8. Drunken Monkeys 2 - I Drink, Therefore I am
Between Monty Python, Rene Descartes and the vineyard, an immaculate truth is made plain on what it is to be human. And, a Lion has stepped forward to challenge the monkey driving us to oblivion.
A New Crusade
Events constantly overtake at this moment. They have in the development of Drunken Monkeys Theory (DMT), started in We’re All a Bunch of Drunken Monkeys. A light-hearted but no less meaningful argument I intended to develop two points from: the concept of the clearing. Remember? The wolf or beaver and the ecosystem-balancing function each plays and how wine has performed a similar function in our development as social beings; and the naturalness of wine, the insight that fermented fruit, whether lying on a pre-historic forest floor or in cuvees at Yquem, is essentially the very same thing.
But no. An Urbi et Orbi klaxon has sounded in Rome. Its call is to establish a better presentation of what it is to be human in the age of Altman, Musk Overdrive. Because, with AI, in all likelihood we have not seen anything yet. So circumstance requires diverting from a fun poke at the monkey to instead bring it fully into the analytical light.
I contend that the model of the drunken monkey, and the characteristics of primate cognitive systems riddled with biases and limitations, is an essential reductive component of our common humanity. Until we accept this inheritance, we are doomed to deploy our chimp brains, exemplified by our self-maximising nature and our eloquence of language, to push our species to points of oblivion and environmental rupture. Drunken monkey theory says that interminable philosophical and political debates made by ardent essayists, lobbyists and politicians are doomed to be positional; slavish to the cognitive errors we are evolutionarily predisposed to. It is all so much closed-loop chattering. Sophisticated and plausible sounding, but utterly deficient in balancing existential and moral elements in context. We will see that our inherited ancestral cognitive brain architecture renders us functionally blind to open-loop, inquisitive thinking.
Drunken Monkey Theory has much to add at this time. And deserves a more serious treatment than I’m going to give it!
Be Wary the Man Who Can Think You Under the Table
Pope Leo, the weak on crime guy, this week issued his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas; a clear-sighted call for an elevated definition of human values otherwise absent from the field in AI or in our conduct of general business, commerce and government for that matter. Magnifica stands in opposition to the tawdry and omnicidal AI scenarios which diminish, subjugate and enslave humanitarian principles, and indeed persons and civilisations if not the species and all life, from technological developments unconstrained by moral/ humanitarian stewardship.
The Pope has moved against the move fast and break things dweebs, who you would otherwise not trust to cut your firewood, in AI are teeing-off in Bond-villianesque pursuit of evermore profit and power. Bravo! But he’s pre-empted my noodlings on these matters in the Strange Fruit essays. I also see Papa Leone has not yet read Drunken Monkeys, or at least he hasn’t “liked” it - has read Lord of the Rings though! Regardless, I think he would agree that wine plays a fundamental role in the human and humanitarian story. Well… the cup, transubstantiation and all that. His job makes him a wine guy. And so, reluctantly we grab the monkey by the shoulders and turn it to face the Eternal City.
The Sippy Cup of Civilisation
As DMT shows, wine is a crucial component in humanity’s development and full cultural bloom. Wine stands in glorious opposition to the monkeys bringing down upon us teenage despair, mass surveillance and autonomous killing platforms. The Magnifica encyclical calls for a non-evil steerage of AI. Doesn’t seem unreasonable. It’s disarmament and rendering unto Caesar in the sense of striving to meet obligations to humanity and its flourishing within the bounds of morality and the natural world. Unfortunately, these limitations the sober monkey, in its hardwired ignorance and hubris, does not or cannot recognise as constraints. The monkey broligarchy1 knows about profit, efficiency, growth and meme coin. Extraction and accumulation are its polestars. It builds towers on these. The chaos monkey2 scoffs at notions of common good and pities those who would rebuild Jerusalem or municipal authorities by contributing to its general consolidated funds3.
The Chaos Monkeys will not take the cup offered by Leo. It will instead be hurled out of the cot or more likely, refused with petulant arms folded and shoulders hunched. “I want Greenland. And I want it now!” Let that sink in.
Blessed are the Cheesemakers
Definitions of what it is to be human, as opposed to vegetation or marsupial, have troubled our best minds since we’ve had capacity to think with them. And our worst. And in the current era of horizonless permissibility, more than some of us deny the distinction at all, preferring to think of ourselves as cats for example - Therians. Others are blind to all but the most acquisitive zero-sum, ingroup definitions of humanity and consider suckers those who stand for the public good, human rights or common weal - they brazenly avoid tax and await their flight to Mars. Still others seek to subsume or supercharge the human condition and body by fusing it with technology in some form of tech-humanism that runs the nutjob gamut from googleglass through to fever dreams of a singularity. There are apparently some 500 dead bodies frozen in liquid nitrogen around the world awaiting a technological epiphany they expect will enable them to be re-animated. Cryonics. Prominent NZ citizen Peter Thiel (another Tolkien chap) is on the waitlist along with 4,000 or so fellow stable geniuses.
I’m not sure the average person understands just how nihilistic and deluded elements of the broligarchy are. The architects of AI. By all means, go look for yourself. But don’t get caught! Search from the relative safety of wikipedia for Thiel, who really has embraced his shadow self; for Dutch historian Rutger Bregman on Sam Altman “The Liar Running the Most Dangerous Company on Earth”; for Praxis_(proposed_city), a near Cheech and Chong-level dingbat duo, and; for Sauron’s puppet Curtis_Yarvin. A shower in holy water might not go amiss when you’re done.
I don’t want to talk about these people. I’d rather talk about all of us. And wine. We started the first Drunken Monkeys story by establishing that wine stimulated the r/evolutionary development of neocortex in our early pre-hominid primate ancestors. Wine lubricated the pre-hominids’ neuronal wheels for an ever more complex social existence which eventually branched off into the beauty, sophistications and wonders of Homo-sapien culture. Nelson Mandela. Medicine and microchips. Sesame Street and Beethoven. Christian Cullen’s swerve. Tom Waits… all that is good about us. But also all that is … not good. Hitler, Pol Pot, and still with us, Putin and the Kim dynasty. And let’s not forget that good and bad occur at everyday levels too, not just in those on the world stage.
Regardless, without wine we might still be grunting, flea picking, rutting brutes, wandering around on our knuckles trying to work the remote so we can watch cage fighting or host it on our rent-free front lawns. Without wine, romance languages, mathematics, and coffee might have instead belonged to lemur or rat societies. Shakespeare and Miles Davis could well have had tails if not for our early tree ape ancestors’ discovery of wine.
Neural Anatomy / Cognitive Anatoyou.
Renes Descartes was not the drunken fart the Pythons made him out to be. He was the, I Think Therefore I Am chap. You may know him as the guy who hooked up electrodes to frog’s legs? His epithetic Think/Am insight stems (ahem) from what became known as Cartesian Dualism, the “mind-body” problem. His dualism centred on the majesty of our pineal glands. Now now. The pineal is an ancient brain structure predating the neocortex. The size of a grain of rice, it is wedged in the epithalamus between the hemispheres and regulates circadian rhythms and such. It is the nexus where Descartes supposed the spiritual mingled with the physical. How the human hardware layer was booted up by the human software program in essence. This was a scientific progression. Scholars have torn strips off one another over the mind-body distinction ever since - as an undergraduate at Auckland University, I was aware of the rift between Behaviourists and Humanists reverberating in sloping halls and stalking the linoleum corridors let alone the literature.
[As an aside, I’d like to think Ron King and I caused some small academic discombobulation among the behaviourist tutors by swapping the pigeons in the “disc pecking-for-reward” learning experiments. Good Lord! I’m practically a vivisectionist like Rene! ]
Thus Drunken Monkey Theory intersects with Rene Descartes’ philosophical principle defining what it is to be human, your consciousness. Your ability to contemplate your existence. It is our brain structures ancient and modern that enabled humanity code to run. And wine was the catalyst for the neocortex’s dominion thus our ability to contemplate ourselves, our navels, life, the universe and … cogito, ergo sum.
We understand that our thinking apparatus is unquestionably highly advantageous to our claim to be an apex species. It is a defining feature of our humanity. However, as Magnifica helps highlight, frankly, some of the thinking we’re doing with is exceedingly dubious, self and other harming and literally genocidal. The Lion has roared in Rome. Soon we will hear from the wolf.
The Loudest Monkey
Mark Rowlands, the philosopher we met in part one, extended Descartes’ insight to what it means to be human. Rowlands’ thing was an experiential and scholarly study of primate thinking versus wolf being. It takes us far beyond our belly buttons.
"If I wanted to define human beings in one sentence, this could be it: they are the animals that believe the stories they tell about themselves. Humans are credulous animals.
This should resonate. At the level of species, we hubristically place ourselves beyond the foodchain by virtue of our thinking, and its expression via language and building; Shakespeare and Bob Dylan, Gilgamesh. The Pantheon, and Great Wall, MRI machines. We discount the language and construction efforts of ants or the communication that has occurred via networks of forest tendrils for a lot longer than humans have had language. Mediterranean pleasure boaters cannot so blithely dismiss the intelligence of Orca, who have proven themselves smart, and socialist, enough to harry them for their own amusement.
Ich Bin Ein Auslander
Following Rowlands, the schtick of being human is to retrofit credibility, using whatever available arguments we can muster, specious sophistry or fact, it’s all the same. Whatever justifies to our consciences the maximisation of our individual purpose or utility. To tell ourselves what is necessary to pursue and impose our privilege or advantage whatever this may be; a religious preference, a political conviction, an economic fetish, an ownership of an artifact or moment of culture. The erasure of a civilisation. We’ve done this inter-species. We excel at it within our human family.
There can be no serious line of reasoning that denies that humanity is hardwired for othering. The sober monkey brain is constantly running calculus on the price of threats/costs and opportunities/rewards in its pursuit of self-interest. It is the very thing that stimulated the pre-hominid’s adaption of a socially-based theory of mind. Anticipating how a Silverback will respond in given circumstances determines how we advance up the line or have the snot beaten out of us. Fundamentally, whether our genes pass on, even. Much later, a suspicion of strangers, others, served us well in less enlightened, more bubonic, cholera or choleric violent times. And it remains in the blood. Today this programming is routinely manipulated to serve private political purposes of apes I really don’t care to speak about. But surely only a very feeble-minded chimp will deny that Farage, Bannon and the tangerine baboon have weaponised othering at scale for private gain? Racists they clearly are, they’ve learnt the propogandist’s playbook. Well, two of them have. One is pure splenetic ignorance and unfiltered ego (enabled by supine chaos monkeys, you will have observed).
It is too easy to be distracted by these pathological examples. I know I’m being a bit mean about elements of our species. But given the stakes, laid out in Magnifica, it is surely right to give our monkey a good once over?
Imposter at the Door
Most of us have worked in or around the theatres of ego that the modern organisation has become. You’ll have watched the barely adequate stumble from promotion to promotion. Often, as far as it goes (skim some of the many academic studies on psychopathy and leadership - use google scholar or some such). Modern management has even invented an ointment for this conceit to help the proto-manager treat any nasty inflammations of conscience. Imposter Syndrome. Survivors of this condition are lauded as heroes as they go on to greater share options and abstractions from reality and the logical confines of their levels of competence as the Peter Principle says they will. It is by definition an arrogance that betrays a simian way of thinking to believe in its own supreme position ergo the lesser position of others without at least some kind of proper test? At least the jungular ape makes a show of baring teeth or arse and a performative beating of its chest. Merit is for losers.
Turtles all the Way Down
Rowlands has us telling ourselves whatever porkies we like to justify our elevation. That sounds very plausible to me and not encouraging. But it is worse than this. Monkey thinking is also polemic and tribal. The excellent Jonathan Haidt posits that, contrary to common understanding, humans don’t hold their position open or adjust positions when better knowledge is to hand. We filter evidence selectively to reinforce already held views. Views that better suit our purpose. We rally behind flags using convenient truths. Classical maladaptive sober monkey thinking. MAGA. And that’s all I’ll say on that.
Two examples of selective filtering we credulous beings routinely use. One local. Arrowtown. The appalling case of a protected sex pest and bully chef able to operate in plain sight despite complaints of misconduct spanning ten years. The restaurant gained by the perpetrator’s profile and so discounted inconvenient knowledge to let the show go on. Various reef fish and remora, who simply must have been in positions to have known, gaily fawned platformed and promoted both the perpetrator and the establishment. It is the oldest story in the book. Arthur Anderson, Fitch, Standards & Poor and Moody’s all signed off on Enron’s books knowing full well they were a fiction. The chimp brain that calculates the risk of sanction to be lower than the heights of the reward will countenance anything.
Another example that shows how general and intergenerational filtering becomes - Arrowtown and Enron are too easily discounted by your inner monkey as “that’s other people, if I was in that situation I would’’ve …” - the misappropriation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. 250 years old this year!
Every B.Comm, libertarian, free trade ideologue, accountant or Finance Minister will confidently produce reels of cant about invisible hands and the market’s superior position in capital allocation. Smith didn’t think as simplistically as this. He barely mentioned invisible hands and the concept was certainly not central in his thinking. He was decidedly not laissez-faire. Yet “numbers men” and self-declared taxpayer advocate politicians latch onto these credulous truths because it suits their purpose or rather their unexplored preconceived beliefs. Smith argued for a central role for social or public goods that only government can provide as essential for competitive self-interest and “free-will” to emerge and to hold. Smith would fully embrace Magnifica’s direction to rebuild Jerusalem. And require Altman’s tower of Babel to apply for a resource consent.
The monkey has only a risk/threat assessment frame to refer to and it jumps to its chosen self-maximisation strategy immediately and hard. And in so doing, it discounts considerations of morality, legality, sustainability, fitness to operate or even overall system viability.
For the monkey, the tower is built on the back of self-maximisation. Not bettering conditions for others. Not extending down the ladder except to a few. Those who would make stimulating company while in long confinement on hostile planets presumably. Not leaving things better than when it found them. There is none of that.
The Wolf Gets its Day in Court
Neither would the wolf read Wealth of Nations like the monkey does. It isn’t a self-promoting story teller or incredulous story buyer. The wolf holds open its position, assessing what is before it. What is. It wouldn’t occur to it to stoop to what amounts to intellectual dishonesty (or feebleness. It can be difficult to distinguish whether these people are aware of the deceptions they propagate) in order to make a piffling point. The wolf does not see itself as being “in” a game you see. Rather it is intrinsically “of” the game, part of the system. There are no rights and obligations for the wolf and therefore no opportunities to misrepresent self or to employ tax accountants and lawyers to avoid obligations. The wolf would certainly not have allowed its own species and its planet’s very existence to hinge on something as tritely nihilistic as Mutually Assured Destruction theory. Or to hand over the keys and weapons to an Übermensch4 AI that is prone to hallucination.
In DMT, I gave the example of native American etiquette that gives agency and expression to nature in deliberations by asking ‘who here speaks for the wolf?’ Necessary because without this intervention the monkey will gaily saw through the branch on which it swings high above the treetops. Such is its blindness to the value of factors, the monkey externalises, even its own life, in pursuit of gain. Master species you say?
In this country, representation of the natural world has elevated the wolf, or the maunga/mountain or awa/river to the level of property rights, the most sacrosanct of our primate juris’ prudence. From Te Uruwera to the world, the natural world is increasingly assigned the status of legal personhood and with it rights of representation and protection by our legal systems. A subject worthy of lengthy diversion. We’ve tarried a lot already. For now, we can take from innovations in jurisprudence from customary influence, that the monkey brain fails us in balancing private property rights against the very environmental limits that provide resource inputs and the stuff of life. It really has come to this. And it has taken a Pope for us to see the choice in sharp relief.
Monsters of God
And how to prevent monkeys from building their AI enslavement/suicide machine and start work on a new Eden/Jerusalem? This is the bit I’ve been waiting for. The answer has been with us all along. The wolf shows the way. But the vine is the way.
In nature, the wolf is the bringer of the clearing. Balance. We discussed this in part one, but essentially by keeping other species on their toes, by weeding out the weak, ecosystems are regulated within balanced parameters. Nothing dominates. Nothing exploits in an extractive manner to push elements too far. Harmony. Calm. Equilibrium.
But by virtue of our monkey neocortex, that red-hot self-maximising reasoning machine with which we’ve built civilisations, art and AI, as well as genocide, napalm and social media, we’re not “in” nature like the wolf. We’ve conquered and transformed it. Abstracted ourselves out of nature. Bent it to our will. Extended it to seafloor, the moon and Ekatahuna.
But of course we’re subject to environmental cutoffs. We can extend boundaries but not escape them, no matter what the elaborate trans/post humanist fetid fantasist might say. It is why the Chaos Monkeys are funding space travel, Mars colonisation, and private ‘digital first’ cities.
On Humans as a Good Source of Dietary Protein
For early ancestors, survival was social. Living in communal mode was the best means of preventing early humans from becoming food at whatever you’d call pre-industry, industrial scale. Our glorious neocortex enabled social living to the point of dominion and now, self-subjugation if not annihilation. We’ve prompted a Pope to write a strongly worded letter on the matter.
Here again though the Wolf serves. As does the bear, crocodile, tiger … In the excellent Monsters of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (2003) by David Quammen makes a case for the symbiotic relationship between human societies and apex predators - those beasts inhabiting our margins in hill country, swamps, rivers and savannahs who see us as prey. Nature at it’s most crocodilian. These are fellow inmates who been with us from the beginning. We used to pay them much more attention than an annual visit to a zoo or a Sunday evening with David Attenborough.
Summarising Quammen’s central thesis, humanity’s long relationship with apex predators has viscerally (surely a word to convey something deeper than visceral is needed here? Apex predators will consume the meat and bones too after all), served to remind the monkey, us, that we are most definitely part of the natural world. In fact, in the foodchain and if ignorant of that, on the menu.
This point is more important than simply reminding us to “stay on the trail” or bring bear spray. Among the functions dangerous beasts have played in our evolution is to protect the wilds from human encroachment and destruction. To allow the natural world on which we stand to find its balance. Making this point from New Zealand, where many of our native birds are flightless due to there being no natural predators prior to human contact, is perhaps more difficult. Less so if living on the margins of Sunderbans in West Bengal or in the Romanian Carpathians.
Insane in the membrane
Can you imagine, for one moment, living in an age where gathering water or wandering off to take in a solitary mountain view carried with it a better than fair chance of … being eaten? Not just attacked and killed. But, consumed!
Drunken Monkeys Part 1 talked about the calming effect that fermented berries afforded stressed pre-hominids. Ever since this discovery, our ancestors have sought relief, in fermented (alcoholic) beverages. From opium, cannabis and other psychedelic plants. Is it any wonder? Temperance/prohibitionist movements are a modern indulgence which in their own way speak to our abstraction from the natural world.
Freedom or relief from cortisol overexcitement is a necessary condition for healthy human function. Prolonged and chronic cortisol production affects multiple physiological and cognitive systems with ‘a cascading impact on physical and mental health’, Mayo Clinic. We may not have tigers in the Karori hills or crocodiles laying in the shallows off Kohimarama. Ducking out for a lunchtime bagel or walking home may raise cortisol levels a little. But performance reviews, constant restructures, angry customers, dropping yield curves, or psycho managers are among our modern apex threats. We add to this daily grind, an AI age that, we are told, will usher in mass unemployment. Is this not an existential crisis?
Magnifica talks of disarming AI in the sense of decoupling it from private monkey power. Balancing de facto rights to govern and impose private interests in determining what ‘govern’ looks like against human values and common good. In context of examples of the monkey’s unchecked nature, and especially with the degenerate nature of current AI architects and broliarchs, our cortisol levels are set to permanently spike.
Pick Up the Loving Cup
And here is wine. A natural product that has been with us from the very beginning. Central in evolving the neocortex upon which our cultural achievements, our art and cathedrals, our towers and cities, have been built.
Wine has always facilitated our species’ social cohesion and communion. Sharing a meal, celebrating a successful harvest, gathering at the end of a working day, marking feasts and celebrations. Even in underwriting peace - to pick up the cup, you must first put down the sword. Ancient China's Banquets of Rapprochement were said to be often used strategies to promote truces and forge alliances, proving that harmony could be reached by breaking bread. The historic cultural record of wine as our companion and moderator is replete.
Wine brings us peace from the modern world by marking the transition between our public toils and our private lives. It is a ritual that allows us to take off our mask and armour. To know we are safe. To breathe. Wine creates space for human to human interaction beyond a bloomberg terminal, godawful standup, boardroom table, or zoom session. Wine gives solace when simply sitting on a couch, fireside or verandha. Contemplating. Wine is also there to give joy and release. Animating the restaurant table. Adding joyous ritual to celebrations and respectful remembrance to solemn occasions. Facilitating communion with strangers at functions or events.
Wine is a gateway into our deep human history, a living echo of ancient farming practices that, in so many ways, are unchanged today in their essentials. Wine is not wine if it does not ask very much indeed of those who produce it. When we visit a cellar door or speak with a winemaker at a tasting, we see and feel what distinguishes rote from passion. Lived from performative. Syrup from exilir. You’ll have your faith in the monkey re-affirmed.
And this is what wine is. What it can do. It is a companion that connects us quite literally, in the present and across our common history. Wine creates a clearing in our personal, familial and social lives just as surely as the wolf does in the natural world. We’ve all but domesticated and harried the predator to the margins of the world or off it altogether. For humans, wine keeps us of the system and connected to our better social selves.
Thinking our way into a full and purposeful sense of “human” is Descartes’ delusion. It implies somehow the individual, the mind, therefore humanity is outside the world. Cartesian duality requires a brain structure to bring our selves into the world ergo we, humanity, are not of the world. The conceit of a monkey unable to tune down it’s self-maximisation algorhithm.
To drink wine is to slip into a richer, older sense of the human inheritance. What we have come through to get here. To be grateful to who and what has gone before that has allowed us freedom to relax and be at peace or revelry. To ponder where we may yet go. To share a table and a glass is to pause the constant chattering of the world and our own minds. To connect with people who matter to us and recognise the humanity in those very different to us; others. Allow the cortisol to dissipate. To be in the world, in balance. Listen to the lion and the wolf.
The Lion and the Wolf. Postscript
It was quite striking to read the Magnifica for its powerful social, political historical framing. The socio-cultural arc that the Catholic Church brings to the table as it has born continual witness to the modern human story. The Pope made much of the encyclical of his namesake Pope Leo XIII, and his Encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. Magnifica was deliberately published on the 135th anniversary of Rerum. Leo XIII’s Urbi et Orbi was in response to the contemporary social, economic and political dishevels and anxieties of the time, relating to the industrial revolution. Of empire and continual European wars. Such a lens on our development as a people is extremely useful. It doesn’t require a godhead to see this.
I would love to read a similar entreaty from other cultural/religious perspectives. It would reinforce the beauty of our diversity and the richness in our common human story that is too easily pixelated out. There is something in reading the Catholic Church’s analysis of ‘worldly matters’, that I found inexpressibly powerful. I’m not sure quite what it was. But worldly concerns addressed from that seat as opposed to more familiar chairs of media, academia, or legislatures was more powerful, clarifying and sane for it.
Bernie Sanders has cogency and conviction, who can argue. But he, and I believe any politician, is demonstrably incapable of cutting through against the stories we tell ourselves about our technology Gods and the powers aligned around them. Or the credulous defences we have built to defend private wealth over common good. It could be that the politician’s frame lacks potency because it does not draw from a continuous / contiguous line of doctrine like Pope Leo can. Or that pastoral considerations, genuine expression of love for humanity, that do not require faith of any extemporal kind, are simply not part of political frameworks or vernacular. Whatever, the Magnifica makes a stark case for the bonkers exploitation and extinction games we’re playing with people and planet when unconstrained by a morality and regulation based on humanitarian principles.
We’re building Babel for the few when we should be rebuilding Jerusalem for all. Poetically profound.
Carol Cadwalladr’s phrase. Carol is the courageous journalist who exposed Cambridge Analytica’s Worm Tongueian service to Facebook and political actors in the UK and US to exert Orwellian influence over voter behaviour. Would you believe that in 2019, at the Wagamama in Heathrow Terminal 4, I sat across from Carol, ate lunch and chatted?
Chaos Monkeys refers to a 2016 book of the same name by Silicon Valley insider Antonio García Martínez
I recall being in San Jose in 2017 when a Mayor, if I recall correctly the chap from San Francisco, staged stunts at the offices of tech companies protesting that they pay a fair share of local tax. It was illustrative to drive the highways and roads of Silicon Valley and note how poorly maintained they were. Babylon it is not despite the towers
Nietzsche’s phrase. And as we know, there was nothing he couldn’t teach us on the raising of the wrist