Matryoshkas

For want of a useful way to describe multiple, intersecting problems plaguing the modern world — a nest of problems, if you will — let me adopt matryoshkas (a/k/a Russian nesting dolls). The metaphor is admittedly imperfect because problems are not discrete, resized replicas of each other that nest snugly, one inside the next. Rather, a better depiction would look more like some crazy mash-up of a Venn diagram and a Rorschach test but without the clean dividing lines or symmetry.

I use matryoshkas because they bear close relationship to each other. Also, the matryoshka is a maternal figure, much like Mother Earth. Matryoshkas are interlocking, each affecting others, though their relationships beyond the metaphor are far too complex to manage or manipulate effectively. For instance, the expansionary (growth) economy matryoshka (the paradigmatic problem of our time), nested two or three levels inside the Mother Earth matryoshka, bursts the outer dolls from within, whereas the collapsing Mother Earth matryoshka crushes the inner dolls. Similarly, if the economy matryoshka contracts (as it should and must), other inner dolls (e.g., nation states) will not survive. Which matryoshka fits inside another is a matter of interpretation. The one representing human consciousness is especially hard to position because it’s both cause and effect.

The Global Climate Strike underway this week reminds us of the outermost matryoshka, the largest one that contains or encapsulates all the others. Dealing with this biggest problem (since it’s truly an extinction level event, though slow-acting due to its global scale) has been delayed so long that (to mix my metaphors) the patient has become terminal. The diagnosis came long ago (i.e., quit smoking, or more accurately, quit burning fossil fuels and heating the planet), but treatment (cessation, really) never happened. We just kept puffing away with our transportation infrastructure (cars, boats, trains, and planes) and industrial machinery (including weaponry) because to do otherwise would — gasp — imperil the economy or negatively impact what’s become a nonnegotiable lifestyle, at least in the First World and only for a diminishing portion. The implicit decision, I suppose, is to live large now but condemn those unfortunate enough to follow in the wake of global ecological destruction.

Unless I misjudge the mood and consensus, climate change is (finally!) no longer the subject of controversy or denial except by a few intransigent fools (including political leaders and news groups that have inexplicably instituted gag orders to conceal the staggering immensity of the problem). Enough nasty events (storms, species die-offs, and epidemics — though no pandemic just yet) have piled up, including by way of example “unprecedented” flooding in Houston (never mind that flooding is a regular occurrence now, establishing a new precedent from which we steadfastly refuse to learn), that it’s impossible to dispute that we’ve entered an era of rather extraordinary instability. (That last sentence has problems with nesting, too, which I could fix by rewriting the sentence, but perhaps it’s fitting to just let the problems fester.) Indeed, as I have indicated before, we’re transitioning out of the Garden Earth (having left behind Ice Age Earth some 12,000 years ago) to Hothouse Earth. The rate of change is quite unlike similar transitions in the geological past, and we’re quite unlikely to survive.

The Severed Roots of Place, pt. 2

Continuing (after some delay) from part 1, Pankaj Mishra concludes chapter 4 of The Age of Anger with an overview of Iranian governments that shifted from U.S./British client state (headed by the Shah of Iran, reigned 1941–1979) to its populist replacement (headed by Ayatollah Khomeini, ruled 1979–1989), both leaders having been authoritarians. During the period discussed, Iran underwent the same modernization and infiltration by liberal, Western values and economics, which produced a backlash familiar from Mishra’s descriptions of other nations and regions that had experienced the same severed roots of place since the onset of the Enlightenment. Vacillation among two or more styles of government might be understood as a thermostatic response: too hot/cold one direction leads to correction in another direction. It’s not a binary relationship, however, between monarchy and democracy (to use just one example). Nor are options between a security state headed by an installed military leader and a leader elected by popular vote. Rather, it’s a question of national identity being alternatively fractured and unified (though difficult to analyze and articulate) in the wake of multiple intellectual influences.

According to Lewis and Huntington, modernity has failed to take root in intransigently traditional and backward Muslim countries despite various attempts to impose it by secular leaders such as Turkey’s Atatürk, the Shah of Iran, Algeria’s Ben Bella, Egypt’s Nasser and Sadat, and Pakistan’s Ayub Khan.

Since 9/11 there have been many versions, crassly populist as well as solemnly intellectual, of the claims by Lewis and Huntington that the crisis in Muslim countries is purely self-induced, and [that] the West is resented for the magnitude of its extraordinary success as a beacon of freedom, and embodiment of the Enlightenment’s achievements … They have mutated into the apparently more sophisticated claim that the clash of civilizations occurs [primarily] within Islam, and that Western interventions are required on behalf of the ‘good Muslim’, who is rational, moderate and liberal. [p. 127]

This is history told by the putative winners. Mishra goes on:

Much of the postcolonial world … became a laboratory for Western-style social engineering, a fresh testing site for the Enlightenment ideas of secular progress. The philosophes had aimed at rationalization, or ‘uniformization’, of a range of institutions inherited from an intensely religious era. Likewise, postcolonial leaders planned to turn illiterate peasants into educated citizens, to industrialize the economy, move the rural population to cities, alchemize local communities into a singular national identity, replace the social hierarchies of the past with an egalitarian order, and promote the cults of science and technology among a pious and often superstitious population. [p. 133]

Readers may recognize this project and/or process by its more contemporary name: globalization. It’s not merely a war of competing ideas, however, because those ideas manifest in various styles of social and political organization. Moreover, the significance of migration from rural agrarian settings to primarily urban and suburban ones can scarcely be overstated. This transformation (referring to the U.S. in the course of the 20th century) is something James Howard Kunstler repeatedly characterizes rather emphatically as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. Mishra summarizes the effects of Westernization handily:

In every human case, identity turns out to be porous and inconsistent rather than fixed and discrete; and prone to get confused and lost in the play of mirrors. The cross-currents of ideas and inspirations — the Nazi reverence for Atatürk, a gay French philosopher’s denunciation of the modern West and sympathy for the Iranian Revolution, or the various ideological inspirations for Iran’s Islamic Revolution (Zionism, Existentialism, Bolshevism and revolutionary Shiism) — reveal that the picture of a planet defined by civilizations closed off from one another and defined by religion (or lack thereof) is a puerile cartoon. They break the simple axis — religious-secular, modern-medieval, spiritual-materialist — on which the contemporary world is still measured, revealing that its populations, however different their pasts, have been on converging and overlapping paths. [p. 158]

These descriptions and analyses put me in mind of a fascinating book I read some years ago and reviewed on Amazon (one of only a handful of Amazon reviews): John Reader’s Man on Earth (1988). Reader describes and indeed celebrates incredibly diverse ways of inhabiting the Earth specially adapted to the landscape and based on evolving local practices. Thus, the notion of “place” is paramount. Comparison occurs only by virtue of juxtaposition. Mishra does something quite different, drawing out the connective ideas that account for “converging and overlapping paths.” Perhaps inevitably, disturbances to collective and individual identities that flow from unique styles of social organization, especially those now operating at industrial scale (i.e., industrial civilization), appear to be picking up. For instance, in the U.S., even as mass shootings (a preferred form of attack but not the only one) appear to be on the rise at the same time that violent crime is at an all-time low, perpetrators of violence are not limited to a few lone wolves, as the common trope goes. According to journalist Matt Agorist,

mass shootings — in which murdering psychopaths go on rampages in public spaces — have claimed the lives of 339 people since 2015 [up to mid-July 2019]. While this number is certainly shocking and far too high, during this same time frame, police in America have claimed the lives of 4,355 citizens.

And according to this article in Vox, this crazy disproportion (police violence to mass shootings) is predominantly an American thing at least partly because of our high rate of fetishized civilian gun ownership. Thus, the self-described “land of the free, home of the brave” has transformed itself into a paranoid garrison state affecting civil authority even more egregiously than the disenfranchised (mostly young men). Something similar occurred during the Cold War, when leaders became hypervigilant for attacks and invasions that never came. Whether a few close calls during the height of the Cold War were the result of escalating paranoia, brinkmanship, or true, maniacal, existential threats from a mustache-twirling, hand-rolling despot hellbent on the destruction of the West is a good question, probably impossible to answer convincingly. However, the result today of this mindset couldn’t be more disastrous:

It is now clear that the post-9/11 policies of pre-emptive war, massive retaliation, regime change, nation-building and reforming Islam have failed — catastrophically failed — while the dirty war against the West’s own Enlightenment [the West secretly at war with itself] — inadvertently pursued through extrajudicial murder, torture, rendition, indefinite detention and massive surveillance — has been a wild success. The uncodified and unbridled violence of the ‘war on terror’ ushered in the present era of absolute enmity in which the adversaries, scornful of all compromise, seek to annihilate each other. Malignant zealots have emerged at the very heart of the democratic West after a decade of political and economic tumult; the simple explanatory paradigm set in stone soon after the attacks of 9/11 — Islam-inspired terrorism versus modernity — lies in ruins. [pp.124–125]

Preposterity

A potpourri of recent newsbits and developments. Sorry, no links or support provided. If you haven’t already heard of most of these, you must be living under a rock. On a moment’s consideration, that may not be such a bad place to dwell.

rant on/

I just made up the word of the title, but anyone could guess its origin easily. Many of today’s political and thought leaders (not quite the same thing; politics doesn’t require much thought), as well as American institutions, are busy creating outrageously preposterous legacies for themselves. Doomers like me doubt anyone will be around to recall in a few decades. For instance, the mainstream media (MSM) garners well-deserved rebuke, often attacking each other in the form of one of the memes of the day: a circular firing squad. Its brazen attempts at thought-control (different thrusts at different media organs) and pathetic abandonment of mission to inform the public with integrity have hollowed it out. No amount of rebranding at the New York Times (or elsewhere) will overcome the fact that the public has largely moved on, swapping superhero fiction for the ubiquitous fictions spun by the MSM and politicians. The RussiaGate debacle may be the worst example, but the MSM’s failures extend well beyond that. The U.S. stock market wobbles madly around its recent all-time high, refusing to admit its value has been severely overhyped and inflated through quantitative easing, cheap credit (an artificial monetary value not unlike cryptocurrencies or fiat currency created out of nothing besides social consensus), and corporate buybacks. The next crash (already well overdue) is like the last hurricane: we might get lucky and it will miss us this season, but eventually our lottery number will come up like those 100-year floods now occurring every few years or decades.

Public and higher education systems continue to creak along, producing a glut of dropouts and graduates ill-suited to do anything but the simplest of jobs requiring no critical thought, little training, and no actual knowledge or expertise. Robots and software will replace them anyway. Civility and empathy are cratering: most everyone is ready and willing to flip the bird, blame others, air their dirty laundry in public, and indulge in casual violence or even mayhem following only modest provocation. Who hasn’t fantasized just a little bit about acting out wildly, pointlessly like the mass killers blackening the calendar? It’s now de rigueur. Thus, the meme infiltrates and corrupts vulnerable minds regularly. Systemic failure of the U.S. healthcare and prison systems — which ought to be public institutions but are, like education, increasingly operated for profit to exploit public resources — continues to be exceptional among developed nations, as does the U.S. military and its bloated budget.

Gaffe-prone Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden cemented his reputation as a goof years ago yet continues to build upon it. One might think that at his age enough would have been enough, but the allure of the highest office in the land is just too great, so he guilelessly applies for the job and the indulgence of the American public. Of course, the real prize-winner is 45, whose constant stream of idiocy and vitriol sends an entire nation scrambling daily to digest their Twitter feeds and make sense of things. Who knows (certainly I don’t) how serious was his remark that he wanted to buy Greenland? It makes a certain sense that a former real-estate developer would offhandedly recommend an entirely new land grab. After all, American history is based on colonialism and expansionism. No matter that the particular land in question is not for sale (didn’t matter for most of our history, either). Of course, everyone leapt into the news cycle with analysis or mockery, only the second of which was appropriate. Even more recent goofiness was 45’s apparent inability to read a map resulting in the suggestion that Hurricane Dorian might strike Alabama. Just as with the Greenland remark, PR flacks went to work to manage and reconfigure public memory, revising storm maps for after-the-fact justification. Has anyone in the media commented that such blatant historical revisionism is the stuff of authoritarian leaders (monarchs, despots, and tyrants) whose underlings and functionaries, fearing loss of livelihood if not indeed life, provide cover for mistakes that really ought to lead to simple admission of error and apology? Nope, just add more goofs to the heaping pile of preposterity.

Of course, the U.S. is hardly alone in these matters. Japan and Russia are busily managing perception of their respective ongoing nuclear disasters, including a new one in Russia that has barely broken through our collective ennui. Having followed the U.S. and others into industrialization and financialization of its economy, China is running up against the same well-known ecological despoliation and limits to growth and is now circling the drain with us. The added spectacle of a trade war with the petulant president in the U.S. distracts everyone from coming scarcity. England has its own clownish supreme leader, at least for now, trying to manage an intractable but binding issue: Brexit. (Does every head of state need a weirdo hairdo?) Like climate change, there is no solution no matter how much steadfast hoping and wishing one into existence occurs, so whatever eventually happens will throw the region into chaos. Folks shooting each other for food and fresh water in the Bahamas post-Hurricane Dorian is a harbinger of violent hair-triggers in the U.S. poised to fire at anything that moves when true existential threats finally materialize. Thus, our collective human legacy is absurd and self-destroying. No more muddling through.

/rant off