Reality Prime

I’ve written a different form of this blog post at least once before, maybe more. Here’s the basic thesis: the bizarro unreality of the world in which we now live is egregious enough to make me wonder if we haven’t veered wildly off the path at some point and now exist within reality prime. I suppose one can choose any number of historical inflections to represent the branching point. For me, it was the reelection of George W. Bush in 2004. (The 9/11 attacks and “wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq had already occurred or commenced by then, and it had already revealed as well that lies — Saddam had WMDs — that sold the American public on the Iraq “war” were effective and remain so today.) Lots of other events changed the course of history, but none other felt as much to me like a gut punch precisely because, in the case of the 2004 presidential election, we chose our path. I fantasized waking up from my reality-prime nightmare but eventually had to grudgingly accept that if multiverses exist, ours mine had become one where we chose (collectively, and just barely) to keep in office an executive who behaved like a farce of stupidity. Well, joke’s on us. Twelve years later, we chose someone even more stupid, though with a “certain serpentine cunning,” and with arguably the worst character of any U.S. executive in living history.

So what to do in the face of this dysfunctional state of affairs? Bret Weinstein below has ideas. (As usual, I’m quite late, embedding a video that by Internet standards is already ancient. I also admit this is equivalent to a smash cut because I don’t have a particularly good transition or justification for turning so suddenly to Weinstein.) Weinstein is an evolutionary biologist, so no surprise that the approach he recommends is borne out of evolutionary thinking. In fairness, a politician would logically recommend political solutions, a financier would recommend economic solutions, and other professionals would seek solutions from within their areas of expertise.

The title of the interview is “Harnessing Evolution,” meaning Weinstein suggests we use evolutionary models to better understand our own needs and distortions to guide or plot proper path(s) forward and get back on track. Never mind that a healthy minority of the U.S. public rejects evolution outright while an additional percentage takes a hybrid stance. While I’m impressed that Weinstein has an answer for everything (pedagogue or demagogue or both?) and has clearly thought through sociopolitical issues, I daresay he’s living in reality double-prime if he thinks science education can be a panacea for what ails us. My pessimism is showing.

Transitional Space

For ambulatory creatures, vision is arguably the primary sense of the five (main) senses. Humans are among those species that stand upright, facilitating a portrait orientation when interacting among ourselves. The terrestrial environment on which we live, however, is in landscape (as distinguished from the more nearly 3D environments of birds and insects in flight or marine life in rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans). My suspicion is that modest visual conflict between portrait and landscape is among the dynamics that give rise to the orienting response, a step down from the startle reflex, that demands full attention when visual environments change.

I recall reading somewhere that wholesale changes in surroundings, such as when crossing a threshold, passing through a doorway, entering or exiting a tunnel, and notably, entering and exiting an elevator, trigger the orienting response. Indeed, the flush of disorientation before one gets his or her bearings is tantamount to a mind wipe, at least momentarily. This response may also help to explain why small, bounded spaces such as interiors of vehicles (large and small) in motion feel like safe, contained, hermetically sealed personal spaces. We orient visually and kinesthetically at the level of the interior, often seated and immobile, rather than at the level of the outer landscape being traversed by the vehicle. This is true, too, of elevators, a modern contraption that confounds the nervous system almost as much as revolving doors — particularly noticeable with small children and pets until they become habituated to managing such doorways with foreknowledge of what lies beyond.

The built environment has historically included transitional spaces between inner and outer environments. Churches and cathedrals include a vestibule or narthex between the exterior door and inner door leading to the church interior or nave. Additional boundaries in church architecture mark increasing levels of hierarchy and intimacy, just as entryways of domiciles give way to increasingly personal spaces: parlor or sitting room, living room, dining room, kitchen, and bedroom. (The sheer utility of the “necessary” room defies these conventions.) Commercial and entertainment spaces use lobbies, atria, and prosceniums in similar fashion.

What most interests me, however, is the transitional space outside of buildings. This came up in a recent conversation, where I observed that local school buildings from the early to middle part of the 20th century have a distinguished architecture set well back from the street where lawns, plazas, sidewalks, and porches leading to entrances function as transitional spaces and encourage social interaction. Ample window space, columnar entryways, and roof embellishments such as dormers, finials, cupolas, and cornices add style and character befitting dignified public buildings. In contrast, 21st-century school buildings in particular and public buildings in general, at least in the city where I live, tend toward porchless big-box warehouses built right up to the sidewalk, essentially robbing denizens of their social space. Blank, institutional walls forbid rather than invite. Consider, for example, how students gathered in a transitional space are unproblematic, whereas those congregated outside a school entrance abutting a narrow sidewalk suggest either a gauntlet to be run or an eruption of violence in the offing. (Or maybe they’re just smoking.) Anyone forced to climb past loiterers outside a commercial establishment experiences similar suspicions and discomforts.

Beautifully designed and constructed public spaces of yore — demonstrations of a sophisticated appreciation of both function and intent — have fallen out of fashion. Maybe they understood then how transitional spaces ease the orientation response, or maybe they only intuited it. Hard to say. Architectural designs of the past acknowledged and accommodated social functions and sophisticated aesthetics that are today actively discouraged except for pointless stunt architecture that usually turns into boondoggles for taxpayers. This has been the experience of many municipalities when replacing or upgrading schools, transit centers, sports arenas, and public parks. Efficient land use today drives toward omission of transitional space. One of my regular reads is James Howard Kunstler’s Eyesore of the Month, which profiles one architectural misfire after the next. He often mocks the lack of transitional space, or when present, observes its open hostility to pedestrian use, including unnecessary obstacles and proximity to vehicular traffic (noise, noxious exhaust, and questionable safety) discouraging use. Chalk this up as another collapsed art (e.g., painting, music, literature, and poetry) so desperate to deny the past and establish new aesthetics that it has ruined itself.

Choice of Aesthetics

As a student, practitioner, and patron of the fine arts, I long ago imbibed the sybaritic imploration that beauty and meaning drawn out of sensory stimulation were a significant source of enjoyment, a high calling even. Accordingly, learning to decode and appreciate the conventions of various forms of expression required effort, which was repaid and deepened over a lifetime of experience. I recognize that, because of their former close association with the European aristocracy and American moneyed class, the fine arts (Western genres) have never quite distanced themselves from charges of elitism. However, I’ve always rejected that perspective. Since the latter part of the 20th century, the fine arts have never been more available to people of all walks of life, as crowds at art galleries attest.

Beyond the fine arts, I also recognize that people have a choice of aesthetics. Maybe it’s the pageantry of sports (including the primal ferocity of combat sports); the gastronomic delight of a fine meal, liquor, or cigar; identification with a famous brand; the pampered lifestyles of the rich and famous, with their premium services, personal staffs, and entourages; the sound of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle or a 1970s American muscle car; the sartorial appointments of high fashion and couture; simple biophilia; the capabilities of a smartphone or other tech device; or the brutal rhetoric and racehorse politics of the campaign trail. Take your pick. In no way do I consider the choice of one aesthetic versus another equivalent. Differences of quality and intent are so obvious that any relativist claim asserting false equivalence ought to be dismissed out of hand. However, there is considerable leeway. One of my teachers summed up taste variance handily: “that’s why they make chocolate and vanilla.”

Beauty and meaning are not interchangeable, but they are often sloppily conflated. The meaning found in earnest striving and sacrifice is a quintessential substitute for beauty. Thus, we’re routinely instructed to honor our troops for their service. Patriotic holidays (Independence Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and others) form a thematic group. Considering how the media reflexively valorizes (rarely deploring) acts of force and mayhem authorized and carried out by the state, and how the citizenry takes that instruction and repeats it, it’s fair to say that an aesthetic attaches to such activity. For instance, some remember (with varying degrees of disgust) news anchor Brian Williams waxing rhapsodic over the Syrian conflict. Perhaps Chris Hedges’ book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning provides greater context. I haven’t read the book, but the title is awfully provocative, which some read as an encomium to war. Book jacket blurbs and reviews indicate more circumspect arguments drawn from Hedges’ experience as a war correspondent.

We’re currently in the so-called season of giving. No one can escape anymore marketing harangues about Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday that launch the season. None of those days have much integrity, not that they ever did, since they bleed into each other as retailers strain to get a jump on one or extend another. We’re a thoroughly consumer society, which is itself an aesthetic (maybe I should have written anesthetic). Purchasing decisions are made according to a choice of aesthetics: brand, features, looks, price, etc. An elaborate machinery of psychological prods and inducements has been developed over the decades to influence consumer behavior. (A subgenre of psychology also studies these influences and behaviors.) The same can be said of the shaping of consumer citizen opinion. While some resist being channeled into others’ prescribed thought worlds, the difficulty of maintaining truly original, independent thought in the face of a deluge of both reasonable and bad-faith influence makes succumbing nearly inevitable. Under such condition, one wonders if choice of aesthetic even really exists.

Rockwell’s America

From time to time, I admit that I’m in no position to referee disputes, usually out of my lack of technical expertise in the hard sciences. I also avoid the impossibility of policing the Internet, assiduously pointing out error where it occurs. Others concern themselves with correcting the record and/or reinterpreting argument with improved context and accuracy. However, once in a while, something crosses my desk that gets under my skin. An article by James Ostrowski entitled “What America Has Done To its Young People is Appalling,” published at LewRockwell.com, is such a case. It’s undoubtedly a coincidence that the most famous Rockwell is arguably Norman Rockwell, whose celebrated illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post in particular helped reinforce a charming midcentury American mythology. Lew Rockwell, OTOH, is described briefly at the website’s About blurb:

The daily news and opinion site LewRockwell.com was founded in 1999 by anarcho-capitalists Lew Rockwell … and Burt Blumert to help carry on the anti-war, anti-state, pro-market work of Murray N. Rothbard.

Those political buzzwords probably deserve some unpacking. However, that project falls outside my scope. In short, they handily foist blame for what ills us in American culture on government planning, as distinguished from the comparative freedom of libertarianism. Government earns its share of blame, no doubt, especially with its enthusiastic prosecution of war (now a forever war); but as snapshots of competing political philosophies, these buzzwords are reductive almost to the point of meaninglessness. Ostrowski lays blame more specifically on feminism and progressive big government and harkens back to an idyllic 1950s nuclear family fully consonant with Norman Rockwell’s illustrations, thus invoking the nostalgic frame.

… the idyllic norm of the 1950’s, where the mother typically stayed home to take care of the kids until they reached school age and perhaps even long afterwards, has been destroyed.  These days, in the typical American family, both parents work fulltime which means that a very large percentage of children are consigned to daycare … in the critical first five years of life, the vast majority of Americans are deprived of the obvious benefits of growing up in an intact family with the mother at home in the pre-school years. We baby boomers took this for granted. That world is gone with the wind. Why? Two main reasons: feminism and progressive big government. Feminism encouraged women to get out of the home and out from under the alleged control of husbands who allegedly controlled the family finances.

Problem is, 1950s social configurations in the U.S. were the product of a convergence of historical forces, not least of which were the end of WWII and newfound American geopolitical and economic prominence. More pointedly, an entire generation of young men and women who had deferred family life during perilous wartime were then able to marry, start families, and provide for them on a single income — typically that of the husband/father. That was the baby boom. Yet to enjoy the benefits of the era fully, one probably needed to be a WASPy middle-class male or the child of one. Women and people of color fared … differently. After all, the 1950s yielded to the sexual revolution and civil rights era one decade later, both of which aimed specifically to improve the lived experience of, well, women and people of color.

Since the 1950s were only roughly 60 years ago, it might be instructive to consider how life was another 60 years before then, or in the 1890s. If one lived in an eastern American city, life was often a Dickensian dystopia, complete with child labor, poorhouses, orphanages, asylums, and unhygienic conditions. If one lived in an agrarian setting, which was far more prevalent before the great 20th-century migration to cities, then life was frequently dirt-poor subsistence and/or pioneer homesteading requiring dawn-to-dusk labor. Neither mode yet enjoyed social planning and progressive support including, for example, sewers and other modern infrastructure, public education, and economic protections such as unionism and trust busting. Thus, 19th-century America might be characterized fairly as being closer to anarcho-capitalism than at any time since. One of its principal legacies, one must be reminded, was pretty brutal exploitation of (and violence against) labor, which can be understood by the emergence of political parties that sought to redress its worst scourges. Hindsight informs us now that reforms were slow, partial, and impermanent, leading to the observation that among all tried forms of self-governance, democratic capitalism can be characterized as perhaps the least awful.

So yeah, the U.S. came a long way from 1890 to 1950, especially in terms of standard of living, but may well be backsliding as the 21st-century middle class is hollowed out (a typical income — now termed household income — being rather challenging for a family), aspirations to rise economically above one’s parents’ level no longer function, and the culture disintegrates into tribal resentments and unrealistic fantasies about nearly everything. Ostrowski marshals a variety of demographic facts and figures to support his argument (with which I agree in large measure), but he fails to make a satisfactory causal connection with feminism and progressivism. Instead, he sounds like 45 selling his slogan Make America Great Again (MAGA), meaning let’s turn back the clock to those nostalgic 1950s happy days. Interpretations of that sentiment run in all directions from innocent to virulent (but coded). By placing blame on feminism and progressivism, it’s not difficult to hear anyone citing those putative causes as an accusation that, if only those feminists and progressives (and others) had stayed in their assigned lanes, we wouldn’t be dealing now with cultural crises that threaten to undo us. What Ostrowski fails to acknowledge is that despite all sorts of government activity over the decades, no one in the U.S. is steering the culture nearly as actively as in centrally planned economies and cultures, current and historical, which in their worst instances are fascist and/or totalitarian. One point I’ll agree on, however, just to be charitable, is that the mess we’ve made and will leave to youngsters is truly appalling.

Hazard Zones

The past few weeks and months have reinforced my awareness that quite a lot of human habitation is precariously situated within a variety of hazard zones, predominantly but not exclusively along the coasts. The desirability of coastlines is obvious: life is especially abundant along such boundaries. Humans rely on other lifeforms for sustenance no less than any other organism, so exploiting available resources at the coasts is a no-brainer. Plus, we need fresh water, so habitation alongside lake and river systems have also been preferential sites when frontier communities were established.

Coastlines and riverbeds in particular are dynamic, changing over varying timescales as new conditions assert themselves. Some changes are quite substantial. For instance, there is evidence that a previous human civilization situated along the coasts during the last ice age (ending some 12,000 years ago) when sea level was about 400 feet lower was effectively destroyed and covered by the Biblical flood precipitated by ice sheets melting rapidly (within a few weeks, perhaps). Since then, sea level and global average atmospheric temperature have been remarkably consistent, but they’re slowly on the rise yet again. Causes may be up for debate, but there is little doubt that human civilization and industrial activity have contributed significantly.

Coasts are not being inundated all at once as before but by slow creep of rising tides onto formerly dry land. Once in a while, storm surges and tsunamis wash inland, warning of what’s to come as global warming accelerates, oceans (continue to) warm and expand, and sea level increases (by tens of meters if the most dire predictions prove correct). This is only one water-borne threat, rhyming with past human experience. Wild fires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, sink holes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters are striking all around us with increasing frequency according to this source — one reason the world is sometimes characterized as a slaughterhouse despite its amazing profundity. The three most recent disasters that amaze me (N. American bias showing here) are the California wildfires, the Hawaiian volcanic eruption on the big island, and the earthquake in Anchorage, Alaska. No need to go back in geological time; each has ample precedent in recent history. Yet we persist in living in these hazard zones and will likely rebuild and repopulate them as opportunity allows.

Whether to recommend abandonment of known hazard zones is not entirely clear to me, though I’ve ranted about the foolhardiness of rebuilding. If history is a reliable indicator and a major extinction event (process) has already commenced, it’s doubtful that anything we do or don’t do will affect outcomes to any significant extent.