También podés leer la versión en castellano.
It's December. Again. That arbitrary time of the year when we take stock of what happened in our lives over the last 12 months. I usually wouldn't engage in such practices because of their arbitrariness. However, over the last 12 months, I've learned—probably to my partner's delight—that it's the arbitrariness of such dates that makes them useful to assess the past and help better engage with the future. It’s been in 2024 that this Substack began, so it's time to review how things have gone in this space of shared ideas.
If you look at the numbers, it's been a resounding success. When I published my first article back in February, I had one subscriber: me. Throughout the year, there's been a 3000% increase in subscribers. Any economy, business, or influencer would kill for those numbers! I'd like to take this opportunity to thank those 30 souls out there who clicked the subscribe button, of whom 5 or 6 of you religiously read my posts. It's with a certain degree of sarcasm, and also with complete honesty, that I thank you. Believe it or not, the fact that you took the time to read whatever nonsense I wrote is invaluable to me and has kept me motivated throughout this special year. Not only to continue writing, but to continue thinking, feeling, and experiencing life. All my blessings to you.
Writing has brought me closer to reading, and during the tail end of the year, I've kept myself busy with Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature: The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt, the Lost Hero of Science, a biography of the 19th-century scientist Alexander von Humboldt. When we think of science, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein come to mind. We could also acknowledge that genius is not only a male attribute and mention Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace, and Jane Goodall. To a lot of us, Alexander von Humboldt is a bit of an unknown. We might recognize the name, but most of us are completely unaware that he was one of the founders of modern environmental sciences and the ecology movement.
Up until the 16th century, people—mostly men who had enough wealth and resources to have leisure time—would sit around and think about the nature of things. That’s what I consider living the life. They were “philosophers.” Because the scientific method wasn't around yet, all they had to do was write their thoughts down and voilà, they had explained how the world works. Yup, living the life. It sounds primitive, but their wacky philosophical ideas still influence the way we view the world today.
Medieval scholastic thinkers codified the “great chain of being,” a hierarchical structure that classified all forms of existence, from rocks to plants, to animals, angels, and humans. Guess who was at the top of that hierarchy? You got it: us bipeds. If medieval scholastics aren't your cup of tea, consider the concept of Cartesian dualism. The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes speculated that there are two substances: the body and the mind. In this framework, only humans have minds, and animals are reduced to being complex biological machines. Only a combination of these two frameworks can sustain the modern industrial food complex and its inherent animal abuse. If animals are inferior machines, we can do with them as we please. As you can see, very odd ideas influence our way of seeing the world.
This speculative approach came to an end in the 16th century, when a guy by the name of Bacon came around and developed a tool. Behold: the scientific method and its resulting scientific revolution. Very quickly, philosophy outsourced the task of explaining how the world works to a new branch of knowledge called science. But science was too broad. If you’ve ever made an attempt to figure out a theory that explains everything, you know what I'm talking about. As a result, science started to fragment into discrete areas that tried to solve more specific problems. This is when humanity saw the birth of fields like physics, chemistry, biology, and botany, to name a few.
In Humboldt's time, the early 19th century, this process was well developed and established. Physicists studied the mechanics of matter and energy, chemists studied the composition of matter, biologists studied living beings and their interaction, and so on. Each in their own little bubble, and in isolation. As a naturalist, geographer, and explorer, Humboldt didn't buy this idea. He saw the world as a whole. He viewed nature as an integrated system, not as a series of discrete phenomena. He maintained that plants, animals, climate, geology, and human activity are all connected. That is, he understood the world as the native inhabitants of South America did—where he travelled as a young man and grasped the principles that he later developed throughout the rest of his life. Humboldt’s contribution was to provide the empirical observation and scientific backing of this philosophical framework. Humboldt was a scientist, but foremost, a philosopher.
Yes, believe it or not, this is related to the assessment of my year on Substack because I'm just like Humboldt. Maybe I should rephrase that. I like his holistic approach, and even though I didn't know it, it's what I've been trying to express in this blog throughout the entire year. Granted, I took the speculative route, but it was speculation based on today's basic common knowledge, with its implicit scientific understanding of the world.
My Substack journey began with Technology isn't our way out. The article is a critique of techno-optimism, a siloed mindset that assumes whatever mess we get ourselves into, we can get our way out of it through technology. I agree we can solve problems with technology, but while tech-based solutions fix one thing, they usually bring new problems. There's no doubt the combustion engine fixed the problem of slow transportation—and cleared out the blanket of horse manure that covered the streets in our cities—but it's also caused millions of deaths and pollution.
In If all you've got is data, you're just another person with numbers, we've discussed the rational “scientific” approach of quantifying phenomena. There's a sort of scientific malpractice in the idea that everything must be quantified, and that quantification equates to objectivity. However, as Humboldt made clear, everything is connected and we can't isolate phenomena through pure quantification. We can see this when he wrote about the impact intensive agriculture in South America had on the environment. In quantitative terms, these agricultural practices worked well for the economy; however, they were terrible for the ecosystem. Yet another example where a fragmented understanding of the world can lead us to biased conclusions.
This brings us to another topic we spent some time on in Everything but the economy, stupid. Another commonly siloed approach in today's political discourse is market ideology: a view that considers we can solve all our problems if we let the market do its thing. This mindset disregards the idea that humans, and the societies we live in, are complex. Our economic activity has externalities the market doesn't account for. What market value does a person's happiness and well-being have? How much are we willing to pay for the conservation of nature? Is it fair or desirable that the only valuable skills are those that can be capitalized?
These market forces today dominate all aspects of our lives. In The gender divide in sports, we observed how a patriarchal market society has excluded women from sports. This may have deprived us of alternative ways of seeing competition. Humboldt was a physical man who felt most alive while climbing mountains and wandering through nature. He surely would’ve had something to say about the monetization of physical activity. Furthermore, he was never married and had profound relationships with various men throughout his life and didn’t fit the stereotypical gender model of his time. Maybe he would’ve had something to say about gender politics.
If we speak about the patriarchy, we are speaking of forms of oppression and dominance. The German scientist-philosopher was vocally against the widespread practice of slavery during his time. He adamantly believed no race, gender, or nationality was inferior. He was an internationalist who believed in sharing scientific knowledge no matter where in the world it originated. I hope he would’ve shared some of the ideas exposed in Hold hands or build walls.
Humboldt’s approach was holistic in the broad sense. That is, he understood that true knowledge is also beautiful. One of his longest and most intimate friendships was with a somewhat popular scribbler, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and he influenced the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Edgar Allan Poe. Humboldt wasn't an obscure, cryptic scientific writer; he wrote beautifully for the layperson to understand science and be marveled by the natural world humanity is part of. The Music for Adults series is an effort to view art as a means to help us better our lives and live with beauty (check out the latest volume, Music for adults Vol. 4: they still exist).
In short, from a place of humility, 2024 has been an unknowing and modest contribution to the same holistic philosophical approach of the German explorer. We’ve mentioned just some of the posts that were published in Writer by Technicality in 2024; stop by and check out the others. I also hope that 2025 will bring us more minute, daily observations to write about and add clarity to the world we live in. Bendiciones.
Thank you for sharing with us a bit of the wonderful and insightful way you see the world!
Keep them coming! 🙌🏻