Individuals: The Queerist Possibility: Chapter 1:

The Evidence Problem

This was a difficult chapter to write. I threw away half as much as you’ll read here. In truth, it needs a longer treatment, and I debated leaving it aside altogether. But, ultimately, I decided it provides a necessary key to understand why I’m writing this way, and not some other. As always, I hope that if you find my argument objectionable, you will at least enjoy having spent your time with it.

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We live in an age of abundant empirical data, predictive algorithms, machine learning, five-sigma certainties, and genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphic analysis, an age in which waves of gravity born a billion light years away are captured by the curious, and cars can fly.¹ How should a humanist stand in relation to these wonders? As scold, cheerleader, ostrich? Should we strive for objectivity, or abandon the pretext?² If the former, how do we establish objective humanistic frames? If the latter, why should anyone take us seriously? Without some commitment to objectivity we can make no claims about human society, its character or its trajectory, that rises above the tyranny of self-righteousness or the frivolity of taste.

One approach is to embrace mathematical rigor, and incorporate testable hypotheses into our arguments. This is the approach Peter Turchin and his fellow cliodynamacists have taken. Converting traditional historical and archaeological analyses into large datasets, they make empirical arguments about social evolution, and work to identify recurring historical patterns.³ An antagonistic approach is to avoid grand theories altogether. Stick to primary texts, make narrow claims in situ, and refuse to induce beyond the boundaries of one’s particular specialization. These are both very fine strategies—necessary and indispensable to the production of human knowledge. And they are they both inadequate.

We know they are inadequate because “we believe all men are created equal” even though our physical, mental, and emotional capacities vary widely both inter and intra-sexually. No empirical dataset will ever show that we are, in fact, equal, and no circumscribed historical epoch or epistemological frame will justify this principle. Furthermore, we believe critique has power even though political regimes for thousands of years have ground dissidents into paste. And we believe justice aspires to cecity even though a two-tiered pleb, patrician legal system is the historical norm.

Experience ceaselessly frustrates our aspirations. Yet, here we are: writing and reading books, protesting and posturing, volunteering and donating blood. No aggregation of data could have predicted the rise of Islam, or Empress Wu Zetian’s subversion of imperial Chinese norms in the 7th century. And no fidelity to disciplinary boundaries would prepare you to see the deep similarities between 14th century lay European Catholicism and 12th-15th century Japanese Pure Land Buddhism, when famine, disease, and war in both geographies, led to democratizations of ritual, faith based salvation, Apocalypticism (Mappō in Buddhism), anti-elitism, and social welfare networks that circumvented traditional institutional hierarchies.

Complex human societies are shaped by forces impervious to empirical reduction or socio-cultural primacy. The very existence of multi-ethnic, transhistorical communities of strangers—what we call religions—belies this. And this kind of creative, anagogical exploration must continue, even in a secular context. It must not be relegated to the past. To make arguments by analogy, aspiration, and intuitive speculation, arguments that pull facts alongside, rather than chase behind them, is vital to our survival as a technologically advanced species. And the impetus to do this is provided by history.

Everywhere we look there are affirmative arrangements towards which human communities tend: transcendent mythology, cooperation, trade, abstract units of exchange, medicine, articulation and translation. But also alongside and intertwined are persistent deprecations: a pervasive sense of impending cosmological doom, a belief in the perfidy of strangers, the circumscription of sexual gratification, the certainty that something deep in the human code is flawed, cracked, occluded, sinful. Theory and philosophy, that is to say hermeneutics and ontology, are still the best and only tools for this kind of exploration. But these methods are hampered by deep and consequential limitations. And here we come to the second and more serious problem of evidence in the humanities. If the humanist’s relationship to objectivity is essential, even if fraught, their relationship to their own subjectivity is fateful.

If some historian somewhere found a letter written in the unmistakable handwriting of Abraham Lincoln that read, “I would subject every negro soul on this continent to the wrack of a southern whip if it would but preserve the union,” would that nullify his Peoria Address, or his House Divided Speech? In light of this evidence, should we consider emancipation a national accident, rather than a natural, even if bitterly fought, amendment to the nation’s original promise. The answer to that question tells us more about the humanist and our present than it does Lincoln and our past. There’s over 5,000 years of written history behind us, countless revolutions and genocides, war, engineered pestilence, slavery, yet here we are in 2025 with 75% of the world’s population calling each other on their cell phones, hundreds of millions of dollars devoted to international charities to improve access to potable water, and deaths from natural disasters and famine dropping to historic lows. So what story should we tell?

Both, of course.

History can turn at any moment. A chemical or biological war could wipe out billions. Millions of working poor are one paycheck away from homelessness. But your disposition towards the strangers who populate our past, present, and future inflects your thinking. What is your relationship to that uncertainty, to the often disagreeable angularity of facts, to the pell-mell of emotions that propel history? How readily can you shed the warmth of social approval? How enamored are you with your own moral luxuries? Have you acquired a taste for truth’s overpowering astringency? Degrees do not prepare you for its bitterness. Politics is an obstruction. Ideology is poison. Only your relationship to your own magnificent inconsequence can prepare you to see the world as it is and as it might be.

It’s possible, reasonable even, that you might reject my framing, my emphasis on intimacies normally expunged from intellectual labor. Certainly you would be in good company. One consequence of the West’s secular turn is that holistic questions of character and intent have been conspicuously shunted to biographical curiosities and coteriean gossip. Spiritual virtues, what Nietzsche called “die große Gesundheit,” the great health required to meet the challenges of a secular age,⁴ were sanitized from our social sciences, our philosophies and histories. The appearance of originality and intelligence are sufficient to draw attention. Intent is bracketed the way phenomenologists bracket the thing-itself. But everyone intuitively understands that “character is higher than intellect,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson declared, Nietzsche cribbed, and Ralph Ellison refined.⁵ The consonance between one’s interior life and one’s social performance, character, engenders trust and admiration everywhere.⁶ Whereas an irresolute genius is indistinguishable from a buffoon. And originality unmoored from intent inevitably leads to perversion. Intellectual horsepower is simply not enough to excavate wisdom from history’s ruin. Undeniably, many miracles manifested out of the West’s secular turn: universal suffrage, antibiotics, literacy, vaccines, caloric abundance. But the value and importance of these essential, private intimacies in our scholarship has plummeted. And this diminished value inflects the collection, filtration, and the sorting of evidence because the intellectual climate we inhabit weathers our intellectual analysis in unmistakable ways.

Misanthropy, resentment, and disaffection darkens scholarship, just as well as out of touch, elite, sanguinity obscures injustice. Much work has been done in the 20th and 21st centuries to uncover the ways in which complex societies elided the suffering of the disenfranchised who powered their ascendance: Blacks in America, Africans in Islam, Koreans in Japan, Jews in Europe, Kurds in Turkey, Indigenous Tributaries in Central and South America, Women everywhere. But that is only one aspect of our history. There are no scales to balance suffering against satisfaction, and I’m not suggesting there can be. But I am saying, forcefully, that unexamined presumptions affect every aspect of our intellectual work. Formal empirical frameworks can be a bulwark against this. Focused historical delimitations can be a bulwark against this. Neither is perfect, nor near perfect, but they offer some protection. But for humanists who would plunge into history’s torrent and return with something of value for the communities that enable their idle, there is no other check than self-awareness.

Roughly 117 billion humans have inhabited the earth so far, maybe 100,000 languages have been spoken, and at least that many distinct cultures have passed across her face.⁷ The magnitude of human diversity humbles the imagination, yet we strive to say something about them, even a sliver of them? We purport to say something about “power,” to say something about “religion,” to say something about “money,” to say something about “knowledge.” Philosophers and theorists are comfortable establishing these faithful orders the way any 4th-century South Asian anchorite was comfortable proclaiming the nature of the universe was suffering. But this comparison isn’t a critique. It’s a defense of the anchorite’s purview and our genealogy, an unabashed celebration of the philosopher’s impulse to create a larger moral universe, because this is the waken,⁸ the alchemy, out of which our higher aspirations are made. In order to meet this challenge, introspection and humility must be part and parcel of our practice. The cenobite’s moral power was tethered to their self-awareness. A similar kind of secular mindfulness of the limitations inherent in our theoretical or aspirational assemblages is needed to continue that work into the 21st century. Towards that end, I propose three principles.⁹

Wisdom doesn’t scale. Two or more things are true at once. And vanity shades everything.

Let’s take the middle proposition first.

The Law of the Excluded Middle

For the physical and life sciences, the statistically empirical application of the law of the excluded middle is the principle that propels them forward.¹⁰ For any given proposition, it is either true or it is false. By rigorously limiting the nearly infinite number of observational end points, the scientific method produces data that authorizes it to judge material phenomenon as either (very, very probably) true, or (very, very probably) false. The truth is this or the truth is that. This “excluded middle,” this or, is as if divine. Like the Dharma and the Tao, like Ørlǫg, like God’s judgment, the truth is revealed through its application, and its disjunction is irrevocable. Until the Enlightenment, this filtration had been the purpose and aspiration of every culture’s germinal transcendental mythology, but now that revelation has become a pantheon of humans. Yes, those cultural mythologies always masked political arrangements that benefited the powerful, but it often also tempered them. For every Christopher Columbus there was a Bartolomé de las Casas.¹¹ The impact of this unmasking cannot be overstated, even where it has been overestimated—as we’ll discuss shortly.

In truth, most of what the sciences produce is junk: it fails to replicate, secures tenure but not truth, yields provisional observations that evaporate when rigorously randomized, suggests correlation but ducks causation. On and on. Yet we have penicillin. It is riddled with errors, yet we have refrigeration and microscopes. Its truths are always provisional, yet we split the atom, then bound it. It is embedded in flawed institutions managed by equally flawed humans, yet it reached back through time and harvested life’s hydrocarbonic remainder to heat the arctic, water the desert, and put a slab of glass in your pocket that recalls at whim the sum total of human knowledge. To deny that 21st century material civilization is a snow globe of miracles is to embrace nihilism.

Humanists can, indeed should, provide the moral imagination to guide scientific disjunction, but we cannot partake in it. We have no recourse to its logical powers. For us, two or more things are always true at once. We might emphasize one element over another, but it’s always a choice. A humanist disturbs the facts of history as surely as an observer disturbs the waves in a quantum mechanical system. Their character shapes their framing. It is natural to envy the power of the experimental sciences, their certainty, but the degree to which we forget that our epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic frames are irrevocably imbricated with their exceptions, and often their antitheses, is the degree to which we become legalists and harridans. We have no access to the excluded middle. Our insights are ephemeral. Like language itself, a humanist’s work skims the surface of a universe in constant flux. But this linguistic improvisation is “the new skin for an old ceremony.” And that ceremony is meant to recall the verities that increase the degrees of freedom that engender human flourishing. To that end, scientific certainty must be preserved and bounded.

This requires the humanist to have a flaneur-like relationship to science’s most beguiling foster child, technology, which leads us to our first principle.

Material Culture is not Symbolic Culture

Material culture is power crafted to purpose. It flows from one symbolic culture to another, is largely indifferent to ideology, and serves no end other than its own reduplication. With a few notable exceptions—the late Bronze Age collapse, the fall of Rome, the disintegration of Mayan civilization in the 9th century—material culture expands relentlessly. Its complexity increases. Its energetic reserves surge.¹² When the Aurignacian peoples used carinated burins to innovate tools better fitted to killing and building that was material culture and that was power. We don’t really have any idea what the Aurignacian’s thought, or the Gravettian’s after them, or the Mousterian or Oldowan before them. But we have their tools. Those tools passed on. They were copied and improved. What remains of their symbolic culture is unknowable—gone forever.¹³

Power was there waiting for humans long before it was mythologized by symbolic culture, or legalized by scripture. Only the dead are free from it. And power as material culture is why anyone beyond a few acolytes care that E=mc2, or that fusion powers the stars. The world of GPS devices and atomic clocks, electric cars and Monsanto seeds runs off the same grid that powered our ascendance over other animals, and it is only tangentially related to symbolic culture. Roughly speaking, symbolic culture, which is transmitted through oral and literary culture, is subsequent to material culture.¹⁴ Shakespeare’s genius will never surpass that of the wheel, no matter how profoundly I am stirred by Lear’s lament. Mahavira’s cosmic compassion can’t encompass the mortar and pestle that first pressed plants into salves against suffering. Even where it endures, symbolic culture is an always-half improvised explanation of the material conditions of a universe which precedes but does not define us.¹⁵ Humans are bound by these conditions, but they are not entirely beholden to them. And this limited freedom has produced these two different strategies for managing our bloody inheritance. One, material culture, scales. The other, symbolic culture, does not. They should not be confused.

Symbolic culture inflects material culture, but it is only inflection. No symbolic culture finally controls material culture for long. It’s why the colonial era could only happen once in human history. For a hundred years it was European iron and gunpowder versus horses and arrows. But now, guns are everywhere. Tanks are everywhere. Land mines are everywhere. Cell phones, drones, and gas powered engines have suffused every symbolic culture with material power— with the exception of a few edge cases like the uncontacted indigenous peoples of Brazil who prove the rule. The United States couldn’t even successfully set up a puppet government in Afghanistan, a country with a GDP just over one-third the size of Vermont’s, the smallest cog in the US economic engine ($17 billion vs $43 billion). No Western power will ever set up a satrap in South Asia again. Power is still asymmetrical, of course. We can still bomb, cajole, and bully. But material culture’s proliferation has ensured that 19th century style colonialism will (very likely) never happen again.

But many humanists have mistaken the virulence of material culture, or technology, for that of Western symbolic culture. Hundreds of thousands of pages have been spent searching for some secret hollow at the heart of Western civilization, some peculiar materialism, some insatiable emptiness that swallowed the world’s pristine heterogeneity. But it wasn’t that. It was material culture, and it will continue on long past any Western hegemony. Yes, the conditions for the Industrial Revolution emerged in Europe, but they were preceded by every other material innovation before them. Yes, the extractive colonialism of the 15th-18th centuries was brutal, and Western, but it was also absolutely unremarkable in the history of empire. Violence has been here all along. Predation and heterotrophy predate photosynthesis and herbivory by hundreds of millions of years. “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him.”¹⁶ Chimpanzees wage war. Bonobos commit infanticide. The weapons and wares of material culture will fill the hands of humans symbolically oriented towards other suns until we are gone from the earth. Barring calamity it will continue to scale, increasing in power by orders of magnitude that dwarf the growth of symbolic culture.

The pace of technological progress has short circuited our ability to think clearly about human social evolution, politics, and religion. Material culture possesses no wisdom. But symbolic culture does. A missile is no less moral than a hammer. But symbolic culture can and does influence how we use the hammer, how we use the missile. The technologies of summoning, transmutation, telekinesis, bilocation, and translocation have uncoiled our cerebral aspirations from our mortal limitations and produced the delusion of a secular break with the past. But there has been no break from the past. The world has not become disenchanted, as Weber claimed and many followed. Our universe is and will always-already be enchanted because symbolic culture is an enchantment, the collective song that animates an indifferent universe.¹⁷ Superstition and violent chauvinism can surge forth at any moment. No symbolic culture will ever be free of it. There is no escape velocity from menace, anxiety, or fear. Wisdom must be found again and again within each generation using the metaphors and analogues endowed to it. This leads us to our final principle. Vanity.

Big Ego, Little Ego

Ecclesiastes was right. Shakespeare was right. Śaṅkara was right. Ego and vanity are inextricably human. But they are also only one side of the double helix that supplies the blueprint for human invention. On the other side is the spiral of curiosity and spirit.¹⁸ No creature completely ruled by vanity could write “Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas,” or “We are such stuff / as dreams are made on and our little life / is rounded with a sleep,” or “Subtler than the subtle, greater than the great, in the heart of each living being, the atman reposes.”¹⁹ In Platonic terms, the flame of liberation casts the shadow of understanding. To know we are in the cave is already to be liberated from it. And though we aren’t entirely ruled by vanity, neither can we escape it.

So there are two ways to go for those who would aspire to the kind of work you and I have been thinking about here. One, to diminish the influence of one’s vanity to such a fine substance that it barely perfumes your work, to stay so close to one’s sources that one’s voice is barely a whisper, and to seek out so many antagonists to one’s prejudices that your biases become inconsequential to your analysis. Two, to encompass so much, account for so many, attend so earnestly, bear as great a weight as one can manage, and then more, to the point of breaking, to the point of failure, straining to the very limit of your capacity to surf language’s wild current so that your biases are outnumbered by your affections.

Turn your vanity into an aesthetic choice, your own song.

This is only one way of knowing. There are others. We’ve barely touched on them. They are of immense value—priceless. I feel gratitude for historians and linguists, biologists and chemists, translators and specialists laser focused on curiosities beyond my eye to discern.

But the way of knowing I’ve outlined here, its principles and aspirations, is important, urgently needed. It’s fallen into disrepute in the academy. It has no home in politics. It doesn’t belong in temples. It should be evaluated by how much it can discern, down to the fractal of the fractals that make up the borders of our knowing, or up and out, towards the larger fractal that encompasses the cosmic correspondences of which we are a part. This knowledge is aspirational. Transubstantiating what might be, into what is. Evidence in the humanities is and must always be selective. It’s unavoidable. Every humanist is always making this choice. I’ve made mine, and this book is its fruit.

—Memento mori, memento vagari

1. The LIGO observatory, which successfully detected a gravity wave in 2015, uses sensors that can detect when a 4km long beam is altered by a thousandth of the width of a proton. According to researchers, that’s like detecting, on earth, when Alpha Centauri moves the width of one human hair. And genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphic analysis has provided tremendous insights into human prehistory, revealing that the Yamnaya, or Pit Grave culture, displaced previously settled Eurasian cultures around 3,000 BCE—think progenitors of the Proto-Indo-European linguistic complex.

2. If you’re flummoxed by the rhetorical question, it’s probably because you haven’t spent much time with late 20th and early 21st century humanists or social scientists. Objectivity as an ideal has been harried, in the post-WWII world, since Karl Mannheim published Ideology and Utopia in 1936. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) was the first that I’m aware of to explicitly tie “objectivity” to power and domination. But their (often opaque) analysis of the ways in which the Enlightenment was used to instrumentalize human beings, to transform objective analysis from a tool of liberation into a program of domination, didn’t last beyond them. Far more simplistic analyses, including those of Michel Foucault, locked themselves onto one half of the prepositional logic: power over, entirely ignoring power to. A whole essay should be written, if it hasn’t already been, that traces the coarsening genealogy.

3. We’ll return to cliodynamics when we discuss the axialogical as an emergent property of complexity in Chapter 8.

4. This is all over Nietzsche’s oeuvre, but is most forcefully expressed in the second edition of The Gay Science, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1887)

5. Ellison was a close reader of Emerson, as he reveals in Shadow and Act (1964). And it is well-known by those who care to know it that Nietzsche read Emerson intensely throughout his life. It is curious that so many humanists in Anglo-American universities spend so much time on Nietzsche and so little time on Emerson.

6. “Understanding the Relationship Between Authenticity and Well-Being,” Review of General Psychology (Rivera, et al. 2019). An imperfect proxy for Emerson’s use of “character” is “authenticity,” a term he does not use but often describes as foundational to character. Character typically refers to one’s purchase on a core set of virtues, but these virtues require authenticity. Unlike deontological or consequentialist moral frames, inauthentic bravery is not bravery, inauthentic compassion is not compassion. However, because virtues are (somewhat) culturally contingent, it is difficult to study them cross-culturally. So what Grace Rivera and her colleagues did was study the perceived (i.e. subjective) value of authenticity to avoid issues with cultures that positively assess role-shifting, such as those in East Asia. In these cultures, “being true to oneself” isn’t laudable; it’s often disrespectful. However, even in these cultures, their research suggests that “authentic” individuals are perceived as more likable and trustworthy. Whatever inflection a culture puts on character and authenticity, its seems that its intersubjective value remains.

7. Population: Population Reference Bureau. For languages and cultures I used ChatGPT, which cited the linguists Johanna Nichols and Merritt Ruhlen for the language total, and Peter Peregrine’s Atlas of Cultural Evolution for the culture total. I spent a little time verifying this, and wouldn’t defend the number beyond aesthetic considerations. They each offer some speculations on how one might determine this number, but the +/- is something like 50,000+. In any case, the numbers are very large.

8. Waken is the element of transformation in Lakota cosmology.

9. That is to say, the thinking that is descriptive (theory), and the thinking that is normative (aspirational).

10. Theoretical physics and mathematics are excluded from this generalization.

11. A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1542). Las Casas was a Dominican friar who defended the humanity of the indigenous and criticized the conquistadors on Christian moral grounds.

12. Energy and Civilization: A History (2018) by Vaclav Smil

13. I am using the following terms interchangeably: on one side, material culture, technology, tools, means of production, industry, and on the other side symbolic culture, ideology, superstructure, signifiers. It is very easy to lose oneself in the weeds here. Each of these terms has an immense literature. You’re welcome to police what is most precious to you.

14. Literary culture’s power stems from the fusion of oral and material culture. What is ephemeral becomes material.

15. Marxists get the order right but the function wrong. Civilization’s superstructure isn’t a coping mechanism. And the means of production isn’t the truth it hides. Both the superstructure and the means of production are adaptations to a biological universe whose fundamental force is power. The Marxist’s description of the relationship between material and symbolic culture is idiosyncratic because it fits a particular narrative teleology. We’ll return to Marx in Chapter 9.

16. Blood Meridian (1985) by Cormac McCarthy.

17. Enchantment from the Latin cantare, to sing.

18. I don’t, yet, know what I mean by “spirit,” other than that which is not scrutable by matter.

19. Respectively, Ecclesiastes, The Tempest, and Śaṅkara’s commentary on the Upanishads. I chose the Latin version of Ecclesiastes because I love it. The repetition in the Latin has always been incantatory to me. An internet version of Śaṅkara with the Sanskrit is available here. As for Shakespeare, take your pick. This was mine.