009: Do you have to be a jerk to be a contrarian?
Hi friends,
I’m turning 30 on the 13th. It feels strange to be reaching this milestone because, truthfully, there were many times I didn’t think I’d make it. I used to have this recurring nightmare, starting around when I was seven. In it, I got in a car accident while driving over a small bridge in my hometown. It’s a real place, and a pretty one too. It spans a usually-dry creekbed, and in the summer the leaves on the trees arch just right to create a tunnel. Later on, in high school, I befriended someone whose house backed up to the creek that bridge ran over. I always white-knuckled the steering wheel as I drove there.
Then, just as suddenly as they started, the dreams stopped when I was 20. I guess my brain had decided I was officially too old to die young* and stopped worrying about it. (I usually believe that dreams are just your brain chewing on something you’re worried about.) (Also, ha!)
I was thinking recently about that internalized worry though. I think there was a part of me that was so sure I’d die by 18 or 21 or 23 that when I made it to my mid-twenties I sort of… got confused. It was like the opposite of feeling invincible as a teenager; I was amazed I made it. I hadn’t given a lot of thought to the future not because I was sure it would be there, but because I was sure it wouldn’t. And now, from the vantage point of July 8, 2020, I look back on my twenties and see clearly how aimless I was for a lot of this decade because I’d never really given serious thought to what I wanted my life as an adult to look like. Even the things I wanted to accomplish when I was a teen—publishing a novel, practicing international criminal law, etc.—there was a part of me that thought I had better do while I was young because I wasn’t going to get to do it later.
Of course, no life story is neat and tidy, which is why I don’t have A Lesson to share from this on the eve of my 30th birthday. Except, I guess, that the way we internalize our fears and hold on to them long past when they should have faded is terrifying in itself. I̶n̶ ̶f̶a̶c̶t̶,̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶o̶n̶g̶o̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶u̶m̶a̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶w̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶I̶ ̶w̶a̶n̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶t̶a̶l̶k̶ ̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶t̶o̶d̶a̶y̶.̶
After several drafts of this week’s letter, I’m admitting defeat: what I wanted to write about simply isn’t coming together the way I want it to. Maybe I need to do more tinkering or maybe I need to admit the two subjects aren’t as related as I thought. In any case, I’ve written about Rupert Sheldrake, who inspired my initial post for this week, but wasn’t meant to be the main focus. Enjoy this weirdo!
*Why does ‘Too Old to Die Young’ sound like it should be the title of a geriatric James Bond spoof? Someone help me make this.
Rupert Sheldrake is a Devil’s Advocate dream scientist. He is well-known in scientific circles for reliably being the guy that will say, “Okay, but what if…?” If you want something that’s generally accepted to be questioned, call Sheldrake. He started in microbiology but has since become a leading researcher in parapsychology. He made the jump because he wanted to understand why things that can’t communicate with one another (that is, can’t teach each other) grow the same way. For instance, why does a tulip in Amsterdam grow to look the same as a tulip in Russia or a tulip in the US?
If you’re currently screaming “GENETICS!” at your screen, science hears you. The number of limbs we have, the existence of toenails, the shape of petals in a tulip, those are all encoded in genes. The expression of those genes is what makes everything that grows look the way it looks. Done and done, right?
Not to Sheldrake. He kept asking, “But why?” Which is where all good science starts from—the insatiable curiosity to know more. Sheldrake wanted to know why genes work; the literal, mechanical how of encoding and expressing. Most scientists would say “proteins!” here. Sheldrake wanted to know more. How do the proteins all ‘speak the same language,’ as it were? How does each seed “know” it’s supposed to be a tulip and not a potato or a Venus flytrap?
And there’s a small gap in scientific knowledge here. We don’t really 100% absolutely know and 100% absolutely understand how gene encoding and expressing works. Science is really close, and maybe there’s a scientific paper that does explain it 100% just waiting to be published in some editor’s queue right now. But for now, this gap is where Sheldrake lives, and where he created morphic resonance.
I first heard of morphic resonance through the Stuff You Should Know podcast. (If you’re not listening to SYSK, check! them! out!) Sheldrake proposed in his 1981 book A New Science of Life that tulips know they are tulips and grow up to be tulips not through something as pedestrian as gene encoding, but through an ever-present, unseen field that exists between members of a species in which memories are spread and last forever, influencing every following member of the species.
From his website:
Morphic resonance is a process whereby self-organising systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems. In its most general formulation, morphic resonance means that the so-called laws of nature are more like habits. The hypothesis of morphic resonance also leads to a radically new interpretation of memory storage in the brain and of biological inheritance. Memory need not be stored in material traces inside brains, which are more like TV receivers than video recorders, tuning into influences from the past. And biological inheritance need not all be coded in the genes, or in epigenetic modifications of the genes; much of it depends on morphic resonance from previous members of the species. Thus each individual inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future.
Obviously, the mainstream scientific establishment hates this. Sheldrake’s ideas are labeled pseudoscience, Sheldrake himself is largely derided for peddling nonsense, and Very Serious Scientists™ don’t give morphic resonance the time of day.
However, these Very Serious Scientists™ are cut from the same cloth as the ones who didn’t believe in different types of sexualities, in gravitational waves, and in anything smaller than the atom. These things are all largely accepted now. They were wrong then, there’s always a teeny tiny possibility that they could be wrong now.
(Whenever I want to poke fun at my Very Serious Scientist™ friends, I draw on this episode from Friends, when Phoebe and Ross fight about evolution and she says to him, “Up until like 50 years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing until you split it open and this whole mess of crap came out!”)
So, I don’t know, who’s to say? There’s so much we don’t understand about the universe. Without evidence of absence… why not?
Devil’s Advocate people are getting a lot of shit in the world recently. And I get why—a lot of “playing Devil’s Advocate” is just choosing to deliberately exhaust who you’re talking to instead of genuinely trying to see the world from their perspective. Even in that episode of Friends, the second Ross admits Phoebe has a point that evolution isn’t 100% certain, Phoebe mocks him for abandoning his whole belief system. When he leaves, she bounces around saying “That was fun!” Being a contrarian can lead to habitual skepticism, which can lead to denialism—things like people refusing to see data that humans are impacting our climate. If the 1% of scientists who question the data of climate change from the other 99% just talk loud enough, we get a culture of refusing to believe science.
But at the same time, contrarians are necessary to society. Without people like Sheldrake demanding that science dig deeper and do better at explaining our world, you get dogmatic institutions that are blind to other ways of being. Without Martin Luther, we’d still have the Catholic Church selling indulgences instead of encouraging actual repentance. Without Ignaz Semmelweis, we’d still have doctors not washing their dang hands. I’m not saying Sheldrake’s right, just that there are ways to be a contrarian without being a dick about it, and maybe Sheldrake has stumbled onto one of them.
According to Sheldrake, morphic resonance is entirely unconscious and also much faster than any kind of epigenetic inheritance. (Epigenetics is the study of how the environment impacts our genetic makeup, which we then pass on.) It’s constantly acting all around us. For instance, he believes that it causes the prickling feeling we get when we feel someone staring at us. They’re putting it out into the morphic field and we pick up on that. I guess I could buy that. Why not?
However, Sheldrake also thinks that morphic resonance fields mean that things like the New York Times crossword puzzle get easier as more people solve it because more people are putting the answers into the morphic field. With stuff like that, I can see why the SYSK hosts called Sheldrake’s hypothesis “hokum.” It seems kind of strange.
Stuff I’ve Read and Loved Lately
A Quick Poll
I’ve been thinking a lot about turning 30 next Monday and things I’m leaving unfinished from my twenties. I’ve decided that I really want to dedicate the next year to finishing one of two projects, and I’d love input from y’all to decide which.
Why do I need y’all to decide? Well, because I would have to set up a Patreon to do it. Both projects would require a lot of deep and difficult research, which means buying books that are too hard to find in libraries and (eventually) traveling to archives, museums, and libraries to dive into their physical archives. Since y’all have shown interest in my work in the past, I wanted you to have first dibs on voting for which project I work on first.
Project A: Completing my Master’s thesis with the goal to publish as a book. My MA was about the emergence of sexual identities in Victorian England and looking at Sherlock Holmes and John Watson through that lens. Basically, do the stories support an understanding of Holmes as gay? And if so, how does that change our understanding of the Victorians? (I actually wrote about this recently, you can read a deeper summary here.) It would be a lot of research about LGBT history, the history of medicine, and the history of fiction.
Project B: A historical fiction book about Jeanne de Belleville, a real female pirate from northern France. After the French king wrongfully executed her husband, Jeanne sold everything she buy a ship, hire a crew, and begin attacking the French navy. She was so good at it that the English crown asked her to help them with an attack against France, leading the 100 Years’ War.
Both project are about 60% to 70% done, but that last 30% - 40% requires more research, which requires financial means. You can vote on which project you’d be more interested in, or you can just shoot me an email!
Thanks in advance, friends!
As always, thank you for reading. If you want to respond just hit reply. Your message will get to me (and only me). If you like this and think your friends might too, feel free to forward it on.
I haven’t been doing much freelance writing lately, but I do want to promote the bookshelf analysis spreadsheet I created for everyone one more time. You can do your own analysis and see who you’re reading (and who you’re being told to care about). If you missed that letter, you can read about my racist, misogynistic bookshelves first.
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Stay healthy, friends!
xx,
Valorie
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