Digesting Tradition

Taking intellectual feasts and rumination seriously

Welcome to The Blackthorn Hedge. This letter continues a series of stand alone writings on tradition begun in “Differentiating Tradition” and continued in “Common Sense Against Mind Viruses” and “The Tissues of Tradition.” I’ll refer to those and they may be interesting background to have, but they should not be necessary. It also has prominent harmonies with “Etics, Emics, and Emetics,” “Productivity and Cleaning, Exhaustion and Fouling,” and “The Internet as a Hive Mind.”

As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.

A ruminant ruminating, via Wikimedia Commons

Textual Feasts

“Tradition” can be a fusty word. It often signals out of date, out of touch fashions (now misinterpreted as principles) or general disgust for the new. This isn’t what I typically mean by it and it’s not my usual focus: by “tradition” I mean anything that is handed down, whether it’s handed down in a dry caricature of Saturnine religious dogmatism or it’s handed down in a cutting-edge Promethean theft of inspiration from convention – or handed down in the gentle care of a marginalized single mother, like Leto and her children.

One of the curious features of tradition is how many different types of transfer can be abstracted as “handing down,” and how differently the recipients can respond to “the same things” “handed down the same way.” In the first paragraph I’ve introduced Classical mythic figures as part of what I’m handing down here, and this will have meant different things to different readers.

To some readers it will have meant very little: maybe just “a big words guy is using big words.” They’re free to skip through the “flowery opening” to focus on the “meat of the argument.”

To the main part of readers, I expect the figures of Saturn and Prometheus to simply appear as commonplace secular symbols of masculine archetypes, and then Leto probably comes off as more unfamiliar but also a natural balancing nod to the feminine: “marginalized” another note to soften the otherwise harsh overtones of Promethean masculine vitalism.¹ They get a sense of humanistic style and some social loyalties, they’ve “gotten a smell” and hopefully “find it appetizing.”

To a smaller part of my readers, these will be richer symbols with specific humanistic background material connected to them: particular myths, poems, paintings, and so on. By introducing them up front I set myself up to bring those in, if I’d like; these readers may begin to hope that their deeper humanistic interests might be engaged here. For these readers, the opening symbols are like the “juices and crusts” of the “meat of the argument” rather than a “mere garnish” like in the “flowery opening” interpretation; they are appetizing in themselves because they’re evidence it’s “well-cooked.”

Culinary images are hardly the only metaphors I could use here. I could talk instead about how the figures prepare readers to “unpack” the rest of the letter. I could talk about providing “keys” to “decode” what follows or “threads” to “unravel” the issues I’m planning to talk about.

Today, however, my mind is on digestion. Cooking and eating well both have many rich cultural traditions, and biologically, digestion has chemistry and evolutionary history I find fascinating. The analogies of material transfer in digestion to representational transfer in tradition are deep, and certainly worth a letter to me.

Order and Re-Order

Abstractly, in the science of general metabolism, digestion can be thought of as a two phase process of breaking down and building up: “catabolism” for the breakdown and “anabolism” for the buildup. Something external is broken down and the parts become material for incorporation. Digestion is a re-ordering of matter.

Encountering the Classical figures in the first paragraph, a reader was already breaking up the visual of text on the screen into words and assigning each a meaning in sequence, then forming a total interpretation of the paragraph: it’s somewhat trivial, but this is a breakdown and then buildup.

Reading the next four paragraphs, the reader did the same again and also, less trivially, followed that text’s meaning to break down the meaning they’d interpreted for the first paragraph and build something new again. If I’ve gotten the reader to think, by now, then that reader has probably also taken one or more of their first interpretations and broken it down on their own terms that I didn’t directly suggest in order to form other ideas I didn’t suggest.

In all this breaking and building, the sentences aren’t behaving very much like units of replication. Personal paraphrases are probably more likely to be interesting takeaways than direct-repeat quotes. The words aren’t tokens with definite shared meanings to everyone in my audience and the sentences are not definite propositions. This is not much like a genetic code where the coding units correspond to definite chemical products.

I rely on common tropes and replicate their typical phrases and names, but I didn’t replicate the tropes’ contents myself: if a reader didn’t have any idea who Saturn, Prometheus, or Leto were, then I didn’t tell them or even link them; if they didn’t get any of the food metaphor, then I didn’t help them learn that either. I may have motivated them to learn it, and they may have gone to look something up or think about one of the metaphors on their own, but they didn’t learn here.²

“Digesting text” is a special case of digesting information and inspiration. In imitation as well, for instance, even an unskilled imitator will identify particular actions or particular aspects of action for specific focus in the process of imitation. The more skilled the imitator, the finer the detail and the decomposition of details to imitate: a guitarist will see a tiny quiver of a finger on a fret as a decisive clue or a pianist may see a particular tension in the left shoulder as a bass line rises in intensity. Some of the most impressive decompositions and recompositions of minute physical skills I’ve seen arose in Alexander technique for acting and Feldenkrais bodywork.

In transmitting intellectual tradition, both reading and embodied imitation tend to play key roles – even when the latter is unrecognized. It may be impossible to read certain works correctly without “hearing the author’s voice in one’s head,” for instance, for those who write like they speak, while for others their writing voice is emphatically not their speaking voice and trying to read their writing in that voice will definitely lead a reader astray.

In each type of case, this “hearing in the head” is often a concrete physical practice of subvocalization that can be learned in person via proximity to someone who knows how. Physical sound is sometimes necessary to pick it up, but the motion of the head and neck may be sufficient by themselves as well.

A student of a tradition who cannot “listen” to the voice of a text in the proper way will hit certain ceilings if the tradition relies on that detail: the texts will never be properly digested. (And if they persist, they may find themselves accidentally inaugurating a new tradition rather than just failing to continue the old one.)

That beak’s not easy on the liver, via Wikimedia Commons

Select, Process, Absorb

The two phase catabolism-anabolism model left implicit another important issue: the selectivity of breakdown and buildup. Another common figure for digestion, more common when focusing on anatomy or behavior than on metabolism, is this: selective ingestion, catabolic processing, selective absorption; mouth, stomach, intestine.

The selective ingestion and selective absorption imply split streams in both cases: there is what is ingested and what is discarded at the points of ingestion and what is absorbed and what is excreted at the points of absorption.³

In my first section, the readers who said to themselves “ignore the flowery introduction” never seriously interpreted the Classical figures at all; they may not have even broken the phrases into words rather than just recognizing “phrase I’m not interested in” and jumping forward. On the other hand, if one of the readers with a serious interest in those myths did break it down but then decided the letter was disappointing after interpretation, they should have no trouble putting the entire thing out of mind quickly.

Selectivities of both kinds operate at several levels with intellectual tradition. On selective ingestion: the choice of example to imitate, the choice of aspects of the example to admire, the choice of details of those aspects to highlight; the choice of reading material or artistic material, the choice of which parts to focus on or examine closely, the choice of details of those parts to consider important enough to ruminate over. On selective absorption: from each example, which imitated habits to adopt once achieved and which to drop; from each book or artwork, which things to remember or which ways to be lastingly changed by them and which to quickly reconsider.

The mouth-stomach-intestine figure leaves out most complexity of the anabolic side of the prior figure, which is appropriate for complex animals with simple digestion that maintain standing reserves of various stable building blocks in their bodies. The anabolic side left out there is just the way the body stores nutrients in its transport fluids and storage tissues. If it’s in blood, for instance, that’s enough: it’s incorporated.

For animals with more complex digestion, including humans, there is some anabolism mixed with catabolism in the intestines before absorption as well, and for some animals that’s very significant: most iconically, the grazing and cud-chewing ruminants. Not all traditions require intellectual rumination, not even all intellectual traditions, but those that do have a special place in my heart. In rumination, the “selective ingestion, processing, selective absorption” sequence gets complexly doubled and nested. Cows have a “mouth-rumen-reticulum-omasum-abomasum-intestine” system, for instance, and the reticulum can feed back to the mouth in a loop for further chewing and swallowing again – somewhat like what I asked of the reader in my first four paragraphs. The abomasum is the acid stomach and is most like ours; the rumen ferments grasses.

Serious scholarly work requires this sort of rumination, with masses of information ingested then partially processed, re-chewed and processed again, final extracts eventually fully absorbed but not before a few rounds of reconsideration. Early schooling requires the opposite: even the most patient and thoughtful kids destined for the deepest thoughts need simpler teaching early that doesn’t require too much critical rumination, more like mother’s milk than rough grasses, just like baby cow calves.

In ruminative intellectual work, much of the digestion is arranged outside of the body in notebooks and partial drafts, more like insect life than mammal life: our great intellectual projects in common like scholarly journals, libraries, and encyclopedias have good analogies to the colony-scale digestion performed in ant hives and termite mounds, where dedicated rooms of decaying leaves can play a role like the cow’s rumen. The community of scholars, like the swarms of ants, may select material for incorporation into what they build in common, process it together, and only then begin to ingest it individually for themselves.

Nutritional and Informational Fungibility

The most glaring weakness of these metaphors is that information, insights, and lessons are not fungible like sugars or proteins are. Scholarly articles in a journal do not have the equivalence that different cells of honey in a honeycomb do. Sometimes intellectuals are managed as if they are fungible: as if, say, the number of books they make abstracts of or the number of citations they receive is what matters; but this is rare at any leading edge where the particulars matter.

The most practical cases of this today are among skilled professional data providers for machine learning data sets. The inscrutability of current state of the art learning algorithms makes it difficult to assign specific value to specific data points, allowing fungible intellectual work to become a commodity at scale. Even then, though, the general models are most valued insofar as their instances can be highly particularized via complex, high-context prompting or fine-tuning.

The strongest cases for the fungibility of information come from the mathematical theory of information. Entropy is in fact a clean, rigorous measure of how difficult a given string of tokens, such as bits or letters, will be to transmit or store. Kolmogorov complexity, similarly, is a clean numerical measure of how difficult a given token sequence is to produce with a deterministic computer program. However, these measures are not foolproof, and mathematicians include some ingenious fools who have broken them in remarkable ways.

For instance, the Kolmogorov complexity of an entirely random sequence is infinite because no finite deterministic program generates true randomness. However, if you’re given a special random sequence to use freely together with your deterministic computer, then you can generate many simple transformations of that random sequence with deterministic programs.

For instance, if it’s a random sequence of 0-1 bits, you could flip each 0 to a 1 and vice versa, or flip every other 0 to a 1 and vice versa, or flip according to any other simple pattern like flipping only every 3rd bit (each multiple of 3), every 5th (each multiple of 5), or each Fibonacci number. Different random sequences can be transformed into one another with more or less lengthy programs, turning the Kolmogorov complexity into a relative distance between these sequences rather than an absolute complexity measure for the sequences.

The special extra sequence is called a “random oracle,” and while it may seem artificial, it’s immensely practical – there are natural processes that are effectively random, and we can hook our computers up to physical detectors of those processes as real-life random oracles; we can also print out secret books of random numbers for spies and use them together with short deterministic programs as random pseudo-oracles to accomplish excellent, effectively unbreakable cryptography.

Extending the analogy from machinery to thought, it’s also hard to argue that human thinking isn’t making use of many nondeterministic oracles of one kind or another,⁴ and that some of these oracles are shared and some are not. There are deep mysteries about social rapport and social deception that might hinge on cognitive details like whether we have social capacities to synchronize nearly-random-bit generators between minds. At very least, we know the mysteries depend on capacity to harmonize inarticulate intuitions in some way that makes psychology experiments extremely hard to rigorously blind and control.

People are very choosy about their fungibilities – they do not want to be digested *by* hostile social traditions, as happened at mass scale in the brutal factory and mining work of the 19th century. In order to resist that kind of hostile action, they make use of sophisticated strategies to ensure their self-expressions and their traditions do not become too easy for hostile outsiders to cognitively digest. Two classic studies of this kind of dynamic are James C. Scott’s Weapons of the Weak, about peasants and nomads willing to so far as to give up traditional writing itself to evade hostile outsiders, and Seeing Like a State, about the dire consequences that can follow the digestion of a people who do not evade modern bureaucracy.

Leto and the frogs. Another prophecy of the alt-right Pepes, like Kek? Via Wikimedia Commons

Paradoxes of Maturity & Oracular Archetypes

It has now been a while since I began my letter with Saturn, Prometheus, and Leto. I’ve returned to their symbols a few times explicitly in the body above, but not enough to motivate my opening. Before I conclude, I want to say more about this topic of fungibility and hard to digest tradition, but in terms of a pattern of resistance more associated with Leo Strauss than James C. Scott: esoteric writing.

Saturn is known for eating his children; Prometheus for having his liver eaten by eagles; and Leto for feeding her own children from herself.

Saturn’s myth signifies a pathology of maturity and old age unwilling to make way for the new. Saturn takes his offspring and consumes them to maintain power for himself. It’s not unheard of in the animal world for parents to do this to their newborns literally, and it’s a commonly perceived dynamic in intellectual traditions. Saturn’s wife Rhea hid Zeus to protect him before he matured, but once mature, he did ascend against his father to take power himself.

More generally, Saturn stands for dry analysis and stiffness. A Saturnine cynicism cuts apart whatever is young and fresh. Saturnine dogmatism is uninterested in anything new unless it falls into an existing system. Digestively, it’s picky. The Saturn myth personalizes the tendencies of any stable order to continue to persist in time at the expense of perturbations. Minimal catabolism, minimal anabolism. It’s as simple as sound bouncing off a rock. Some low and high frequencies that match the rock’s natural harmonics can be absorbed, while all others echo or pass through. It’s nothing personal.

Saturn is a figure of the oldest traditions and of silence. He is also a figure of secrecy. The old man’s silence is often a knowing silence, and he often has a subtle spark in his eye even when he seems as dry as dust to the younger men.

Prometheus, on the other hand, is a figure of disclosure, rebellion, and short-lived freedom. Fire to Saturn’s stone.

Prometheus signifies the young man impatient with limits and determined to change the world now, by empowering others to act against prior tradition. After stepping out of place, he is bound to a rock and tortured by eagles: long-time symbols of imperial authority. His liver, specifically, is eaten; the liver was considered the seat of the “appetitive soul” in Platonic metaphysics and played a crucial role in contemporary divination practices.

Generally, Prometheus stands for dangerous creativity and deviance. Promethean ambition is indifferent to its motivating fuel: anything that burns similarly seems like an ally. Fire is not a picky eater; it does not care much if a candle wax derives from bee hives or animal fat. It’s also not naturally a clean eater: it will generate black smoke as easily as a clean flame, and it will blacken and stain before it creates a fine white calcined powder.

Leto, finally, is the outcast mother of Artemis and Apollo, Sun and Moon. Impregnated by Zeus and cursed by Hera, she could not give birth on land or sea, but only the floating island that became Delos.

She was known for being soft, mild, and kind, but also for turning a whole crowd of inhospitable villagers into frogs. Many of her myths involve flight and resistance to rape, and many involve the support of her children; Apollo protects her from Python and she supports Artemis at Troy.

I have introduced her here as a figure for the smooth, easy digestion of milk and for the early immaturity that precedes any sophisticated tradition; if Saturn has stood for dogma here and Prometheus for heresy, two sides of explicit order, then Leto has stood for the implicit, unthought intuitions that precede either.

Not by accident, these are also the three prior sections of this letter: metabolic order and reorder, appropriation and separation, and implicit homogeneity and fungibility.

It’s not an accident, but I also won’t be able to explain exactly why I’ve done that in writing, nor what other details I’ve fit together similarly. I’m sure this final section has been a jarring change of pace for some of you – maybe like the opening was also jarring, because my purpose is the same: to suggest a rumination, to make a point about how tradition is handed down that does not come across so well without some initially jarring reversals. When a bull’s cud comes up from the reticulum, it’s a lot like vomit.

Specifically, I want to suggest a contemplation of how these mythic figures have such strangely rich, memorable content and webs of meaning associated with them. They’re often superficially paradoxical, as with Saturn’s combined associations of dogma and secrecy.

“Paradox” is an interesting word for it: “para” for contrary, “doxa” for opinion, so “contrary to [common] opinion.” I’ve read Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition this week to follow up on Jameson’s Postmodernism and Anderson’s A Zone of Engagement, and he suggests postmodernism is characterized by “paralogism”: “contrary to logic.” But this “logic” as Lyotard means it is probably what a Greek would have called opinion, since they were quite a bit more serious about their opinions than we are and the postmodernists are generally less serious about logic.

This sort of reversal of meaning that I see in Lyotard may not occur to every reader, but it will to many ruminative readers. There are typical patterns, in the history of common opinion and common sense, by which words take one another’s places in these challenging ways. It may take some time to get used to them, but with practice they become very natural to work around. Words cease to be tokens of definite meanings in themselves and become much more subtly contextual.

A similar pattern is also present in the mythic archetypes. The superficial paradoxes of Saturn’s character represent genuine differences in opinion about the old man archetype as seen by different types of person – or sometimes by just one type of person but in different moods. Young Prometheans are hasty to judge the old Saturnine dogmatists this negative way or that, changing their particular aggrieved opinions based on their tortured appetites more than anything else. Sometimes the old men seem to be empty-headed dogmatists, other times they seem to be keeping secrets it’s unfair not to share.

It’s a funny trick, but certain longstanding traditional images are specifically tuned to represent hard-won lessons of age that can only seem paradoxical to those who lack the relevant experience. The elegance of the symbolism then goes completely over the head of anyone who lacks it – not because they’re stupid, not because anyone has fooled them deliberately, but just because they lack a certain hard-won oracle, an experience of a certain counterintuitive unity.

Even if the old man wanted to tell his secrets, he might not be able to in any finite number of words. Sometimes, it’s truly a matter of time.

The application to Strauss’s Persecution and the Art of Writing is left as an exercise to the reader. (But exercises to the reader – who really does those? Athena?) As always, I welcome all respectful comments and messages.

1. Internet translator’s note: Bronze Age Pervert.

2. If they looked it up on Wikipedia, though, that might have been me. You never know.

3. The implicit resource and waste framing here poses all the problems I discussed about “presence” resources and “absence” resources in “Productivity and Cleaning, Exhaustion and Fouling,” but I won’t go further into that here.

4. Though I would not defend Roger Penrose’s quantum microtubule theory here, I don’t want to simply pile on against “quantum woo” either, so I’ll say I believe there are other fair candidates for room temperature quantum effects in perception, particularly the perception of odor. (And it may not be an unrelated coincidence that odor plays a very special role in general memory that is well-recognized, by Proust of course and also by all traditional shamanic practices I’m aware of – but this is a conversation for another time.)