On Reflection

I liked very much reading “Kokoro”, (“Hearts”), by Natsume Sōseki. A lovely snapshot into the Japanese hearts of that very special period that is the Meiji Restoration. I liked it so much that I'm now reading another book of the same author — “I am a cat”. Also great, but in a very different way.

“Kokoro”. It's so difficult to understand the human heart. Take the Japanese heart of 100 years ago, or slightly more, for example. What kind of man, what kind of woman, is one that is born there and then, which has lived their life there and then? That's a mystery already. And even a greater mystery is what happens when that man or woman sees all of their world mutate.

That's what happened with the arrival of the Americans in Japan, and the end of the Edo isolation, and the awareness that there was a world outside of Japan. An alien world, yes, but also a powerful one. One that could not just be ignored. A different world that, as it had become painfully clear from the start, could have a profound influence on Japan and the Japanese. And, regrettably, it would have an even larger impact a few years later.

“Kokoro” is all about this. It's about the Japanese hearts, and the way they respond to the world around them. While in “I am a cat” there is irony, in “Kokoro” there's a little of everything; and there's drama. There is death. Which is one of the responses that men and women sometimes give themselves, when the world around them becomes unbearable. Guilt, distress. Fear. Pressure. Shame. A feeling of inadequacy. A feeling of mismatch. It's a response that many Japanese choose for themselves even today. Different hearts, maybe, and the same answer, if it can be called like that.

“Kokoro” is a way to reflect on all this not as I'm doing right now, but more graphically. It's a snapshot, as I said already. But one that tells much more that what I could ever hope to express through a systematic discussion.

It is actually two books into one. Two stories with overlapping hearts. The young heart, the old heart; the countryside heart and the one of the big city; the woman's and the man's. The open heart and the secluded one. Stories of the match between those hearts and their societies, at all scales. From two friends to families to villages to the city and the nation.

I think that the fortune of this novel lies in this: it's the most compact way to tell, or better to preserve, those many stories. It is therefore more a monument than a “simple” book; it's a monument to those lives and times; to those hearts.

Kokoro's 1955 movie

After writing this post, I watched Kon Ichikawa's movie by the same title. A masterwork. Not only it materializes / visualizes what I could only and barely imagine while reading the Book — much more than that, it tells aspect that at the same time are and aren't in the Book. It faithfully brings life to a part of the story that the Author shadowed out. The highest visual Art based on the highest written Art. I'm impressed and moved.

Sensei writes his long letter to Hioki; 先生の遺書, Sensei's Testament.

Kokoro's 1973 movie

A second Kokoro movie appeared in 1973, directed by Kaneto Shindō. I have been watching it these days (October 2024). I am truly speechless, because I daresay this second interpretation is even more beautiful than Kon Ichikawa's. Kaneto diverges from the original setting in so many fundamental ways — the story is set in the Seventies, and focuses on sensei's testament part, omitting the disciple from the story. Why then, I ask myself, it is so truer to the novel? What kind of miracle is this? The director (who also wrote the screenplay) made it possible; but also the wonderful actors: Otowa Nobuko (who became Kaneto's mistress in 1951, appearing in nearly all of his films, and then his wife in 1977), Noboru Matsuhashi, the young sensei, Kazunaga Tsuji, his upright friend, and the beautiful Anri. So perfect is their interpretation, and so perfectly relived are the ideas and messages of the novel, that even the jazz trumpet-based soundtrack fits in perfectly rather than reminding the watcher of French movies of the Fifties and Sixties, and so the Moonlight Sonata, which never seems like a foreign organism (cf. Kaneko Atsushi's Soil.)

Noboru Matsuhashi

Mr. Robert Fripp. Ah no, sorry, it's Mr. Kazunaga Tsuji

Anri (I-ko or, much more appropriately, Ai-chan, as her mother calls her)

A man seen from behind walks along a pavement bordering a road. It's sensei's friend. The road rises and the man moves a little heavily, as if the climb weighs on him. In reality it is his thoughts that weigh him down, and that fork up there that leads who knows where.

Kokoro by Eidon is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

From 'Permian-Triassic Boundary Outcrop'. Photo by
Allosauroid Enthusiast.

252 million years ago a chain of events produced the so called Permian–Triassic (P–Tr) extinction event — a catastrophe that affected so deeply the terrestrial ecosystem that it is conjectured “it took some 10 million years for Earth to recover” from it. Nevertheless, the Earth ultimately did recover from it, which led to so big a change in natural history that scientists had to clearly separate what was before from what followed — the Paleozoic (“Old Life”) from the Mesozoic (the “Middle Life”). Among the many important questions that raise when considering so catastrophic an event, some that I feel are particularly intriguing are:

  • Q1: Was there any “common reasons” behind the P–Tr extinction event? In other words—were there “common triggers” causing such a widespread correlated failure?
  • Q2: What was the key ingredient — the key defensive strategies that is — that made it possible for the Earth to survive in spite of so harsh a blow?

In order to attempt to formulate an answer to the above questions, now I recall the following facts:

  • F1: “Mineralised skeletons confer protection against predators” (Wood 2018, Knoll 2003)
  • F2: “Skeleton formation requires more than the ability to precipitate minerals; precipitation must be carried out in a controlled fashion in specific biological environments” (Knoll 2003).
  • F3: “The extinction primarily affected organisms with calcium carbonate skeletons, especially those reliant on ambient CO2 levels to produce their skeletons” (Wikipedia 2021).

The three facts tell us, respectively, that:

  • One of nature's many independent evolutionary paths was particularly successful (F1) and thus became widespread.
  • Regrettably, the adoption of the solution implied a strong dependence on predefined and stable environmental conditions (F2).
  • A correlation exists between the class of species that adopted the solution and that of the species that were affected most by the P–Tr extinction event (F3).

A similar scenario can be drawn for very different stages. For instance, in computer systems, we could imagine that

  • A certain solution becomes widespread (for instance a memory technology, a software library, a programming language, an operating system, or a search engine).
  • The solution introduces a weakness: for instance, a dependence on a hidden assumption, or a “bug” depending on certain subtle and very rare environmental conditions.
  • The weakness translates into a common trigger, a single-point-of-multiple-failures. One or a few events could “ignite” the weakness and hit hard on all the systems that made use of the solution.

What can we conclude from the above facts and analogies? That solutions that (appear to) work well in the “common case” are those that widespread more. Regrettably, this decreases disparity, namely inter-species diversity. Species that externally appear considerably different from each other in fact share a common trait — a common design template. This means that whenever the “common case” is replaced by the very rare and very dangerous “Black Swan”, a large portion of the ecosystem is jeopardized. In fact, the rarest the exceptional condition, the more widespread is the template and the larger the share of species that will be affected.

This provides some elements towards an answer to question Q1: yes, there were common triggers that ultimately produced the P–Tr extinction event by increasing the diffusion of the same “recipes” thus paving the way to large amounts of correlated failures. On the other hand, the Earth did survive the Great Dying and other extinction events. Why? My guess, which also constitutes a tentative answer to question Q2, is that Nature introduces systemic thresholds that make sure that disparity never goes beyond some minimum. The key ingredient to guarantee this is diversity: it is not by chance that mutation is an intrinsic method in genetic evolution. Mutation and possibly other mechanisms make sure that, at any point in time, not all of the species share the same design templates. In turn, this guarantees that, at any point in time, not all the species share the same fate.

The major lesson we need to learn from all this is that diversity is an essential ingredient to resilience. Spread the use of a “general solution,” and you will bring down diversity, thus decreasing the chance that the ecosystem will be able to withstand the Black Swan when it will show up.

And if the general solution has not been tested for long-term side effects, the black swan may show up much sooner than expected.

Relying on a general solution may not be the right solution. Picture from the Vergilius Vaticanus (c. 400), Public Domain, Link

By avoiding a single, global strategy, even when that strategy proves wrong or counter-productive, still the damage will not be global and full. The few that did not comply will be able to pass through the sieves of the Black Swan with limited damage.

References

Post Scriptum

“Une erreur stratégique qui impacte l'avenir de l'humanité” : appel du Pr Luc Montagnier

Also available here.

Post Post Scriptum

”...selection of common viral escape mutants...”

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