The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Here’s what you get when you combine the wisdom of Aristotle and Henry David Thoreau.
You’ve heard the idiom, “nature abhors a vacuum,” right?
So what does that mean, how does it apply to the current state of our democracy, and why am I thinking about that on this summer Sunday morning?
Hopefully this will all become clear in a few minutes.
The Latin term, “Horror vacui,” is cited by scholars, especially in physics, or alternatively plenism, which is commonly stated as “nature abhors a vacuum.”
According to the scholarship, including online encyclopedias, this is a “postulate” attributed to Aristotle, the Greek philosopher from 300 BC. He articulated a belief, later criticized by the atomism of Epicurus and Lucretius, that nature contains no vacuums because the denser surrounding material continuum would immediately fill the rarity of an incipient void.
I have often thought of the concept in terms of natural law, or nature. Any gardener knows that if you leave a plot of ground open and unfilled, weeds or other plants will creep in to fill the void.
But it also applies in social systems to humans. Watch what happens when a leader steps down in government or business, either to retire, finish a term in office or even when a supervisor goes on vacation.
A vacuum in leadership was created when President Obama could not run for another term and Trump unseated the establishment who were keeping the government and the financial system going.
Like weeds, lesser leaders may crawl into the void and try to take over the space.
Take the Trump White House, for example.
A story came out recently reporting that the science division of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy was unstaffed as of last Friday as the three remaining employees departed this past week, sources told CBS News. All three employees were holdovers from the Obama administration, when the division was staffed with more than 100 employees.
Who do you think will step into the void? Perhaps another climate change denier, Vice President Mike Pence, or simply Trump himself, who appears intent on starving the federal government of competent workers to fulfill his 2016 campaign promise to “drain the swamp.”
This is a drastic continuation of a myth about the Reagan years. His acolytes think Ronald Reagan’s likeness belongs on Mount Rushmore because of his alleged effort to “shrink” the federal government, although taxes and the number of government employees actually went up during his two terms. Attacking the federal government then was only lip service, otherwise known as political rhetoric or hyperbole.
Reagan is also given credit for bringing the Cold War to an end by outspending the Soviet Union on military hardware, even though we now know that the alleged threat from the Russian military was wildly exaggerated by the CIA — and the Cold War actually came to an end under the one term of George H.W. Bush.
When there is a vacuum of information, a myth creeps in to fill the void.
Unfortunately, in the absence of anyone to run government agencies, even a campground, chances are things will simply fall apart. Some people will rejoice. At least anarchists and libertarians.
But most people will complain, even if they consider themselves anti-government, where there is no one there to tell them where to camp, to pick up the garbage, to save them from a heart attack on the side of the road in the summer heat, or catch the criminal who steals their stuff, etc.
It’s really no wonder liberals and Democrats constantly complain about Trump on Facebook about the absence of facts in his speeches and tweets. Facts are derived in our world by adherence to certain scientific principles. If you gut science itself, where are facts going to come from? Trump’s gut? Really? From the waste product of McDonald’s hamberders?
No wonder this is not working. You can’t make intelligence out of shite, to use the British slang.
Aristotle’s insight on this subject is complicated, but amazing in that he was not just talking about vacuums in nature. From the very start, he was talking about human nature, long before modern science or sociology came along.
Scholars have summarized his thoughts in this way. Any absence of a regular or expected person or thing will soon be filled by someone or something similar. Based on Aristotle’s observation that no true vacuums exist in nature (on Earth) because the difference in pressure results in an immediate force that acts to correct the equilibrium.
Even in terms of a government agency or a corporate hierarchy, the vacuum left by a departing manager or executive must be filled immediately, or the company or agency risks languishing and eventually imploding.
It is said that “Even a live presentation cannot cope with dead, silent air time, in the same manner that nature abhors a vacuum.”
The Anthropocene Epoch
This is all too bad, because someone needs to tell President Donald Trump (or his brain trust, if he has one) that we have now entered a new geological era or epoch. We are moving past the Holocene period or epoch, which began approximately 10,000 years ago (about 8000 BC) with the end of the last Ice Age.
According to current scholarship, the Anthropocene defines Earth’s most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans.
The word combines the root “anthropo,” meaning “human” with the root “-cene”, the standard suffix for “epoch” in geologic time.
You could attempt to make a political argument against this if you wanted to try, but you would find it hard to convince many people in Louisiana or California, where floods and wild fires appear nearly out of control — and more than mere acts of god.
What does this have to do with Thoreau?
July 12 marked the anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s birthday. If he had discovered the fountain of youth he would have been 202.
Almost every word I write draws inspiration from Thoreau.
Some scholars are now saying Walden was not his greatest masterpiece. In his 2-million-word journal, the transcendentalist, naturalist and arguably the first American nature writer discovered how to balance poetic wonder and scientific rigor as he explored the natural world in his two-million-word journals, according to one essay in Atlantic, a magazine the Harvard grad wrote for on occasion.
“Thoreau’s love for nature sings off his journal pages in spring. His winter writing slices right into the heart,” wrote Andrea Wulf. “His entries, day after day, are testimony to the power of renewal and rebirth—and to the importance of harnessing the human sense of wonder to better understand and protect the Earth. In our age of the Anthropocene, as we distance ourselves from the cyclical rhythms of nature, we are disconnecting from our planet. Thoreau’s journal is a reminder of what is at stake.”
So I will be departing the D.C. area in the next few days, heading up to New York and then Massachusetts. Stay tuned for my upcoming column from Walden Pond.
