Nowhere Left to Go

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has reset its doomsday clock ten seconds closer to midnight (figuratively, nuclear Armageddon), bringing the world closest to catastrophe in its history. Bizarrely, its statement published today points squarely at Russia as the culprit but fails to mention the participation of the United States and other NATO countries in the conflict. Seems to me a rather unethical deployment of distinctly one-sided rhetoric. With the clock poised so close to midnight, there’s nearly nowhere left to reset the clock until the bombs fly. In contrast, two of the blogs I read that are openly critical of provocations and escalation against Russia, not by Russia, are Bracing Views (on my blogroll) and Caitlin Johnstone (not on my blogroll). Neither minces words, and both either suggest or say openly that U.S. leadership are the bad guys indulging in nuclear brinkmanship. Many more example of that ongoing debate are available. Judge for yourself whose characterizations are more accurate and useful.

Although armed conflict at one scale or another, one time or another, is inescapable given mankind’s violent nature, it takes no subtle morality or highfalutin ethics to be default antiwar, whereas U.S. leadership is uniformly prowar. Can’t know for sure what the motivations are, but the usual suspects include fear of appearing weak (um, it’s actually that fear that’s weak, dummies) and the profit motive (war is a racket). Neither convinces me in the slightest that squandering lives, energy, and lucre make war worth contemplating except in extremis. Military action (and its logistical support such as the U.S. is providing to Ukraine) should only be undertaken with the gravest regret and reluctance. Instead, war is glorified and valorized. Fools rush in ….

No need to think hard on this subject, no matter where one gets information and reporting (alternately, disinformation and misreporting). Also doesn’t ultimately matter who are the good guys or the bad guys. What needs to happen in all directions and by all parties is deescalation and diplomacy. Name calling, scapegoating, and finger pointing might soothe some that they’re on the right side of history. The bad side of history will be when nuclear powers go MAD, at which point no one can stake any moral high ground.

The Four (or Five (or Six)) Inequalities

My inquiries into media theory long ago led me to Alan Jacobs and his abandoned, reactivated, then reabandoned blog Text Patterns. Jacobs is a promiscuous thinker and even more promiscuous technologist in that he has adopted and abandoned quite a few computer apps and publishing venues over time, offering explanations each time. Always looking for better tools, perhaps, but this roving public intellectual requires persistent attention lest one lose track of him. His current blog (for now) is The Homebound Symphony (not on my ruthlessly short blogroll), which is updated roughly daily, sometimes with linkfests or simple an image, other times with thoughtful analysis. Since I’m not as available as most academics to spend all day reading and synthesizing what I’ve read to put into a blog post, college class, or book, I am not on any sort of schedule and only publish new blog posts when I’m ready. Discovered in my latest visit to The Homebound Symphony was a plethora of super-interesting subject matter, which I daresay is relevant to the more literate and literary among us. Let me draw out the one that most piqued my interest. (That was the long way of tipping my hat to Jacobs for the link.)

In an old (by Internet standards) yet fascinating book review by Michael Walzer of Siep Stuurman’s The Invention of Humanity: Equality and Cultural Difference in World History (2017), Walzer describes the four inequalities that have persisted throughout human history, adding a fifth identified by Stuurman:

• geographic inequality
• racial inequality
• hierarchical inequality
• economic inequality
• temporal inequality

I won’t unpack what each means if they’re not apparent on their face. Read for yourself. Intersections and overlapping are common in taxonomies of this sort, so don’t expect categories to be completely separate and distinct. The question of equality (or its inverse inequality) is a fairly recent development, part of a stew of 18th-century thought in the West that was ultimately distilled to one famous phrase “all men are created equal.” Seems obvious, but the phrase is fraught, and we’ve never really been equal, have we? So is it equal before god? Equal before the law? Equal in all opportunities and outcomes as social justice warriors now insist? On a moment’s inspection, no one can possibly believe we’re all equal despite aspirations that everyone be treated fairly. The very existence of perennial inequalities puts the lie to any notion of equality trucked in with the invention of humanity during the Enlightenment.

To those inequalities I would add a sixth: genetic inequality. Again, overlap with the others is acknowledged, but it might be worth observing that divergent inherited characteristics (other than wealth) appear quite early in life among siblings and peers, before most others manifest. By that, I certainly don’t mean race or sex, though differences clearly exist there as well. Think instead of intelligence, height, beauty, athletic ability, charisma, health and constitution, and even longevity (life span). Each of us has a mixture of characteristics that are plainly different from those of others and which provide either springboards or produce disadvantages. Just as it’s unusual to find someone in possession of all positive characteristics at once — the equivalent of rolling a 12 for each attribute of a new D&D character — few possess all negatives (a series of 1’s), either. Also, there’s probably no good way to rank best to worst, strongest to weakest, or most to least successful. Bean counters from one discipline or another might try, but that runs counter to the mythology “all men are created equal” and thus becomes a taboo to acknowledge, much less scrutinize.

What to do with the knowledge that all men are not in fact created equal and never will be? That some are stronger; more charming; smarter; taller with good teeth (or these days, dentists), hair, vision, and square jaws; luckier in the genetic lottery? Well, chalk it up, buddy. We all lack some things and possess others.

Hyperanalysis, Intervention, and Micromanagement

A bunch of unrelated things I have been reading and hearing suddenly and rather unexpectedly came together synthetically. The profusion is too great to provide a handy set of links, and backstage analytics indicate that almost no one follows the links I provide anyway, so this will be free form.

Hyperanalysis

As I have previously blogged, peering (or staring) too intently at a physical object or subject of inquiry tends to result in the object or subject being examined at the wrong resolution. An obtuse way of restating this is that one can’t study the cosmos under a microscope or cell biology through a telescope. The common mistake is to study minutia and fail to perceive the whole, rarely the reverse. Iain McGilchrist suggests that hyperanalysis is a hallmark of an imbalance in brain lateralization, where the left brain (the Emissary) takes primacy over the right brain (the Master). Others building on McGilchrist’s thesis have theorized that human culture and styles of cognition have swung in and out of proper balance periodically throughout history. One theory used portraiture to support how depiction of the human face can be either humanistic or clinical in orientation. What artists perceive then produce divergent aesthetics where the eyes and mouth in particular suggest different ways of encountering the world. Using art to develop theories of psychohistory fits well with one of the preoccupations of this blog, namely, the nature of consciousness.

Intervention

Armed with a precise appreciation of some small aspect of a whole, often abstracted and idealized independently from easily observed fact in actuality, some make the leap that human activity can be acted upon confidently with entirely foreseeable outcomes. Thus, incautious decision-makers intervene to correct, adjust, or game areas within their concern and control. The applicable aphorism that restrains cautious people is “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Perhaps the Dunning-Kruger Effect helps to explain (at least in part) why actors plunge forward despite ample evidence that outcomes don’t adhere reliably to planning. Indeed, the rise and fall of many institutions demonstrate the fallibility of interventions in dynamic systems. Just ask the Federal Reserve. Periodic recourse to warfare is also characterized as a breakdown of peaceful stratagems accompanied by a fog where clarity of purpose is lost. Faced with deteriorating conditions, the demand that something be done, not nothing, also testifies to human frailty and frequent refusal to accept unknown contingency or inevitability.

Micromanagement

When ideology truly misfires, strenuous interventions take the form of tyranny in an attempt to force resistant outcomes into predetermined channels. Too many awful examples of abject failure on that account to mention. Small-scale tyranny might be better recognized as micromanagement. Control freaks adopt that behavior out of any number of motivations, such as distrust of others’ competence, inability to delegate or share responsibility, and hero syndrome. Ironically, the targets of control are often petty and do not contribute meaningfully to enhanced behavior or function. Rather, they focus on a subsidiary metric as a proxy for overall health, wellbeing, and effectiveness.

As people encounter ideologies and learn to systematize, they are especially prone to using incomplete understandings of complex systems and then seizing upon one intervention or another to attempt to solve problems. This is not limited to students in the early years of college who discover a supposed Rosetta stone for fixing ills but rather includes any reform political candidate or newly minted CEO with a mandate to remove corruption, dead weight, or inefficiency. This is also the domain of specialists, experts, and academics who have concentrated their efforts in a narrow subfield and feel confident generalizing that acquired skill and applied knowledge outside the area of focus. Of course, it’s warranted to rely on brain surgeons for brain surgery and car mechanics for automotive repairs. But no one expects them to offer advice on intractable social problems, correct historical wrongs, or develop a centered philosophy of anything. Indeed, institutions and societies are so complex and inherently unsteerable that, despite many futile attempts, no one has ever developed a comprehensive understanding sufficient to engineer programs that lead anywhere remotely in the vicinity of utopia. Yet with an abundance of confidence, agitators and activists — sometime quite young but unafraid to instruct their elders — seek to implement their ideological designs, by force if necessary, to enact desired change. Maybe those changes are considered humble baby steps toward improved social justice and greater equity, tinkering around the edges perhaps, but I doubt most ambitions are so constrained. While that energy is absolutely necessary in a pluralistic society to avoid cynicism and stagnation, it often becomes a victim of its own success when radicals gain power and impose orthodoxies that are ultimately self-defeating and thus short lived. History is full of movements, civil wars, and revolutions that demonstrate the point. Dystopian fiction also forewarns how tyrannies develop out of misguided application of ideology and power.

I probably haven’t described any too well the power law that coalesced in my thinking. Nor do I pretend to have solutions for anything. As I’ve often written, given the myriad problems global civilization now faces, it’s well nigh impossible to know what to wish for with much clarity since deliverance from one set of problems often exacerbates others. World systems theorists try to piece together various dynamics into a coherent unified theory, and I admire the effort to understand how the world really works, but I still subscribe to the precautionary principle when it comes to implementing globe-spanning programs.

Review: Glass Onion

A few years ago, Knives Out (2019) unexpectedly solidified the revival of the whodunit and introduced its modern-day master sleuth: Benoit Blanc. The primary appeal of the whodunit has always been smartly constructed plots that unfold slowly and culminate in a final reveal or unmasking that invites readers to reread in search of missed clues. The two early masters of this category of genre fiction were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, both succeeding in making their fictional detectives iconic. Others followed their examples, though the genre arguably shifted onto (into?) the TV with shows such as Perry Mason, Columbo, and Murder She Wrote. No surprise, Hollywood transformed what might have been a one-and-done story into the beginnings of a franchise, following up Knives Out with Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (subtitle displayed unnecessarily to ensure audiences make the connection — wouldn’t a better subtitle be A Benoit Blanc Mystery?). Both movies are entertaining enough to justify munching some popcorn in the dark but neither observes the conventions of the genre — novel, TV, or film — any too closely. Spoilers ahead.

I harbor a sneaking suspicion that Benoit Blanc is actually a bumbling fool the way poor, rumpled Columbo only pretended to be. Although I can’t blame Daniel Craig for taking roles that allow him to portray someone other than James Bond, Craig is badly miscast and adopts a silly Southern accent others complain sounds laughably close to Foghorn Leghorn. (Craig was similarly miscast in the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but that’s an entirely different, unwritten review.) So long as Blanc is a nitwit, I suppose the jokey accent provides some weak characterization and enjoyment. Problem is, because the film is only superficially a whodunit, there is no apparent crime to solve after Blanc figures out the staged murder mystery (sorta like an escape room) just after the vacation weekend gets started but before the faux murder even occurs. Kinda ruins the momentum. As a result, the film digresses to a lengthy flashback to establish the real crime that Blanc is there to solve. Maybe good mystery novels have partial reveals in the middle, reframing the entire mystery. I dunno but rather doubt it.

The plot is by no means tightly knit or clever as a whodunit normally demands. Rather, it employs lazy, pedestrian devices that irritate as much as entertain. Such as one of the characters (the real murdered character) having an identical twin who substitutes herself for the dead one; such as trapping attendees on a remote island without servants or transportation but largely ignoring their suggested captivity; such as uncovering an orgy of evidence better suited to misdirection and framing of an innocent; such as mixing faux violence with real violence, though none of the characters appears even modestly afraid at any point; such as bullets being fortuitously stopped by items in a breast pocket; such as sleuthing and detecting — done by the twin, not Blanc! — being presented in a montage of coinkidinks that demonstrate more luck than skill. I could go on. The worst cinematic trick is reprising scenes in flashback but altered to insert clues viewers would have noticed initially. Those aren’t reveals; they’re revisions. Moreover, instead of inviting viewers to rewatch, this gimmick jams supposedly unnoticed clues down their throats. How insulting. If Benoit Blanc is really an overconfident, dandified nincompoop, I suppose it’s better and more convenient (for bad storytelling) to be lucky than good. He doesn’t solve anything; he’s just there to monologue incessantly.

The weekend party is hosted by a character patterned after … oh never mind, you know who. I decline to provide the name of that real-life narcissist. Members of the entourage are mostly sycophants, originally good friends but later ruined in different ways by proximity to a hyper-successful fraud. As a group, they’re known as The Shitheads, which just about sums it up. Critics have observed a shift in entertainment toward depicting super-wealthy pretty people as heels of the highest order. Not sure what makes that entertaining exactly. I enjoy no Schadenfreude witnessing the high and mighty brought low, much as they may deserve it. It’s just another lazy cliché (like its inverse: the dignity of the downtrodden everyman a/k/a the noble savage) trotted out in the absence of better ideas.

Safely Distanced

/rant on

New Year’s Day (or just prior) is the annual cue for fools full of loose talk to provide unasked their year-in-review and “best of” articles summarizing the previous calendar year. I don’t go in for such clichéd forms of curation but certainly recognize an appetite among Web denizens for predigested content that tells them where to park their attention and what or how to think rather than thinking for themselves. Considering how mis- and under-educated the public has grown to be since the steady slippage destruction of educational standards and curricula began in the 1970s (says me), I suppose that appetite might be better characterized as need in much the same way children needs guidance and rules enforced by wizened authorities beginning with parents yet never truly ending, only shifting over to various institutions that inform and restrain society as a whole. I continue to be flabbergasted by the failure of parents (and teachers) to curb the awful effects of electronic media. I also find it impossible not to characterize social media and other hyperstimuli as gateways into the minds of impressionable youth (and permanent adult children) very much like certain drugs (e.g., nicotine, alcohol, and cannabis) are characterized as gateways to even worse drugs. No doubt everyone must work out a relationship with these unavoidable, ubiquitous influences, but that’s not equivalent to throwing wide open the gate for everything imaginable to parade right in, as many do.

Hard to assess whether foundations below American institutions (to limit my focus) were allowed to decay through neglect and inattention or were actively undermined. Either way, their corruption and now inter-generational inability to function effectively put everyone in a wildly precarious position. The know-how, ambition, and moral focus needed to do anything other than game sclerotic systems for personal profit and acquisition of power are eroding so quickly that operations requiring widespread subscription by the public (such as English literacy) or taking more than the push of a button or click of a mouse to initiate preprogrammed commands are entering failure mode. Like the accidental horror film Idiocracy, the point will come when too few possess the knowledge and skills anymore to get things done but can only indulge in crass spectacle with their undeveloped minds. Because this is a date-related blog post, I point out that Idiocracy depicts results of cultural decay 500 years hence. It won’t take nearly that long. Just one miserable example is the fascist, censorious mood — a style of curation — that has swept through government agencies and Silicon Valley offices intent on installing unchallenged orthodoxies, or for that matter, news junkies and social media platform users content to accept coerced thinking. Religions of old ran that gambit but no need to wait for a new Inquisition to arise. Heretics are already persecuted via cancel culture, which includes excommunication social expulsion, suspension and/or cancellation of media accounts, and confiscation of bank deposits.

A similar point can be made about the climate emergency. Fools point to weather rather than climate to dispel urgency. Reports extrapolating trends often focus on the year 2100, well after almost all of us now alive will have departed this Earth, as a bogus target date for eventualities like disappearance of sea and glacial ice, sea level rise, unrecoverable greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, pH imbalance in the oceans, and other runaway, self-reinforcing consequences of roughly 300 years of industrial activity that succeeded unwittingly in terraforming the planet, along the way making it fundamentally uninhabitable for most species. The masses labor in 2023 under the false impression that everyone is safely distanced from those outcomes or indeed any of the consequences of institutional failure that don’t take geological time to manifest fully. Such notions are like assurances offered to children who seek to understand their own mortality: no need to worry about that now, that’s a long, long way off. Besides, right now there are hangovers to nurse, gifts to return for cash, snow to shovel, and Super Bowl parties to plan. Those are right now or at least imminent. Sorry to say, so is the full-on collapse of institutions that sustain and protect everyone. The past three years have already demonstrated just how precarious modern living arrangements are, yet most mental models can’t or won’t contemplate the wholesale disappearance of this way of life, and if one has learned of others pointing to this understanding, well, no need to worry about that just yet, that’s a long, long way off. However, the slide down the opposite side of all those energy, population, and wealth curves won’t take nearly as long as it took to climb up them.

/rant off