Dissolving Reality, pt. 3

Continuing from part 1 and part 2, let me add one further example of how meaning is reversed under the Ironic perspective. At my abandoned group blog, Creative Destruction, which garners more traffic than The Spiral Staircase despite being woefully out of date, the post that gets the most hits argues (without irony) that, in the Star Wars universe, the Empire represents the good guys and the Jedi are the terrorists despite the good vs. evil archetypes being almost cartoonishly drawn, with the principal villain having succumbed to the dark side only to be redeemed by his innate goodness in the 11th hour. The reverse argument undoubtedly has some merit, but it requires overthinking and outsmarting oneself to arrive at the backwards conclusion. A similar dilemma of competing perspectives is present in The Avengers, where Captain America is unconflicted in his all-American goodness and straightforward identification of villainy but is surrounded by other far-too-clever superheroes who overanalyze (snarkily so), cannot agree on strategy, and/or question motivations and each others’ double or triple agency. If I understand correctly, this plot hook is the basis for the civil war among allies in the next Avengers movie.

The Post-Ironic takes the reversal of meaning and paradoxical retention of opposites that characterizes the Ironic and expands issues from false dualisms (e.g., either you’re with us or against us) to multifaceted free-for-alls where anyone’s wild interpretation of facts, events, policy, and strategy has roughly equal footing with another’s precisely because no authority exists to satisfy everyone as to the truth of matters. The cacophony of competing viewpoints — the multiplicity of possible meanings conjured from any collection of evidence — virtually guarantees that someone out there (often someone loony) will speak as though reading your mind. Don’t trust politicians, scientists, news anchors, pundits, teachers, academics, your parents, or even the pope? No problem. Just belly up to the ideological buffet and cherry pick choose from any of a multitude of viewpoints, few of which have much plausibility. But no matter: it’s a smorgasbord of options, and almost none of them can be discarded out of hand for being too beyond the pale. All must be tried and entertained.

One of the themes of this blog is imminent (i.e., occurring within the lifetimes of most readers) industrial collapse resulting from either financial collapse or loss of habitat for humans (or a combination of factors). Either could happen first, but my suspicion is that financial collapse will be the lit fuse leading to explosion of the population bomb. Collapse is quite literally the biggest story of our time despite its being prospective. However, opinion on the matter is loose, undisciplined, and ranges all over the map. Consensus within expert bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, assembled specifically to study climate change and reports its findings, ought to put an end to controversy, yet waters have been so muddied by competing narratives that credulous folks, if they bother paying attention at all, can’t really tell whom to believe. It doesn’t help that even well-educated folks, including many professionals, often lack critical thinking skill with which to evaluate evidence. So instead, wishy-washy emotionalism and psychological vulnerability award hearts and minds to the most charismatic storyteller, not the truth-teller.

Perhaps the best instance of multiple meanings being simultaneously present and demanding consideration is found in the game of poker, which has become enormously popular in the past decade. To play the game effectively, one must weigh the likelihood and potential for any one of several competing narratives based on opponents’ actions. Mathematical analysis and intuition combine to recommend which scenario is most likely true and whether the risk is worth it (pot odds). If, for just one example, an opponent bets big at any point in the poker hand, several scenarios that must be considered:

• the opponent has made his hand and cannot be beaten (e.g., nut flush, full house)
• the opponent has a dominating hand and can be beaten only if one draws to make a better hand (e.g., top pair with high kicker or two pair)
• the opponent has not yet fully made his hand and is on a draw (open-ended straight or four cards to a flush)
• the opponent has a partial or weak hand and is bluffing at the pot

Take note that, as with climate change, evaluation in poker is prospective. Sometimes an opponent’s betting strategy is discovered in a showdown where players must reveal their cards; but often, one player or another mucks or folds and the actual scenario is undisclosed. The truth of climate change, until the future manifests, is to some tantalizingly unknown and contingent, as though it could be influenced by belief, hope, and/or faith. To rigorous thinkers, however, the future is charted for us with about the same inevitability as the sun rising in the morning — the biggest remaining unknown being timing.

Habitual awareness of multiple, competing scenarios extends well beyond table games and climate change. In geopolitics, the refusal to rule out the nuclear option, even when it would be completely disproportionate to a given provocation, is reckless brinkmanship. The typical rhetoric is that, like fighting dogs, any gesture of backing down would be interpreted as a display of submission or weakness and thus invite attack. So is the provocation or the response a bluff, a strong hand, or both? Although it is difficult to judge how U.S. leadership is perceived abroad (since I’m inside the bubble), the historical record demonstrates that the U.S. never hesitates to get mixed up in military action and adopts overweening strategies to defeat essentially feudal societies (e.g., Korea and Vietnam). Never mind that those strategies have been shown to fail or that those countries represented no credible threat to the U.S. Our military escapades in the 21st century are not so divergent, with the perception of threats being raised well beyond their true proportions relative to any number of health and social scourges that routinely kill many more Americans than terrorism ever did.

Because this post is already running long, conclusions will be in an addendum. Apologies for the drawn out posts.