Glory in humility
Yesterday as my I drove home from an afternoon walk in the mountains with my wife and youngest son, we hit some pop-up showers, as happens a lot in late summer in north Georgia. A remarkable thing happened: not only did we see a rainbow, but we became the rainbow as the sunlight hit the rain in just the right way.
The rainbow floated just ahead of the car, fixed in its relative position but moving with us. Now I could explain how sunlight refracts off water droplets to form a specific arc: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet from outer to inner bow, but you probably learned that in grade school. The mechanics of rainbows are well-known and really nothing special.
But this one was special. Normally, the rainbow is “far” enough away to appear stationary, but this one was right here in our face. It’s pretty remarkable for this to occur naturally because the conditions have to be just right. Maybe you’ve seen it happen before, but I haven’t.
Looking at things that happen in different ways is one key to humility. Finding explanations and then claiming the things line up with the preferred story is a key to pride.
I’d really appreciate you staying with me this Sunday afternoon, because I’m going to be like a hot pot of spaghetti and meatballs dropped on the floor—all over the place. But I promise I’ll get somewhere by the end (or at least clean up my mess).
Science is supposed to be free of pride, but it’s not. History is supposed to be a dispassionate telling of past events, but it’s not. It’s fun to swirl them together like a soft-serve cone: The history of science and mathematics is replete with rivalries, intrigues and flat out retcons.
It gets complex. All you have to do is look at the story of the quadratic equation. “Completing the square” was originally done by Diophantus, and lost to antiquity; then by al-Khwarizmi about 600 years later. But it was Fibonacci who published the popular version we see today in algebra books.
Who invented radio? Every school kid is taught that Guglielmo Marconi did, but Aleksandr Popov was actually first, but failed to patent his invention. There’s still a robust discussion over whether Brazilian Alberto Santos-Dumont or the Wright Brothers deserve to be called the fathers of modern aviation. Or maybe it was Gustave Whitehead flying over Bridgeport, Connecticut nearly two years before the Wrights launched over the dunes at Kitty Hawk.
Here’s what’s probably true: they all flew. And Popov’s radio would have worked if he bothered to commercialize it. The knowledge to construct a radio, or build an airplane, or write the quadratic equation, was there, and ripe for someone to “discover” it. Most inventions happen because someone keeps trying and happens upon the working version while others give up, move on, or just aren’t fast enough to claim the prize.
There’s some narratives today that drive large chunks of science. Like history, science tends to be written by the victors in narrative battles. It is the humble scientist who realizes his or her conclusions are more like the moving rainbow than the fixed rate an apple falls from a measured height in a vacuum.
An academic named Patrick Brown recently wrote how he got his climate change paper published in the prestigious Nature journal. It was because he, like all researchers vying for publishing credit in top-shelf scientific journals, crafted his paper to match the narrative enforced by the editors of those journals. He left out the relevant bits that would go a large way toward explaining the actual influence of man-caused factors in the recent extreme wildfires plaguing Canada and other nations.
So factors like poor forest management, increases in the number of wildfires ignited by humans, were ignored. And the statistics were framed in a way that enhanced the way climate impact presented. Brown wrote that doing this “is the norm for high-profile research papers.”
The media is especially susceptible to narrative crafting (“Duh!” — the Understatement Police). A recent report from Hong Kong by the BBC says “[climate] change has increased the intensity and frequency of tropical storms, leading to an increase in flash flooding and greater damage.” This is a typical sentence you’ll find in any story related to flooding or storms. But a few paragraphs above that, the story noted “Shenzhen discharged water from its reservoirs after issuing a notice to Hong Kong - an action that raised questions from Hong Kong locals online as to whether this exacerbated their city's flooding.”
China’s government has a policy of protecting some high-value cities by diverting floods, which then inundate other cities. This dates back well before the record-breaking 2023 rains. But you won’t find those references in stories today, because they might detract from the drumbeat of “it’s climate change!”
This doesn’t mean that climate change isn’t real, or human-caused. I believe the evidence for both these is fairly well-established. But humility demands that science should look at other factors as assiduously as climate change as the explainer for practically every weather phenomenon that harms human endeavors on our planet.
The image above isn’t faked. It’s an actual image from the James Webb Space Telescope. It’s also quite relevant. Scientists know that our observable universe fits certain rules, that we call theories, or even laws, that describe behavior of matter, energy, and light. But they also know that we can only observe less than 10% of what’s “out there” to make our hypothesis and experiments. The rest is called “dark matter” and “dark energy.” We can only assume what those are by the behavior of what we can see in the form of cosmic radiation, light, and other forms of energy that we can measure.
The latest observations from the JWST are causing some cosmologists (who are borderline philosophy practitioners) to rethink their assumptions and theories. This is typical when a new, ground-breaking piece of gear gets deployed, bringing better and more detailed data than ever before.
Over many decades, theories and predictions associated with them get overturned when better data is gathered, and better assumptions are used. The problem we have with climate change isn’t one of data, but of pride.
To make a Biblical reference, Matthew (and the other Gospel writers) recorded Jesus saying how “no one knows, not even the angels in Heaven, nor the son, but only the Father” when Jesus will return. (Matthew 24:36.) Over the centuries, many have tried to predict the date, and all have failed (“so far” — the Pedant). But here’s something else in Jesus’ statement:
As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. (Matthew 24:37-39.)
Why do I bring up the Bible when I’m talking about science, rainbows, and points of view? Well, first because it ties nicely with my rainbow story from the beginning of this article, and I like a neat symmetrical essay. Also, it’s because the New Testament has been around over 2,000 years, and the book of Genesis was written probably 1,400 years before that. The story of Noah, the flood, and the world refusing to believe Noah’s warning is here for everyone to see.
The spate of earthquakes, floods, storms, disasters, wars form a background to a world obsessed with itself, eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage. Jesus could show up any day at all, and these signs of his coming would be totally ignored, with most claiming they weren’t given any warning when their eternal judgment comes up.
The truth is, we just don’t know a whole lot, and humility demands we must decide what we believe before we adopt a narrative to fit the rest of the universe into our neat little story.
This goes for science, religion, news, and of course, politics. The truth is, both U.S. political parties are pretty lousy right now, and that’s not a rare thing like a moving rainbow driving down the road. It’s only in which way you look at it that determines which party is the “enemy” and shouldn’t be trusted. Really, we shouldn’t trust any of them, at least not until they learn to be humble.
There’s glory in humility and in knowing how much we don’t know. Perhaps that will change my view of politics, because I’ll take a humble liberal over a prideful conservative. The prideful one won’t be swayed by facts that don’t fit the preconceived narrative. The humble one will learn to refine truth to fit the facts. The prideful one will rewrite the facts and history to fit the story. The humble one will write the truth.