Ghosts in the Machine (The Babel Trilogy Book 2) (41 page)

If you don’t know it, listen to the first part of Joseph Haydn’s oratorio
Die Schöpfung
(
The Creation
), with the volume turned way, way up. The C-major chord on the word
light
is a real spine tingler. In the English version, the crucial words are “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light”—which suggests to me a chain of three events: He decided that light would be a good idea, He reached for the switch, and the light came on as a result of His action. The German text seems to do a better job of hinting at a less ordinary, more appropriate idea.
“Und Gott sprach: ‘Es werde Licht!’ Und es ward Licht”
: literally, “And God said it would be light—and
that was the light
.” On this view, more broadly, God doesn’t cause the universe to exist, because His idea of the universe
is
the universe. So we exist in the mind of God. (I’m grateful to Henry Newell for introducing me to both the oratorio and this insight about the text many years ago.)

See the note on Hegel—and, if you’re interested in a grand intellectual detour, look up “the simulation argument,” a more recent and perhaps rather creepier take on the idea that we, and the universe, might be nothing more that someone else’s idea.

Religion, immortality, and equating consciousness with the soul that survives death

Balakrishnan is giving a very simplified view here, and one that sounds much more like Christianity (or perhaps Islam) than religion in general. The Greeks seem to have a very ambivalent view of whether or in what sense the dead survive; so does Judaism; Buddhism and Hinduism perhaps even more so, since they think of survival after death in term of reincarnation—and they think of reincarnation as something to be escaped.

Einstein . . . “the theory has to be right”

Though Einstein’s two great theories were published in 1905 and 1915, it was in 1919 that he became world famous. That was when Arthur Eddington used a total solar eclipse to show that the sun’s gravity “bends” starlight just as general relativity predicts. Einstein joked that it would have been a pity if the experiment had gone the other way—not because that would have disproved his theory, but because it was “correct anyway.” That’s not arrogance; it expresses the perfectly sound idea that even a new theory needs more than one contrary “fact” to defeat it, especially if it’s profoundly convincing in other ways. Science works through a balance of evidence about what to believe overall, and theories guide what it makes sense to believe just as much as facts do.

Descartes’s ghost

The great French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes outlined his version of mind-body dualism in
The Passions of the Soul
, 1649. According to his view (or, arguably, an unfair simplification of it), the body is analogous to a mechanical device—a robot, we might say—controlled or piloted by an immaterial and immortal substance that resides within it. Descartes believed the world was made up of two fundamentally different kinds of stuff, matter and thought. (Or three, really: matter, thought, and God.) Matter is
res extensa
—“extended stuff,” or, literally, stuff that takes up space. Thinking stuff,
res cogitans
, has no extension in space. But we human beings are uniquely dual: physical objects that think.

The big problem for dualism—closely related to Bill Calder’s skepticism about the very idea of “the supernatural”—seems to be this: How can we make sense of the idea that the mind/soul and matter interact? There has never been a good answer to that question, and in
The Concept of Mind
(published exactly three centuries after
The Passions of the Soul
, in 1949), English philosopher Gilbert Ryle dismissed “Cartesian dualism” as the “ghost in the machine” theory.

Ryle’s work ushered in an era in which few philosophers took dualism seriously; instead, various forms of physicalism or naturalism or materialism, which might collectively be called “all machine, no ghost” theories, reigned supreme. They still do, despite the fact that purely materialist theories are also beset by deep problems. In particular: If matter is all there is, as Bill Calder and Mayo both think, how can we make sense of the idea that mind or soul or consciousness (the reality of which we experience directly every moment of our waking lives) even exists? The question has driven some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett, to propose in all seriousness the apparently self-contradictory “eliminative materialist” doctrine that consciousness itself is an illusion. By way of illustrating how deep the trouble is, another philosopher, Galen Strawson, has memorably described this as “the silliest view that anyone has held in the whole history of humanity.”

See also the note on Turing, and on “
Our biology is a barrier to our nature, because matter is evolving into mind
.”

Of course, there may be another option. Patience, grasshopper.

Haole . . . buried him at sea

The word
haole
implies pale-skinned, and it’s now used in the sense of a white person from the mainland, but that’s not what it originally meant. Probably (no one seems sure) it meant “without breath,” and this had to do with Europeans not following Hawaiian customs involving breathing. One theory is that Hawaiians traditionally greeted one another by touching noses and in effect intermingling their breaths, and Europeans failed to do that.

Middle Eastern street . . . hijabs . . . abayas

A burqa is the fullest garment: it covers the whole body, with a mesh screen for the eyes. Chadors and abayas are full-body hooded cloaks, worn over other clothes. A niqab is a veil for the face only, usually with a slit for the eyes. A hijab is basically a scarf that covers the hair but not the face, and is often worn with what is otherwise Western-style clothing. Morag is guilty of cliché, as she suspects: Jordan is one of the most liberal Islamic countries, and many women there, especially in the cities, wear either the hijab or no head covering at all.

P
ART
IV: G
HOSTS

Giant mines (and a short polemic on the relationship between wealth, government, colonialism, racism, and terrorism)

The island of New Guinea is rich in minerals; the open-pit mines at Ok Tedi and Porgera in Papua New Guinea, and the Freeport mine at Grasberg on the Indonesian side of the border, are among the largest man-made holes on Earth. (Use Google Earth to look up Puncak Jaya, the tallest peak in New Guinea. The Grasberg mine is the set of concentric rings clearly visible just to the west of it.) It’s a classic example of what economists call the “resource curse,” in which poor, vulnerable people have their lives made immeasurably worse, rather than better, by the discovery of mineral wealth on their own land. Almost none of the vast profits from these mines have gone to indigenous groups, mine tailings have poisoned once-pristine major rivers like the Strickland and Fly, and violence has blossomed in the jungles like a big new crop.

Unfortunately for the people of Papua New Guinea and West Papua, the biggest problem isn’t even foreign mining (and logging) corporations, but corrupt governments that find those corporations to be an irresistible sources of cash. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Angus Deaton has pointed out, one of the biggest factors separating the most fortunate people in the world from the least fortunate is the matter of living under relatively stable, transparent, competent, corruption-free governments—and those of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea rank a miserable 107th and 145th out of 175 on Transparency International’s global corruption index.

Around the world, governments at this level are a lot like the bully in the school corridor: reliably stupid, but also reliably strong, selfish, pitiless, and violent. For all its failings, at least the government of Papua New Guinea is indigenous. The government of West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya), on the contrary, is one of the most brutal, most ruthless, most overtly racist exercises in colonial domination in history, comparable to the worst excesses of the European powers in Africa in the nineteenth century.

The former Dutch territory was forcibly annexed by Indonesia during a drive for independence from 1961 to 1969. As zoologist Tim Flannery drily remarked (writing in 1998, shortly after the area had been renamed “Irian Jaya” by the Indonesian government):

“Surely it is a perverse twist of fate that has put a nation of mostly Muslim, mostly Javanese, people in control of a place like Irian Jaya. You could not imagine, even if you tried, two more antipathetic cultures. Muslims abhor pigs, while to a Highland Irianese they are the most highly esteemed of possessions. Javanese have a highly developed sense of modesty . . . for most Irianese, near-nudity is the universally respectable state . . . Javanese fear the forest and are happiest in towns . . . Irianese treat the forest as their home.”

This is a short quote from a long list of opposites, and bad things could have been predicted to flow from them. But alas,
bad
is far too weak a word, as it is not really even the Indonesian government that rules West Papua, but the Indonesian military—which, after enjoying decades of generous support, supplies, training, and diplomatic shielding by the United States, Australia, and even the United Nations,
has one of the worst human-rights records of any entity on earth
. In the fifty years since the brutally violent annexation, many tens of thousands of West Papuans (over five hundred thousand, according to the group International Parliamentarians for West Papua) have been murdered by Indonesian forces, with thousands more imprisoned, raped, tortured, and “disappeared,” in a campaign of terror that arguably amounts to genocide.

About that word
terror
. We’re encouraged to think that terrorism is a very big deal, but what is it? The US State Department recognizes more than sixty terrorist organizations around the world. It would appear that what unites the listed organizations is their willingness to pursue political goals by using violence to intimidate and kill innocent people—and they are doing so at an unprecedented rate, mainly in Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria. Currently the world’s worst example is Nigeria’s Boko Haram, an especially bloodthirsty Islamic extremist group affiliated with ISIS/ISIL. It’s on the list and in the news for murdering 6,664 people in 2014, more even than the rest of ISIS/ISIL worldwide. (Figures are from the Institute for Economics and Peace, 2015 Global Terrorism Index.) But since 1963 the Indonesian military has murdered up to
seventy times
that many people in Irian Jaya/West Papua alone, out of a population of just 4.5 million. It continues to imprison, torture, and murder West Papuans today, making something of a specialty of pro-democracy activists, otherwise known as “rebels” (look up, for example, the cases of Yawan Wayeni and Danny Kogoya), and farmers and children (see, but be warned of very disturbing images at,
freewestpapua.blogspot.com
). Yet Indonesia’s army doesn’t even make it onto the State Department’s terrorist list.

Possibly this is evidence that the United States government is a fan not only of our “ally,” Indonesia, but also of Lewis Carroll. For, as Humpty Dumpty famously tells Alice, “When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

You can find out more about what’s going on in West Papua in this article from the
Diplomat
,
http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/the-human-tragedy-of-west-papua
, and at the websites of Human Rights Watch, International Parliamentarians for West Papua, Cultural Survival, Survival International, and Amnesty International.

839 languages

New Internationalist
magazine lists 253 tribal languages for the Indonesian province of West Papua and states that the island as a whole accounts for 15 percent of all known languages—so that’s a total of about eight hundred to one thousand. Zoologist Tim Flannery gives a similar number. Let’s say eight hundred. By way of comparison, Ethnologue lists 166 for all of Europe and Scandinavia combined.

Singing dog

The New Guinea singing dog (
Canis lupus hallstromi
) is actually a shy, rare, and genuinely wild relative of the Australian dingo; hunting dogs in the Highlands are descended (at any rate partly) from them.

Giant rat

He doesn’t just mean it’s a big one. The Bosavi woolly rat, a species discovered in 2009, is one of many “giant rat” species of the genus
Muridae
in New Guinea, and it may be the largest of all: it’s almost three feet long and weighs about three and a half pounds. Rats like this are a common food source for many tribes in New Guinea. The Bosavi woolly rat, by the way, was found living in the crater of an extinct volcano.

Lost tribes . . . “the Hagahai, the Fayu, the Liawep”

These are just three real New Guinea tribes that as recently as the 1980s or 1990s had had little or no contact with Westerners, and relatively little contact even with other local tribes. There’s good information on the Hagahai at
culturalsurvival.org
; for the Fayu, see Sabine Kuegler’s memoir
Child of the Jungle
and Jared Diamond’s
Guns, Germs, and Steel
; for the Liawep, see Edward Marriott’s
The Lost Tribe
. Several other tribes with very little outside contact are described in Tim Flannery’s memoir
Throwim Way Leg
—including both the Miyanmin and the Atbalmin, whose territory is approximately where I’ve set the Chens’ encounter with the Tainu. Survival International claims there are forty such groups in West Papua alone.

Many tribes or groups referred to as “uncontacted” in places like New Guinea and the Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon are better characterized as having responded to contact with neighboring populations and the “outside world” by making it clear that they wish to minimize or avoid any more of it.