Tropospheric Complacency

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tunes while others are left unmoved. These are the considerations that prompt me to

wonder whether, in the not too distant future, everyone might turn permanently

sadness-deaf with respect to fiddle musicthat no musical ears will remain able to detect

such emotions within my favored music. In the same vein, I imagine that were we everto hear again the lyres of Homers time, we might struggle mightily to discern in their

cacophony the intoxicating stirrings described by the poet. The superior heft of com-

peting paradigms for emotive expression in music can easily drive the active possibility of

hearing fiddle tunes as sad into oblivion.

Indeed, we can easily see how such losses of apparent musical content might arise

even within the narrow evolution of our own listening. For example, the probable effect

of listening to an abundance of mid-twentieth century jazz and popular music is that one

acquires what might be called a hunger for major seventh chords: music begins to

sound empty if the tonic is not harmonically supported by a fuller chord like C-E-G-B or

one of its extended cousins. Before such expectations take holdif we have been largely

raised on a diet of folk music, for example, tonal assemblies of this type are apt tosound rather ugly; but once we have bitten firmly on the harmonic bait, we will begin to

feel fidgety if the extending tones are absent. And such an appetite for strong har-

monization can, almost by itself, seriously weaken the old possibilities for expressiveness

that the fiddle tunes require. Once the question why dont we hear a Cmaj7 here?

begins to loom large, the response how sad this sounds may recede into unre-

coverable oblivion (in fact, the affective contours of Texas fiddle music altered in much

this way after World War II). There is a very real sense in which we can seem to lose a

concept by doing nothing except learning something else (such forgetfulness through

learning appears as well in the Druid case of 1,ix). This is a phenomenon that is hard to

understand within a traditional approach to human understanding and it is an issue withwhich we will struggle throughout the book.

With respect to those tape recordings I have made on behalf of future generations

who, when their time comes around, may not be able to hear it properly, I can only say:

I regret such changes, if indeed they occur, but I wouldnt fault anyone for them.

(iii)

Tropospheric complacency. What is most striking about our Darwin critic is that he

has probably never considered tempering apologetics of this ilk, for he undoubtedly

suffers from that form of parochial vision that Hume satirizes:

His own pursuits are always, in his account, the most engaging, the objects of his passion

the most valuable, and the road which he pursues the only one which leads to happiness.10

Im sure he presumes (without having thought much about it) that the Mozartian musical

merits, melancholy and all, are clearly objectively presentin the physical sound, although it

10 David Hume, The Skeptic in Selected Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 95.

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may require an individual of refined sensibility to perceive it properly. Of course, he

grants this ability requires training; indeed, he undoubtedly prides himself in having

manfully endured the mandatory drill. He will readily grant that he himself would require

practice before he could spot a bird in the forest canopy as ably as Darwin. But some

matters are more important than flora and fauna, he thinks, so the old naturalist canbe fairly chastised for aesthetic obtuseness because the content required for proper

flourishing is clearly out there, if only Darwin would seek the path towards it.

In my diagnosis, our moralizing critic suffers from a common form of tunnel vision in

which we all, to some degree or other, participate and which neednt, in itself, bear such

obnoxious fruit. The attitude in question I call tropospheric complacencyit represents

our native inclination to picture the distribution of properties everywhere across the

multifarious universe as if they represented simple transfers of what we experience

while roaming the comfortable confines of a temperate and pleasantly illuminated

terrestrial crust. In such a vein, we readily fancy that we already know what it is like to

be red or solid or icy everywhere, even in alien circumstances subject to violent grav-

itational tides or unimaginable temperatures, deep within the ground under extremepressures, or at size scales much smaller or grander than our own, and so forth. But the

substantive discoveries of those who have actually probed these environments quickly

reveals how shallow and hapless our complacent expectations are likely to prove.

For example, I think most of us are inclined to presume that we have a pretty good

sense of what the property ofbeing ice involves. Water, in fact, represents a notoriously

eccentric substance, capable of forming into a wide range of peculiar structures that

display admixtures of typical solid and liquid behaviors. For example,

A chapter on crystalline water would be incomplete without some mention of a group of ice

cousins, the clathrate hydrates, also known as gas hydrates. Like the ice polymorphs, they

are crystalline solids, formed by water molecules, but hydrogen-bonded in such a way thatpolyhedral cavities of different sizes are created that are capable of accommodating certain

kinds of guest molecules.11

The author doesnt regard the clathrate structure as true ice (because it is bonded in

gauche rather than cis formation), but is it clear that our everyday conception of ice

11 Felix Franks, Water: A Matrix of Life (Cambridge: Royal Society of Chemistry, 2000), 39.

Clathrate hydrate

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requiresas opposed to acceptsthis distinction? (I, for one, had never thought about

such matters at all). Likewise, our text indicates that in theory it should be possible to

supercool liquid water until it vitrifies into a non-crystalline substance of very high

viscosity structurally resembling normal glassware (in fact, many scientists regardglasses as different states of matter than normal crystalline solids). Should this glass-

like stuff qualify as a novel form of ice or not? Our chemist will presumably say no

because the stuff is not crystalline but many of us would perhaps put a higher premium

on its apparent solidity. There is a popular school of contemporary philosophy (char-

acterized by their blithe appeals to the worlds alleged natural kinds) that severely

overestimates the degree to which any of usour societal experts or notare presently

prepared to classify the universes abundance of strange materials adequately.

Or consider the matter of high pressure. Common materials display a remarkable

ability to assume all sorts of radically different organizational structures (chemists call

them phases) under diverse pressures (and temperatures). Indeed, gauche-bonded ice

displays seven or eight known phases. Typically, such high pressure forms quickly revertto familiar ice when brought to atmospheric pressure. But occasionally the chemical

bonds in certain high pressure phases are so strong that a material cannot easily

rearrange itself back into its preferred low pressure form. A striking illustration of this

type is the diamond, which truly represents an anomalous visitor to our milder

dominions from the high pressure realm (the preferred, normal atmospheric pressure

form of carbon is graphite; diamonds form only under extreme compression). Properly

speaking, diamonds shouldnt be found near the earths surface at all, but once volcanic

forces have churned them upwards from their dens of subterranean nurture, their

unstable bondings relax to greasy graphite so extraordinarily slowly that they qualify

as permanent by any reasonable clock. If some analogously rugged solid form of highpressure (and room temperature) water could be formedwould it qualify as being ice?

I do not know.

As we witnessed in the Druid case, the manner of introduction of a novel object can

easily make it seem as if we have been fully prepared to classify it as an X all alongif

we first learn about the clathrate hydrates from our textbook, it may never occur to us

that anyone else might have reasonably considered them as ices. It is easy to build up

an exaggerated estimate of our conceptual preparedness from this basis alone. Few of us

have probably thought much about such matters, which, as a matter of biological

mercy, is fortunate because our poor cluttered brains can only bear a certain amount of

information (having devoted much gray matter already to childhood memories of

inconsequential television shows). What practical difference should it make to mostof us that were not presently fully prepared for a clathrate hydrate? Indeed, it is

well appreciated that, in certain subjects, we do best to traffic primarily in inaccurate

generalizationsAll birds flyand leave the penguins and kiwis to the footnotes or

special occasions.

Allied to these sources of tropospheric complacency is our instinctive tendency to

respond to queries about the classification of unfamiliar objects in a procrastinating

vein, Well, I cant determine from your description whether your substance is

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ice or not, but if you could just show me some of the stuff, I bet I could answer

you, as if a high pressure phase of water could easily be laid out on the kitchen

table. Indeed, our manifestly unwise trust that a visual presentation offers the surest

key to reliable classification is rather remarkable. Consider all of those science-fictionmoviesThe Incredible Shrinking Man providing the great paradigmwhere some

human protagonist gets reduced to sub-millimeter level (and is thereby forced into

battle with surly arthropods). We happily drink all this in as clearly possible, never

mind the fact that human eyes shouldnt be able to focus light at that scale or that

our hero cant expect to move as he does within our own gravity-dominated regime.

In themselves, such fantasies of possibility are probably harmless enough, but they

can sometimes cloud our appreciation of our universes surprising range of real

variation.

Indeed, there is a passage in this vein from Nathaniel Hawthornes The Snow

Image that has long irked me and reminds me of the blinkered superiority of our

Darwin critic:

But, after all, there is no teaching anything to wise good men of good Mr. Lindseys stamp.

They know everythingoh, to be sure!everything that has been, and everything that is,

and everything that, by any future possibility, can be. And, should some phenomenon of

nature or providence transcend their system, they will not recognize it, even if come to pass

under their very noses.12

Although ostensibly condemning complacency of all kinds, I feel this quotation reveals a

rather disagreeable vein of smugness ingrained within Hawthornes own thinking, as he

patronizes the limitations of the scientific intellect personified in the story by the clueless

Mr. Lindsey. The Hawthornian possibility that Lindsey overlooks is that of aninanimate objectan ice statuethat becomes mysteriously invigorated by a human-

like spirit. But the most striking feature of this transcendent possibility is its utter

banality. Contrary to Hawthorne, musings of this stripe scarcely pass unrecognized

they are the very stuff of fairy tales (think of poor Sylvester the donkey encased in stone!)

As such, they undoubtedly spring from conceptions of mind and soul coeval with the

earliest animist religions. But excessive emphasis on these soul-like varieties of possib-

ility runs the risk, I believe, of obscuring from our attention the genuinely surprising

eventualities that often emerge in the course of clinical work with brain-damaged

individuals, where our normal expectations with respect to psychology become con-

founded by astonishing disassociations in expected patterns of human behavior. I dare

say that we are more likely to confront unexpected futures of this sort than any thatinvolve supernaturally animated snow children. Such real world discoveries may leave

us totally at a loss as to how our familiar psychological terminology should properly

apply within their startling circumstances. If only a soul could jump into blocks of

ice!for in such a world the mind would indubitably possess that blessed indivisible

unity upon which Descartes always insisted.

12 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Snow Image in Twice-Told Tales (Norwalk, Conn.: Heritage, 1966), 20.

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Tropospheric Complacency

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