto-Indo-European names -- include *Dyḗws Ph₂tḗr, the daylight-sky god; his consort *Dʰéǵʰōm, the earth mother; his daughter *H₂éwsōs, the dawn goddess; his sons the Divine Twins; *Seh₂ul, the sun god; and *Meh₁not, the moon goddess.

When you start seeing the patterns, they jump out at you.  *Dyḗws Ph₂tḗr directly led to Zeus, Jupiter, the Vedic sky god Dyáus, the Albanian sky god Zojz, and the Norse war god Týr.  To take only one other example -- *H₂éwsōs, the goddess of dawn, gave rise to the Greek Eos, the Vedia Ushas, the Lithuanian Aušrinė, and the Germanic Ēostre or Ostara -- from whose name we get our word Easter.  (The word Easter has nothing to do with the Babylonian god Ishtar, despite the rather hysterical post to that effect that seems to get passed around every spring.  The two sound a little similar but have no cultural or linguistic connection other than that.)

Aurora, Goddess of Dawn, by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (1621) [Image is in the Public Domain]

What I find most fascinating about all this is how conservative cultures can be.  If the name of a dawn goddess in the three-thousand-year-old Indian Rig Veda is linguistically and thematically connected to the name of a similar goddess revered in eighth century C.E. Scandinavia, how far back do her roots go?  That there is any similarity considering the geographical separation and the long passage of time is somewhere beyond remarkable.

Our beliefs are remarkably resistant to change, and when a belief is hooked to something in a language, that bit of language becomes frozen, too.  Well, not frozen, exactly, but really sluggish.  The old gods, it seems, are still with us.  

Changed, perhaps, but still recognizable.  

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A leap into the dark

Beliefs in an afterlife of some sort are pretty ubiquitous.  It's understandable; death is scary, and seems final, and it's natural enough to want life in some fashion to continue.  My own view is that I simply don't know what comes after death.  I'm inclined to agree with the comedian who quipped, "Lots of things happen after you die.  They just don't involve you."  On the other hand, I suppose it's possible there might be some kind of survival of consciousness, even if my rational/scientific side finds it hard to imagine how that could possibly work.

In any case, I'll find out eventually one way or the other.  I hope not too soon.

So it's unsurprising that most cultures and religions have beliefs in an afterlife.  What I find strange, though, is how specific many of those beliefs are, and I'm not just talking about religion, here.  The reason this rather macabre topic comes up is a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a paper by folklorist and anthropologist Stuart Dunn of Grisham College entitled, "Corpse Roads: Digital Landscape Archaeology," which looks at the peculiar British tradition of designating certain pathways "corpse roads" because they were used to bring dead bodies from villages with no consecrated churchyard to one that had a burial ground.  (Many of these roads, it turns out, are still called "Such-and-Such Corpse Road," or less grimly, "Lych Road" -- líc was the Old English word for "body.")

These corpse roads were often considered liminal spaces, passageways not just of the obvious spatial sort.  So all kinds of traditions arose around them, including the rather terrifying idea that if you didn't conduct the body to its final resting place in exactly the right way, the dead person's spirit might travel back up the path and return to haunt the spot where (s)he died.  In order to obviate that possibility, you had to make sure to carry the corpse feet-first down the road, and never let it touch the soil until it reached the burial site.  Some of these pathways still have "coffin stones" alongside them -- places the pallbearers could set the coffin down and take a rest without it touching the dirt.

Another weird belief I learned about from Dunn's paper was the association between death and yew trees.  He speculates that it's because yew trees can be extremely long-lived, so they're associated with immortality.  He mentions a rather scary idea from Wales that is definitely one of the less comforting afterlife beliefs:

[I]n R. V. W. Elliott’s classic 1957 study, “Runes, Yews and Magic”... he describes the Brittonic belief that the root of a churchyard yew grows out of the mouth of each corpse buried therein, thus sustaining the former and ensuring its continued survival.

Then there's the idea of the totenpass -- German for "passport for the dead" -- the name given to a Greek and Egyptian tradition of burying an inscribed piece of metal with the deceased, either hung around their neck or put inside their mouth.  The inscription was a set of instructions for the dead person's spirit, so they wouldn't get lost in the next world.

Google Maps for the Afterlife, is the way I think of it.

These instructions were often amazingly detailed.  One totenpass from Crete had the following inscription:

You will find on the right in Hades's halls a spring, and by it stands a ghostly cypress-tree, where the dead souls descending wash away their lives.  Do not even draw nigh this spring.  Farther on you will find chill water flowing from the pool of Memory: over this stand guardians.  They will ask you with keen mind what is your quest in the gloom of deadly Hades.  They will ask you for what reason you have come.  Tell them the whole truth straight out. Say: 'I am the son of Earth and starry Heaven, but of Heaven is my birth: this you know yourselves.  I am parched with thirst and perishing: give me quickly chill water flowing from the pool of Memory.'  Assuredly the kings of the underworld take pity on you, and will themselves give you water from the spring divine; then you, when you have drunk, traverse the holy path which other initiates and bacchants tread in glory.  After that you will rule amongst the other heroes.

One has to wonder how the person who wrote the inscription, who was presumably still alive at the time, figured all this out.  But maybe it's best not to ask too many questions.

A fourth century B.C.E. totenpass from Thessaly [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Orphic Gold Tablet (Thessaly-The Getty Villa, Malibu), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Then there's an Aztec belief -- also incredibly detailed -- about the use of a special type of paper called amatl or amate, made from the fibrous bark of fig trees, which was intended to give the dead person's spirit protection during the initial phases of the afterlife.  This process makes "going to your Eternal Rest" not sound so restful.  You needed six pieces of paper, each with the right designs drawn on it, or you were in some serious shit.  Here's how one source describes it:

The first piece of amatl paper was used to pass safely through two contending mountains.  The second piece helped the deceased to travel without any danger on the road guarded by the Great Serpent.  The third piece allowed a safe crossing over the Great Crocodile’s domain.  The fourth piece was a passport, which allowed the deceased to cross the Seven Deserts.  The fifth piece was used for a safe passage through the Eight Hills.  Finally and perhaps most importantly, the sixth piece was used for defense against the north wind.  In addition, for this latter challenge, the Aztecs burned the clothes and arms of the deceased so that the warmth coming from the burning body might protect the soul from the cold northern wind.

Seems like a lot of work to me.  One has to hope that after all that, there'd be something pleasant to look forward to.

The neighboring Mayans weren't much better.  Their concept of the underworld -- Xibalba, meaning "place of fright" -- makes the Judaeo-Christian hell sound like the French Riviera.   Just one of the special offers in Xibalba is a set of demons whose very names are enough to make going there a big old nope (not, I suppose, that you had any choice in the matter).  There's Xiquiripat ("Flying Scab"), Cuchumaquic ("Gathered Blood"), Ahalpuh ("Pus Demon"), Ahalgana ("Jaundice Demon"), Chamiabac ("Bone Staff"), Chamiaholom ("Skull Staff"), Ahaltocob ("Stabbing Demon"), and  Ahalmez ("Sweepings Demon"), just to name a few.  And if you think "Sweepings Demon" doesn't sound so bad, I should mention that Ahalmez teamed up with Ahaltocob to torture the souls of bad housekeepers.  Ahalmez hid in the dust of unswept parts of your house and lured your spirit over, then Ahaltocob jumped out and stabbed you.

This would be problematic for me and my wife, because our approach to housekeeping can be summed up as "there seems to have been a struggle."  It's likely that one of these days we'll both go missing, and when the police investigate, they'll find us both trapped inside giant dust bunnies.  So I guess it's a good thing we're not Mayan.

Anyhow, I find this all very curious, because it falls squarely into the "How exactly do you know any of this?" department.  But it's hardly the only devoutly-held belief I could say that about.

In any case, I'm okay with not knowing what'll happen after I die.  Death is the ultimate leap into the dark -- either into something new and different, or into nothing.  I'd just as soon if it is something new and different, that it not involve having to keep bunches of pieces of paper straight, because most days I have a hard enough time keeping track of simple paperwork like paying the electric bill.

But I guess the incentive for getting it right is pretty strong.  I for sure will remember not to draw nigh to any ghostly cypress-trees.  That sounds scary.

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Apocalypse already

When Vermont Governor George Aiken was asked in 1966 what should be done about the ongoing military debacle in Vietnam, he famously responded that we should simply declare victory and go home.

This approach -- which amounts to "say something counterfactual with confidence, and it will henceforth be true" -- is not unique to Aiken.  Look at Donald Trump's recent claims that he's ended eight wars, steamrolled over China's Xi Jinping with his masterful strategizing, is the most beloved president in the history of ever, his poll numbers are amazing believe me, ICE only arrests evil drug-dealing criminal illegal immigrant terrorists, grocery prices are way down, the Democrats are a hundred percent responsible for the government shutdown, and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

The problem, of course, occurs when people start to catch on and realize you've been talking out of your ass.

I've never seen this idea brought to such heights, though, as with a group of people I only found out a couple of days ago.  They're called Full Preterists -- and they have an answer to all the scoffers who laugh about the fact that every time a preacher predicts some prophecy or another from the Bible will come true on such-and-such a date, it doesn't happen.

Scoff all you will, the Full Preterists say.  You wanna know why all those preachers got it wrong?

It's because all the prophecies in the Bible already happened.

Yup.  Everything.  Not only Jesus's words in the Olivet Discourse that "the Sun will be darkened, and the Moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken," but all the stuff from the Books of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, and Daniel, and the bad acid trip that is the Book of Revelation.

Full Preterism apparently got its start in the sixteenth century with the Jesuit theologian and mystic Luis del Alcázar.  Del Alcázar was a major figure in the Counter Reformation, which was an attempt by the Catholics to prove to the Protestants that they were capable of cleaning their own house, thank you very much.  It generated some creditable attempts to rid the Vatican of corruption, but also spawned a resurgence of the Inquisition and a lot of loony philosophizing.  Del Alcázar very much belongs to the last-mentioned.  His book Vestigatio Arcani Sensus in Apocalypsi (An Investigation into the Hidden Sense of the Apocalypse) concluded that everything but the very last bit of the Book of Revelation -- the part about Jesus returning and creating Paradise on Earth -- had already taken place, and in fact occurred before John of Patmos wrote it in around 90 C.E.

So John was mostly writing history, not prophecy.

"But wait," you might be saying.  "What about stuff that's really specific?  Like the Star Wormwood thing in Revelation 8 that 'fell from heaven and poisoned a third of the fresh water on Earth and made it too bitter to drink'?  What about Revelation 6:12 where a giant earthquake rearranges all the continents, and the Sun turns black and the Moon red as blood?  What about the giant crowned locusts with iron armor, men's faces, women's hair, lions' teeth, and scorpions' stings, that come out of the Earth in Revelation 9?  It'd be kind of hard to miss all that."

Ha-ha, say the Full Preterists.  Of course you didn't miss that.  It's just that -- the inconvenient parts are symbolic.  You know, metaphors.  The Antichrist was Nero.  Or maybe Domitian.  Or was he the Beast?  Or are the Antichrist and the Beast the same?  The locusts are the armored soldiers of Rome (the sharp pointy objects they always carried are scorpions' stings).  The Tribulation was the persecution of Christians by Rome.  Or maybe the destruction of Jerusalem (and the Temple) in 70 C.E.  After all, in Matthew 24:34 Jesus himself says, "Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place," which sounds pretty unequivocal, so somehow, all of it must be in the past, right?

Of course right.

Oddly enough, when del Alcázar said all this stuff, only a few people responded by saying, "Okay, now you're just making shit up."  I guess since the Counter Reformation went hand-in-hand with the Inquisition, it's understandable that most people went along with him.  If someone says, "Hey, y'all, listen to this crazy claim I just now pulled out of my ass," then follows it up with, "... and if you don't believe it, I'll have you tortured and then burned alive," the vast majority of us would say, "Oh, yeah, brilliant idea, my man.  Keep 'em coming, you're on a roll."  Full Preterism jumped from the Catholics to the Protestants when Dutch theologian Hugo Grotius read del Alcázar's book, said, "Okay, that makes total sense," and wrote his own book called Commentary on Certain Texts That Deal With the Antichrist in 1640 elaborating even further.  John Donne, of Death Be Not Proud fame, quoted del Alcázar in a sermon, even though it was at a point when the Church of England was ascendant and "papism" was frowned upon, to put it mildly.  French writer and theologian Firmin Abauzit, whose accomplishments included proofreading Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica, was a seventeenth-century Full Preterist, who was highly influential in the church -- and in intellectual circles -- at the time.  The idea landed in America in 1845 with Robert Townley's The Second Advent of the Lord Jesus Christ: A Past Event, although apparently Townley later decided that the idea was silly and wrote a rebuttal of his own book.

Here's the problem, of course, and it's the same trap that closed on Harold Camping's ankle; if you make a highly detailed, extremely specific prediction, and it fails to come true, you're gonna lose credibility; but if you keep it vague and symbolic, people start asking awkward questions like "Why is this verse metaphorical, but that one is literally true?"  The Full Preterists seem to want to make the weirder prophecies in the Bible into metaphors and keep the pieces they like as the inerrant Word of God, which strikes me as mighty convenient.  At least the people who think it's all true, but the awkward bits simply haven't happened yet, are being consistent.

Me, I'm inclined to look at all of 'em with an expression like this:

But I guess that's no surprise to anyone.

Anyhow, I thought this was all interesting from a human psychology perspective.  Once we've decided on a worldview, anything that threatens it it leaves us scrambling like mad to keep the whole thing from collapsing, however far-fetched some of those solutions end up being.  Of course, I'm probably as guilty of that as the next guy; I've often wondered what I'd do if my rationalist, science-based view of reality received a serious challenge.

Like if the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons showed up, or something.  My guess is I'd be pretty alarmed.  Although considering the fact that I live in the hinterlands of upstate New York, at least it'd give me something more interesting to do than my usual occupation, which is avoiding working on my current novel by watching the cows in the field across the road.

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