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Autonomy

The Connectome Scaling Wall: What Mapping Fly Brains Teaches Us About Robotics

In October 2024, a consortium of 200+ scientists published the complete wiring diagram of an adult fruit fly brain—all 139,255 neurons and 54.5 million synapses mapped at nanometer resolution. This achievement, 38 years after the first complete connectome (C. elegans’ 302 neurons in 1986), represents far more than neuroscience milestone. It exposes a fundamental scaling problem that governs both biological intelligence and autonomous robotics: the exponential cost of adding capability.

The fruit fly connectome breakthrough arrives at a pivotal moment for robotics. Investors are pouring billions into humanoid robots, autonomous systems, and AI-powered machines that promise to operate independently in the real world. Yet the same scaling laws that made the fly brain 460 times harder to map than the worm also explain why your $75,000 humanoid robot runs for 90 minutes while a honeybee—consuming just 5 microwatts—flies all day on a droplet of nectar. Understanding why insects compute so efficiently with biological hardware reveals the design principles that will determine which robotics companies survive the next decade.

From worms to flies: the 38-year scaling barrier

When Sydney Brenner and his team at Cambridge published the complete C. elegans connectome in 1986, they had spent 15 years manually tracing neurons through 8,000 electron microscopy images using colored pens on glossy prints. The result was a landmark: 302 neurons, 5,000 chemical synapses, and 600 gap junctions—the first complete wiring diagram of any animal’s nervous system. The technology of the 1980s barely made it possible. Brenner’s team initially tried using a Modular I computer with 64 kilobytes of memory to automate the reconstruction, but that room-sized machine proved inadequate. They completed the work by hand.

Exponential Growth

460× more neurons in 38 years

7,142× more synapses

Complexity: O(n²) connections

The C. elegans connectome established the field of connectomics and won Brenner the 2002 Nobel Prize. But for nearly four decades, it remained the only complete adult animal connectome—not because neuroscientists lacked ambition, but because scaling up proved brutally difficult. Moving from 302 neurons to the fruit fly’s 139,255 neurons meant analyzing not just 460 times more neurons, but dealing with exponentially more complex connectivity patterns. The fly brain contains 8,453 distinct cell types compared to C. elegans’ 118 classes. Total synaptic connections jumped from 7,000 to 54.5 million—nearly 8,000 times more wiring to trace and validate.

The FlyWire consortium, led by Princeton’s Mala Murthy and Sebastian Seung, solved this with a hybrid approach that Brenner’s generation couldn’t imagine. They combined flood-filling neural networks for automated segmentation, crowdsourced human proofreading involving hundreds of scientists and citizen scientists, and machine learning to predict neurotransmitter identity from electron microscopy images alone. The original imaging—7,000 ultra-thin slices at 8-nanometer thickness—generated a 100-teravoxel dataset that took approximately 50 person-years to reconstruct and validate. Even with modern AI, human expertise remained essential. The algorithms made mistakes that only skilled neuroscientists could catch, creating a collaborative workflow between silicon and carbon intelligence.

What makes this achievement scientifically profound is completeness. Previous partial connectomes, including the 2020 “hemibrain” covering just 25,000 neurons in one hemisphere, couldn’t capture whole-brain computation. The fruit fly adult brain now joins the C. elegans connectome and the 2023 Drosophila larval connectome (3,016 neurons) as complete wiring diagrams. Researchers can now trace entire pathways from sensory input to motor output. When UC Berkeley neuroscientists simulated the complete brain as a leaky integrate-and-fire network—running on a laptop—the model correctly predicted which neurons activate during sugar sensing, water sensing, and proboscis extension for feeding. The simulation revealed that sugar and water pathways share circuitry, an unexpected finding validated through experiments. The connectome transforms from static anatomy to functional roadmap.

The computational efficiency paradox

Here’s where biology gets interesting for robotics investors. The fruit fly brain that took 200 scientists, AI algorithms, and years of effort to map operates on roughly 5-10 microwatts—less power than the LED on your laptop. This poppy seed-sized brain enables controlled flight, real-time sensory integration, navigation, learning, courtship behavior, and decision-making. It processes visual information through 77,536 optic lobe neurons at rates that would require hundreds of watts in conventional computing systems. A human brain consuming 20 watts performs computations estimated at 1 exaFLOP, achieving an energy efficiency of approximately 50 petaFLOPS per watt. Compare this to Oak Ridge’s Frontier supercomputer: 1 exaFLOP at 20 megawatts, delivering 50 FLOPS per watt. The brain is roughly one trillion times more energy efficient.

This efficiency gap isn’t merely impressive—it’s the fundamental constraint limiting autonomous robotics. Boston Dynamics’ Spot quadruped robot weighs 32 kilograms, carries 4 kilograms of lithium-ion batteries, and operates for about 90 minutes. That 12.5% battery fraction represents a near-optimal trade-off: more battery means more weight means more power needed for locomotion. Meanwhile, insects routinely carry payload fractions of 80% or more (their nectar sacks). The energy density gap explains why: animal fat stores 38 MJ/kg while lithium-ion batteries manage just 0.9 MJ/kg—a 40-fold difference that chemistry alone can’t bridge in the foreseeable future.

The connectome reveals how biological systems achieve this efficiency through principles that artificial systems are only beginning to adopt. Neurons don’t process every cycle like a clocked computer chip; they fire sparsely and asynchronously, computing only when needed. The fly brain exhibits high recurrence—within four synaptic hops, nearly every neuron can influence every other—yet maintains stable, efficient operation. Strong connections (comprising 70-79% of all synapses but only 16% of graph edges) carry reliable signals, while weak connections may represent developmental variability or context-dependent modulation. This architecture naturally implements event-driven computation: no input equals no energy consumption.

Neuromorphic computing closes the gap

The efficiency principles revealed by connectomes are now being implemented in silicon. Intel’s Loihi 2 neuromorphic chip, fabricated on the company’s advanced 4nm process, integrates 1 million neurons per chip with fully programmable neuron models and graded spike events. The 2024 Hala Point system scales this to 1,152 chips—1.15 billion neurons and 128 billion synapses—while consuming just 2,600 watts maximum (2.26 microwatts per neuron). For audio processing tasks, Loihi 2 delivers a 16-fold reduction in energy compared to conventional hardware. That’s approaching biological efficiency levels, though still orders of magnitude behind insect brains.

IBM’s NorthPole chip, announced in 2023, takes a different approach by eliminating the von Neumann bottleneck entirely—co-locating memory with computation. With 22 billion transistors on an 800 mm² die, NorthPole achieves 25x better energy efficiency and 22x faster performance than comparable 12nm GPUs on image recognition tasks. For large language model inference, NorthPole demonstrates 46.9x faster processing and 72.7x better energy efficiency than the next most efficient GPU, completing token generation in less than 1 millisecond. These chips can’t yet match the largest language models like GPT-4, but for edge applications requiring real-time inference—precisely the robotics use case—they represent a paradigm shift.

The commercial leader is BrainChip’s Akida processor, the first neuromorphic chip available for purchase since 2021. Operating at power levels from 100 microwatts to 300 milliwatts depending on task, Akida enables always-on sensing and on-chip learning for edge devices. The October 2024 Akida Pico variant operates at less than 1 milliwatt—approaching insect-brain power budgets. BrainChip has signed partnerships with NASA, Mercedes-Benz, and Raytheon, targeting applications where battery life and real-time response matter more than raw computational throughput.

The key differentiator for neuromorphic chips is event-driven versus clock-driven computation. Traditional processors operate synchronously, with every component tied to a global clock that consumes 30-40% of chip power even when mostly idle. Neuromorphic systems process information asynchronously—computation occurs only when a spike (event) arrives. For sparse sensory data like vision or audio, where most inputs are unchanging, this yields dramatic efficiency gains. Event-based cameras paired with neuromorphic processors report only pixel changes, triggering computation exclusively when something moves. A GPU consumes 30 watts even at idle; event-driven neuromorphic chips idle at under 1 milliwatt.

The micro-robotics power wall

The scaling challenge becomes acute at insect scale. Harvard’s RoboBee project, active since the early 2010s, has achieved controlled flight for devices weighing just 80-100 milligrams with a 3-centimeter wingspan. The latest 4-wing version incorporating solar cells weighs 259 milligrams and consumes 120 milliwatts during flight. But those solar cells deliver only 0.76 milliwatts per milligram at full sun intensity—and the RoboBee requires illumination equivalent to three Earth suns to achieve sustained flight. In practical terms, this means lab demonstrations under halogen lights, not outdoor operation. The 2025 MIT micro-robot achieved a record flight duration exceeding 1,000 seconds (over 17 minutes) and demonstrated double aerial flips, but remains tethered to external power and control.

The fundamental barrier is energy storage scaling. As devices shrink to micron scale, the surface-area-to-volume ratio increases, and power generation (proportional to area) scales more poorly than power requirements (proportional to volume). At sub-gram scale, even the most advanced lithium-ion batteries provide only 1.8 MJ/kg of energy. Meanwhile, insects fly on metabolic fuel—fat at 38 MJ/kg—giving them a structural 21-fold advantage that no battery chemistry on the horizon can match. This creates a “catch-22”: larger batteries enable longer flight, but add weight requiring larger actuators consuming more power, necessitating even bigger batteries.

Chinese researchers at Beijing Institute of Technology have pursued an alternative approach: cyborg insects. Their 74-milligram brain controller—the world’s lightest—straps onto a bee’s back with three electrodes inserted directly into the brain, achieving 90% command compliance for turning and movement. The entire system consumes hundreds of microwatts for control electronics while the bee’s biological propulsion runs on internal metabolic fuel. Compared to fully robotic micro-flyers consuming 100-1000 milliwatts, cyborg insects demonstrate a 1,000-fold power advantage. The University of Washington achieved a 248-milligram autonomous vision system that streams video at 1-5 frames per second over 120 meters with 6-hour battery life, but even this milestone represents power consumption orders of magnitude above biological equivalents.

The 2020 RoBeetle—an 88-milligram crawling robot powered by catalytic methanol combustion—proved that chemical fuels can bypass the battery limitation. Methanol delivers 20 MJ/kg, more than 10 times lithium-ion density, enabling true autonomy for terrestrial micro-robots. But scaling this to aerial vehicles introduces combustion complexity, weight penalties for fuel systems, and thermal management challenges at millimeter scale. For now, practical micro-aerial robotics faces a stark choice: tethered operation, cyborg hybrid approaches, or accepting flight times measured in minutes rather than hours.

Scaling constraints across the morphology spectrum

The power constraint manifests differently across robot scales but follows predictable patterns. For underwater autonomous vehicles (AUVs), diesel submarines carry 10 times more energy per kilogram than battery-powered AUVs can manage, and batteries can’t access atmospheric oxygen for combustion. This forces AUVs to operate at just 1.7 meters per second—slow enough to eke out range but far below the 5-10 m/s typical for surface vessels. Underwater recharge stations help, but even a 66 kWh station requires 4-8 hours to refill an AUV battery.

Flying robots face the harshest energy-per-distance penalties. Power consumption scales roughly with speed cubed, meaning aggressive maneuvering can reduce effective flight time to 25-30% of calculated hover time. Consumer drones typically achieve 20-30 minutes of flight; advanced commercial models reach 40-55 minutes. Headwinds can cut range by half. The biological comparison is stark: monarch butterflies migrate thousands of kilometers on 140 milligrams of fat—enough for 44 hours of continuous flapping or 1,040 hours of soaring and gliding. Their mass-adjusted range efficiency exceeds artificial flyers by 200 times at insect scale.

Ground robots have it easier. Boston Dynamics’ Spot operates for roughly 90 minutes, covering an estimated 3-5 kilometers per charge. Wheeled robots consume 2-5 times less energy than legged robots for the same distance because legged locomotion is fundamentally inefficient—constantly fighting gravity during stance phase while generating propulsion. Yet even the best humanoid robots demonstrate a cost of transport 5-10 times worse than humans. Honda’s ASIMO consumed energy at 10 times human rates; the more recent Durus improved to 5 times. Biological systems still dominate, not through superior motors (electric motors can exceed 90% efficiency while muscles achieve only 25%) but through integrated energy storage, adaptive control, and 40-fold better energy density in fuel.

The computational overhead adds a second penalty. Autonomous vehicles require 500-1,000 watts just for AI processing—sensors, perception, path planning, and decision-making—on top of propulsion power. For large vehicles drawing 10-30 kilowatts total, this represents 5-10% overhead. But for smaller robots where actuation demands only 100-500 watts, computation can consume 20-50% of the energy budget. At micro-scale, the fraction inverts: computation dominates. A 3-centimeter autonomous robot with CNN-based vision achieves just 15 minutes of untethered operation from a 40 mAh battery because processing video and running control algorithms drains power faster than the actuator itself.

Biological solutions to the autonomy trilemma

Connectomes reveal how biology solves the “three-pronged holy grail” of sensor, power, and control autonomy at micro-scale—a problem artificial systems haven’t cracked. Consider the dragonfly, whose visual interception abilities approach theoretical limits. With roughly 1 million total neurons, a dragonfly responds to prey maneuvers in just 50 milliseconds: 10 ms for eye detection and signal transmission, 5 ms for muscle force production, leaving only 35 milliseconds for neural computation. That’s approximately 3-4 neuron layers maximum given biological signaling speeds. The algorithm is elegantly simple: parallel navigation, maintaining constant line-of-sight angle to prey while adjusting speed. The dragonfly’s “eye” contains 441 neurons feeding into 194,481 processing neurons, running at 200 frames per second (versus human 60 fps), with 1/100th the spatial resolution but sufficient for 95%+ prey capture success.

The computational efficiency comes from specialized, task-optimized circuits. The 2023 Drosophila larval connectome (3,016 neurons, 548,000 synapses) revealed highly recurrent architecture with 41% of neurons receiving long-range recurrent input. Rather than deep feedforward layers like artificial neural networks, insect brains use nested recurrent loops that compensate for lack of depth. Multisensory integration starts with distinct second-order neurons for each sense but progressively shares third and fourth-order processing across modalities—a biological form of transfer learning. This architecture enables learning, value computation, and action selection with minimal neurons and microwatts of power.

Neuromorphic implementations are beginning to replicate this efficiency. Researchers have built dragonfly-inspired interception circuits using III-V nanowire optoelectronics operating at sub-picowatt power levels per neuron. The human brain’s 86 billion neurons consuming 20 watts average 0.23 nanowatts per neuron—roughly 100,000 times more efficient than conventional processors per operation. Neuromorphic chips like Loihi 2 and NorthPole narrow this gap but remain 1,000-fold behind biological efficiency. The remaining distance requires not just better hardware but architectural innovation: event-driven sparse computation, co-located memory, adaptive synaptic weights, and hierarchical control mixing reactive reflexes with deliberative planning.

The insect brain also demonstrates distributed control rather than centralized processing. Spinal reflexes in animals produce 10-30 millisecond responses without brain involvement; central pattern generators produce rhythmic movements locally; parallel sensory streams avoid bottlenecks. Contrast this with typical robotic systems where a central processor makes all decisions, creating single points of failure and communication bottlenecks. Modern autonomous vehicles route all sensor data to central compute clusters, adding latency and power overhead. Bio-inspired approaches increasingly adopt hierarchical control—high-level deliberative planning (slow, occasional) with low-level reactive control (fast, continuous)—matching the insect nervous system’s architecture.

The investment thesis: efficiency as moat

For investors evaluating robotics companies, these scaling laws create predictable winners and losers. Companies building humanoid robots without dramatic improvements in actuator efficiency or battery technology will struggle with 90-minute runtimes regardless of impressive demos. The physics doesn’t care about computer vision breakthroughs or better grasping algorithms if the robot runs out of power before finishing useful work. Boston Dynamics spent 30 years perfecting Atlas before achieving reliable bipedal locomotion, but runtime specifications remain undisclosed—likely because they’re uncompetitive with human workers who “refuel” in minutes and operate for hours.

The immediate opportunity lies in applications where bio-inspired efficiency creates 10-100x advantages. BrainChip’s commercial success with Akida—the only pure-play public neuromorphic company—demonstrates demand for always-on sensing at milliwatt power levels in edge devices, autonomous vehicles, and defense applications. Intel’s Loihi 2 research platform and IBM’s NorthPole proof-of-concept show that large tech players view neuromorphic as a generational computing shift, not a niche curiosity. When neuromorphic inference chips consistently deliver 100x better energy efficiency than GPUs across diverse workloads, the inflection point arrives—potentially capturing 10-30% of the $50 billion edge AI market by 2030.

For early-stage robotics companies, the lesson from connectomics is clear: scaling beyond simple demonstrations requires solving energy at the system level. The C. elegans connectome took 15 years of manual labor in the 1970s-80s. The fruit fly connectome required AI-assisted reconstruction, crowdsourced validation, and decades of methodological development—yet still took 38 years from the worm. Each 10-fold increase in neural complexity demands more than linear increases in tools, time, and integration complexity. Similarly, moving from teleoperated robots to semi-autonomous to fully autonomous systems faces exponential power and computation costs. The RoboBee flies for seconds; adding onboard control and sensing might enable minutes; achieving hour-long autonomous operation remains impossible with current battery chemistry.

The path forward combines multiple strategies. Structural batteries that serve as both energy storage and load-bearing elements can improve the mass fraction available for payload. Variable impedance actuators that mimic muscle compliance reduce energy waste during impacts and perturbations. Neuromorphic processors enable always-on sensing without draining batteries. Most importantly, task-specific optimization—designing robots for narrow, well-defined missions rather than general-purpose autonomy—allows exploiting biological principles like the dragonfly’s parallel navigation algorithm: simple, fast, efficient, and good enough.

Implications for the next decade

The 2024 fruit fly connectome achievement marks a milestone not just for neuroscience but for bio-inspired engineering. With complete wiring diagrams of C. elegans (302 neurons), Drosophila larva (3,016 neurons), and adult fruit fly (139,255 neurons), researchers now have a progression of ground-truth biological networks demonstrating how evolution solves sensing, computation, and control at different complexity scales. The next target—mouse brain with approximately 75 million neurons—may take another 5-10 years using current methods. But each connectome contributes design principles for neuromorphic hardware and algorithms.

The robotics industry sits at an inflection point. Massive investment in humanoids and autonomous systems assumes that better AI solves autonomy challenges. Yet the fundamental barriers are physical: energy density, power efficiency, and the computational cost of real-time sensorimotor control. Companies that crack biological-level efficiency—whether through neuromorphic chips, fuel-based micro-robots, cyborg hybrids, or radically efficient actuators—will define the next generation of autonomous machines. Those that ignore energetics in favor of incrementally better perception models will hit the same wall that kept connectomics from scaling beyond C. elegans for 38 years.

The fruit fly brain accomplishes flight control, navigation, learning, and decision-making in 139,255 neurons consuming 5-10 microwatts. That’s the benchmark. When robotics achieves even 1% of that efficiency at scale, truly autonomous micro-robots become feasible. Until then, the scaling laws remain unforgiving: every doubling of capability demands exponentially more energy, computation, and integration complexity. The connectome breakthrough reveals both how far biological systems evolved beyond our current artificial equivalents—and the specific architectural principles required to close that gap. For robotics founders and investors, the message is clear: efficiency isn’t a feature, it’s the product.

October 16, 2025 (updated October 16, 2025) By Tim Booher 0 Comments

Personal Projects & Interests

Plato, Aristotle and Control

Plato is an unexpected architect of progressive thought, but his name has come up as the bad guy in some conservative circles lately. This is partly because at the heart of Plato’s political philosophy lies the concept of the philosopher-king, a notion that resonates with progressive governance and control.

The philosopher-king concept fundamentally assumes that an elite class knows better than the common person what’s good for them. When progressives advocate for expert-driven policy or administrative state control, they’re following this Platonic tradition of believing that some people are better qualified to make decisions for others. But conservatives can be elitists too. John Adams comes to mind.

Plato’s student, Aristotle, by contrast, believed in practical wisdom. His understanding that knowledge is distributed throughout society stands in direct opposition to Plato’s vision of enlightened rulers. When Aristotle talks about the wisdom of the many over the few, he’s making a fundamental argument against the kind of technocratic control that characterizes much of progressive thought.

In The Republic, Plato envisions leaders who combine wisdom with virtue to guide society toward the common good. This isn’t far from the progressive belief in expertise-driven governance that emerged in the early 20th century. When progressives advocate for policy guided by scientific research or expert analysis, they’re echoing Plato’s conviction that knowledge should be at the helm of governance.

The progressive focus on justice and collective welfare also finds its roots in Platonic thought. Where Plato saw justice as a harmonious society with each class contributing appropriately to the whole, progressivism seeks to structure society in ways that address systemic inequalities and promote collective well-being. The progressive call for government intervention to correct social injustices mirrors Plato’s vision of an ordered society where the state plays an active role in maintaining balance and fairness.

Education stands as another bridge between Platonic philosophy and progressive ideals. Plato believed deeply in education’s power to cultivate virtue and prepare citizens for their roles in society. This belief reverberates through progressive educational reforms, from John Dewey’s revolutionary ideas to contemporary pushes for universal public education. Both traditions see education not just as skill-building, but as a cornerstone of personal growth and civic responsibility.

Interestingly, both Plato and progressive thinkers share a certain wariness toward pure democracy. Plato worried that unchecked democratic rule could devolve into mob rule, driven by passion rather than reason. Progressive institutions like regulatory bodies and an independent judiciary reflect a similar concern, seeking to balance popular will with reasoned governance. This isn’t anti-democratic so much as a recognition that democracy needs careful structuring to function effectively.

Perhaps most striking is how both Plato and progressivism share a fundamentally utopian vision. The Republic presents an ambitious blueprint for a perfectly just society, much as progressive movements envision a future free from poverty, discrimination, and social ills. While progressives typically work within democratic frameworks rather than advocating for philosopher-kings, they share Plato’s belief that society can be consciously improved through reasoned intervention.

These parallels suggest that progressive thought, far from being a purely modern phenomenon, has deep roots in classical political philosophy. Plato’s insights into governance, justice, and social organization continue to resonate in progressive approaches to political and social reform. While today’s progressives might not explicitly reference Plato, their fundamental beliefs about the role of knowledge in governance, the importance of education, and the possibility of creating a more just society all echo themes first articulated in The Republic.

November 11, 2024 By Tim Booher 0 Comments

Personal Projects & Interests

Pairing Philosophers in 2023

Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche are valued teachers and they generated many of the ideas bumping into each other in the culture today.

Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and social critic who is known for his contributions to the field of existentialism. He believed that the individual’s relationship to God was the most important aspect of human life, and that the search for meaning and purpose was an essential part of the human experience. Kierkegaard argued that the traditional institutions of society, such as the church and the state, were inadequate for helping individuals to find meaning and fulfillment in life, and he called for a return to a more personal and inward-looking approach to faith and spirituality.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher who is known for his critiques of traditional values and his celebration of the individual. He argued that traditional morality, with its emphasis on self-denial and restraint, was destructive to the human spirit and hindered the development of truly great individuals. Nietzsche believed that people should embrace their own desires and passions, and strive to become what he called “overmen,” or individuals who had fully realized their own potential and lived life to the fullest.

These two philosophers define authentic to me. Neither of them would have been comfortable in my Church or in my society, but I can’t escape how much I would love to host a cup of coffee with these two thinkers.

Authenticity is really hard because we can’t escape our obsession with status no matter how hard we try. It’s better to not think about status too much because focusing on it can compromise authenticity. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are good to match up because they both were independent thinkers who didn’t care about others’ opinions, yet were deeply wounded by the world’s rejection.

One stark difference: Kierkegaard embraced faith, while Nietzsche rejected the idea of a greater meaning in life.

Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were obsessed with finding the truth, wherever that quest went, and were both deeply troubled by what they found and by the process of finding it.

Desiring truth not consistency is probably the hardest intellectual challenge and it can be a lonely and troubling journey. Since I know that I’m not wiser than the weight of history or the leaders of my faith community, I tend to side on tradition when I don’t understand things. Yet I strive to overcome the temptation to prioritize consistency in my beliefs over seeking new information that may challenge them. Consistency is a good default, but it can prevent us from fully understanding the world around us and making informed decisions. An open and certain mind is a rare thing and both do and don’t have one.

Nietzsche and Kierkegaard inspire me on this point. They were concerned with the nature of human existence and the meaning of life, and they both sought to fundamentally re-think the traditional Western philosophical tradition. This makes them good foils to consider what they might think about three significant developments in the modern world: the rise of populism, the decrease in organized religion, and the rise of artificial intelligence.

The Rise of Populism

Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were both critical of the values of the Enlightenment and the modern world, and they both argued that the modern world had lost touch with the deeper meanings and values of life. In this sense, they might both view the rise of populism with a certain degree of skepticism. Populism is often associated with a rejection of traditional political and social elites and a focus on the needs and concerns of ordinary people. Both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard would likely argue that this focus on the needs and desires of the masses can lead to a superficial and shallow understanding of the world, and they would both caution against a reliance on the “tyranny of the majority” as a guiding principle for society.

At the same time, however, both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard placed a strong emphasis on the importance of individuality and the need for individuals to be true to themselves and their own values. In this sense, they might both see the rise of populism as an opportunity for individuals to reclaim their own autonomy and agency, and to resist the homogenizing forces of modernity.

The Decrease in Organized Religion

Both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were deeply concerned with the role of religion in human life, and they both grappled with the question of how individuals can find meaning and purpose in the absence of traditional religious beliefs. Nietzsche was highly critical of traditional Christianity and other monotheistic religions, and he is known for his arguments against the existence of God and his rejection of traditional moral values. He argued that individuals should create their own values and meaning rather than relying on traditional sources of authority.

Kierkegaard, on the other hand, was deeply religious and saw faith as a central aspect of human life. He argued that belief in God was not a matter of reason, but rather a matter of the heart, and he developed the concept of the “leap of faith” to describe the idea that individuals must make a leap of faith in order to truly believe in something.

In the modern world, we are seeing a decline in organized religion and a shift away from traditional religious beliefs. Nietzsche might view this trend as a positive development, as he rejected traditional religious beliefs and saw them as a source of oppression and illusion. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, might view the decline in organized religion with concern, as he saw faith as a central aspect of human life and argued that individuals need a sense of transcendence and meaning beyond the material world.

The Rise of Artificial Intelligence

In the 21st century, we are seeing a rapid development of artificial intelligence and the increasing integration of technology into all aspects of our lives. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard would likely have very different perspectives on the rise of artificial intelligence.

Kierkegaard and AI (picture generated by Dall-E 2)

Nietzsche might view the development of artificial intelligence with a certain degree of skepticism, as he placed a strong emphasis on the value of human creativity and individuality. He might argue that the increasing reliance on artificial intelligence could lead to a dehumanization of society and a loss of the unique qualities that make humans special. But! Nietzsche was interested in the potential of technology to enhance human life and enable individuals to overcome their limitations, and he might have seen the development of artificial intelligence as a potential way to achieve this.

Kierkegaard, on the other hand, might have been more skeptical of the role of technology in society and could have seen it as a threat to human dignity and autonomy. He might have argued that the increasing reliance on technology was a symptom of a deeper spiritual malaise in modern society and could lead to a loss of meaning and purpose in life. (Good grief, how much I love Kierkegaard.)

Who Else?

All this had me thinking, what other pair might be an interesting lens to view society? And I think five other pairings would be super fun to meet up with:

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke

These two philosophers had very different views on the nature of the state and the role of the individual in society. Rousseau argued for the primacy of the common good and the need for the state to exert control over the lives of individuals, while Locke argued for the importance of individual rights and the need for limited government. Comparing these two philosophers could provide a useful framework for thinking about issues related to the balance between individual freedom and the role of the state in modern society.

Karl Marx and Adam Smith

These two philosophers had very different views on the nature of economic systems and the role of the state in regulating them. Marx argued for the abolition of private property and the need for a socialist economic system, while Smith argued for the importance of free markets and the role of self-interest in driving economic growth. Comparing these two philosophers could provide a useful framework for thinking about issues related to economic policy and the role of the state in the economy.

Michel Foucault and John Rawls

These two philosophers had very different views on the nature of justice and the foundations of moral and political theory. They pretty much define the camps in the American left today. Foucault argued that power relations are a fundamental aspect of society (#BLM, Woke!) and that justice is not an objective concept, while Rawls argued for the importance of a social contract based on fairness and equality (think Clinton/Blair). Comparing these two philosophers could provide a useful framework for thinking about issues related to social justice and the foundations of political theory.

Thomas Hobbes and John Locke

These two philosophers had very different views on the nature of the state and the role of the individual in society. Hobbes argued for the need for a strong, centralized state in order to maintain order and prevent anarchy, while Locke argued for the importance of individual rights and the need for limited government. Comparing these two philosophers could provide a useful framework for thinking about issues related to the balance between individual freedom and the role of the state in modern society.

Finally, Kant and Hegel!

Immanuel Kant, an 18th-century philosopher has had the same level of influence as Kierkegaard on me. I consider myself a Kantian. I love the idea that the moral worth of an action is determined by the motivation behind it, rather than the consequences that it produces. An action is considered morally right if it is done out of a sense of duty or respect for moral law, rather than as a means to achieve some other end or goal. Also, the moral law is universal and applies to all people, regardless of their individual circumstances or desires.

Kantian ethicists argue that we have a moral duty to treat others with respect and to always act in accordance with moral principles, even when it is difficult or inconvenient to do so. They believe that this is the only way to create a just and moral society, and that failure to live up to these standards can have serious consequences for individuals and for society as a whole.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a 19th-century philosopher, would be a great contrast to Kant. Some specific areas of disagreement between the two philosophers include:

The nature of history and the role of reason: Kant argued that human reason was a universal and timeless principle, while Hegel argued that reason was an inherent part of the historical process and that the world was shaped by the interplay of opposing forces. Hegel used organic metaphors and language to describe the way in which history unfolds and develops over time. For example, he referred to the process of historical development as a “world-historical process” and described the different periods of history as “stages” in the development of human consciousness.

The nature of the state and the role of the individual: Kant argued for the importance of individual rights and the need for limited government, while Hegel argued for the primacy of the state and the idea that individuals should be subservient to the state.

The nature of knowledge and the foundations of moral and political theory: Kant argued for the importance of reason and the a priori principles that structure our experience, while Hegel argued that knowledge was a product of the historical process and that the ultimate goal of human development was the realization of the “Absolute.”

How fun it would be to pair all the philosophers mentioned above about up. They probably would find my company pretty boring, but it would be fun to tell them about the 1900s and answer their questions about what we believe today. Ah, well, I get to read their books, write this stuff up and, even better, talk to you about this stuff.

January 8, 2023 (updated January 9, 2023) By Tim Booher 3 Comments

Career & Productivity

Work vs Relaxation or Why Captain Call is the Villain

Embracing hard things is important. We lift up those among us who work harder, endure more and suffer to get stronger or make the world better. But how much suck should we embrace? When is ok to relax or is choosing to relax opening the door to cowardice and weakness?

Yesterday when I was playing with my 11 year old daughter having a carefree time horsing around and I had a pang of guilt: should I be doing something harder? Of course not. It’s common wisdom that it’s good to horse around with kids and to have fun, with no specific agenda or goal. It’s necessary to be present in the moment and to enjoy oneself apart from achieving any goal. But! While it’s ok, would it be better to be push for something better? That time with my daughter, wouldn’t it be better to aim for some lesson? What if I were trying to make it more fun for her instead of just enjoying myself? The fact is that we can always do something better and can always elevate our impact — delivering more purpose, meaning and, ultimately, the potential for more joy.

The call to a life of unlimited effort is alive and well today. At MIT, all-nighters, an insane course load and failing health due to work were a badge of honor. I remember my first week, when an upper classman on crew bragged to me that she just finished a two-hour team workout that started at 5am after pulling her second consecutive all-nighter. My first thought was not sympathy, but if I had what it takes in this new environment.

It doesn’t get any easier. The professional life is a road race that puts you in constant competition. Also, you start to get a feel for the cost of your time as the demands for your money go up. A single hour of fun could alternatively provide enough money to do something significant for people you love. When I started consulting, this became much more stressful. I could turn an hour of rest into money. When you know the value of your time and can directly convert hours to dollars, it presents a real challenge. Naval Ravikant (investor, entrepreneur) writes:

“Say you value your time at $100 an hour. If you decide to spend an hour driving across town to get something, you’re effectively throwing away $100. Are you going to do that? . . . I would make a theatrical show out of throwing something in the trash or giving it to Salvation Army, rather than returning it or trying to fix it.”
Naval Ravikant

Now he famously valued his time at the start of his career at $5,000 an hour. That is a good trick to focus your priorities, but watching a sunset fall at the cost of 5K is a non-trivial decision if you think about all the good you can do with that kind of money.

The good news is that at some level, we have to sleep, relax and kick back or we die. Since we must relax, there has to be a point when is it ok, watch a movie in flight, or just sit and watch the trees blow — without it being a chance to “reflect on strategy”? Under what conditions is it ok to take a nap or waste time? Do we relax, just so we can run faster later, or do we run fast so we can relax? Put more broadly, what principles govern the balance of work and play? To what degree can we actually enjoy things without feeling guilty that we aren’t doing something harder. It’s clear to me that all meaningful things are hard, but are all hard things more meaningful than their alternative?

I’ve thought about this a lot and one of my first conclusions is to focus on what the right thing is, evaluate your current actions, and do the right thing. Always be honest, kind, just and humble. If it’s hard, do it. If it’s easy, enjoy it. This provides a lot of clarity. When riding a bike, you work hard on the up-hills and enjoy the glide on the downhills. In both cases you are completely focused and acting to reach your destination. There should be zero guilt on a pain free and enjoyable glide down hill. In that case, your optimal strategy is to enjoy the moment.

So that may be pretty easy, but what about when you pause the race, when you step away from fastest way to get somewhere? Stopping the race to enjoy the scenery will definitely cost you, but also give you something. It’s selfish to stop, breathe fresh air and be solely present in the moment, but it’s also necessary.

I’ve always loved how CS Lewis gets at this in the Screwtape letters. Joy is a fundamental human need and it maps closely to meaning and joy requires being present in the physical moment. He writes that the demon must prevent the “patient” from enjoying the present:

“It is far better to make them live in the Future…it is unknown to them, so that making them think about it we make them think of unrealities… it is the most completely temporal part of time- for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays”
CS Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Operations Research provides an opportunity to understand how to separate the goal from the enablers. Every set of equations has an objective function: the ultimate goal, and a set of constraints that bound the ability to get the optimal answer. To understand how to balance work and relaxation, you have to answer the question of what gives life meaning. There can be many constraints on that objective function: the need to sleep, make money, stay in shape, eat food. But it’s key to keep the constraints separate from the objective. There is no benefit in dying with a six-pack or even of dying with a lot of trophies. Effort, the suck, doing hard things are all about the doing the constraints well– in order to optimize something else. What is that?

The staid reformers of the Heidelberg Catechism asked: What is the chief end of man? Answer: To glorify God, and fully to enjoy Him forever. The cause and effect are so clearly bound together: act and receive. Glorifying God is work, but it’s also a joy to the believer. Enjoying God is pure rest, and is also joy. Work and rest. Suffer and enjoy. It would be so easy to stop at the first clause, but that would deny the purpose of our creation–we were created, not just to worship, but to enjoy that act. With an objective like this, the “hard things” are embraced as a means to an end. The “soft things” are there to be fully accepted, enjoyed and shared.

Worship as a chief end is not just for the Christians. “Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children,” wrote Derek Thompson in the Atlantic. “But everybody worships something. And workism is among the most potent of the new religions competing for congregants.” Could work itself be a valid great objective and life-purpose?

But we can dig into this more under the lens of Christianity. While the goal of life is open-ended for the non-believer, the believer is instructed to worship and obey as revealed through an honest and consistent reading of scripture. The apostle Paul emphasized his work and suffering in his descriptions of beatings, imprisonments, riots, sleepless nights, and hunger (2 Corinthians 6:5). He makes it clear that life in a fallen world is not easy, and the Christian life is described as more difficult, even challenged by demonic forces. In Genesis, physical labor is cursed with friction and obstacles at every turn. And yet Christians are called to rise and face these challenges. Paul’s hardships are shown as a means for the faithful to encounter resistance and endure, not give up.

Christians should be the freest people on the planet to work hard because their doctrine liberates them to pour their energy, time and skill and creativity into blessing others. This is principle leading to behavior. It is a good rule to work hard, but to avoid self worth, or even identity based on that work. Conversely, rest is just another activity, and does not confer identity. Work and rest have purpose, when they seek to optimize worship and make room for joy. (I originally had about 8 more paragraphs on the Christian view of work, but pulled that out into a separate post.)

A counterpoint to Christian view is much older, the first philosophers widely considered that enjoyment itself was a valuable pursuit. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Democritus, Aristippus, and Epicurus embraced the hedonistic theory that a good life involved pleasure and you had a moral duty to make good use of your pleasures. You have a short life so you had better do what you can to enjoy living it. Aristotle thought that work made you worse because people who are too busy working don’t have the time to perform their civic duty or develop sophisticated morals. Other philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard and Michel Foucault believe that pleasure is essential in developing selfhood. Foucault thought that embracing pleasure was a form of expressing and developing personal freedom. Kierkegaard adopted Hegel’s view that in enjoyment the individual develops an awareness of themself as the particular individual they are.

Making pleasure a goal doesn’t sit well with me. I’ve always been skeptical of the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of something with broader meaning seems so much more important. Jordan Peterson resonates with me when he writes:

It’s all very well to think the meaning of life is happiness, but what happens when you’re unhappy? Happiness is a great side effect. When it comes, accept it gratefully. But it’s fleeting and unpredictable. It’s not something to aim at – because it’s not an aim. And if happiness is the purpose of life, what happens when you’re unhappy? Then you’re a failure. And perhaps a suicidal failure. Happiness is like cotton candy. It’s just not going to do the job.
Jordan Peterson

However, this post is the result from a recent perspective from a much less holy book I read recently: Lonesome Dove a 1985 Western novel by Larry McMurtry. It’s a story of two different protagonists: one who lives life to enjoy it, Gus McCrae, in another one who lives life to work, Captain Call. Both of them are superheroes of the James Bourne type: put them in front of a pack of bandits or wild Indians and each of them are going to emerge victorious. Gus, however, is loud, talkative and willing to take in the pleasures of life. Capt Call works from sun up until dark and steadily leads a motley bunch of cowboys and former bandits. In the end, however, he is ultimately a coward, using work to hide his pain. His son doesn’t know who his father is, and Capt Call is too afraid or ashamed to tell him. Even worse, his absence of vulnerability prevents him from experiencing joy and developing friendships.

Several scenes show his power. When his son is threatened by a solider who wants to take a horse, Capt Call easily beats the solider senseless. He endures all manner of hardship to honor a promise and take his friend’s body back to Texas. The natural opinion is to see Gus and Capt Call as a powerful pair who match each other’s weaknesses. The two of them together form the power of their team and their friendship appears to be the bond that keeps the group together.

After more thought, I’m convicted that Capt Call is the villain of the whole story. He has all the appearances of strength, but when it matters he is a coward, unwilling to be happy and willing to embrace the full potential of life. Gus, by contrast, exhibits a deplorable set of values. He treats woman as objects, is an open racist, lacks empathy and is prone towards physical violence. He leaves broken lives in his wake and, worst of all, is oblivious to the pain he causes from his selfish pursuit of pleasure. Some of this is excused by his era and the hard nature of his life. And there is no doubting that he is a clear hero–willing to risk his life to help and save others. He also has an endearing sense of humor. What truly makes him great is his embrace of life. He is willing to work, but he doesn’t serve work. Work is a constraint, not an objective in itself and none of this diminishes his strength.

So what life do you want to live: One more like Gus or one like Capt Call? I want to have hard, fulfilling work, that is seasoned with much joy. I want to have the courage to do the hard things that need doing, but to also have the wisdom to put effort in it’s proper place. I’m very deliberate and intentional about the roles I have: worshiper, husband, father, worker, citizen. I want to do all those things with honor. Really doing those right, especially the first three, requires a copious amount of joy and grace. My children are best served by remembering a dad who was quick to laugh, serve and wait for them, than a dad who was always after optimizing his personal output, growth and accomplishment. Relationships are formed in trust and shared joys and the roles I list are successful only in the context of deeply effective relationships.

All this said, what do I do? First, keep the goal separate from the constraints. The most critical thing for me is to be clear on the goal. I divide the goals into roles. As a living being (health goals), worshiper (spiritual goals), husband, father, worker, and citizen. I picture the life I want to have and the contributions I want to make. I write these down and review them during my daily journaling. Well set goals, shared with your community, provide peace. You can either rest or adjust your goals. They force you to prioritize and decide. The goals you agree not to do are just as important as the goals you decide to pursue. And this is a very iterative process for me. I’m constantly adjusting and learning what I can and can’t do as well as what I should and shouldn’t be doing. Time audits/journaling and sharing your goals with others provide the ideal feedback mechanism.

The constraints are just as meaningful as the goals as they become your personal set of rules. I love this WSJ article from 2015. In that article, Jennifer Wallace writes that “personal policies”

Personal policies are an established set of simple rules that guide your decisions and actions. On the surface, they offer a gentler way of saying no, as in: “I don’t take work calls on Saturdays because that’s my time with family.” On a deeper level, they encourage reflection, help to define priorities and aid decision-making, especially with in-the-moment requests. They can stop you from defaulting to that regretful “yes.”
A Policy of Saying ‘No’ Can Save You Time and Guilt by Jennifer Breheny Wallace

These are also connected to what James Clear writes about identity based habits and Ray Dalio in principles. Rules like: “I don’t swear”, “I go to bed at 10pm” or “I exercise every day” become the type of constraints that form what you get done in life. They should all be tied to specific goals. They make the decisions that lead toward successful completion of goals easy. Just like goals, they require a system that evaluates them. I also have found that community is key. Your spouse or close friends will be a great sounding board for rules that just don’t make sense for you. I’ve found that even the process of sharing them culls a lot of stupid rules. In any case, being intentional here is key. You have to write down your rules. I also tie them to the role they support and the associated goal for that role. I end up with rules like this:

In order to be a good husband, I will be sure to call my wife every day, no matter where I’m traveling.
Since my chief end is worship, I start every day with a prayer, followed by reflection and journaling.
As a Christian, I go to church every Sunday and participate actively in the congregation.
As an athlete, I exercise every day.
etc.

So, please, enjoy the downhill rides, and the hard slogs uphill. Also, enjoy the stops on the side of the road, especially if you are sharing the ride, because you know where you are going and when you need to get there. Hug your companion. Joke, laugh and watch the sunset. In the morning, run hard, work hard and don’t be afraid to sweat. All these are the constraints. Define your objective, and keep that in mind. Never waver from doing the hard things that need doing. But! Most important, never place effort, work and grit as the objective itself. That’s a bad drug that gives the appearance of meaning, but the meaning get’s trapped and self-consumed without joy to make it fully flower.

If you make work itself the goal, you need look no farther to the austere and empty end that met Capt Call.

June 13, 2022 (updated June 16, 2025) By Tim Booher 4 Comments

Personal Projects & Interests

Woke Karl Barth

“If love is the essence and totality of the good demanded of us, how can it be known that we love?”

Karl Barth

We think in groups and live in tribes. It’s hard to believe anything that doesn’t align with a big group of folks. The historical struggle between economic classes is shifting to a conflict between specific identity groups. This is a consequence of the failure of Marxism in practice. I’ve been given a front-row seat to observe that the power in our culture is increasingly concentrated into a few geographic regions that control business, marketing and media. Old ideas are recycled into weapons to gain political power as new groups align to seek their own self-interest. This leaves a lot of us confused as we try to live authentic and peaceful lives in light of constantly changing goalposts.

One way to view history is by teasing out the changes in hopes and fears. All people are constantly trying to be safe and in control of their lives, and some people (generally the *elite* which has been everything from the church to the secular left) are always trying to control others. It is a modern activity to leverage technology and the marketplace of ideas as a means to power. Since the 15th century, Europe has been the source of radical transformation. The shift from pre-Modernity to Modernity ushered in an era of constant change starting with the Italian Renaissance, followed by the growth of Humanism and the Reformation movement. The colonization of the East and the Americas, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, new nationalistic states and the Industrial Revolution made all this spin faster. However, nothing accelerated things more than technology and the ability to record and share scientific knowledge. (cf Karl Barth, Die Protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert)

Things looked rosy for America and the West at the start of the 20th century. Scientists performed Miracles. Automobiles, modern factories, new medicines and aircraft gave the news a constant stream of novel wonders to share. Western countries were confident of their superiority as they reached the zenith of their political and economic power. This was coincident with an age where many theologians were optimistically convinced of man’s natural ability to know God and speak about God. They believed theology needed to be as “scientific” as all the other sciences. They were convinced that it would be possible to speak about God in scientific terms, based on the innate qualities of humanity. Human reason, experience, morality and history became the foundation of religious discourse. There were no doubts about our ability to improve and reshape society with the aid of scientific knowledge. Scientists were convinced that unlimited progress would create a better and brighter future for all people. Dreamers were in vogue reading novels such as Jules Verne’s, From the Earth to the Moon (De la terre à la lune), — the story of the Baltimore Gun Club and their attempts to build an enormous space gun which could launch the club’s president and a French poet to the moon.

World War I changed everything. Optimism was replaced by fear, and by the knowledge that science and technology not only facilitated the progress and well-being of humanity, but also the devastation of society and the destruction of humanity. This realization caused a major crisis in European society.

It was this crisis that led to our current discussion of critical race theory, which is an offshoot of critical theories that trace back to intellectuals, academics, and political dissidents dissatisfied with the contemporary socio-economic systems (capitalist, fascist, communist) of the 1930s. The Frankfurt School was an ideological consolation prize for the Marxists of the failed German Revolution of 1918-19, in the same way that Woke Progressivism was a consolation prize for those of the failed Revolution of ‘68. It was originally located at the Institute for Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung), an attached institute at the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. The Institute was founded in 1923 thanks to a donation by Felix Weil with the aim of developing Marxist studies in Germany. After 1933, the Nazis forced its closure, and the Institute was moved to the United States where it found hospitality at Columbia University in New York City. The Frankfurt theorists proposed that social theory was inadequate for explaining the turbulent political factionalism and reactionary politics that arose from 20th century liberal capitalist societies. Criticism of capitalism and of Marxism–Leninism as philosophically inflexible systems of social organization, the School’s critical theory research indicated alternative paths to realizing the social development of a society and a nation.

The academic influence of the critical method is far reaching. Some of the key issues and philosophical preoccupations of the School involve the critique of modernity and capitalist society, the definition of social emancipation, as well as the detection of the pathologies of society.

The legacy of the Frankfurt School is Critical Theory, which is a full-fledged philosophical and sociological movement spread across many universities around the world. Critical Theory provides a specific interpretation of Marxist philosophy with regards to some of its central economic and political notions like commodification, reification, fetishization and critique of mass culture. Marxism led to the Frankfurt School, which led to Critical Theory, followed by Critical Legal Studies, and finally Critical Race Theory. The end result today of all this in the public square is a post-modern struggle between culture and races that emphasizes lived experience over liberal argumentation and truth discovery. When people often talk past each other, they are failing to realize that they operate in wholly different truth systems.

In emphasizing lived experience over other sources of truth such as science and reason, everything is viewed as a racial power struggle. Philosophically, we trade Kant’s logical system for Foucault’s rejection of the knowability of anything. Marx’s fervent calls for bloody class warfare are replaced with an equally fervent focus on inter-racial dynamics as CRT assumes a priori that racism is present in everything under a doctrine known as “systemic racism.”

Enter Karl Barth (1886-1968), the local pastor of the small industrial town of Safenwil in the Swiss canton of Aargau. A fascinating fellow, he is no evangelical, but is the father of neo-orthodoxy and crisis theology. He addressed critical theory with a focus on the sinfulness of humanity, God’s absolute transcendence, and the human inability to know God except through revelation. The critical nature of his theology came to be known as “dialectical theology,” or “the theology of crisis.” This initiated a trend toward neo-orthodoxy in Protestant theology. The neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth reacted strongly against liberal Protestant neglect of historical revelation. He wanted to lead theology away from the influence of modern religious philosophy, with its emphasis on feeling and humanism, and back to the principles of the Reformation and the teachings of the Bible.

Karl Barth presciently used the modern language of Wokeness in his defense of orthodoxy. He defined the entire life of Christian discipleship as people who are continually reawakened – continuous repentance, continuous transformation, continuous renewal. Barth was careful to say that Christians aren’t the people who are awake vs. everybody else who’s asleep. Christians are those who constantly stand in need of reawakening from the sleep of all kinds of errors and “fantasies and falsehoods.” To Barth, we have to be on guard so we don’t fall asleep to what’s true, and what’s coming to us in Jesus’ way of love and peace.

Barth departed from evangelicals in his view that the Bible not as the actual revelation of God but as only the record of that revelation. To Barth, God’s single revelation occurred in Jesus Christ. In short, Barth rejected two main lines of interest in Protestant theology of that time: historical criticism of the Bible and attempt to find justification for religious experience from philosophy and other sources. Barth saw in historical criticism great value on its own level, but it often led Christians to lessen the significance of the testimony of the apostolic community to Jesus as being based on faith and not on history. Theology that uses philosophy is always on the defensive and more anxious to accommodate the Christian faith to others than to pay attention to what the Bible really says.

“The person who knows only his side of the argument knows little of that.” — Karl Barth

Barth stays out of the evangelical camp due to his view of the individual’s role in scriptural interpretation. John Calvin, by contrast, emphasizes the inspiration of Scripture, the text itself being God-breathed, regardless of whether or how believers receive it. Barth prefers to speak of the out-breathing of the Spirit of God in both the text and the believer, thus distancing himself both from the exegesis of Scripture and from the Reformed tradition.

However, Barth is a bold defender of the rights of the individual and for the goodness of self-criticism. One of my favorite Barth stories tells of a letter he received which said Professor Barth, I have discovered the following contradictions in your writings, what do you say about these contradictions? And Barth ostensibly wrote back and said: Well, here are some others. And lists a few more contradictions. Yours faithfully . . . This is a powerful statement of the liberal idea of welcoming self-criticism.

This is in contrast to the anti-liberal idea articulated by critical race theory that race is a political construction that was invented by white people to give themselves power while excluding all other races from it, and racism is the ordinary state of affairs in society, present in all interactions, institutions, and phenomena, and effectively permanent in society. Karl Barth would be a powerful force for dialogue in an age where conservatives have to hide their views while activist groups use well orchestrated pressure to isolate and marginalize non-conformity.

This is why I find such joy in revisiting Karl Barth. He passes my “coffee test” where I know I would enjoy a sit-down with him. He combines love and grace with an intense pursuit of the truth and then dares to think original thoughts. The fact he doesn’t fit in my American Evangelical tribe is a welcome bonus. I’m pretty sure everything I believe is wrong in some way. Both my orthodox theology, my teleology and my scientific worldview compel me to admit that every tenant I hold should be tested and improved. This is why I love voices that start with grace and end with brilliance. I’m open to change and hunger to learn, but skeptical of political agendas. I’m aware that history is the story of power politics. Oppression is real, but doesn’t belong to one identity. Insight and wisdom are real, but don’t belong to one group. He shares that we are all equally guilty, and equally deserving of grace. Karl Barth preached, wrote and shared his wisdom by inviting others to learn. He and I share the same loves (wisdom, Jesus, learning and talking) and many of the same convictions (that grace and redemption are real, possible and freely available). I’m glad he took to the time to share his thoughts as they are a great comfort in times such as these.

June 20, 2021 By Tim Booher 2 Comments

Uncategorized

Review: Sapiens

Yuval Harari (יובל נח הררי) has written a scholarly, thought-provoking and crisply written survey of “big history” that he uses to preach his starkly different views of philosophy and economics. Dr. Harari teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he wrote Sapiens in Hebrew and accomplished the very idiomatic translation himself. Provocative and broad, he argues for a different perspective on history with confidence and swagger that he has it all figured out. Certainly, his very use of “Sapiens” for the title is in itself provocative. It reminds us that, long ago, the world held half a dozen species of human, of which only Homo sapiens survives. By highlighting the remarkably unpredictable path of history, he continually emphasizes that our present state is merely one of many possible — and he applies this both to the nature of our species and our beliefs (what he calls “shared myths”). This contrasts with my worldview which is the Christian narrative that we were uniquely created in God’s likeness and image and uniquely entrusted with a creation mandate.

Despite my differences, I appreciate any book that unleashes my imagination and challenges my worldview. Sapiens delivers with surveys of the impact of language, agriculture, economics, and science and technology against the unique backdrop of our species. The final conclusion is that we have won. While we are no longer competing for dominance on the planet, our greatest danger is our own inability to govern ourselves and anticipate the impact of our technology. Thus, for all our advances, our victory may be Pyrrhic: we have specularly failed to use our powers to increase our well-being and happiness. Because of this, Dr Harari predicts that we will vanish within a few centuries, either because we’ve gained such godlike powers as to become unrecognizable or because we’ve destroyed ourselves through environmental mismanagement.

From all this, I found Sapiens contains several new and powerful ideas: that Sapiens’ takeover of the planet is complete, that our greatest power is the ability to collectively create, believe and share ideas, that technology often enslaves us and can’t be resisted, and that the scientific revolution is the result of a willingness to admit ignorance.

We win! Sapiens now dominate the Planet

While the image below is not from Sapiens (it is from xkcd), it makes the point well that our species has dominated the planet. If you consider humans and our domesticated animals, our takeover is complete and the remaining wildlife is simply there to amuse us and give meaning to the pictures in our children’s books.

I wish he would have calculated the date Sapiens “won”, or the date where our species could basically do whatever we wanted with nature. While the industrial revolution might be seen by many as the period we conquered the world, I suspect the rise of the agrarian economy is where we took a different route and established a dominant position over nature. For most of its history, Homo sapiens lived a nomadic lifestyle. The vast majority of our ancestors spent their lives hunting prey and gathering vegetation. Rather than settling in one area, they travelled to wherever food was plentiful. Around 12,000 years ago, however, that all changed and that is when our population started to explode. On a small patch of land, farmers could grow a mass of edible plants. The consequent increase in the food supply meant that human societies could sustain much higher populations, but that required the systems we use today: money, government, war and politics.

However, the systems that provide us this dominance may provide the means for our downfall. Sapiens reminds us that we may be collectively acting in a way that is harmful to our future as a species by establishing such a dominant position on our planet without a matching increase in our wisdom or ability to govern. I often worry that we have developed several generations of technology, but are morally equivalent to our ancestors dating back 1000s of years. What politician today has the gravitas or ethics of Cicero? Clearly, our iPads don’t make us better people.

This wouldn’t be a problem, except the interdependent economic systems and the explosion of the money supply (i.e. leverage) makes our society dependent on high expectations about the future and how bank interdependencies have increased systemic risk to a level unprecedented in history.

Sapiens’ power is our ability to shared and jointly believe in ideas

Sapiens have accomplished this domination because we can uniquely cooperate in very large numbers across vast distances. This is Harari’s most strident theme: the physical un-reality of all our ideas. He claims that all large-scale human cooperation is based on myths, which he highlights are fiction. He describes shared concepts like the nation, money, and human rights as fabrications that have no relation to our biological reality as they don’t exist objectively. He claims that the fact that we share and ascribe such a lofty status to fictions is our most unique characteristic as a species.

While he remarks that we tend to over-value the reality of all our ideas, he reserves his sharpest criticism for Religion and its role in forming a shared human story. He covers Zoroastrian sacred texts, the Book of Genesis, the Popul Vuh. To him, gossip forms the most fundamental bond between local groups, but larger groups require religion which can sweep past trifling details and unite nations. In his narrative, religion was the necessary glue for human society until the 19th century, when scientific knowledge was able to create a standardized set of world beliefs. However, he notes that, without religion, there is no basis for many of the values we hold dear such as human rights.

This denigration of reality of our ideas and institutions is one where Harari overplays his hand. I believe our ideas and institutions, what Harari calls myths, have a complex ontological status. While Nationhood, the Pythagorean Theorem and the fundamental equality of human beings before the law are all non-physical notions formed in human brains, to label them all as fictions as Harari does, without distinguishing more carefully, diminishes the entire book.

Technology and Progress are a Mixed Blessing

When he talks technology and the Scientific revolution, Harari is now talking an area I’m much more familiar with. He makes clear that our obsession with technology is a modern phenomenon. To him, the relationship between science and technology itself is a recent development and when Bacon connected the two in the early seventeenth century, it was a revolutionary idea.

While our current society looks at the blessings of technology as an absolute win, Harari highlights the darker shadow behind technical advances. Namely, despite appearances consumers don’t have a choice to adopt new technology. Someone can decide to forgo email and credit cards, but they will not be able to participate in the modern economy. New technology thus creates addictions and what he calls a “luxury trap”.

For example, examine the rise of farming. Agriculture increased the amount of available food, yet the result of prosperity was not happiness but “population explosions and pampered elites.” Farmers worked harder than foragers and had a worse diet and poorer health, but the foragers had to adopt to the new economy. The surplus went to the privileged few, who used it to oppress. “The Agricultural Revolution,” Harari says, “was history’s biggest fraud.”

At the end of the book, Harari expresses an ambivalence about what we consider today to be a species-wide increase in well-being. “Unfortunately,” he says, “the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of.” While I’m personally in awe of quantum electrodynamics, the modern financial system and anatheisa, Harari is arguing that living better has not made us more content. Citing recent research in psychology, he states that happiness “depends on the correlation between objective conditions and subjective expectations.” He cites that one may win the lottery and another become disabled. While one will most likely experience a short-term happiness and the other depression, research has shown that will be equally happy in a year, even though their circumstances remain different.

More worrying, our current dependence on technology may be our downfall. Not only are we interconnected to an unprecedented degree, but we also are addicted to growth and near-impossible expectations for technology to increase productivity and make scarce resources abundant. While this has historically avoided our malthusian collapse as population has grown, Harari persuasively argues that history is notoriously difficult to predict.

We might be at the beginning of the end of our species

At DARPA, we are starting to understand and experiment with human-machine symbiosis. Recently, we have not only wired a sense of touch from a mechanical hand directly into the brain, but have also figured out how to connect the brain to sensors that feel natural. Sapiens highlights the transplantation of ears onto mice and some of the fascinating and terrifying implications of stem cell manipulation.

Harari notes that for the first time in history, “we will see real changes in humans themselves – in their biology, in their physical and cognitive abilities”. History reveals that while we have enough imagination to invent new technologies, we are unable to foresee their consequences. Harari states:

It was the same with the agricultural revolution about 10,000 years ago. Nobody sat down and had a vision: ‘This is what agriculture is going to be for humankind and for the rest of the planet.’ It was an incremental process, step by step, taking centuries, even thousands of years, which nobody really understood and nobody could foresee the consequences.

The Scientific Revolution is the result of an Admission of Ignorance

Harari takes a stab at what caused the scientific revolution: a willingness to admit ignorance. Before the modern scientific era, the State (the King) and the Church were the source of all truth. There was no excuse to be ignorant. With pith and awe, Harari describes the Scientific Revolution as the point in history when “humankind admits its ignorance and begins to acquire unprecedented power.”

It is worth quoting him here. He writes:

“But modern science differs from all previous traditions of knowledge in three critical ways:

a) The willingness to admit ignorance. Modern science is based on the Latin injunction ignoramus – ‘we do not know’. It assumes that we don’t know everything. Even more critically, it accepts that the things that we think we know could be proven wrong as we gain more knowledge. No concept, idea or theory is sacred and beyond challenge.

b) The centrality of observation and mathematics. Having admitted ignorance, modern science aims to obtain new knowledge. It does so by gathering observations and then using mathematical reels to connect these observations into comprehensive theories.

c)The acquisition of new powers. Modern science is not content with creating theories. It uses these theories in order to acquire new powers, and in particular to develop new technologies.

The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that hunched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions.”

Also, this scientific progress, he asserts, was fueled by the twin forces of imperialism and capitalism.

He writes:

“What forged the historical bond between modern science and European imperialism? Technology was an important factor in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but in the early modern era it was of limited importance. The key factor was that the plant-seeking botanist and the colony-seeking naval officer shared a similar mindset. Both scientist and conqueror began by admitting ignorance – they both said, ‘I don’t know what’s out there.’ They both felt compelled to go out and make new discoveries. And they both hoped the new knowledge thus acquired would make them masters of the world.”

While I find his views fascinating here, they still don’t match with my worldview. I consider the grand vision of using the scientific method to gain mastery over the physical world arose from the long-standing Christian vision—dating back at least to St. Augustine in the fourth century. My view is that nature as the second book through which God made himself known to humanity (the first being the Bible). Galileo justified science as an attempt to know the mind of God through his handiwork.

To miss this connection is only possible by forcing to remove the lens of current accepted groupthink. This is where Harari disappoints. He defers too much to current orthodoxies often resisting the logic of his own arguments for fear of affronting feminists or avoids conclusions that criticize his gay lifestyle, vegan sensibilities or postmodern worldview. There seems to be an inner conflict between the author’s freethinking scientific mind and a fuzzier worldview hobbled by political correctness.

In any case, I find Sapiens breathtaking in its scope and fascinating in its perspective.

There are some great quotes from the book here.

August 1, 2016 By Tim Booher 3 Comments

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The Scientific Revolution is the result of an Admission of Ignorance