In which I navel-gaze about Moses and Aaron and God. A lot.

[raspberryhunter]

Interactive Complexity as Indigenous to Human Systems is the crazy Office-esque crack!AU of Moses und Aron I wrote for yuletide (I talk about my other yuletide fics here), set in a corporation where Moses is the Chief Scientist, Aaron is his salesman/spokesman, and God is the CEO, and instead of talking about God and religion they talk about science and algorithms. NO I DO NOT KNOW WHERE THIS CAME FROM. MY SUBCONSCIOUS MAY NEED TO GET OUT MORE.

It's also, in a sense, a companion story to "Waters." "Waters" treats what I had to say about my personal feelings about the religious philosophies M&A espouses and alternatives thereof, but it doesn't actually explicitly delve into the Moses and Aaron relationship at all (...they're not even characters in "Waters," no wait, I guess Moses gets one speaking line), and I wanted to do that. I also wanted to engage with what seekingferret called the game of telephone -- where the message from God gets changed and filtered, with a monotonic loss of transmission from God->Moses->Aaron->Israelites. (My other fic rejects that idea, so I wanted to do it here.)

And also, I wanted to reconcile Numbers 20 with M&A. There's a glancing reference to "the rock" in Act III of M&A that makes me believe that it is meant to have happened after the Meribah incident. How did that play in to the world of M&A? What happened at Meribah in the world of M&A, and how did that relate to the Act III drama where Aaron is cast out and (in my libretto stage directions) drops dead at the end? In the Bible version, Moses is involved and culpable; how would this even be possible in Schoenberg's conception? And even taking Numbers 20 alone, it never sat right with me that Moses got punished so severely for what seems like a really trivial matter; why was that? This fic is a partial answer to all these questions. (Only partial, because it assumes a closer personal relationship between Moses and Aaron than we really get in Schoenberg, not least because they don't start out as brothers.)

The real impetus for this story, though, was that I watched the Ruhrtriennale 2009 version of Moses und Aron, and that production utterly sold me on the relationship between Moses and Aaron themselves, and I found Aaron rather engaging (though of course flawed, as he is) in that production as well, but I just didn't find Moses at all likeable or sympathetic (okay, fine, "O wort, du wort, das mir fehlt" was shattering), which I think may have shaped some of my reactions to the opera. I mean, it's not the production's fault, because they were clearly trying (and from time to time succeded); Moses is not supposed to be likeable or sympathetic, he's supposed to be above such mundane things. But it makes a difference because Schoenberg clearly expects us to buy in to Moses' philosophy, which is hard for me personally to do when I'm busy thinking, "Man, Moses is really a jerk." Plus which people aren't actually like that -- I mean, solely superhuman jerks! And apparently when I'm confronted with this kind of situation, my response is to try to figure out away to make the character understandable. Through fic!

So I set out to make him a protagonist such that I, at least, could see where he was coming from, without losing sight of the fact that he really is a brusque and unyielding sort of personality. (I am totally aware that this completely goes against the spirit of what Schoenberg was doing, by the way. I think that Moses, like God, is supposed to be not understandable. But if anything this only encouraged me.) But I had to transpose it to the modern era to make his character comprehensible. And then I was at work and talking to a coworker about the necessary evil of HR, and I wrote down in my yuletide file, "Aaron is SO HR! ...no, wait, Sales." and it just sort of snowballed from there. I wrote pretty much the entire draft in a couple of days, before I had more than the bare seeds of ideas for the other fic.

I succeeded in terms of my own reaction. I feel very strongly about the purity of science, about how it can't be compromised for the sake of how you feel about anything. And translating Moses' unbendingness into that milieu made me much more sympathetic towards his point of view.

Interestingly, I completely failed to communicate a major portion of this where seekingferret was concerned, which makes me sad (not about seekingferret at all, only about my inability to communicate). Seekingferret wrote a very thoughtful and interesting critique of "Complexity" where he reads it as Moshe and Aaron on a more equal footing. In a certain sense he is right, and I will talk about that below. But in another sense, that is not what I meant at all! In "Waters," both Moses and Aaron are missing the point to some extent, which is not what Schoenberg meant but what I get out of it when I watch it. In "Complexity," Moshe is meant to be right. All right, there is a place for image in our imperfect finite minds trying to come to grips with the divine -- and I do believe that (in this world where the Tabernacle was built), and the first half of the fic makes that point -- but in both the central conflicts, the Golden Calf conflict and the Meribah conflict, Aaron is asking to compromise the idea for the sake of the image, compromise the scientific truth for the sake of getting the job done. The choice, when it comes down to the important choice, is between making something look good (the image) and the truth (the idea). And Aaron, in choosing appearances/image, is wrong, wrong, wrong; it is never right to compromise the analysis. You just don't misrepresent science, you must not, for your job or your friends or anything else. And I failed in not making this clear, because in my worldview it is so very obvious that Aaron is wrong that it didn't even occur to me that it might not be obvious to someone who isn't me and didn't know me.

(Moshe is so totally my POV character in this one, despite Aaron being a lot more likeable. What he says about organizational theory? Is what I think about organizational theory. (Sorry if there are any organizational theorists reading this! Feel free to educate me!) And I'm a scientist/engineer by training/profession, and have my discipline's ingrained suspicion of HR and Sales and management (here I should append that my company has lovely HR, no sales as a separate department, and quite understanding management, but it doesn't stop all us engineers from being suspicious of all of them nevertheless). And Aaron talking about quantum correlations? Does not, in fact, make any sense. Oh, Aaron.)

The tragedy -- at least in my particular reimagining; here I'm departing from Schoenberg -- is that when Moshe unbends a little, tries to let Aaron in, when he tries to make that compromise because he does, after all, love Aaron -- that's the moment when we find that Moshe was right all along, that Aaron is wrong, that this compromise can't be made, and when you try to make it, it leads to disaster. As seekingferret says, Moses is right, but the world sets us up for failure.

Well, that's what I meant, anyway. Perhaps that's not what actually came out :)

I'm really glad he wrote that piece of meta, both because it made me aware of this flaw in my writing and because he speaks to something I hadn't thought about when I wrote it -- the Moses-God relationship. Which I think he's completely right about -- as written, the CEO is this shadowy figure On High. (Heh, "Christian New Testament God." Made me laugh. Guilty!) Because of ase's beautiful beta work, I don't think it is so much of a problem in the first half, at least to my reading, but it is somewhat glaring in the second half, especially in the characters' reactions to and aftermath of the pivotal scenes, and it didn't have to be that way. Is seekingferret's reading of M&A correct? I have mixed thoughts on this -- but the point is, it's something I didn't think about when I wrote the story, and I should have, regardless of what my eventual answer turned out to be. About that he was wholly right.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the conception of God is split between the CEO and Science (or math, or algorithms, I think is what the fic actually says, but I'm using Science as a catchall phrase). Although the CEO is intended to be the crackified (New Testamentesque?) persona of God, it's really Science, or the truth embodied by science, that bears the philosophical weight of the Moses-God relationship in the opera. Although I understood this implicitly while I was writing, I don't think I figured it out explicitly, enough to spend time thinking about what it implied in terms of the character dynamics and relationships (in particular, both CEO-truth and CEO-Moses). Ah well.

And now that I am thinking about it, I suspect there are a couple of parts I could tweak very slightly that could address these concerns and make everything work rather better, so why didn't I? Eh. Well, if I have seekingferret's permission and blessing, perhaps I shall.


Paean of praise to betas: "Complexity" did not have a Judaism beta (for fairly obvious reasons, but in hindsight, I should have gotten one). elements_ao3 whacked the word choice like anything. mithrigil deserves major points for pointing out, "To be completely frank, this is more like 'if Schoenberg wrote bible fanfic instead of an opera and put all his kinks in it' than fanfic for the opera itself," and so have I summarized it. And, as I sort of said above, if I'd considered ase's critique more carefully, I might have made my point of view more understandable. To the extent that it is understandable, I totally have ase to thank for pushing me to that level.

There, I should probably have written an essay instead of fics and have been done with it :)

Comments

[raspberryhunter]

Oh! I wonder if we have been talking at cross-purposes this whole time. Because, yes -- I would have to say that (donning my scientific/atheistic hat) I believe in the Scientific Method and not particularly in the Forces of Nature. When I've said "science" in this whole discussion, I actually mean the Scientific Method; I agree with Hawking. I don't really have faith in gravity or quantum mechanics in that sense, and now I see why this seems so weird to you. Because it seems weird to me too.

Because theories of science are always subject to change. Having faith in Newtonian mechanics would be silly, even though for hundreds of years they were the accepted Way the World Works, because we now know that they're only an approximation, that at relativistic speeds or at the quantum mechanical level Newtonian mechanics fails. But of course science is always like that. Tomorrow we might find that our understanding of particle physics is totally wrong. (Probably not today -- my grad school advisor was a little sad that they found the Higgs and validated what we know, because it would have been much more interesting, he said, if they hadn't!) As a scientist, I don't believe in having faith in a scientific theory; that nullifies the whole point of it being a theory.

But I wouldn't say that I have faith in rules that aren't understood. What I have faith in is that induction will always work, that logic will always work. That mathematics continues to be consistent. That mathematics continues to be a useful model to describe the world. That making predictions and experimentally validating them remains a valid way to understand what's going on. That the universe really does work according to laws that are discoverable and that are mathematically beautiful. That we will continue to understand more and more about the world works -- if gravity stopped working tomorrow, we'll eventually be able to understand why, and how that plays into a universe in which gravity did work up until now. This is what I mean when I use the vocabulary of faith to describe how I feel about science -- not the results of science, but the process of science. And I do have a relationship with it; these assumptions are fundamental to the way I interact with the world.

(And it's not so different from a religious faith in some ways; faith in God doesn't mean one has faith the sun will come up either, because God could of course decide, for whatever reason, that the sun wouldn't come up today. But either way, we might as well plan our lives under the assumption that the sun will come up tomorrow.)

There are of course various philosophical reasons why one might not buy in to such a faith (in process-of-science), or individual tenets of that faith. But something deep in me really does believe, in some fundamental unshaken way, in all those tenets. ...This is becoming a very interesting and somewhat disturbing discussion for me, thank you for bringing it up. I had never articulated it in exactly this way before. I also wonder if this is part of what disturbed you about "Complexity," this worldview coming through, because now I'm certainly a little disturbed. Perhaps if I'd just written straight lighthearted crack, without trying to transpose the serious bits, there would not be this issue at all!

(I don't know why I keep thinking about Ted Chiang, but I think his story Division by Zero is relevant.)

As for your other point, hmm. I also don't think I agree that Moses and Aron can't function without the other personally in Schoenberg (although I agree with you in general; I do think that's the case in "Waters," and the case I was trying to make because I do believe that with that structure of family undercut, they're both lost) because Moses seems to me to be very sure of himself suddenly in Act III, in a way he's not in Act II, and also because for the first time, as far as I know, we see Moses address the people (or, well, an alle) instead of Aaron, at the very end, without Aaron as intermediary. (At least, that is what my libretto says; my memory of Straub-Huilet is that they don't really stage it quite like that.)

I wonder if Schoenberg would have said (about Act III as it currently stands) that casting Aaron out was what let Moses finally communicate with the people. Though again I'd like to think that he would have changed it around :) because -- although I think it is supported by the text of Act III -- I don't agree with that at all!

Because yes -- like you're saying, so Schoenberg!Moses wins the argument, well, yay for him -- but when one actually considers it as a real person, it's still a tragedy, because what has he lost: Miriam's dead, Aaron's cast out/dead, he's so obnoxious that I can't imagine that Zipporah likes him at all at this point -- and without family, without that to balance him, what is left for him?

And yes, that's right about Miriam -- she loves Moses and Aaron, and what she wants more than anything else is for them to stop fighting and realize that they love each other -- of course she'd be even happier if they agreed with her philosophy, everyone likes to be agreed with, but whatever. (Interestingly, I had almost exactly this conversation with my beta -- "What does Miriam really want here?" and that was my answer.)

[seekingferret]

More, later, but I have a rant about "Division by Zero" somewhere. Really, really awful math. Does not at all appreciate the relationship between math and empiricism. Doesn't appreciate at all that there is a relationship.

But one of the things we are learning about that relationship is that it has limits- Pauli Exclusion Principle, Godel's Theorem, Halting Problem, etc... One of the particularly bothersome problems for me with having faith in the scientific method and the discoverability of the world is that we already know it's not the Alpha and the Omega. (heh, sorry) Though I have the same problem as a person of faith, only it's called: Why did God create an entropic universe?

[raspberryhunter]

Does not at all appreciate the relationship between math and empiricism. Doesn't appreciate at all that there is a relationship.

Ah -- but that (to drive the metaphor further) is the mystery of faith! Why is there such a relationship? Why ought there to be a connection between empirical counting and the Principia Mathematica? What has the axiom of reducibility to do with showing a toddler one object and then two objects, and her understanding that those aren't the same? Clearly it seems there must be a deep connection between the mathematical abstraction of "one" and the empirical idea we use in everyday life, and we all assume this is the case, but I don't comprehend what it is or why we can generally choose to conflate the two. That part, I take on faith. (And a real, pure mathematician could really not care less anyway. What has a mathematician to do with empirical anything? That's not what math is about. Well, that's what math is about to a scientist, yes, or to an applied mathematician; but not to a pure mathematician, to whom it is a beautiful but essentially artificial structure.)

(I mentioned this discussion to my husband, who said it reminded him of Eugene Wigner's paper on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the physical sciences, which he was surprised I'd never heard of before.)

In physics, I don't know that we've conceded any limits, really. The Pauli exclusion principle only tells us what the universe can't or can't do, not what we can or can't learn. One might think that (say) the Heisenberg uncertainty principle (perhaps this is what you meant?) is more limiting, that we can't measure in nonorthogonal axes simultaneously without disturbing the state, so yes, there are specific things we can't learn about the universe locally. But more generally these restrictions on the rich mathematical space of a quantum state are really interesting and actually expand how much we can learn about the way the universe works, which is the interesting question.

[seekingferret]

Why ought there to be a connection between empirical counting and the Principia Mathematica?

There isn't some magical, inherent connection. This isn't a 'mystery of faith' kind of thing. There is a relationship because we designed a relationship, and in the 21st century we know how easy it is to design mathematical constructs that don't map onto any kind of reality. When I studied Number Theory my instructors spent a lot more time than was strictly necessary explaining the Peano Axioms to us so that we would understand that yes, even for something as simple as empirical counting, the relationship to mathematics is there because we designed the axioms, not because of the mystery of faith.

(I've seen the Wigner essay. I think it stretches the point. An essay in the NYTimes magazine that I should try to find again gave me this amazing quote, which is roughly "There are approximately 360 million people in America. That means that a million to one event happens to one of them every day." Surprising relationships do not signify magical relationships.)

[raspberryhunter]

Oh hey, are you trying to say that I got too overly invested in my own extended metaphor? Because that never happens to me. *rolls eyes at self* Okay, fine, you're right, that's kind of embarrassing. D, my husband (whom I should pressure to get a DW account so he can join in directly), also argued strongly for your point of view, pointing out that repeatability and predictability (and probably locality helps too) of a universe should be sufficient for some system of mathematics to be structured that describes it.

But in terms of Wigner's point, I still don't quite understand philosophically why it should be possible to design a mathematical system that regularly does have non-consciously-designed correspondences with physics (complex numbers; matrices -- I should say that D argued against this example because linear systems are sort of an obvious generalization, but I still like it because it doesn't seem obvious to me that it should be a good way to describe discrete quantum systems; group theory...). I tend to like to think that the universe is in fact based on something like a mathematical structure, but of course there are other explanations (a tendency to further develop branches of mathematics that have some empirical correspondences; selection bias by Wigner and me; perhaps even if the universe isn't based on mathematical structure, it's based on forms that reappear; etc.)

Sure, improbable events are "surprising" when they occur because any one person's experience is restricted to being a particular instantiation of a probability distribution, even if theoretically we understand the law of large numbers applies globally to a large population. And I think you're saying -- the same sort of thing for any of the explanations given above: they provide a global mechanism for which the correspondences may be surprising locally but make sense in the context of the mechanism. Now, I think it's mysterious (in a way that statistics is not) in the sense that I think there can be debate about the proper interpretation, whereas I don't think there's any debate about improbable events -- but I agree, not in the sense of not having an explanation.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, I mean, when you study closely the history of scientific discoveries based on unexpected mathematics, you often find that say, Einstein knew he had made a discovery that had a systematic relationship he didn't understand. So he talked to all of the mathematicians he knew and eventually somebody pointed him to a paper Poincare had written thirty years earlier- but that was only after he'd looked at and rejected hundreds of other mathematical frameworks. That's where selection bias comes in. It wasn't like Poincare's theorems had an inherent and immediately obvious rightness over other theorems that don't have any physical value.

We simply designed (or borrowed from existing work) mathematics that worked. I mean, it's interesting that a sort of convergence happened, where over the course of human history neither the physics or the math existed, and then within a thirty year period you had both, but you could equally hypothesize that had Poincare not written the paper, Einstein would have had to find a mathematician and force him to develop it. Or else maybe Einstein's great discovery would have gone nowhere. Who knows what physical discoveries we can't act on now because we haven't yet come up with mathematics to explain them?