Global dumbing: The politics of entropy
Posted: 01 Sep 2015 11:30 PM PDT
From our overstocked archives
Sam Smith
1992
Global dumbing, according to the thesis I have been considering lately, involves the virtually imperceptible but steady deterioration of the aggregate human mind -- as well as of its institutions -- much as the temperature of the earth is apparently rising at a rate so minuscule that scientists will be still be debating its escalation even as the waters of the Atlantic Ocean lap at the potted plants in the lobby of the Trump Plaza.
In fact, global warming and global dumbing are intimately connected. Without the latter, something actually might be done before that portion of Washington below the fall line of the Potomac is totally submerged. And like global warming, global dumbing concerns itself with losses incurred by energy transfers and nature's ceaseless quest for the random equilibrium of chaos. It is, in short, the entropy of the human spirit and of the systems it has created.
In physics, entropy is a measure of unavailable energy. In the natural world, entropy is reflected in the pollution from your car and the radioactive tailings from Seabrook. If the world were perfect, energy would do just what it was supposed to do and not go wandering off like some groupie of that cosmic band, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. As it is, much of it is wasted and thus when you bake something, your kitchen as well as your oven gets warm. Such phenomena led the German physicist Ruldolf Clausius to propose in 1865 that we were losing energy everywhere and that we call this sorry state of affairs entropy. It's been downhill ever since.
Allow entropy to go on long enough and you could theoretically have all energy transferred from where it is to a great hyper-heated toxic dump in the sky, with the result that the whole universe would just burn up. Fortunately, there is still debate about this.
Entropy causes enough problems as it is, such as the tendency in nature for things to move towards an equilibrium of disorder and towards a simple, inert state. Thus while we can easily burn wood in our fireplaces, no one has figured out how to take the ashes and turn them into a tree limb again, let alone recreate a whole rain forest. Information theorists say entropy goes on in communications as well. The repeated transfer of information results not in knowledge, they argue, but noise and static as the information degrades in its repetition, much as a fifth generation photocopy of a fax becomes unreadable.
Cultures lose energy, too. Which is why the Egyptians don't build pyramids any more, and why Guatemalans have to import digital watches rather than just checking their Mayan calendars. The creation of a great civilization or a great world power wastes a enormous amount of energy. As Barry Commoner put it, in nature there is no free lunch.