Borsalino Test #31: Sewage and the art of falconry

Sewage and the art of falconry

Roman Emperor Frederick II’s contemporaries dubbed him stupor mundi, the "astonishment of the world", for his temperamental stubbornness. During the late Roman Empire, he ruled Sicily, Germany, Italy, and Jerusalem. He also loved exotic animals, and his menagerie included hounds, giraffes, cheetahs, lynxes, leopards, and an elephant. Falconry was his true vocation though. 

Frederick fully understood the migration of some birds at a time when all sorts of now improbable theories were common. Importantly, he authored the first treatise on the subject of falconry, “De Arte Venandi cum Avibus” ("The Art of Hunting with Birds"). The treatise is the single most important piece of work put together on the topic in the entire history. This is a book from 1240s. Nothing new or relevant happened in the realm of falcon hunting after Frederick II.

For reference, that would be like if some modern-day politician published a timeless treatise on their hobby. Imagine George W. Bush changing the game of oil painting with his manuscript. Or Putin flipping the principles of karate on their head.

The idea that someone with that level of power and influence could amass the knowledge required to dive in such depth while in charge is inconceivable. Didn’t Frederick have pressing issues to attend? An entire empire to respond to? I sound like Joe Rogan interviewing Elon Musk: “where do you find the time to juggle all your involvements?”

The reason why these stories sound so rare is that history has taught us to interpret life as a game. A journey down the main path. This is the narrative of the central purpose. The main vocation. Certainly, it’s hard to find. It comes at the expense of most people’s 20s, or 30s. But when identified, it has to be pursued relentlessly and with blind dedication.

That makes sense. Our entire Western culture (and some Eastern philosophies, too) are founded on the human urge to dominate chaos by establishing order. To wander aimlessly before reverting back to the main road. In the words of clinical psychologist Jordan B. Peterson:

Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time, the monster under the bed, the hidden anger of your mother, and the sickness of your child. Chaos is the despair and horror you feel when you have been profoundly betrayed. It’s the place you end up when things fall apart; when your dreams die, your career collapses, or your marriage ends. It’s the underworld of fairytale and myth, where the dragon and the gold it guards eternally co-exist. Chaos is where we are when we don’t know where we are, and what we are doing when we don’t know what we are doing. It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.

Chaos is darkness, violence. War, and ugliness. And disease. Like when cholera was around. Up until the first half of the Eighteen century, we had no concept of hygiene and personal care as we do today. The progress made in hydraulics by the Romans never reached sanitation, and it remained unchanged until the Industrial Revolution.

In 1830, the situation in London was unbearable. The tremendous stench that emanated from the city (the famous Great Stink) was joined by various cholera epidemics with a very high death toll. During one of them, in 1847, an English doctor, John Snow, who had devoted his life to the study of epidemics, reached the conclusion that cholera was caused by drinking water that had been contaminated with wastewater. And proved that epidemics ceased in those areas where pumps had been closed.

The magnitude of innovations like sewage is hard to overstate. By taming cholera, sewage systems extended human lifespan more than any other innovation before in human history. Scientific, technical and social technologies (e.g., cooperation systems, political narratives, …) all share the same purpose.

In the immortal words of Daft Punk, innovations are faster, smaller, better cheaper. They allow to do more with less. In a sense, they reduce scarcity. Balaji Srinivasan makes a great point on this. To him, the ultimate purpose of technology is to eliminate scarcity. Through technology and innovation, we bring order to chaos.

Now, let’s zoom out. From a historical perspective, my generation is likely the first one who never dealt directly with the cultural construct of a global conflict. One could argue boomers are the first. I disagree, as the post-WWII rebuilt and the cold war tension made the reality of a global conflict cognitively very proximate.

I have no idea what it means to live in times of war. Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for only 268 of them, or just 8 percent of recorded history. Where is the human, financial, and cognitive capital that was once destined to defense going to go now? What kind of scarcity are we going to attempt to eliminate with all these resources available? 

This question is giving me a lot to think about. In a way, up until now our ancestors spent their efforts on safety and physiological needs so we can spend ours on self-actualization. But how do we do it? Most importantly, what’s the process of self-actualization like? It surely sounds fun. 

There are several moments throughout history when humanity solved critical issues (eliminated scarcity) and elevated its way towards a closer version of what the world looks like today. The way we do it is by looking at reality in a deeper, more critical way. We develop new muscles to capture nuances and we become more sophisticated. We increase the number of decimal places on our sensory scale.

Take the history of the color blue, which was not a known concept for a very long time. There was a complete absence of the concept of blue in ancient Greece. In The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer, the first great poet of western civilization described the sea as oînops, or ‘wine-dark’.

The strange description has baffled people for centuries, and while some saw ‘wine dark’ as nothing more than poetic license at play, nineteenth-century British prime minister William Gladstone went so far as to suggest that the ancients were partially color blind.

To that end, building on Gladstone’s theory, German scientist Hugo Magnus argued that the human race had progressed in its ability to distinguish between colours. So while people in the Homeric period could only distinguish between red, orange, and yellow, by the nineteenth century the European eye was able to see blue and violet.

For Deutscher, however, the strange phenomenon of seemingly intelligent people ascribing the colour red to the sea, and black to the sky, can be explained much more simply. There were no words for what we call ‘blue’. Of course, Homer and the Murray Islanders could see blue as vividly as we do. It’s just that in their languages, blue was not regarded as a color in its own right. Blue was just an approximation of red, or black. An unnecessary nuance, unworthy of its own characterization and name. 

We are blind until we are not. I think about human longevity in a similar way. The science of lifespan extension is going through its Renaissance as I write this. Soon, we will be able to develop therapies that will contain our natural physical decline after the age of 50. Lifespan will become malleable.

Importantly, the longevity movement characterizes aging as a disease. The mother of all diseases. The one we all suffer from. By eliminating an issue to its core, we would avoid dealing with a whole series of physical malfunctions. Perhaps we will eradicate all diseases. This will add a completely new way to conceive human health, like adding a new wavelength band on the visible spectrum.

Imagine if the wingspan of our medical knowledge would extend as much as Frederick II’s knowledge of falconry. It would be 1240 again, but for medicine. One whole human domain, completely mastered. Crossed off the list. If I had to attribute a color to this idea, it would certainly be blue.

The ultimate purpose of technology is to reduce scarcity. And mortality is a form of scarcity, after all. It’s the ultimate source of scarcity. Yes, because our time is finite. If we are able to break this barrier as a species, most of our current thinking would become obsolete. What would we use all that extra time for? How would our sense of urgency to find our main path, our main purpose, mutate in light of that? Would we still try to establish order where lies chaos? 

Humans strive under the tension generated during a transition from chaos to order, and from scarcity to abundance. Under this light, chaos is not only darkness and despair. In the tension between freedom and structure, which shows itself with special clarity in skilled practices, there is something important to be learned about human agency in general.

Managing this tension is itself an art. The role of the conscious mind is alert watchfulness, without meddling. It is an unstable condition, which degrades all too easily into either a complete lack of watchfulness or too much involvement. When this mental practice is lived, it doesn’t manifest as something beautiful for a bystander to behold. 

Consider road racing. Writer and philosopher Matthew Crawford talks extensively about drivers’ tension. This “alert watchfulness without meddling” by the conscious mind while one is riding on the street often takes the form of hunches. Hypotheses about what might happen that are conscious but not fully articulate, because they don’t really need to be.

On the track, motorcycle racers have to have complete faith in the mental image they hold of a corner. Their mental image is based on repetition (you go around the same track many times in practice sessions) and is assumed to be reliable. In the event of a disrupting hazard, there are corner workers who wave yellow flags and position themselves where they can be seen early. These corner workers serve to relieve the conscious mind of its burden of actively positing hypotheses about bad contingencies. A masterful road racer, thus relieved, takes the art of motorcycling to its highest level. It is beautiful to watch, and forces one to recalibrate one’s sense of what human beings are capable of.

I think about that tension as "aristocratic cool", also known as “sprezzatura”. Sprezzatura is the Mona Lisa smile and positioning of her hands. It is disdain and detachment. It is the art of refraining from the appearance of trying to present oneself in a particular way. In reality, of course, tremendous exertion went into pretending not to bother or care. There’s extreme tension, like on a racetrack. 

In Brooklyn English, sprezzatura is “cool”. A general state of well-being. A transcendent, internal state of peace and serenity, even in the face of effort and adverse contingencies. A state of harmony and balance. Cool is related in this sense to both social control and transcendental balance. A peak state of the mind.

Coolness is a positive trait based on the inference that an entity is autonomous in an appropriate way. Thanks to innovation, we are eliminating scarcity and becoming cool, like Roman emperors hunting with falcons.