 Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here, and being so sunny outside and the temperatures are warmer, I basically, it's very nice of you to be here, and clearly in support of Mark Asher on his behalf. I thank you for that. You know, my name is Antonio Tepeda Benito, and the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. And I welcome you to the last full professor lecture of the spring semester. John just reminded me that this is what this was. I've been known to confuse this with other events. The College of Arts and Sciences initiated these lectures as a way of acknowledging and recognizing the promotion of faculty to the highest rank in the university. There is a huge amount of work and effort that goes into becoming a full professor. And so I think it's a great idea to have the opportunity to be here and learn from the masters. And today we have that opportunity with Mark Asher. I did start another type of tradition, and that is that my remarks will be short, and then there will be a colleague or somebody who has known Mark for a longer time to also have the opportunity to share the bragging rights with me. And I do that because, you know, Deans, Provost, President and so forth always are the ones who take credit for the things that the faculty actually do. And I want to make sure that a colleague is up here honoring Mark and celebrating his success. Mark is a professor and chair of the Classics Department. He has taught at UVM since 2000 and is a graduate alumnus. In addition to academic books and articles in Greek and Latin literature, he has published three books of children, original poetry and translations, and two opera libretti. So he is quite a polyvalent man, and he has other gifts that I'm amazed how he finds time and he has the talent to do everything and do it so well. So I'm going to read a few remarks from students and colleagues who are very eloquent and captured very well who Mark is and the great person he is and why he is so liked and appreciated by all who know him. My greatest, this is a student talking, my greatest improvements as an undergraduate writer, I owe to Mark how Professor Asher can find time to operate a farm, produce a scholarship and children's books, chair of the department, and still focus on each of his students is beyond my ability to comprehend. Personally, I don't think he sleeps, so I'm just going to ask a question Mark, do you sleep? Not enough. He doesn't sleep. All right, this is students Mark and I guess that correctly. One colleague remarked, not only is Mark an outstanding teacher at all levels, he has achieved an exceptional level of integration of his research with his curricular offerings, ever since he was an undergraduate student at UBM, Mark has displayed integrity, thirst for knowledge and an ability to engage others in his many interests. So, basically, I had the fortune to read his promotion on tenure at dossier and I can tell you that remarks like this were abundant and went on and on about his ability. At a personal level, I can tell you that my interactions with Mark have always been incredibly rewarding and for the faculty in the department and the students of the department, you couldn't have a great advocate for what you stand for and what you hope to achieve. So, with any further ado, I want to now introduce David Geneman, who is an associate professor of English and food director of the Humanities Center who will tell us a bit more about Mark and his accomplishments, but thank you. Thanks Antonio. Mark, congratulations first of all. As you guys will clearly hear, I have lost my voice and so I prepared about an hour's worth of material, but I'm just going to have to keep it short. Mark's farm, for those of you who don't know, is called Works and Days Farm and the name comes from the long poem by the Greek writer Hesiod about the farmer and his brother and at the beginning of the poem, the protagonist sort of describes the creation of the earth and Zeus's creation of the five ages of humanity. And in the first few ages, things are pretty good. You know, you have heroes and people with great nobility, but in the age that we unfortunately live in, things aren't so good and Hesiod says that the sort of defining characteristic of that period is that envy foul mouthed the lightning and evil with scowling face will go along with wretched men one and all. And that really took me because whenever I think of Mark, I feel nothing but envy. Just boiling green eyed envy. I look at his CV and I am jealous that he publishes both in an academic context very successfully, but he's also written children's books and graphic novels. I am astonished that he writes librettoes, libretti for operas. He has published an article just recently on one of my favorite filmmakers, Pierpaolo Pasolini. I teach in the film and television studies department. I don't have the guts to write about Pasolini. When I get invited to do an event like this, I feel compelled to put on a coat and tie. When Mark gets to do an event like this, he gets to wear a Hawaiian shirt. Mark and I each have three children. His are grown. That's reason for envy enough. Mark has three grown children and he looks like he's 25. I have little children and I look like I'm 60. The reality is actually the reverse. Mark, despite looking like he could be anywhere between 25 and 40, is actually 78 years old. And I am 22. But the more I think about Mark, the more I am overcome with the need to transform envy into something else, which is admiration. I have spent the last few years working closely with Mark, both because Mark was one of my predecessors as the director of the Humanities Center and has been a remarkable and sage counsel for how to approach the humanities and celebrate the humanities at the university and in the community. And he's a living example of the way the humanities impacts not just what we do here, but the world around us and our living and breathing communities. As a teacher, I value his insights, his style, his thoughtfulness. We've talked together in the Honors College first year seminar. And I'm going to switch back into envy again. We got to suggest a film to teach in the Honors College. And I teach film and television. That's my thing. And I, of course, took the opportunity to do something really fun and exciting for the students and decided to assign a Danish documentary about avant-garde film makers who are battling with each other over theoretical issues. And Mark chose an animated film to assign. So at every stage, Mark demonstrates both the seriousness of what we do, the importance of what we do, but also the joy of what we do. And so as I think about Mark and congratulate him as he is elevated to the full professor, I am also overcome with admiration for what he does. And in keeping with Hesse and the works and days, I'm reminded that admiration is what's going to let us still continue to hang out with all of those noble people from the great generations, of which Mark certainly is one. So Mark, congratulations and thank you very much for your inspiration. Thank you. Thank you, Antonio. Thank you, Dave. I don't deserve all that, but I'm happy to have received it. And I'm very happy to be here and happy to see so many people here. Friends from my neighborhood, family members, my father, David, my lovely wife Caroline is here. As Antonio mentioned, I'm an undergraduate alumnus from this fine institution. And so I have teachers to thank too, and I'm just like scouring the audience like right now. I tried to do it before. See if I've had any of you. Ann Clark said she might be here. Is she here? Ann Clark. I owe Ann Clark a great debt. She was my teacher. It's not because Ann is very old. It's because I was a nontraditional student when I was here. So Ann was one of my teachers. Bill Mears, did I see you lurking about? Bill Mears is one of my teachers from art history and classics. And I owe you a debt of gratitude as well for being here. Let's see. Anybody else? Well, primus inter pares amongst my teachers that I'm grateful to and will always be grateful to is the man. I have the pointer here. I don't know if it'll point back to you. Phil Ambrose. Ambrosius Mayus was my great teacher and got me inspired to want to pursue this path in the first place. So I'm very, very grateful indeed. Okay. This is only the second PowerPoint I've ever done. The first one was for my dean's lecture. So bear with me. I think I can make this all work. I have the mouse. The mouse looks like it's on. Or is it on? Does it need to be on? Okay. I just need the mouse for one thing. Oh no. This mouse works. Okay. Great. I got that. All right. So I thought a lot about what to talk about. And what you're going to hear today is very provisional. It's something I've been thinking about only for a couple of months. I had thought I would try to rest on my laurels or advertise other projects I'm working on. The irons I have in the fire. Here is one of them. But I couldn't resist giving you a sample of what this piece is. This is the opera that I'm in the midst of writing the libretto for, compiling the libretto from Greek and Latin text and writing interstitial dialogue in English on the topic of the great emperor, not so great emperor, Nero. And here is the piece. And here's a sample from... Turn it up. Probably one of these buttons. So Wagner, Eat Your Heart Out. That was Nero singing to papaya, a love duet, borrowed from Virgil's Georgics. Very, very touching and moving. And now for something completely different. A very small sample from this. That is the sible. Her eyes rolling in her head. Just a sample from the sible's prophecy. Announcing Nero's eventual downfall, the culmination of the first scene. What you heard there was the singer singing Sprechstimme, which is a form of, I guess I want to call it like operatic scat singing, where what's written in the text is sort of ad-libbed as the singer desires. Thought about talking about this. This is another project. This is a collection of poems that I wrote and criticism that I wrote, translations also. And it's called The Sentences of Ernst Halp, which is an inversion of the German Halp Ernst. And it's meant to be tongue-in-cheek. This will be published about two-thirds complete. And it's wonderful to be able to write the poems and then write the criticism on them. But that's part of the game. Very much part of the game. And self-consciously so. I pretend not to be myself in both guises. And it's poised kind of aesthetically in between, somewhere between Dante's Confessional, La Weta Nuova, and Nabokov's satirical peril fire, something like that. I think maybe uneasily poised between those two things. But that's been a lot of fun to work on. And I'll probably finish this first before I finish what you're about to hear me talk about, which is this. Sustainability, complex systems, and the Greeks. Again, I have just begun thinking about this. And so this is a risk for me. But I figured that this is what this profession is about, taking risks. And I'm going to try it out on you. And I'm going to listen to what you say afterwards, both, you know, yay or nay. This project is an exercise in two things. And they're both part of the joys of being a classicist. You look around the world and you see familiar things all the time. Familiar because they go back to antiquity. I'm going to be careful here and not try to claim too much for the Greek legacy, for both this notion of sustainability and complex systems. But this notion that the more things change, or the more it changes, the more it stays the same, plus au champ, plus c'est la même chose, a little witticism that was uttered in the context of fashion. And the more round, full, let's just say biblical version, the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be, and that which is done, is that which shall be done, and there is no new thing under the sun. We'll revisit the sun again in a minute, just by happenstance as we progress. So again, it's one of the things that I enjoy about being a classicist is seeing ideas reemerge all the time. It's also an exercise in this. Steve Martin in the New Yorker from a few years back, that it's okay to be wrong and it's okay to over claim because you can calibrate it, you can come back, you can come back to a reasonable conclusion, reasonable argument, reasonable position. So if something I say today strikes you as modestly unreasonable, that's okay, I've got Steve Martin on my side. So what is sustainability? And notice it's in inverted commas, sustainability, what is it? Well, one thing I know for sure as this chart definitively proves the word sustainable is itself unsustainable in the English language. It crops up all the time. You see the newspapers, you hear it all the time, people throw it around, politicians throw it around all the time. What is sustainability? So as you see, let's see if I can use this pointer to work, by 2109, this is a joke by the way, by 2109 all sentences will just be the words sustainable repeated over and over again. So there you go, complex systems loves to put things in graphs and chart the rate of growth of things and there you go. So that's courtesy of xkct.com. So sustainability, sustainability does have an origin and again, as a classicist, I like, we do as a kind, like to go back to origins, to discover origins. By my lights, from what I've read, from what I've been able to determine, the use of the word sustainable, the way we use it today, about the environment and about human interaction with the environment stems from this, 1968, the meeting of the club at Rome, club of Rome in 1968, some thinkers in terms of environmental policies and computer modelers funded by a wealthy Italian businessman gathered in Rome in 1968 and talked about these things. And the result of their work was this book in 1972. It's essentially the report of the club at Rome meeting in 1968 called The Limits to Growth. The two key figures there are the Meadows, Donella or Dana Meadows and Dennis Meadows, her husband. Dennis Meadows was a computer scientist at MIT and Dana Meadows knew him there. She's the primary author of this book, but this is one of the first, if not the first, uses of the word sustainable in the way we tend to think of it today. And there's their definition. We are searching for a model output that represents a world system that is sustainable without sudden or uncontrollable collapse. And two, it's capable of satisfying the basic material requirements of all people. There's the word sustainable in color blind. See the red or green. But there's that. The Brent report of 1980 also spoke of sustainable biological environment and sustainable prosperity. But in that report, Brent warns about the persistent confusion of growth with development. So this notion of sustainable development, which I think we're going to see on the next slide. Yeah, the term sustainable development in apparent oxymoron, but perhaps not, we could argue that, was coined in the Brutland Commission's paper, Our Common Future. And just to paraphrase the way they define it, sustainable development is defined as the kind of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. As far as definitions go, I can take these. These work. These are workable definitions of sustainability. I'm not an expert in this field. They're probably refined different variations on this theme depending on what angle you see sustainability from, whether it's economic, environmental, biological, whatever you want to think. So the Greeks. Once upon a time, way back when, societies had myths and myths preserved behaviors. In the beginning was not the word, but in the beginning was the deed. That's one particular take on myth to paraphrase Faust. And in fact, Mark does this as well when he talks about the notion that behavior comes before to talk about behavior or dialogue about behavior. Anyway, in myths are preserved behaviors. One of the important behaviors that I wanted to talk about right now is this notion of the goddess who is the mistress of the animals. The protectress of nature, the protectress of the environment, the protectress of animals in particular. And here's an example of this. This is a pot from about 680 from Biosha. It's in the National Archaeological Museum at Athens. Of the Potnia Theron. The Greek. The mistress of wild beasts. The mistress of the animals. And here you see her. Actually, I love this picture. It's really great. Here she is. She's got a fish between her legs. She's got wild animals. Maybe they're wolves here. Maybe domesticated animal bull here. A whale here. Caitos probably are some sort of fish. Birds here. And you've got the swastika symbol, prosperity, health, peace. And a very old concept. A very old concept about a mother goddess who controls nature. And here's another example of it. The famous Diana of the Ephesians. If you are an enthusiast of the book of Acts or biblical literature at all, New Testament, she makes her appearance even there. When the Apostle Paul is with, I think, Silas in Ephesus. There's a big ruckus about the new religion being introduced. But Diana of the Ephesians was worshipped from antiquity, long antiquity in the area of Ephesus. And here's her image. Now we often think of Diana as a live goddess, very skinny girl-like in a small tunic prancing around, hunting in the woods. Well, she does become that. But she was once indeed, and remains still throughout antiquity simultaneously, the mistress of the animals, the protectors of nature. So you see her... You see her, you know, multiple breasts here. You see emblems of nature all over her body and her hair. If you look up close, there's bees, there's acorns. All these, again, symbols of fertility. And here she is presiding over the beasts who have lost their heads, but there they are there. Here's a coin from the time of the... From the time of... Well, almost the time of Apostle Paul. The time of Claudius, Claudius and Agrippina on the front, and this image of Diana of Ephesus on the back. So really a trajectory that persists for a long time in the ancient world of this idea of the mistress of the animals. And, you know, the Greeks didn't invent it. It goes back. It's prehistoric. It's neolithic. It's widespread. Pretty much every culture has this. And there's the Venus of Villendorf. A tiny little thing, though. It looks ginormous, little thing like that. That goes back to 30,000 BCE. So in the Greek world, we do get myths about this. We get myths of encroachment and violation. That is people trespassing on the mistress's domain. Here's a famous pot. It's actually a famous myth of Actaeon. Actaeon is hunting with his dogs. And you see his dogs all around him here. I'll tell you what's about to happen. Most many of you will know this story already. But he errs, quite literally errs, E-R-R-O-R, wanders into the sacred precinct of this Diana figure or Artemis figure. In Greek, Artemis in Latin or Roman mythology, Diana. And he is punished for it. Now, Abid's version of the story, which I'll show you in just a second, it develops it. It gives a motive and a reason and kind of causality. But the idea behind this lies in the way Greek sanctuary structures were set up from, again, going back to the Bronze Age and even probably the Neolithic period, where a divinity would have carved out around its sanctuary, temple, wooden stone, whatever period of history we were talking about. A sacred precinct where things were preserved. You don't mess with it. You preserve it to keep it. And you could think it's because it belongs to the deity and it hands off, otherwise you're in trouble. But another anthropological reading of this is that it's a way to build in a taboo into society, into one society that prevents one from taking too much. You can't take from there because it's a limit. This idea of setting limits, again, in prehistoric primitive thinking. So he wanders in there and he's punished for it and he's shot with arrows. The story goes that he saw her bathing nude in her pond attended by her maidens. This is a painting by Kronach much later. And then he's turned into a stag, so the human is reverted back to nature and then becomes subject to the cycle of nature as a part by his own dogs. This tale becomes slightly moralized. In Ovid's version, which is really wonderful, it could in fact be autobiographical because this is a sideline here. Ovid was exiled for two things, Carmen at error, meaning he just wandered in the wrong place and probably saw something that he shouldn't have seen and then maybe wrote a poem about it, a Carmen about it. But I don't want to make too much about that. Self-indulgent poem I wrote. The thing about the Ovid passage, you can just read that yourself if you care to, is this business here, the way he depicts, and again, he's inheriting this whole notion and he's an artist and he's a poet and he's doing it consciously, but it's a long-standing cultural leftover. You know, an ancient forest was standing that had been violated or harmed by no axe and a cave in the middle of it which was overgrown with bushes and foliage. This notion of a pristine nature untouched by human hands, that's the way Ovid sets up this particular scene that Actaean wanders into. Okay, another example of this encroachment, again in sort of this mythic layer, you probably didn't know that one of the precipitory acts of the Trojan War and the problems of the Trojan War was a similar sort of encroachment involving Artemis and that involves Agamemnon, the king of Argos, Mycenae, the head, the king of let's just say all the Greeks in the Trojan cycle, and so this is a notice that, oops, sorry, this is a notice that, okay, they're assembled for the second time to go to Troy, Agamemnon killed the deer while hunting and claimed to surpass Artemis herself. In that statement right there, there's something latent there, this tendency to moralize these stories that were probably, again, I just say cultural taboos. This is a very late version of this story, and so it's survived, so he's guilty because he claimed to be better than Artemis, but probably originally the whole idea of a Temenos, that's the word that describes that area around the temple, from the word Temno, which means to cut out from everything else, represents just this basic fact that you're not to trespass, you're not to overstep. Overstep is important, that's what over trespass means. So from this stems the fact that he has to sacrifice something of his own to appease Artemis. He sacrifices his daughter Iphigenia, a key building block in the whole Trojan story, the Trojan cycle, probably the foundation stone of Escalus' Orestia, this great trilogy about the homecoming of Agamemnon and later his subsequent murder by his wife, Cleitem Nestra. The point I'm trying to make here is that this is like encroachment and violation of sacred space and space that is protected. Overstepping, human overstepping, is fundamental to Western thought, preserved here in myth. Here's a Roman wall painting of Iphigenia being sacrificed in place of the, you see the stag up there, some versions, I won't go into all the versions, but she's later substituted, she doesn't die in the end, but Escalus' version she does. Another thing you might not know is there's another version of, there is a version or an account of the beginning of the Trojan war, the reason for the Trojan war, that you don't get from the Iliad because it's not there. It's part of the prequel to the whole cycle of epics that comprise the epic cycle, Homer's Iliad and Odyssey just being sort of a slice of that larger tradition. And it's in this poem called the Cypria. And here we have this explicit notion of Zeus contriving the Trojan war precisely because of overpopulation, that the earth groans under the weight of all the human beings that are on it and he acts and sets the Trojan war in motion. I guess I couldn't let you out here without hearing some Greek and I won't read the Cypria, the Greek from the Cypria. I'll read Homer's Iliad and then I want to draw attention to this. Men and Aida Teah, I can do the bouncing ball with this. Pei lei, ado, akeleos, ulemenein, hei muriakai ois, alga eteken, polas, dipti mus, psukas, aidipro, eapsen, ero on, autus, dehloria, teuke, kunesi, oi o nois itepasi, dios, deteleit o bule. And you see here, you don't even have to know Greek to see that there is a direct correspondence between the version of the Cypria, you know, the incipit of the whole poem. Zeus's plan was fulfilled and the echo of that in Homer's Iliad. Cypria was probably composed as a poem after the Iliad, but it represents a tradition that is all part of a piece going back. You see it in the biblical world. You see the Tower of Babel is a version of the same story, not the same story, but a similar story. Human overreach. Here it's, again, moralized, as we saw in that other example from Proclus and Agamemnon killing the deer. He bragged to be equal to Artemis herself. Here it's, you know, they're trying to make a name for themselves, these human beings, so they must be put down by the gods. But this has also parallels in other Near Eastern literatures and also in the Indian Mahabharata, this idea of people getting too big, too much, and being pushed back down. Another myth. I won't go too far with these, but there is Siktham. This is a similar myth. You probably don't know about it, unless you've read Ovid. Ovid is the primary preserver of this story. This illustration comes from UVM's Special Collections, Ovid Collection, the Prindle Collection of Ovid, by Solis. So here, Eresiktham, a wicked tyrant king from, I think, Thrace, which is where all wild things come from in Greek mythology, chops down a tree, and that tree is sacred to Ceres, or Demeter, Demeter is the other name for Ceres, goddess of agriculture. You can see the votive offerings here. So as a result of that, a punishment for chopping down the sacred tree within the Temenos, the sacred area of the goddess. It's not supposed to be violated. He's punished by perpetual hunger, and he has to, I don't want to go into details, but he has to sell his daughter again and again to keep getting money to buy food. So it becomes sort of a parable in Ovid of this idea of insatiable, excessive, overreaching, overstepping. Something that the Greeks, in the mythical tradition like this, but also in the philosophical tradition, were very, very keen to address, and that's part of the premise of what I'm getting at, that there's this intellectual heritage about sustainability that the Greeks exhibit. So here's a summary. Actually, I'll get ready for later here. So there's a deep-rooted sensitivity in prehistoric and pre-industrialized societies to sustainable living. This is due to necessity, survival, common interest, which is reinforced by cultural norms, practices, and reflected in ancient narratives like the myths we've just been talking about. Really, our only access to them for the Greeks, though we can reconstruct many of these things through comparative studies with living, traditional cultures fewer and farther between these days, but, you know, hunting-gathering societies in sub-Saharan Africa or, you know, New Guinea Highlanders or whatever. All right. Now, okay, here's a moment of transition. So this is the temple of Apollo at Delphi. I didn't take the picture, but I've been there. It is just as magnificent as that. On the temple of Apollo at Delphi, where the Oracle of Apollo resided, two things were inscribed in Greek. Gnothi saoton and madean agon. The first one means, no thyself. The second one means, nothing in excess. Now, these things are often, because we see things from the vantage point of all that has subsequently been written by Greek authors about them, we tend to see them in sort of like philosophic statements, like, no thyself in some sort of existential way, right? Or, nothing in excess, madean agon. Sort of the Aristotelian definition of virtue as the mean between excess and defect, right? But really, they were inscribed there long before philosophy ever raised its ugly head or dawned on the rest of the world. These things are maxims, very proverbial Wolfgang maxims that talk about no thyself, meaning no your place in the world, no where you belong, don't overstep it. Know it. The other one also, nothing in excess, very just generic proverbial, rather than the sort of philosophized version that Aristotle gives us. Okay. So, the reason why I have that slide there is because we're moving from sort of mythic narratives and this idea of sustainability, of observing limits to a more philosophical take on it, which we have ample evidence for. And if I haven't said so already, these are just snippets of this larger project. I mean, this is the first I've written down of it right here. You're looking at it. So, this is all very provisional in the best sense. I'm looking forward. And I'm not married to really any of it, but I do feel that one of the signal texts in any project about sustainability complex systems in the Greeks is Plato's Republic. So, Plato has a passage in the Republic for those of you who've read it or those who have not, where he talks about the origins of cities, why cities come to be, right? And Plato, very quickly here, Plato's grand scheme in the Republic, right? He starts with, he wants to know what justice is. That's how the whole thing starts. What is justice? What's the definition of justice? First book tries to, you know, raise that question, ends, oh, gosh, chocolate, Bailey just walked in. Now I'm really in trouble. So, what justice is? But he's really, ultimately, Plato's interested in what it means to be just in oneself, one's psychological justice, some sort of, you know, what a personhood is in the soul, justice in the soul. But he doesn't start there. He starts with justice in society. He starts with the city. He argues, he says, you know, it'll be easier to read the fine print if we start with the big letters first. So, there's a notion of a homology between the macrocosm of what a society is and what the individual should be within society is central to the whole architecture and progression of the argument of the Republic. So, he's at that moment where he's talking about the origins of cities. And this is very interesting because he talks about, like, you know, what, I say, by the way, I call it Sim City. I don't know if anybody's ever played this game before, but it's a game you can play when you can, like, create a city and pretend how it's going to work. And probably, there's an interesting connection there because this idea of modeling and simulating is super important to see how things, quote, unquote, play out. This is a thought experiment of a different sort, you know, without the mathematical equations. So, anyway, he says, come then, let's make a theoretical state from scratch. I think our need for it will build it for us. This notion of need, again, needing one another and mutual need is important to it. So then he goes on to, you know, say what you need in it and, you know, you need everyone doing what they're supposed to do. And then, hold on, what do I get down here? I don't want to spend too much time on this, but he's careful to note in the construction of this Sim City that it can't be too big because if it gets too big, it'll get out of hand and that could be a problem. But he does admit, and this is Plato's way of proceeding or Socrates' way of proceeding. Let's admit that it needs some things like, you know, oops, wage earners and laborers and then the question is what is justice in the city? And then Glaucon's conclusion here is kind of, I think, important. Again, this notion of communitarianism as it were. Glaucon says, I have no idea where justice is in such a city that we've just created theoretically unless it is in the needs of those same people regarding their mutual interests. This idea of cooperation and mutual interest important to Plato's city of Sim City. Now, here he describes the ideal city Socrates does and what happens is that Glaucon declares it to be a city for pigs. No human would want to live in this. This is too simple. This is too, it's without all the things that we need like BMWs and, you know, these things and those things and whatever else. So what kind of life will the people who have been provided or in this way, will they make anything other than food, wine, clothing and shoes? And then he goes through, no, they'll need all these other things. And then he says they will be fed on barley meal, prepare for themselves, make flour from wheat, cook or need some of it, serve excellent barley cakes, blah, blah, blah. So very wholesome, very close to nature, not too far from nature, not too far in the direction of culture. They will, there's culture, they'll drink wine. They'll sing praises to the gods, living in harmony with each other and not producing children beyond their means. Remarkable to me that Plato was quite aware of that in this theoretical city, probably based on real practical considerations from real culture. Okay, let's see what I want to talk about here. So Glaucon objects that nobody wants to, nobody wants this kind of city, but let me just read what Plato, what Socrates says in the eye here is Socrates. So he's saying, well, Glaucon says you're making people dine without relishes and condiments. That's true, I said. I've forgotten, we will have condiments and then he gets a whole big list of things that will make their food taste good. So there will be pleasure in the city. They will roast myrtleberries and acorns in the ashes near the fire, it's probably a euphemism for sex. And while they drink in moderation, so it seems they will spend their lives in peace and good health, they will reach old age, and this is key, and pass on to their successors a life just like this one. It's not going to be too big, and they're going to pass it down to their ancestors intact, or it's going to be sustainable as in the Bruntland report. So anyway, Glaucon objects that this is not, this is like not the city, nobody wants to live in here, it's a city of pigs, it's a Huopolis, Greek for that, and Plato retorts, oh, you want one then that is luxurious, and you want one that is not the healthy one that I just described, the one that is quote-unquote ideal in our theoretical SimCity game, but you want one that is inflamed or sick feverish. Feverish is the typical way that's translated. So the rest of the republic unfolds as a way to deal with the fact that we have a feverish city, this is the city we live in, this is what we face, and so how to deal with it, where is justice, what is justice in that context. So again, a signal text for me that I will revisit, no doubt, more so, we can talk about this afterwards. So Socrates, Plato was not Socrates' only disciple, he had many disciples, and in fact Plato was probably the least representative of the Socraticism that Socrates practiced. I think the closest analog, or the closest disciples and spirit, and maybe even in practice in some ways, were the cynics. And this is Diogenes the cynic in his own hometown of Sinope, on the Black Sea in modern Turkey. You see his lantern there, looking for one good man in broad daylight, and you see his little dog, cynic by the way for those who don't know, means dog, dog or dog-like. And they recall that because they did all their private business out in the open like dogs do. Dogs don't care. And the cynics did this on purpose to make a statement. And that's really what I want to focus on here is just the notion of the statement that they're trying to make. I'll cruise through this. I'm going to have to give this a shorter shrift. So you have encounters in the cynic tradition of the cynic goal was this, to need as little as possible and to want even less than that as they put it. So to need as little as possible to want even less than that, to make do. And to deal with this, they practiced. They practiced. The word ascetic comes from the cynics, ascesis or practice. It's a word that derives from the world of Greek athletics. And they practiced more so, to do without, so that they could do without when pressed, when pushed came to shove. And there are some wonderful encounters on the world stage. They're probably fictional, but here's Diogenes living in his barrel, little dog living out of doors. He begged for a living. They did that. They carried around their little staff and their cloak and that was it. And this is Alexander the Great who has this encounter with him. And Alexander says, I'll do whatever you want. I have the world's power. I'll give you whatever you want. What do you want? And Diogenes, in a hippie sort of way, says here in the Greek, undarken me or unshade me please, meaning stand out of my light because Alexander's in his way and all he wants is to do is bask in the light in front of his barrel. That's from a children's book I wrote on the same topic where Diogenes is cast as a dog. Again I couldn't resist putting it in there and you get the kind of GQ Alexander figure and it's even more explicit there. Get out of my light. Well, you know, what goes around comes around and more things change and more they stay the same. I don't know if anybody knows of this character, Colin Bevin, a self promoter, as many cynics were, but he lived in, anybody heard of this guy? Perhaps, yeah. He lived in Manhattan in an apartment and chose to do without to kind of make a statement about sustainability. Put his wife through it and she divorced him a few years later. No surprise. But, you know, no paper diapers. They composted in the apartment. They didn't have any electricity. They didn't ride a bike. This is the documentary film that was the culmination of what started as a blog, a series of New York Times, excuse me, articles, and that's the man himself. And I think now he's a green party or progressive candidate or maybe he won a seat in New York. The New York Senate or Congress, I'm not sure. But no impact, man. So, again, there's that. I'm going to skip over this in the interest of time. This is, I'm going to briefly talk about it only. This is a passage about a cynic who was in the train of Alexander the Great when Alexander was conquering the world going east. So, a Greek cynic was with him. He was an admiral, a terrible admiral. Probably not a very good cynic either, but he's in the story. And he goes out in quest of eastern wisdom, a very typical motif in this kind of travel literature from antiquity novels. So, he's out for this sort of eastern wisdom and he meets up with these people called gymnosophists, which means naked philosophers. And one naked philosopher he meets up with says this, in the beginning the world teamed with weed and barley. Now it is made mostly of dirt. These fountains yielded an abundance of water, milk, even honey, wine, and olive oil. But excess, blemosunes, self-indulgence, truffes, or echoes here with Plato's Republic, but that's just because that's what these words mean, only made men insolent, es hubrin, except pezon, hoy antropoi. So, this notion, and then so in discuss of the state, Zeus took away these blessings and subjected men to a life of labor when self-restraint, self-forsune, or just moderation, and other virtues developed, then opportunities for a good life reappeared. But greed and arrogance, you said, the words there are caros and hubris, caros means satiety, meaning having more than you need. Once again, threatening man's existence, and at present there is a renewed risk of widespread devastation, affanismos ton onton, which literally means, it doesn't mean widespread devastation, I should have changed that too, but what is of what exists? So, here you have this encounter of arch, radical, sustainability people in Greece, the cynics, encountering people who are even better than them in the East, a very typical thing, but the point that the author of this is trying to make, or this encounter is trying to bring out, is this contrast here. So, Mendonis is the gymnosophist and the secretist meets up with, his considered opinion was that the Greeks were sensible in most respects, but wrong to defer to custom over nature. So in other words, this notion of living according to nature, the Greeks aired on the side of deferring to custom, big debate in antiquity, a huge debate. Are we are what we are by nurture, which is the Greek word namos, or are we are what we are by nature fousis? We born that way hardwired, are we acculturated to be that way? That's not a new question, it goes back to the Greeks too. So anyway, there's that, and then these are the modern gymnosophists, or they were the gymnosophists back then. These are sadhus from modern India, and these are the characters that are described in this episode. All right, phase two, part two, what is a complex system? One thing I'd like to just point out is that systems thinking and sustainability, you can correct me if I'm wrong, they're sort of co-evil in some ways, at least in the popular imagination. They're both part of what the limits to growth, the result of the Club at Rome report. They were talking about modeling a system which is sustainable, modeling it mathematically. I've been told, and I don't precisely care about it, but I've been told that there are models, there are a lot of flaws with their models. The predictions that they make are not going, they don't hold water, and they're flawed in that way. But the fact is the idea of modeling something, mathematically in this case, and the notion of sustainability to be able to predict where we'll be if we can be there in the future, go together. So what is a complex system? Maggie teaches a course on this. I should probably just give you the one that you can take over. Well, this is a complex system. This is my 2000 Jetta TDI with over 300,000 miles on it. It shows emergent properties every day, practically. Yes, the other day the thermostat didn't work. It's also sort of a conundrum of identity because I think, you know, it's like the ship of Theseus. Like, you know, every part in this car, except the engine, has been replaced. So is it the same car that it once was? I mean, it's my car. I love it. It's my daily commuter from Shoreham. I had the temerity to change over to my summer tires yesterday. We'll see if that was a good idea. So that's a complex system, a car for sure, a used car. If you want to have a conversation afterwards about why I think used cars are sustainable, I'd love to have that conversation. This is not a complex system. This is chaos. This is lambing in February or January was a Caroline. January at like 20 below zero or 15 below zero, really cold. Yes, we do lamb in January, so we can have lambs ready for the Easter market in the spring, in the same spring as they're born. And I wish I had the soundtrack to this because you would agree with me that it's chaos. It's just like sheer and utter cacophony when you sprinkle some grain for them and they come running. But anyway, that's chaos and not that. So this assures me that at least talking about complex systems is not narrow and not specialized. It's reached the popular imagination for sure. This is from last week's New Yorker cartoon. We are being controlled by the random outcomes of a complex system. The cartoon actually shows a misunderstanding, I think, of what a complex system is because it's not always random. And even when you have chaos, as I understand it, there is a pattern we're just not able to discern it. But patterns within a complex system become important. Okay, key features of complexity. A complex system is, and I'm just pirating this from various sources, probably not the best ones, a network of interacting objects or agents. It's more than the sum of its parts and that's what's meant by exhibits emergent properties. It's affected by memory or feedback, which can be leveraged to control it and change the behavior of a complex system, which is often what we want to do when a complex system is a little too close to chaos. It's self-regulating or cybernetic. That's also important. It's a mix of disordered and ordered behavior and it's dynamic and evolutionary. You know, I admit to being dependent on, this is Danella Meadows, Dana Meadows' subsequent textbook on this thinking and systems, and she's the one that was responsible for the Limits to Growth report. And also this Neil Johnson, not to be confused with Stephen Johnson, who wrote a book on emergence. He's the tech journalist guy. This guy is a physicist at the University of Miami, so I believe him for the most part. Johnson gives an example of... What do I want to do here? I'm tracing the genealogy of ideas, modern ideas about sustainability and complexity back to the Greeks. I see a lot of parallels. Some of them may be phenotypical, but I think some of those parallels are rooted in sort of a cultural DNA. This is Johnson. He's given an example about what a complex system is. And he's segueing from this discussion of keeping a ruler balanced upright on one's finger. And he talks about how that can be quantified, the energy that goes into that, and how it operates in predictability of how long it's going to be able to stay, the ruler's going to be able to stay upright while you move your finger around. But then he responds with this analogy. The energy which we use to create the feedback loop to keep that ruler in place for the ruler comes from the food we eat. And the food we eat, and this is what he says, and the food we eat can be traced back to plants. This is even true for meat and dairy products. They come from animals who themselves ate plants. So it all comes down to plants and plants get their energy from that great energy source in the sky, the sun. He capitalizes it. In other words, the sun represents the root cause of the pockets of order observed around us. All right, true enough. I think you have to be an advanced theoretical physicist to know this. This is actually quite a deep statement, he says, since it means that the sun is what helps us buck the general trend from order to disorder. This is even true when we build buildings or create other ordered structures using machines and materials such as concrete. Why? Because machines are made of metal and run on gasoline and gasoline metal concrete all originate and those in turn owe their existence to the solar system and hence the sun. I think some of you know where I'm probably going with this. He also says, I won't, you don't know yet because I haven't shown it, but this is another thing he says about, oh, I'm going to skip that slide. This is where I was going. To Plato. Famously in the Republic, Plato talks about the sun as being the offspring of the good, the source of all we see around us, the source of being able to see it but not the good in and of itself. It's the offspring of the good. And, you know, I don't have to read this. Most people are familiar with if you've read the Republic even in whatever, your old college days. This is a major, major analogy that Plato makes for the way the world works and for what justice is and for what society is and for what psychological justice, is all about. Yeah, and then he talks about it being responsible for all these things. He talks about it being the origin and he uses metaphors of parterition, tecusa, giving birth to, you know, ekanas, takas. This is all, you know, biological and again, he didn't have the math to do it or didn't need it. He saw it around him. Okay, let's pause that. One of what those slides up there was that, you know, Johnson had no clue. He had no clue that this has been a long, an age-old analogy from culture. He thinks he's inventing it, but it happens to be, you know, true in terms of the physics of it, to the sun being responsible for pockets of order in what could be complete disorder. All right, so Anaximander of Miletus. Anaximander of Wilcox, an early quote-unquote natural philosopher. He was the student of Thales and Miletus is on the coast of Asia Minor. And he was in a marvelous, he is described in a marvelous essay by Carlo Roveli as the first scientist. And I think you'll see why and I think he's important to me too for this project on complexity for several reasons. I'll read this because this contains this. He was the author of the first prose book that we have at all, we don't have it that we know of from antiquity. So Anaximander is the first prose author so far as we know and the name of his work was called Perifusaeos, Physics or On Nature to put it another way. So of those that say the universe is one moving and infinite, Anaximander son of praxeides, mylesion this is a report of Theophrastus from Theophrastus. The successor and pupil of Thales said that the principle and element of existing things was the apeiron. Ta apeiron in Greek, ta aperon means boundless. It's disputed exactly what Anaximander meant by it, but boundless, indefinite, infinite, undifferentiated. Being the first to introduce this name for the first principle, R.K. Chief undertaking of the pre-Socratics was to find some fundament of life of the world. What is the basis? The first principle or what is the thing that makes everything else work in the world? Usually a physical property, for Thales it was water. But interestingly enough for Anaximander it's a concept it's maybe the concept of space or empty space, ta aperon the boundless. He says it's neither water nor any other so-called elements, but some other apeiron nature, from which come into being all the heavens and the world in them. So it has a progenitor quality. And the origin, genesis of existing things is that into which destruction too takes place. So there's some sort of reciprocal interaction, dynamical system between destruction and creation. This is a quotation from the work. According to necessity for they pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice according to the order of time as he describes it in rather poetical words. So the quotation marks around there preserve what we're confident because of the dialectical forms there that comes from Anaximander, that's a quotation from Anaximander's book. And it's the only verbatim quotation that we have. Sorry, I'm probably pinning a lot on one fragment and you can fault me for that later. All right. So how do I see this working with complexity? All right. Well, let me first give you a notion of Anaximander's cybernetic universe, uncreated universe that there's no invisible hand making it work. A key element to complex systems and to the world as we actually know it properly described in terms of modern theoretical physics. He describes, this is how he's presented as describing the origin of the world. I'm not putting too much on this. I'm putting big bang in parentheses and quotation marks and also origin of species and quotation marks. But basically he views the eternal productive element of hot and cold were separated off at the origin of this world and a kind of ball of flame grew around the air that surrounds the earth like bark around a tree. Okay, interesting. But no God is saying fiat looks. There's something, there's a naturalistic explanation for how this is coming about. It is cybernetic, uncreated. The origin of species, this is really quite wonderful and he's actually surprisingly right and you've got to wonder you know, empirically does he just observe this and intuit this from empirical observation because they didn't experiment at this point. Biological life, this is again, we have this in paraphrase from others, arises from moisture and slime by the application of the sun. Men evolved from fish. Wow, which over time emerged from the sea onto dry land. We can talk more about that later if you want. Okay, this is where I really get into trouble. Alright, I have a, we'll see. Alright, complex systems, oh boy, Maggie I'm really nervous. Complex systems utilize a version of one particular equation to talk about the the change in a system over time and it is this thing called a logistic map and I don't even know why it's called a logistic map. It's also called an output time series and that makes more sense to me actually. I don't know why it's called a logistic map. But the logistic map or output time series illustrates mathematically how complex and chaotic changes can arise from very simple nonlinear dynamical equations. Here's like a standard version of that equation where r is the rate of growth and that's the actual most important thing that we're going to be talking about. The changing of the value of r in this equation or in real life, not just the equation, in a dynamical complex system changes significantly, even a small change changes significantly the behavior of the system as a whole. Here's a I have this courtesy of Sam Darbyshire from King's College London who loves this stuff and this is not esoteric knowledge, this is widespread knowledge among complex systems people but you see that there's a very small change in that r value results in very very different behaviors. So like if you make r three point from that number you get permanent oscillations between two values. If the number is between that and that, that's a pretty small difference at least to untutored me, you get permanent oscillations among four values. If r increases beyond this, you get period doubling bifurcation but then the difference between that and that is so small but you get the onset of chaos at that point. Maggie Epstein was so good to me to show me how this works graphically and visually because that helps me a lot. This is not her how do I do this her diagram but you can see visually how this happens when it's when it's graphed onto an x y coordinate parabola. So the r value is up in the upper left-hand corner and this is just for fun. So this is all ordered behavior a little less ordered and then when r approaches four it becomes chaotic or defined as chaotic but again I'm told mathematicians in the room can expound on this that even chaotic behavior can be, there is a pattern to it, it's just beyond sometimes beyond recognition, beyond being able to identify it. Let's get out of that slide before I get into real trouble and speaking of being in trouble I know I'm in trouble because when you have a prepared statement which I do, I have a prepared statement on this topic about an axiomander I'm going to read it to you but somebody's in trouble and they have that. An axiomander speaks of the reciprocal and this is the moment, this is the point I'm trying to make. An axiomander speaks of the reciprocal calibration of elemental opposites over time one to another, one to another for their injustice, granted a metaphor from the political world talking about it as injustice but that's actually interesting. According to the ordering of time in greek that's kaiten tukronu toxin system scientists working in nonlinear dynamics speak of arrangements of objects or the output of their interaction over time those same components are adimbrated in an axiomander statement the word toxin means arrangement or order kronu is time, i.e. the r value of the logistic map and taokrayon necessity is quote unquote expressed in greek as a necessity a natural or mathematical law so I'm not suggesting that an axiomander knew the logistic map but I'm suggesting that he understood and was sensitive to the importance of time as an element of change so a periodic time series i.e. period doubling bifurcation yields fractals you've probably seen these described by johnson as a typical emergent phenomenon in complex systems fractals represent states that are not too ordered and not too disordered in johnson's words, and this is important the upshot is that there is indeed a type of universal pattern of life lying somewhere in the middle ground between completely ordered patterns and completely disordered patterns fractals comprise a mathematical description of phenomena and characterize not only things in nature, i.e. the contours of mountain ranges and coastlines the human heartbeat, I've heard that that's debated though but also it has been shown products of culture like city skylines and modern jazz music studies on that are an interesting article on jazz an axiomander seems to have recognized some such automatic self-regulatory principle in nature though of course he did not and could not explain describe it mathematically I'll leave that for consideration later but that's the nature of my thinking about why an axiomander might be important for this project Heraclitus this is going to be difficult you know I'm almost tempted I'm almost tempted to not talk about heraclitus look how many slides there are that would leave me in trouble Heraclitus is also important for this project for a number of reasons let me just paraphrase it Heraclitus was also an ancient physicist his book was called Parafusaeos we don't have it all but we have substantial fragments he wrote in a very riddling style I think Nietzsche in Ionic Greek but he did this on purpose the observations he was making about the natural world and the nature of reality were paradoxical and he talks about a self-regulatory system in fact I want to go to one slide and it's this one because it features alright Heraclitus used the bow and the lyre as an example of the kind of the kind of thing that makes the world work and he called that kind of thing harmonia or word harmony comes from a Greek root word that means to put together from our old Indo-European root our Arorisco is a whole bunch of them word homer might be related to it so this is what he says and this is the only fragment I'll talk about here so he says this is a quote from Heraclitus they do not apprehend they being the unwashed masses how being at variance it agrees with itself literally how being brought apart it is brought together and the it there is the nature of reality the structure of the world oh and I just that's the point I make about noting the correspondence with another fragment that he has there is a back stretched connection and the word connection there is harmonia as in the bow and the lyre and I wanted to put this slide up here because I get to brag about my colleague John Franklin who wrote an astounding paper and I don't say that lightly a really killer paper on this topic called harmony in Greek and Indo-Iranian cosmology for the journal of Indo-European studies so for Heraclitus comparing the bow to the lyre both the bow and the lyre are as it were a complex system that form a feedback loop a circularity of the under tension so both ends of the bow are under tension by a string it contains potential energy that if activated can do things so it can show emergent properties this is what John says about it the living bow and I just point out that in Heraclitus he has another another axiom or another fragment that says that the bow's name Bios with the accent on the last syllable is life Bios accent on the first syllable but its work is death again typical paradox but the idea that the bow that the result the sum total is greater the result is more than the sum of its parts you know the bow's name is life but it produces death so the living bow says John was a very simple ancient and striking example of a transcendent hole the parts of which are caught in a continuous circular interplay mutually causing what has been called a whole systems theory and quote-unquote emergent property and here he's quoting Frito of Capra's the web of life I think John is but this notion of palin tropos a thing turning back on itself is important and I think is akin to the notion of a complex systems tendency to be self self-regulating and cybernetic and self-sufficient with no invisible hand I think I'm going to pause there because I do want to have time for questions or comments there's one rule for questions and comments and that is you can't ask me a question about math or physics but you may make a comment about math or physics for my edification thank you