Mithridates and the June Bugs

Mithridates VI, or Mithridates the Great after his death, reigned over the Kingdom of Pontus, an area adjacent to the Black Sea which at its height included parts of present-day Turkey, as well as Ukraine, Russia, Bulgaria, and Romania. Mithridates’ staunch opposition to Roman rule and his reputation as a cunning opponent of an ascendant Rome (he lived 135-63 BCE) makes him noteworthy among classical Hellenistic and Roman historians; but his reputation is more commonly associated with mithridatism, or the practice of developing a tolerance to poison by regularly ingesting sub-lethal doses of said poison (the king, fearing poisoning, allegedly built up a tolerance to many different poisons in this way). Ironically, Mithridates VI probably died by the sword after a failed suicide attempt involving one of the poisons to which he had built up a tolerance.

There would appear to be a folk lesson in this story that has carried the name of this king who reigned over two millennia ago through history: building up a tolerance to poison as metaphor, as an act not just of self-preservation (leaders, successors, and would-be leaders being poisoned is, after all, hardly rare in history) but of strengthening oneself in the face of the world’s woes. There is something almost noble about being able to bear what would kill others in the same situation; a kind of noble ethic that isn’t much with us (for better or worse) in a far more democratic world than that of Mithridates. The notion that having gone through a painful journey, akin to consuming daily sub-lethal doses of poison, makes us stronger, wiser, more profound—I am reminded of the old saying, variously attributed to Native American activist Vine Deloria Jr., late rock idol David Bowie, among others: “Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for people who have been there.” I do not consider myself religious or spiritual, but I do get the thrust of the saying—we become more than we were by having, and surviving, Really Bad Days.

I remember taking night swims in my apartment pool back in Texas, many years ago. The lights beneath the water, making enjoyment of the pool possible after dark, also mesmerized the little June bugs that often found themselves falling victim to the lights. In fact, the June bug is a famously clumsy critter, with its hard, sticky legs and bumbling flight patterns making it an unwelcome pest. Then I learned in a book by biologist Richard Dawkins (yes, his books contain lots of other things besides criticizing religion) that the June bug is not a bumbling fool of a creature but another example of evolutionary fine-tuning over 200 million years in the making. That means they survived the extinction event that killed the dinosaurs; there are also hundreds of species we colloquially call June bugs. They take flight by the light of the moon, and like other nocturnal critters, the moon is their compass. However, as with other nocturnal flying critters, artificial light created by humans (in the form of, say, pool lights) is easily confused with the light of the moon. A creature that is wired to fly by moonlight is suddenly thrown into hopeless confusion by the array of artificial lights humans have created. And since the June bug has been around for over 200 million years and the widespread use of electric light has been around less than 200 years, the poor creature’s inborn evolutionary tendencies that served it so well in the past are hijacked by those glimmering bulbs.

There is a metaphor here, too, I think—and perhaps more than a metaphor, a central insight in connecting the social world of human beings to the biological world out of which we all arose, and on which we all depend. Humans are, of course, more complex and more intelligent than June bugs (though it’s hard to imagine we would have survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that ended the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago) but we still have inbuilt tendencies that developed over hundreds of thousands of years. Most of the history of our species was spent wandering the world in small bands, hunting, gathering, fishing. We went a long, long time without electric light relative to the age of our species (though not nearly as long as the June bug). Now, with the advent of mass media and a culture that has us fixated for an ever-greater number of hours on moving two-dimensional displays that kick out dopamine (the reward neurotransmitter in our brains) in exchange for our attention, perhaps we have outsmarted ourselves.

I am wondering aloud whether the technological society we inhabit should be treated like Mithridates treated poison, or if we are just as doomed as the June bug. I could hardly argue that electric light is a bad thing; it’s made the night, and in many cases, the day, a far safer place, and as someone who reads a lot of books it’s hard to imagine my vision would be any good anymore if I read all those hours by candlelight. I feel for the June bug, and after learning more about them, made an effort to scoop them out of the pool, even if, to my chagrin, sometimes I’d find another, or even the same, June bug flailing helplessly in the water minutes later.

Reflecting, once more, on my ongoing abandonment of social media, I am wondering if leaving it has been more trouble than it’s worth; I’m losing money as well as friends with every day that I’m not logging in; this is not a “fear of missing out” but an objective reality (I just got a royalty statement from one of my publishers). Leaving altogether just because the platforms gave voice to some of the more toxic human tendencies is a bit like Mithridates refusing to take his daily sub-lethal dose—if I am brave and noble and all that, I should be working to become more resilient in the face of a toxic environment, not running away from it, right? I mean, like electric lights and unlike poison, screen culture has lots of benefits, too, perhaps more than the inventors of electric light could have imagined: connecting, sharing, staying informed, and of course, gaming, scrolling, and the like is fun. Just don’t read the comments sections, and ignore the haters, right?

The massive social experiment arguably began with the television has culminated in a world in which a significant chunk of our lives is spent interacting with screens. What if it is not a generally good thing once we build up a reasonable tolerance to its toxicity; but is instead analogous to the June bug facing the advent of the electric light? Maybe we have created the means to manipulate our biological tendencies ever more successfully; we are putting that ability to dubious or destructive ends that we have no inbuilt means to counteract whether consciously aware of it or not. We have created a society that has sabotaged our own ability to meaningfully find our way, and will go crashing haphazardly from artificial light to artificial light until we drown. Anxiety, depression, suicide, attention disorders, substance abuse, and social dysfunction trending upward; and these trends are taking hold in the so-called “developed areas” like the US and Europe. I’m not going to be one of those “moral entrepreneurs” who blames this on one cause. I’m still learning about these trends myself, and also, almost nothing in the social world has one and only one cause. But I am going to wonder out loud what’s going on.

Only questions now, as social science crashes headlong into historical and biological metaphor. Surely to thrive, both as individuals and as a species, we need to adapt to the world as it is an its many attendant problems—like Mithridates, we need to be prepared for what may await us. However, I question the wisdom of perpetuating, through action or inaction, a social world in which technological development consistently outstrips wisdom, that renders the problems of the new as issues to deal with after the fact, as technical matters for the next wave of innovation rather than as moral issues that inhere not only in our beliefs, values, and interests, but also, as distant cousins to the humble June bug, in the flesh-and-blood bodies we inhabit.

Sources:

I (re) read about Mithridates recently in Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in 2010.

I believe the Dawkins discussion of June bugs actually appeared in his 2008 book The God Delusion which I read over a decade ago, though I’ve read several of his books, only a few of which I actually own, and am having trouble remembering exactly where that bit comes from. Sadly, an Internet search on Dawkins focuses almost entirely on his atheism, and in ways that are often shallow and/or don’t address his arguments well.

Added disclaimer: If you’re new here, “I read that” does not mean “I agree with everything it says.” In fact, I try hard to read books that I don’t think I’ll agree with.

Image source: stylized green scarab beetle. The June bug, by the way, is a member of the scarab beetle family. https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Stylized-green-beetle/48718.html