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Painting Credit: John Trumbull

Oct 27, 2008
Plasma Politics

The flood of new data during the space age has also inundated astronomers with surprises.

New instruments have acquired images and measurements that traditional theories about gravity and gas didn’t expect. The data hasn’t “made sense” until exceptions or additions or revisions have been made to the theories.

But insights into the behavior of plasma have made sense of the data—without modifications. A new field of study has arisen: Plasma Cosmology is a part of the world’s largest professional organization, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)

In a similar manner, the data of ancient art, artifacts, and narratives (myths and legends) haven’t made sense in any comprehensive way. The familiar ideas of common natural events, social structures, or shamanic hallucinations have provided scant intellectual satisfaction in explaining individual myths and designs.

But the obvious similarities of themes around the world in different and independent societies have gone begging to be accounted for. Again, the data hasn’t made sense, insights into the behavior of plasma have made sense of the data. “Making sense” is not “proving” the hypothesis. Hard and ongoing work of testing—against further data and alternative hypotheses—is still required.

One researcher, Rens van der Sluijs, has proposed that this application of plasma principles to ancient historical data be called Plasma Mythology. As happened with plasma cosmology, plasma mythology turns accepted explanations on their heads:

"Durkheim's and Dumézil’s assertion that many myths reflect aspects of human society are on target, although they were not inspired by those aspects, but acted as models for them. Jung’s archetypes and Lévi-Strauss’ binary structure exist and operate in the mind as suggested, but were the imprint rather than the origin of the myths."

The implications of this new awareness of plasma touch almost every traditional field of study with the promise (or threat, depending on one’s appetite for adventure) of revolution. For example, imagine a new field of Plasma Politics.

Traditional theorists such as Rousseau and Locke have sought the origins of civil society in a “state of nature,” envisioned as present conditions from which social and governmental aspects are excised. (For a more modern overview of this idea, see Part I of Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia.) Individuals band together for trade and protection.

In response to the different efficiencies and expediencies of the individuals’ various attempts to do this, certain patterns of order will emerge as dominant. Locke and Rousseau attributed that order (of civil society) to a “compact or “contract” among the members of the society, prompting a number of individuals to ask to see the original document with their signatures on it.

But after Adam Smith—and more modern theorists such as Ludwig von Mises in economics and Stuart Kauffman in biology—the idea of emergent order in complex systems (Smith called it an “invisible hand”) provides a more useful understanding than attributing order to a mysterious “intentional design.”

Plasma politics, to stretch Thomas Paine’s contention, puts it “in our power to begin the world over again.” The original state of plasma nature was quite different from the presumed present-state-sans-society: It was a nature engulfed in a global thunderstorm of god-like intensity.

The social and political orders that arose from this original cataclysmic state did not emerge by way of invisible hands but in compulsive-obsessive commemoration of fists that smote the Earth and humanity haphazardly. Trade with and protection from other humans were secondary.

After the gods and their thunderstorm went away, people were left to trade and to defend themselves in a context of memorials and rituals that no longer had justification. The institutions of civil society would not emerge as entirely rational responses to a reasonable nature but as “guilt-ridden and fear-driven” quasi-rational responses to an unreasonable, absurd nature.

In the shadow of plasma mythology, the task of plasma politics is not to explain how civil society arose from generally peaceful individuals with unalienable rights but to explain how it evolved from global trauma and capricious violence.

By Mel Acheson
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  EXECUTIVE EDITORS: David Talbott, Wallace Thornhill
     MANAGING EDITORS: Steve Smith, Mel Acheson
  CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Michael Armstrong, Dwardu Cardona,
Ev Cochrane, C.J. Ransom, Don Scott, Rens van der Sluijs, Ian Tresman
  WEBMASTER: Brian Talbott

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