Archaeology From Space

I don’t personally know any archaeologists. But if I could single out one who is an unapologetic apologist for archaeology, it would be Sarah Parcak. Her book, Archaeology From Space, won the most recent Phi Beta Kappa Book Award for Science. I heard about it when I tuned in to the online awards ceremony. Parcak’s brief remarks about her book were all that was needed for me to add it to my must-read list. I was not disappointed.

 

I’d heard of using LIDAR mapping to discover archaeological sites through perusing the occasional news article. What I didn’t know was that prior to LIDAR, older eye-in-the-sky technologies were already aiding archaeologists. I also didn’t know that you and I can aid archaeology from the comfort of our homes and an internet connection through Global Xplorer, launched by Parcak and her team after she received the 2016 TED million-dollar prize for her dream-big audacity. I’m looking forward to seeing Peru from Space!

 

Satellite imagery gives you a starting point, a narrowing down of possibilities. Then comes the hard work of dig-in-the-dirt archaeology. Parcak goes into fascinating detail focusing on some well-chosen examples in her career; successes and failures both get the royal treatment. Her story-telling is brisk and bursting with enthusiasm; reading it I felt like I was right there in the thick of things. And she’s funny. Humorous asides punctuate the text all over. I believe her when she thanks her editor in her acknowledgement for the “tough love and for reading early drafts containing terrible jokes that needed to be buried in tombs forever. May they never resurface.” Well, the jokes that she did leave in bring joy to this reader!

 

While Parcak is an Egyptologist by specialty, and she goes into fascinating detail in this area, her many collaborations lead to projects in North America, Europe, and South America. I enjoyed reading about different archaeological sites, different concerns, different challenges, and how much we can learn about the past. The chapter on looting and the trade in antiquities is heartbreaking. Many people involved are caught in a system fueled on the one hand by greed, and on the other hand by poverty. Not knowing much about this area, I found it particularly eye-opening.

 

My favorite chapter in her book is “The Future of the Past”. (This reminds me I should re-read Alexander Stille’s excellent book of the same name. I see it on my bookshelf beckoning!) Parcak begins by imagining a future archaeotechnician in the year 2119 acquiring data with the help of several scanning bots. She then ties the different activities to what’s possible now, what’s in the near-future, and what’s not so easy to achieve. She also makes what I think is a prescient prediction: “In the future, I think it’s very likely that all archaeologists will develop an additional primary expertise within the sciences… [those] with strong scientific and interdisciplinary backgrounds have a far greater chance of employment… we have to ask ourselves whether archaeology will become a sub-focus within the sciences.”

 

What got me really excited was reading about hyperspectral imaging in archaeology. As a chemist attempting to get students interested in making visible the invisible (via the interaction of “light and matter”), I’m starting to re-imagine different aspects of my G-Chem 1 class to make it archaeologically-themed. We already talk about different types of spectroscopy to identify the structures of atoms, molecules, and crystalline solids, but I hadn’t connected this to a larger systemic context; maybe archaeology could be the link! I could even tie it to space exploration, as Parcak does with both wit and aplomb. Why is it that I’m always excited about revamping a class shortly after I’ve finished teaching it? I’ll need to wait until next fall. Right now I need to focus on G-Chem 2 as the spring semester is about to begin.

 

While I find archaeology fascinating, I’ve never pictured myself as an archaeologist because I don’t think I could survive the hard, painstaking, outdoor work in terrible weather. I much prefer reading from my armchair. A number of years back, I did incorporate a book by archaeologists into a first-year living-learning-community that my G-Chem class was a part of. Perhaps I could do something similar with Parcak’s book, but I’ll have to think more about how exactly this might work. Oh, so many ideas, so little time! At least Parcak’s book motivated me to play Thebes this weekend. That’s the closest I get to being an archaeologist. Until I get going on Global Xplorer. I’m holding off for at least a month because early in the semester is not a good time to potentially get addicted, and not put in the time doing my actual job as a chemistry professor.

Systems Chemistry Education

I recently attended an American Chemical Society sponsored webinar on “Systems Thinking in Chemistry Education”. Since my area of research involves complex systems, and I get paid to be a chemistry educator, you might think that I’d automatically incorporate systems-thinking into teaching my chemistry classes. Well, I do and I don’t. Mostly because I haven’t spent the time seriously thinking about how the two should complement each other in my classes. So this was an opportunity to learn from others who have been thinking about the issue.

 

The presenters provided an overview, some specific examples of how systems thinking might be incorporated into General Chemistry, potential future directions, and some resources. I learned that the Dec 2019 issue of the Journal of Chemical Education is devoted to this topic. I read three papers highlighted by the presenters in their examples, and today’s blog post will focus on one of them – the overview introductory article that sets the stage. (Abstract and citation shown below.)

 

The article begins by recognizing the useful role of reductionism in both scientific discovery and science education. Reductionism has its limitations, and often is contrasted with Emergence. While the two might be inverses of each other in complicated systems, this is not true for complex systems. And many systems that we deal with are complex. I’m pleased that Ludwig von Bertalanffy’s contributions are prominently highlighted in the article, and that the way systems thinking is described was not overly-simplistic (which I feared it might be before reading the article fully). In particular, systems thinking was not pushed as the panacea nor a substitute for present approaches that have worked well over the years, but rather as a potential enhancing complement in appropriate areas.

 

Systems thinking is defined as “the ability to understand and interpret complex systems and involves the following…”

·      Visualizing the interconnections and relationships between the parts of the system

·      Examining behavior that changes over time; and

·      Examining how systems-level phenomena emerge from interactions between the system’s parts.

I also found the “Systems Thinking Hierarchical Model” (the triangle shown with the abstract above) useful as a guide to seeing the different aspects at which a student might engage in systems thinking.

 

From the examples provided, the second semester of G-Chem (covering thermodynamics, kinetics, and equilibrium) seems to be a good place to incorporate systems thinking. The sense that I get from the examples is about seeing the chemistry in context by highlighting the systems-level features. Most of us already provide application-examples for context in our classes, but these are usually discussed briefly and anecdotally rather than probed more carefully for those systems-level features. Environmental science and sustainability seem to be the prime contextual targets, and the aim seems to be “educating future global citizens”.

 

Incidentally, in preparing for my upcoming G-Chem 2 class, I had been thinking about how science builds limited models as a way of studying systems via reductionism. Thermodynamics provides a prime example. By defining closed systems with particular idiosyncratic boundaries between subsystems, we’ve stripped out the complex parts, and over-simplified the system such that it no longer behaves as a complex system. That’s partly why entropy has to be introduced as a separate concept. We do this all the time in science, and we’ve similarly done so in science education especially as we moved towards mass education. Build a box. Reduce the systems. Make machines. Convince yourself that what you’ve made is similar enough to the real thing.

 

I don’t think what I’ve described is what most chemical educators have in mind even if that’s what we’re all engaging in, and I’m not sure that is the systems thinking suggested by the articles I read and the presentations I saw. That being said, I will be trying to introduce a bit of systems thinking into my Honors G-Chem 2 class this coming semester, by meshing what we’re learning to the material students will encounter in a bioenergetics intro-Bio level Honors class that most of them are also enrolled in. I’m not going to do too much this semester because we’re still in a pandemic and I’m teaching online. We all have enough to deal with already so I’m not doing any major overhauls. But I’d like to think about these matters more carefully this summer as I look forward to next year. It will also give me time to read more articles in that Dec issue so I can come up with something that works well!

Slicing the Chemistry Pi(e)

Prompted by a colleague to ponder the unity and diversity of chemistry, I’ve been imagining Venn diagrams. For some reason, they come in threes.

 

Let’s start by considering the three traditional science disciplines and their mutual overlaps. The following diagram which I’ve previously introduced to introductory students when discussing the definition of life. 

 

I’ve labeled the overlaps from a chemist’s perspective. Physical chemistry is where physics and chemistry overlap (a physicist might call it chemical physics); that’s formally how I’m classified within the world of chemistry. I teach the dreaded P-Chem (Advanced Arithmancy!) and within the American Chemical Society (ACS), I’m part of the PHYS (physical chemistry) division. Biochemistry is where biology and chemistry overlap. And all three might come together in an area I’ve called biophysical chemistry. This way of slicing the chemistry pie visualizes its relationships (and lack thereof in non-overlapping areas) with its sister sciences, physics and biology.

 

The ACS curriculum identifies five areas within chemistry: Analytical, Biochem, Inorganic, Organic, and Physical. To certify that our graduates have gone through the ACS-certified curriculum, our department has to show ACS that our students have covered material in these five areas, usually logged as class hours spent in both lecture and lab across these areas. This classification can be traced historically as chemistry began to specialize into these domains. Nowadays we might also discuss further specialization in areas such as materials chemistry, environmental chemistry, polymer chemistry, nuclear chemistry, solid-state chemistry, or my area of expertise – computational chemistry. You could represent these in a sliced-up pie chart, but I prefer the Venn diagram because it highlights the overlap between boundaries.

 

How might we make sense of all these different subfields and their relationships? Let’s try to group things by category. Here’s one possibility: Geochemistry, Biochemistry, Astrochemistry. These are three distinct areas of chemistry, but they also potentially overlap in interesting ways. You could further subdivide geochemistry into its three spatial realms: lithosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere. Once again, the boundary zones are of great interest, chock-full of complexity, and likely to enlarge our understanding of chemistry.

 

When I chat with students about what they might find interesting in chemistry, we discuss what classes they enjoyed, but I also talk to them about two main activities of chemistry: Making and Measuring. While not exclusive to each other, different laboratory activities tend to focus either on one or the other (although we do bring them together at the end). If I was looking for a trinity of chemistry applications, I could perhaps choose: Materials, Medicine, and Manufacturing, for my three Venn circles. Once again, the overlaps might be where interesting action may be found.

 

What unites all these different slices of chemistry? Today I’d say that chemistry focuses on the Molecular level, and translates what’s going on there to the Macroscopic human-sized world where we operate. We’ve used a lot of M-words in the last paragraph, kinda like an M-Theory. All these M-words are anthropocentric to us humans who are practicioners of chemistry.

 

What my colleague actually asked me is whether there are cross-cutting concepts across the different areas of chemistry, or perhaps what unites the slices of the pie. That they’re all pie? Maybe I should ask what are the ingredients of the pie? Or the pi? What does pi have to do with the pie? We’ll get to that.

 

The slices and Venn circles are labeled in ways familiar to chemists. They help us distinguish differences. But what unites them? In the spirit of threes and the anthropocentric “I”, may I suggest the following three concepts: Identity, Interaction, Information. There, I made a Venn diagram!

 

I chose not to use the more familiar structure-function dyad, because I think it’s too limiting, and we’re too used to the mantra that structure dictates function. This limitation is especially apparent in the growing field of Systems chemistry. I haven’t fleshed out my three I’s, but here’s what I can say broadly or vaguely. I think a truly cross-cutting concept should be more generic, and may manifest itself in potentially different but related forms across the different slices of the chemistry pie. (1) While Identity is most easily associated with individual molecular structure, it might encompass more abstract concepts such as familial relationships, classification, and macroscopic views of matter. (2) Interaction isn’t just about intermolecular forces and chemical reactions, and should not just be subsumed into Identity, but may encompass other types of dynamics that chemists are not used to contemplating. (3) Information, the slipperiest of the three, should not just be relegated to cheminformatics or Shannon entropy; I haven’t yet grasped how to think about it in a broader sense beyond the analogy that semantics, and not just syntax, is key to the understanding of language. Information could also encompass other I’s such as Imagination or Interpretation, that highlight the Interaction between observer and observed, a boundary that might prove non-trivial.

 

The slices we have made are human conveniences to corral what might be a huge area into more manageable ones. We may specialize and self-identify (or be identified) with certain slices. But we should be continuously aware that by reducing our field of vision – for good reason, to learn some new things! – we also blinker ourselves from the richness of the whole. In a previous post, I quoted Rosen’s description of that funny number pi – yes, the one that shows up in pies, and that we celebrate by eating said pies on Pi Day. Those seemingly thin boundaries along slices of pie, might actually be broad rich areas of investigation, fractal-like as you look closer, but more complexly so, and certainly not captured by simple Venn diagrams.

 

Identity, Interaction, Information. Perhaps that’s one way to think about the Chemistry Pi.

 

P.S. For other Pi-related posts, see Abstraction or Happy Pi Day!

Making an Impact

I tell my students that one of the best things about being a professor is when my former students come back and tell me what they’re up to in life! While travel is much reduced because of Covid, I had a number of former students out-of-the-blue e-mail me this past week to say hello, give me an update, and thank me for the impact I made in their lives. It’s very heartening and I’ve felt encouraged, and (almost) ready for the new semester.

 

I get to know students in different ways, and a selection of students I heard from this week will illustrate these different relationships. One was an academic advisee letting me know of successful post-graduation plans. One was a student in two of my classes who is finishing up one successful post-doctoral research stint and moving on to the next opportunity. One was a research student (but had not taken a class with me as an undergraduate) who was going through a difficult time, but was reminiscing about the positive experience working in my lab. And one was all three – an academic advisee, a student in one of my classes, and a research student – who is on track to finish her PhD this year.

 

I spent a fair amount of time chatting with these students during their undergraduate days, be it in office hours, in lab, or in the hallway. While I try to get to know students in my classes, there’s little time to actually do so in class or the five minutes before class begins. So I tell students in my classes that one of my favorite times is office hours. Come visit, come get to know me, and give me the opportunity to get to know you. This happens as a matter of course for my academic advisees and my research students, but not necessarily for students in my classes who aren’t my advisees or working in my research lab. Not many take me up on the opportunity, although I was interviewed by a student a couple of years ago.

 

I am not like most of my students. I don’t look like them. I don’t talk like them. I grew up in a very different country, and have an accent strange to their ears. And my teaching style is a bit more “authoritative” (the dominant style where I grew up) so it might feel intimidating to the student. It doesn’t help that I teach P-Chem, the toughest and least-liked class of our majors. I try to be friendly and amiable, but my introverted slightly guarded personality might get in the way. So sometimes I’m not sure if I’m making an impact, although I keep trying. This week I got a precious reminder that I do make an impact, not on everyone and not all the time, but it does happen and it’s a great reason to keep at it.

Irreducible Complexity

It’s unfortunate that the phrase irreducible complexity is most commonly known nowadays as the failed idea of creationists arguing against neo-Darwinian evolution. I’m greatly over-simplifying the story here because today’s blog post is not about this popular “controversy” between science and religion.

 

Instead I’m going to discuss some thoughts from reading Robert Rosen’s Essays on Life Itself, in particular focusing on the relationship between physics and biology. I’d like to think I have special insight as a chemist sitting between these two fields, but maybe I don’t, and maybe it’s an open question whether or not these fields are sequentially linked. The Venn diagram I have used with my students to discuss definitions of life may not be accurate either.

 

I discovered Rosen’s work after stumbling on Mikulecky’s definition of complexity, which implicitly contains the idea of the irreducible. This is distinguished from something that is “merely” complicated, which is reducible to its parts even if the disentanglement process is super-complicated. Rosen begins with Schrodinger’s What is Life? and argues that most contemporary physicists and biologists ignore a deeper fundamental question about the relationship between the two areas.

 

Schrodinger argued that we might need a “new physics” to characterize life. In the present reductive model, familiar to scientists and students of science, biology can be implicitly reduced into chemistry, which can then be reduced to physics. Living organisms are a subset of the larger “world” of non-organismic materials and forces; they are a special and perhaps even rare case – rare in the physical universe because of the special Goldilocks conditions of planet Earth. Rosen turns this idea around, making the enigmatic proposal that “organisms are more general than the non-organisms in the old physics, and that their apparent rarity is only an artifact of sampling.”

 

An argument made against modern-day proponents of irreducible complexity from scientific creationists affiliated with the IDEA institute and the Intelligent Design movement is that they are reviving the failed idea of vitalism, and attempting to smuggle in God as its sustainer – thus we can’t explain life without God, the author and creator of life. I find this view theologically impoverished; it seems like a God-of-the-gaps argument that relegates the supreme being to a tinkerer of parts within the “old physics”.

 

It’s hard for us to get out of the mindset that life seems rare and special. Perhaps that’s because we modern folk think in terms of material substances rather than functionality. To think of functionality smacks of teleology and the smuggling in of purpose. We the scientific-literates focus on the syntax but not on the meaning. Information is reduced to bits, bytes, and Shannon entropy. We’re all about counting backwards and forwards in precise discrete addition and subtraction, each piece independent from each other. We do acknowledge mysteries such as the nature of energy – we don’t know what it is but we can count it – but that’s only because we haven’t gotten through the process of disentangling its complications.

 

Rosen has many analogies as to why this sort of thinking is flawed. Here’s my favorite one that serves as an analogy to why the “old physics” might be a subset of unruly biology, rather than the other way around of subsuming biology within the larger realm of physics.

 

“This kind of argument rests on a confusion about, or equivocation on, the term rare, and identifying it with special. An analogous argument could have been made in a humble area like arithmetic, at a time when most numbers of ordinary experience were rational numbers, the ratios of integers. Suddenly a number such as π (pi) shows up, which is not rational. It is clearly rare, in the context of the rational numbers we think we know. But there is an enormous world of ‘new arithmetic’ locked up in π, arising from the fact that is much too general to be rational. This greater generality does not mean there is anything vitalistic about π, or even anything unarithmetic about it; the only vitalistic aspects show up in the mistaken belief that ‘number’ means ‘rational number’.”

 

There are many other thought-provoking ideas just in the first fifty pages of Essays on Life Itself, I could spend the rest of my lifetime exploring them in detail. As a reminder to myself, since my blog is a cyborgian extension of my otherwise poor memory, I will briefly note a few of these here in the hope that I will get back to them at some point.

 

Rosen grounds his definition of complexity by thinking about the non-commutability of relationships, and that analysis and synthesis are not exactly opposite processes. I’m reminded of when I discuss Hermitian operators and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in my quantum chemistry class, and it seems like there’s some quantum astrology going on. Rosen regularly refers to the difference between inertial and gravitational mass, with a hint to why the N-body problem exists. Most of us (me included) don’t think about the difference between these two types of mass because they are numerically equivalent. But they are not the same.

 

This brings me to Rosen’s thoughts on biomimesis and simulation. Can mind be reduced to machine? If an artificial intelligence passes the Turing test, does it mean it is alive? Does it matter if we humans can’t tell the difference? Rosen marvelously connects science and magic as he ponders the nature of objectivity: “[Mimesis] is animated by an idea that things that behave enough alike are alike, interchangeable. In biology, such ideas go back to the earliest historical times and, indeed, are intimately related to the archaic concept of sympathies as in ‘sympathetic magic’ … if we can produce a system manifesting enough properties of an organism, i.e., it behaves enough like an organism, than that system will be an organism… Indeed, mimesis treats such individual behaviors as a reductionist treats atoms, as syntactic units… [that] can be reduced and then recombined...”

 

I’m reminded of the parallel work in origin-of-life research that studies artificial life, some through carefully designed biophysical systems such following GARD, but more often through simulation – with the underlying assumption that software and hardware can be treated independently from each other. As a computational chemist, I also wonder if my particular approach to tackling origin-of-life questions is doomed to failure, given that one aspect of the complexity of biology, according to Rosen, is that it is non-computable. The irreducibility of life makes it so. I’m also reminded of one tricky aspect that most students don’t notice on the first day of my introductory chemistry class when we discuss the definitions of element, atom, molecule, compound. There’s a certain circularity to those definitions, and I feel a slight pang of helplessness every time we go through it, because the occasional student (one who has had little background in chemistry) will for good reason that they cannot easily articulate find the definitions confusing, and I will provide pat answers in class so we can move on.

 

Rosen employs notions of graph theory as he ponders how to think relationally about forces acting on materials which are themselves sources of forces. I’ve been thinking along these lines in my current research as I struggle to conceive the limitations of differential equations in studying the kinetics of autocatalytic systems and how they evolve. There’s a strange (by which I mean I don’t understand it) recursive relationship going on, that might lead to infinite regress on the one hand – you might need a larger system to explain what’s going on in your subsystem – and yet “infinity is not the same as large finite” as Rosen states, and it boggles my mind how to think about this. Even more mind-boggling, Rosen suggests a possible way out through replication as some way to stabilize open systems such that somehow the recursive loops close back into some sort of discrete entity (an organism!) with boundaries that remain fuzzy.

 

Murkily, rather than clearly, the approach to understanding complexity will not adequately proceed through pure reductionism. Reductionist models can give us partial understanding of the part, not the whole, and we need to remember the limitations of our model whereby we’ve conveniently hidden or ignored the irreducible parts. To grasp that whole, maybe a “leap of faith” is required. Not because of small gaps because the “old physics” is starting to see widening chasms as it explores complexity theory, but large gaps that Schrodinger began to ponder when he suggested a new physics is needed. Those lessons may come from life itself.

Automagic

“Our ultimate ambition is to transform the overall Google experience, making it beautifully simple, almost automagical because we understand what you want and can deliver it instantly.”

 

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, apparently said this, as quoted by Shoshana Zuboff in her 500+ page tome, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. I’m halfway through the book, and it’s about as depressing as my recent other apocalyptic reading. Zuboff draws back the curtain to reveal the driving force of behemoths such as Google and Facebook. There’s likely much she doesn’t know behind the scenes, but we she does reveal is illuminating – in a “how did we get to this screwy situation” kinda way, and perhaps we should have known better.

 

The essence of surveillance capitalism is the mopping up of behavioral data in its bits and bytes, with or without your permission. The more you get, the more you corner the market. It’s a rich-get-richer situation, not unlike autocatalysis and the evolution of life, I suppose. It might have started with wanting to help you streamline your life by efficiently helping you to find what you need and want. And seemingly free-of-charge to you, the social-media and web-browsing user. But you can’t sustain such a helpful service without income. All your clicking and typing, though, can be monetized if a profile of you – the personal you with all its quirks, conscious and unconscious – can be built up. Then we can start selling you stuff, predict your future behavior, or nudge you to do something at the right time and place. Automagic!

 

We’ve seen such scenarios in dystopian fiction and literature. The movie Minority Report is a good example of the dark side of being stuck in such a coercive system. Last week I was watching the second season of HBO’s Westworld. Does their vision seem too fantastical? We don’t have the skills to make human-like cyborgs yet, but the data collection to build up user profiles is happening and will continue to accelerate. “Behavioral surplus”, the data gold rush powering our tech behemoths, is there for the taking because we’re constantly feeding the beast, and the U.S. has little to no data privacy protection.

 

It’s hard not to feed the beast. I use e-mail, my credit card, access services online, search/browse the web, and occasionally log on to social media to keep in touch with friends and family. The pandemic means that I do more things online, especially with regard to teaching. Previously I delivered course materials through my own course website with no tracking of student activity. Now I use Zoom and the Learning Management System. And yes, these do track activity regardless of whether I care about such things as an instructor. In fact, we’re “encouraged” to use data analytics in our teaching. It’s supposed to keep us informed so that early warning signals can remind us to do “interventions” all in the name of helping our students be better learners.

 

As an academic adviser, I was encouraged to look at and use holistic data analytical tools that look beyond the classroom, with an eye towards student engagement or the warning signs of disengagement. I’m sure the folks in student affairs mean well, but after logging into such a system probably ten years ago to see what the hoopla was all about, I never did so again. If there’s an issue, I directly contact someone and talk to them. I was not going to feed data into the system, even when encouraged (but never forced) to do so. I refuse to subject my students to lockdown browsers that monitor them supposedly to reduce cheating – what a ghastly invention. I refuse to use Turnitin. Students who want to cheat will try anyway; I much prefer to get to know my students, establish mutual trust, explain my pedagogical strategies, why and how I grade, and hopefully show them through words and actions that I care about their learning. But it’s still their learning, and they have to put in the work to learn the material.

 

I cannot escape the system I’m caught in; I’m certainly not rich enough to go off-the-grid. No, I don’t think we are in a Terminator Judgement Day scenario, but I do keep my phone in airplane mode much of the time, and I never turn on location services. I don’t web-browse on my smartphone and hardly use any apps. No digital assistants. I’m not tempted to get an Amazon Echo. No wearables. I was intrigued by Roomba and Nest, but reading Zuboff’s book has convinced me not to do so. In fact, if anything seems automagical, I should be doubly alert.

 

While I grew up in an era without data scrapers trying to get every bit of data, my students are fully immersed in them. It’s scary to me. But they don’t seem too worried. That’s scary too. I’m sure they’d be happy to get more personalized education at their fingertips, and educational technology companies are happily trying to convince us that their products are in the best interests of our students. And to some extent they’re not wrong. But in this new world where behavioral surplus drives surveillance capitalism, it’s not worth it for them to deliver such useful products without the gold mine of data scraping access. Brave new world indeed.

When Magic Fades

The Farthest Shore brings a fitting close to Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy. But first there is a crisis. Magic seems to be fading from the known world, first at its far reaches, but like a disease it begins to spread. It leaves the inhabitants listless, directionless, regardless of whether they had magical abilities to begin with; some are even driven mad. The young protagonist from A Wizard of Earthsea, now older and wiser, must embark on a quest to discover why this is happening before the world falls apart. 

 

The disappearance of magic has been explored by writers who immerse their tales in legend. Arthurian Tales, The Lady of the Lake and Excalibur, Merlin and Morgana, imagine a medieval Britain where magic was once powerful in the realm. After the great events of The Lord of the Rings, as the Elves depart and Middle Earth becomes the realm of Men, magic seems to fade away. The contemporary Once Upon a Time TV series begins with a transplanted fairy tale world cursed to a realm without magic (although they bring it back quickly enough). In our own realm, we consider scientific thinking to have displaced magical thinking as children grow up, or as societies develop technology – the new magic. We’d love to think it might be present yet hidden, perhaps in the wizarding societies of Harry Potter’s world.

 

Great works of fiction and narrative explore the profound and mysterious, in a way both more powerful and accessible than the non-fiction treatises laden with philosophy and theology. Tolkien’s stories are powerful in that regard; more so (in my opinion) than Rowling’s world which does attempt to juxtapose good and evil, and takes up the questions of what it means to fear death and the costs of trying to be immortal. Le Guin ponders the same questions, but goes deeper than Rowling and gives the reader a glimmer of the mysterious and profound questions of life and death, good and evil, existence and free will. While I don’t subscribe to the yin-yang underpinnings of Earthsea as the underlying truth of our cosmos, there’s much that is insightful in The Farthest Shore.

 

I’ve tried not to give away the story for those who want to experience the wonder of reading it for themselves. But I’ll quote one passage from the main protagonist that speak strongly to the human condition. “The little traitor soul in us, in the dark, like the worm in the apple. He talks to us. But only some understand him. The wizards and the sorcerers. The singers; the makers. And the heroes, the ones who seek to be themselves. To be one’s self is a rare thing and a great one. To be one’s self forever: is that not better still?”

 

Much of Earthsea magic parallels the skilled work of expert artisans. One might similarly ask the question of what is lost when expertise is denigrated and eventually lost. A race to the bottom. Reversion to the mean – and perhaps not the statistical measure, but the brutishly mean. Mass production. That’s why I’m concerned with the diminishing of the arts in education. Science and technology, the new magic, has been placed on too high a pedestal – the new gods, as it were, and mean ones too. It’s why I worry about the ways machine intelligence has increasingly permeated the world of education, promising to personalize, but is likely to lead to further depersonalization and widening the every-increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots.

 

The flatter world has become the meaner world. As the protagonist in The Farthest Shore says: “But when we crave power over life – endless wealth, unassailable safety, immortality – then desire becomes greed. And if knowledge allies itself to that greed, then comes evil. Then the balance of the world is swayed, and ruin weighs heavy in the scale.”

 

The best fiction functions like a mirror, but a mirror darkly – not so clear and shiny that we notice only the superficial. It won’t get everything right; there’s much that we still don’t know about ourselves, the world around us, and the world beyond us. We should be careful not to trade life for death in a quest for the new scientific philosopher's stones of power. The fading of magic, true magic, is perhaps an ominous sign.