Steinbeck on Teleology

In the spring of 1940, while the second World War was beginning to escalate in distant Europe, John Steinbeck and his dear friend, marine biologist Ed Ricketts, decided to go on a scientific boat expedition to the Gulf of California, also known as the Sea of Cortez.

“Let us go,” we said, “into the Sea of Cortez, realizing that we become forever a part of it; that our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eel-grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool, make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region. We shall take something away from it, but we shall leave something too.”

Their stated goal was the description and collection of a great number of specimens of all the life forms they could find along the coast. What they actually achieved was, I think, much more: a marvelous book that speaks of the Universe.

We had sat beside the little pool and watched the tree-frogs and the horsehair worms and the water-skaters, and had wondered how they got there, so far from other water. It seemed to us that life in every form is incipiently everywhere waiting for a chance to take root and start reproducing; eggs, spores, seeds, bacilli—everywhere. Let a raindrop fall and it is crowded with the waiting life. Everything is everywhere.

The book, which they titled The Log from the Sea of Cortez, has everything I ever wanted from a book. I'm known to have a soft spot for seafaring stories, and this one is all about cramped spaces cradled by the waves; the prose is literally Nobel-laureate-level good; and I want nothing more from a text than depth—another quality that distinguishes the Log more than most other books I know.

Steinbeck and Ricketts recount every early-morning excursion on those Mexican shores, every single variant they observed of the few clades of creatures that live in the region. At the same time, they organically expand the scope of their discoveries to the broadest truths about reality and existence. Their daily activities are mostly mundane, repetitive, diligent, and yet they can never bore you because they come across as deeply meaningful. Their expedition didn't simply catalog some species resident somewhere far away from most other places: it also showed what they meant when they wrote that "everything is everywhere".

The Log is too full of beautiful passages to do it any justice here. I only want to present you a few excerpts from a particular part of the book, Chapter 14, that touches on a theme I've been working on personally for a long time: teleology—the idea that many things happen for specific purposes—and the ills it engenders.

In the past couple of years I've read many papers, essays, and books on the topic of teleology and I have formed some pretty detailed ideas about it. I have a long essay on this topic coming up soon on Plankton Valhalla, so I know from experience how difficult it is to create a simple and coherent argument on these topics. I thought it needed a lot of scientific premises to really get the point across.

Well, the Log's fourteenth chapter explains teleology (and non-teleology) better than most others, and without requiring the reader to deeply understand hard sciences. To my astonishment, it does it better than many eminent scientists and philosophers who tried, and chronologically earlier than most of them! I started reading this book hoping for beautiful descriptions of nature and voyage, and did not expect to find such a precious inspiration for my own research. This is why you should always read broadly.

Steinbeck's and Ricketts' point (these ideas were born from their evening beer-fueled conversations, so it is meaningless to try attributing what follows to only one of them) is that teleological thinking is a distorting and unhelpful way to look at the world. Its basic assumption is that things have to be either "right" or "wrong", depending on whether they further a stated goal or not. But this does not reflect reality, because reality can't be right or wrong, it can only be. They write:

In their sometimes intolerant refusal to face facts as they are, teleological notions may substitute a fierce but ineffectual attempt to change conditions which are assumed to be undesirable, in place of the understanding-acceptance which would pave the way for a more sensible attempt at any change which might still be indicated.

In other words, purpose-based thinking nudges you into a narrow view of the world where your role is to execute or protect some preordained plans, rather than seeing things in the full richness of their possibilities.

It is better to let go of such notions and embrace the non-teleological view of life. It is a philosophy of unbounded acceptance.

[Non-teleological ideas] consider events as outgrowths and expressions rather than as results; conscious acceptance as a desideratum, and certainly as an all-important prerequisite. Non-teleological thinking concerns itself primarily not with what should be, or could be, or might be, but rather with what actually “is”—attempting at most to answer the already sufficiently difficult questions what or how, instead of why.

Take in the world without burdening it with your judgment, say the authors. It is enough, and more rewarding, to take in the uncountable expressions of existence as they are, instead of shoehorning them into narrow schemes and subtly shaky value systems.

The chapter offers several examples, like the following.

At one time an important game bird in Norway, the willow grouse, was so clearly threatened with extinction that it was thought wise to establish protective regulations and to place a bounty on its chief enemy, a hawk which was known to feed heavily on it. Quantities of the hawks were exterminated, but despite such drastic measures the grouse disappeared actually more rapidly than before. The naively applied customary remedies had obviously failed.

The naïveté stems from the teleological approach. If you assume that the nearly-extinct species should survive, automatically its predators become bad. The answer, then, seems straightforward: kill the bad hawks to save the good grouse. Why didn't it work, then?

An ecological analysis into the relational aspects of the situation disclosed that a parasitic disease, coccidiosis, was epizootic among the grouse. In its incipient stages, this disease so reduced the flying speed of the grouse that the mildly ill individuals became easy prey for the hawks. In living largely off the slightly ill birds, the hawks prevented them from developing the disease in its full intensity and so spreading it more widely and quickly to otherwise healthy fowl. Thus the presumed enemies of the grouse, by controlling the epizootic aspects of the disease, proved to be friends in disguise.

The non-teleological mindset, here, would be one of acceptance. Nothing should be anything, nothing is good or bad, and everything simultaneously just is. The hawks are, just as much as the grouse are, and many other things are too: you have to take them all into account to have any hope of coming up with effective interventions. If something we do allows their population to stabilize, that's that. If the grouse disappear, that's that, too.

This stance feels wrong to some people, though, because "whoever employs this type of thinking with other than a few close friends will be referred to as detached, hard-hearted, or even cruel."

This is a mistake, claim Steinbeck and Ricketts, because the opposite is true.

Non-teleological methods more than any other seem capable of great tenderness, of an all-embracingness which is rare otherwise. Consider, for instance, the fact that, once a given situation is deeply understood, no apologies are required. There are ample difficulties even to understanding conditions “as is.” Once that has been accomplished, the “why” of it ... seems no longer to be preponderantly important. It needn’t be condoned or extenuated, it just “is.” It is seen merely as part of a more or less dim whole picture.

I was surprised to read such a modern and scientifically grounded worldview from people writing in 1930s. These views are easy enough to accept if you know something about the theory of dynamical systems, ecology, and biological complexity—none of which were really a thing (as we understand them today scientifically) when the Log was published!

But I want to conclude with what I think is the most mind-bending point in Chapter 14. The authors' non-teleological philosophy is not simply a matter of whether or not you assume goals in things and judge them based on how well those goals are accomplished. The non-teleological view is necessary also because it removes the distorting veil of causal thinking.

Cause-and-effect relations—the fact that everything is caused by something else— is something we take for granted, but it is an illusion, a crutch or compromise we use to make sense of the world around us.

But again, everything simply is, everywhere and all at once, so there can be no hierarchies or before/afters:

In such a pattern, causality would be merely a name for something that exists only in our partial and biased mental reconstructings. The pattern which it indexes, however, would be real, but not intellectually apperceivable because the pattern goes everywhere and is everything and cannot be encompassed by finite mind or by anything short of life—which it is.

This is hard to swallow. It is even hard to understand! Why would the fact that everything is, without goals, make causality an illusion? Perhaps an example will help you see their point.

Imagine watching a horse walk behind a wooden palisade. Only thin vertical slices of the other side are visible through the planks. When the horse passes behind one of those slits, you first see its snout appear and disappear in a second. Then the ears show up—sudden dark spikes against the greenery beyond. Then comes the thickness of the neck, after which the legs flicker into view for an instant, broken-looking. The curves of the back and belly manifest to you as a smooth growth followed by a shrinkage of a vertical chestnut band. You see legs again, then the rear that collapses out of existence, and finally the precipitous dive of the short bundle of blond hairs that make up the horse's tail. Then the horse passes behind another slit, and another, repeating the same spectacle for you several times.

Now suppose you have never seen a horse before in your life. Those fleeting shapes between the wooden surfaces are all you've ever seen of what people call "horse". "Horse," then, may seem to you to belong to the category of mysterious events rather than the category of things. You saw a sequence of happenings, not something that exists at the same time.

You may even start to believe that those strange but well-ordered events—the ear-spike, the belly-pulse, the tail-dive—are linked to each other by causality: the first event triggers the one after it, the growth of a shape sets the stage and causes the occurrence of the next bold transformation.

Of course, you would be wrong to think that. The "occurrence" of the legs' complex flicker in the gap between the planks does not "cause" the distinctive patterns that follow it: they simply are what they are at the same time, and the regular temporal relationship between those "events" is only an artifact of the very limited view afforded you by the wooden barrier.

John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts believed that reality is that horse, and our senses are slits in that palisade. Letting go of a teleological view of life is not equivalent to removing the palisade and seeing the horse all at once—that is not really possible for our "finite minds". It means accepting that the palisade is there and that things are whole and connected despite all appearances.

The two mariners only spell this line of reasoning out in that one chapter, but this lens, or rather absence of a teleological lens pervades the entire book. Demonstrating its own point about simultaneity, the Log echoes the same idea in a scientifically poetic, or poetically scientific passage at its very beginning, right after that first "Let us go" quote. After saying that they will take something away from the region and also leave something behind, they continue:

And if we seem a small factor in a huge pattern, nevertheless it is of relative importance. We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn’t terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn’t very important in the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.

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