Of quantum physics and the heart of darkness

Sir Francis Bacon, the Renaissance Englishman who is credited with the art of a post-Aristotelian classification of knowledge into fields and disciplines, once said, "I have taken all knowledge to be my province".

He had meant that to improve the human condition (an endeavor described by Bacon as his "moderate civil ends") one had to subject everything to intellectual scrutiny.

On the one hand, by declaring "all knowledge" to be one's "province", Francis Bacon had opened up to the lay person, the "generalist", as it were, such hermetic bodies of knowledge as the sciences (back then metaphysics and alchemy with a sprinkling of nascent physics); on the other, he had exposed specialized knowledge to the hazard of being dragged out of context and circulated in a half-baked way in general human discourse.

For instance, as Professors of Philosophy and Physics respectively, at Stony brook University, Robert Crease and Alfred Goldhaber, say, the use of scientific terminologies, like "quantum", pervades general cultural discourses in today's day and age. Non-scientists appropriate scientific words and adapt them to their local cultural chit chat.

The writers, especially, the physics half of the writing duo, I believe, may harbor an ambivalent attitude to such free uprooting of words from their scientific terrains and re implanting them in non-scientific one's. They may interpret the appropriation as a misappropriation.

Thus when Lady Gaga contrasts her notion of the fragility of memory in one of her music videos with the uniqueness of the "atoms and particles in quantum physics," the physicist may be peeved to counter that Lady Gaga's referencing is "inapt" because, "in quantum physics, atoms and particles, unlike memories, can lose their individuality, for any two of the same kind cannot be distinguished from each other." 

The philosopher, however, would rationalize the "inapt" use of scientific terms by the non-scientific community as inevitable:

Every major scientific development has served this function, delivering a stock of new tools for describing aspects of human life. Newtonian mechanics offered novel images of causality and attraction; evolutionary theory gave us ways of discussing survival and fitness.

Besides, as the philosopher would add,

Nothing is intrinsically wrong with applying scientific language metaphorically to human experience. Metaphors are valuable when our experiences are enigmatic or difficult to capture, when existing words don’t fit the situation at hand. Even the incorrect use of technical terms can meaningfully express what we intuit but cannot otherwise say.

The philosopher would point to the perfect marriage of imperfect use of science in the service of the perfect expression of human experience that like physical phenomena, is always innately complex.

But what if the "knowledge" thus appropriated in the Baconian spirit of free-spiritedness, is not from the discipline of science, but from the discipline of the humanities?

I would think that there would be no one to defend or attack the usages, and a deafening neutrality or indifference would ensue.

For, unlike the sciences, the humanities, particularly literature and art, have somehow been perceived in cultures worldwide as everybody's province, including those of scientists and economists (consider the use of literary texts as springboard to launch a treatise on the 21st century global economy in Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century).

It's as though nobody could be bothered to fact check the use and/or abuse of literary references in the non-literary discourses of our cultures, because the humanities is seen since the time of Plato as a flaccid placeholder for everything and anybody can put anything they want in it or take out anything they want out of it, without fear of being rapped on the knuckles for decontextualizing.

While the Stony brook professors pointed out the plusses and minuses of living in a culture "awash in references to quantum leaps, parallel worlds and the uncertainty principle" (including, President Obama's use of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle"), there has been no such discussion of the plusses and minuses of President Barack Obama's reference to the contraption of Islamic fundamentalism called ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), as the "heart of darkness."

While a loose use of the word "quantum" can do some damage to our understanding of it by being propagated as an imprecise concept, a loose use of the core of one of the Western world's most paradigm-shifting of novels, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, won't raise an eyebrow because we assume the descriptor to have no precise historical or geographical province.

Literature is imprecise and cloudy, a cipher, as Plato would have put it--a world of representations not facts, that contribute to the battening of our false consciousnesses anyway.

Yet, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness published in 1899, at the height of European material and territorial exploitation of Africa, is a potent historical document, with a precise geographical referent, despite the metaphorical resonance of the title.

The referent, if one reads the novel closely enough, is so not Africa; it's Europe, or the heart of Europe as signified in the novel itself by the river Thames, and more specifically, Belgium, which is not named but on whose brutal history of colonial rule in the Congo, the novel's idea is based.

Paradigm-shifting literature is a literature of dissent; it opens people's eyes to that which remains hidden by the manipulation of mainstream politics. Today we associate the heart of darkness with anything that is obviously barbaric, but back then Conrad would have liked the reader to see the heart of barbarism in what conventional wisdom took to be the heart of civilization--Europe.

Mahatma Gandhi understood this ironic transposition (I'm not saying that he read Conrad's Heart of Darkness) when he remarked that the "idea" of the "West" is "great". 

In the Heart of Darkness Mr. Kurtz is the European "white" man who turns dark in his soul; it may be simplistic to think that Africa corrupts Kurtz; Conrad says pretty clearly, that all of Europe went into the making of Kurtz.

No one expects the President of the United States, even someone as erudite and intellectually discerning as Barack Obama, to particularize the reference to reflect what Joseph Conrad originally meant (all of Western bungling has gone into the making of the ISIS), but someone ought to say something about the usage of a literary term that's gone so far from its roots as not to be recognized as originating from the Conradian province.

Literary terms, I'm sad to say, has become a spin-off of spin-offs with no record-keeping of when the spin-off began. Today, art terms suffer the same fate as literary one's; the pilfering of the term "surreal" to mean anything that's is beyond rational explanation or merely strange, is too disturbing to contemplate.

The humanities in this sense has dwindled to the status of a temple prostitute, the (in(famous) and sexually exploited temple-women of ancient India whom the whole village had sexual access to, and on whom any male could lay claim during the sexual act.

I mean to say that like the temple prostitute, literature has become communal property with no distinct identity of its own like the sciences have.