Unthinking the Thinkable

/rant on

The self-appointed Thought Police continue their rampage through the public sphere, campaigning to disallow certain thoughts and fence off unacceptable, unsanitary, unhygienic, unhealthy utterances lest they spread, infect, and distort their host thinkers. Entire histories are being purged from, well, history, to pretend they either never happened or will never happen again, because (doncha know?) attempting to squeeze disreputable thought out of existence can’t possibly result in those forbidden fruits blossoming elsewhere, in the shadows, in all their overripe color and sweetness. The restrictive impulse — policing free speech and free thought — is as old as it is stupid. For example, it’s found in the use of euphemisms that pretend to mask the true nature of all manner of unpleasantness, such as death, racial and national epithets, unsavory ideologies, etc. However, farting is still farting, and calling it “passing wind” does nothing to reduce its stink. Plus, we all fart, just like we all inevitably traffic in ideas from time to time that are unwholesome. Manners demand some discretion when farting broaching some topics, but the point is that one must learn how to handle such difficulty responsibly rather than attempting to hold it in drive it out of thought entirely, which simply doesn’t work. No one knows automatically how to navigate through these minefields.

Considering that the body and mind possess myriad inhibitory-excitatory mechanisms that push and/or pull (i.e., good/bad, on/off, native/alien), a wizened person might recognize that both directions are needed to achieve balance. For instance, exposure to at least some hardship has the salutary effect of building character, whereas constant indulgence results in spoiled children (later, adults). Similarly, the biceps/triceps operate in tandem and opposition and need each other to function properly. However, most inhibitory-excitatory mechanisms aren’t so nearly binary as our language tends to imply but rather rely on an array of inputs. Sorting them all out is like trying to answer the nature/nurture question. Good luck with that.

Here’s a case in point: student and professional athletes in the U.S. are often prohibited from kneeling in dissent during the playing of the national anthem. The prohibition does nothing to ameliorate the roots of dissent but only suppresses its expression under narrow, temporary circumstances. Muzzling speech (ironically in the form of silent behavior) prior to sports contests may actually boomerang to inflame it. Some athletes knuckle under and accept the deal they’re offered (STFU! or lose your position — note the initialism used to hide the curse word) while others take principled stands (while kneeling, ha!) against others attempting to police thought. Some might argue that the setting demands good manners and restraint, while others argue that, by not stomping around the playing field carrying placards, gesticulating threateningly, or chanting slogans, restraint is being used. Opinions differ, obviously, and so the debate goes on. In a free society, that’s how it works. Societies with too many severe restrictions, often bordering on or going fully into fascism and totalitarianism, are intolerable to many of us fed current-day jingoism regarding democracy, freedom, and self-determination.

Many members of the U.S. Congress, sworn protectors of the U.S. Constitution, fundamentally misunderstand the First Amendment, or at least they conveniently pretend to. (I suspect it’s the former). Here is it for reference:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Defending the First Amendment against infringement requires character and principles. What we have instead, both in Congress and in American society, are ideologues and authorities who want to make some categories flatly unthinkable and subject others to prosecution. Whistleblowing falls into the latter category. They are aided by the gradual erosion of educational achievement and shift away from literacy to orality, which robs language of its richness and polysemy. If words are placed out of bounds, made unutterable (but not unthinkable), the very tools of thought and expression are removed. The thoughts themselves may be driven underground or reduced to incoherence, but that’s not a respectable goal. Only under the harshest conditions (Orwell depicted them) can specific thoughts be made truly unthinkable, which typically impoverishes and/or breaks the mind of the thinker or at least results in pro forma public assent while private dissent gets stuffed down. To balance and combat truly virulent notions, exposure and discussion is needed, not suppression. But because many public figures have swallowed a bizarre combination of incoherent notions and are advocating for them, the mood is shifting away from First Amendment protection. Even absolutists like me are forced to reconsider, as for example with this article. The very openness to consideration of contrary thinking may well be the vulnerability being exploited by crypto-fascists.

Calls to establish a Ministry of Truth have progressed beyond the Silicon Valley tech platforms’ arbitrary and (one presumes) algorithm-driven removal of huge swaths of user-created content to a new bill introduced in the Colorado State Senate to establish a Digital Communications Regulation commission (summary here). Maybe this first step toward hammering out a legislative response to surveillance capitalism will rein in the predatory behaviors of big tech. The cynic in me harbors doubts. Instead, resulting legislation is far more likely to be aimed at users of those platforms.

/rant off

The Chirographic Mind

The backblog at The Spiral Staircase includes numerous book reviews and three book-blogging projects — one completed and two others either abandoned or on semi-permanent hiatus. I’m launching a new project on Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), which comes highly recommended and appears quite interesting given my preoccupations with language, literacy, and consciousness. To keep my thinking fresh, I have not consulted any online reviews or synopses.

Early on, Ong provides curious (but unsurprising) definitions I suspect will contribute to the book’s main thesis. Here is one from the intro:

It is useful to approach orality and literacy synchronically, by comparing oral cultures and chirographic (i.e., writing) cultures that coexist at a given period of time. But it is absolutely essential to approach them also diachronically or historically, by comparing successive periods with one another. [p. 2]

I don’t recall reading the word chirographic before, but I blogged about the typographic mind (in which Ong’s analyses are discussed) and lamented that the modern world is moving away from literacy, back toward orality, which feels (to me at least) like retrogression and retreat. (Someone is certain to argue return to orality is actually progress.) As a result, Western institutions such as the independent press are decaying. Moreover, it’s probably fair to say that democracy in the West is by now only a remnant fiction, replaced by oligarchic rule and popular subscription to a variety of fantasy narratives easily dispelled by modest inventory of what exists in actuality.

Here is another passage and definition:

A grapholect is a transdialectal language formed by deep commitment to writing. Writing gives a grapholect a power far exceeding that of any purely oral dialect. The grapholect known as standard English has accessible for use a recorded vocabulary of at least a million and a half words, of which not only the present meanings but also hundreds of thousands of past meanings are known. A simply oral dialect will commonly have resources of only a few thousand words, and its users will have virtually no knowledge of the real semantic history of any of these words. [p. 8]

My finding is that terms such as democracy, liberalism, social justice, etc. fail to mean anything (except perhaps to academics and committed readers) precisely because their consensus usage has shifted so wildly over time that common historical points of reference are impossible to establish in a culture heavily dominated by contemporary memes, slang, talking heads, and talking points — components of orality rather than literacy. And as part of a wider epistemological crisis, one can no longer rely on critical thinking to sort out competing truth claims because the modifier critical now bandied about recklessly in academia, now infecting the workplace and politics, has unironically reversed its meaning and requires uncritical doublethink to swallow what’s taught and argued. Let me stress, too, that playing word games (such as dissembling what is means) is a commonplace tactic to put off criticism by distorting word meanings beyond recognition.

Although it’s unclear just yet (to me, obviously) what Ong argues in his book beyond the preliminary comparison and contrast of oral and chirographic cultures (or in terms of the title of the book, orality and literacy), I rather doubt he argues as I do that the modern world has swung around to rejection of literacy and the style of thought that flows from deep engagement with the written word. Frankly, it would surprise me if his did; the book predates the Internet, social media, and what’s now become omnimedia. The last decade in particular has demonstrated that by placing a cheap, personal, 24/7/365 communications device in the hands of every individual from the age of 12 or so, a radical social experiment was launched that no one in particular designed — except that once the outlines of the experiment began to clarify, those most responsible (i.e., social media platforms in particular but also biased journalists and activist academics) have refused to admit that they are major contributors to the derangement of society. Cynics learned long ago to expect that advertisers, PR hacks, and politicians should be discounted, which requires ongoing skepticism and resistance to omnipresent lures, cons, and propaganda. Call it waking up to reality or simply growing up and behaving responsibly in an information environment designed to be disorienting. Accordingly, the existence of counterweights — information networks derived from truth, authority, and integrity — has always been, um, well, critical. Their extinction presages much graver losses as information structures and even the memory of mental habits that society needs to function are simply swept aside.

Fake It Til You Make It

I have observed various instances of magical thinking in mainstream culture, especially here, which I find problematical. Although it’s not my ambition to disabuse anyone of magical thinking, which extends far beyond, say, religious thought, I was somewhat taken aback at the suggestion found in the comic at this link (not embedded). For those not familiar with Questionable Content (one of two online comics I read regularly), the comic presents an extended cast of characters, mostly in their early 20s, living in a contemporary New England college town. Those characters are supplemented by a few older parents and lots of AIs (in robot bodies). The AIs are not particularly futuristic but are simply accepted as a normal (if curious) part of the world of the comic. Major story arcs involve characters and AIs (the AIs are characters, I suppose) in the process of discovering and establishing themselves as they (the humans, anyway) transition into early adulthood. There are no great political themes or intrusions into life in a college town. Rather, the comic is largely about acceptance of difference. Often, that means washing away meaningful difference in the name of banal tolerance. Real existential struggle is almost entirely absent.

In the linked comic, a new character comes along and offers advice to an established character struggling with sexual attractions and orientation. The dialogue includes this exchange:

Character A: If tarot or astrology or religion halps you make sense of the world and your place in it, then why not use them?
Character B: But they’re not real. [emphasis in original]
Character A: It doesn’t matter, if you use them constructively!

There it is in a nutshell: believe whatever you want if it, um, halps. I’ve always felt that being wrong (i.e., using unreal or make-believe things) was a sufficient injunction against anchoring oneself to notions widely known to be false. Besides, isn’t it often remarked that the biggest fool is one who fools himself? (Fiction as a combination of entertainment and building a worldview is quite normative, but it’s understood as fiction, or to a lesser degree, as life imitating art and its inverse. Exceptions abound, which are regarded as psychopathy.) The instruction in that dialogue (part object lesson, part lesson in cognition) is not that it’s OK to make mistakes but that knowingly believing something false has worthwhile advantages.

Surveying examples where promulgating false beliefs have constructive and destructive effects is too large a project. Well short of that, nasty categories include fraud, gaslighting, and propaganda, which are criminal in many cases and ought to be in most others (looking at you, MSM! — or not, since I neither trust nor watch). One familiar benevolent category is expressed in the phrase fake it til you make it, often recommended to overcome a lack of confidence. Of course, a swindle is also known as a confidence game (or by its diminutive, a con), so beware overconfidence when asked by another to pay for something (e.g., tarot or astrology readings), take risks, or accept an ideology without question.

As philosophy, willful adoption of falsity for its supposed benefits is half-baked. Though impossible to quantify, my suspicion is that instances of positive outcomes are overbalanced by negative ones. Maybe living in a constructed reality or self-reinforcing fantasy is what people want. The comic discussed is certainly in line with that approach. However, while we dither and delude ourselves with happy, aspirational stories based on silliness, the actual world around us, including all the human institutions that used to serve us but no longer do, falls to tatters. Is it better going through life and eventually to one’s grave refusing to see that reality? Should childlike wonder and innocence be retained in spite of what is easily observable just by poking one’s head up and dismissing comforting lies? Decide for yourself.

Another Change of Sea

Returning to the subject of this post, I asserted that the modern era frustrates a deep, human yearning for meaning. As a result, the Medieval Period, and to a lesser degree, life on the highroad, became narrative fixations. Had I time to investigate further, I would read C.S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image (1964), but my reading list is already overfull. Nonetheless, I found an executive summary of how Lewis describes the Medieval approach to history and education:

Medieval historians varied in that some of them were more scientific, but most historians tried to create a “picture of the past.” This “picture” was not necessarily based in fact and was meant more to entertain curiosity than to seriously inform. Educated people in medieval times, however, had a high standard for education composed of The Seven Liberal Arts of grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.

In the last chapter, Lewis summarizes the influence of the Medieval Model. In general, the model was widely accepted, meaning that most people of the time conformed to the same way of thinking. The model, he reiterates, satisfied imagination and curiosity, but was not necessarily accurate or factual, specifically when analyzed by modern thinkers.

Aside. Regular readers of The Spiral Staircase may also recognize how consciousness informs this blog post. Historical psychology offers a glimpse into worldviews of bygone eras, with the Medieval Period perhaps being the easiest to excavate contemplate due to proximity. Few storytellers (cinema or literature) attempt to depict what the world was truly like in the past (best as we can know) but instead resort to an ahistorical modern gloss on how men and women thought and behaved. One notable exception may be the 1986 film The Name of the Rose, which depicts the emerging rational mind in stark conflict with the cloistered Medieval mind. Sword-and-sandal epics set in ancient Rome and Greece get things even worse.

Not Found on My Bookshelf

/rant on

I recently shopped at a media store that sells new releases as well as second-hand copies of books, music, movies, video games, and tchotchkes. Remember those? Amazon killed off most of them. Lots of costumes this time of year, too, which is to be expected given proximity to Halloween. The rather forced reintroduction of pumpkin spice into foods items has already appeared, but I haven’t yet seen the annual, heavy marketing swing toward the Christmas engorgement buying season. Let’s hope it’s muted this year. Somewhat predictably, given my eclectic tastes, I found nothing of interest to buy but did see of a row of bins offering vinyl (LPs, if you prefer) for sale, which were displaced by CDs in the 1980s except for used record stores. Funny how vinyl has come back ’round. My vinyl collection dates me and probably makes me a curmudgeon, not a hipster.

I keep up with neither new fiction nor the latest “this is what just happened …” exposé authored by someone given a book deal (and presumably a ghostwriter), typically on the heels of some very recent event or job loss. A cottage industry seems to have sprung up along these lines without my having noticed. Curiously, one thematic bin/table/kiosk sold titles mostly by conservative pundits and operators to whom I award little or no attention (obviously not keeping my ideological enemies close). Here’s a brief list of the ones I can remember (no links):

• John Bolton — The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir (2020)
• Karl Rove — Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight (2010)
• Candace Owens — Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation (2020)
• Michael Eric Dyson — What Truth Sounds Like: Robert F. Kennedy, James Baldwin, and Our Unfinished Conversation About Race in America (2018)
• Sarah Huckabee Sanders — Speaking for Myself: Faith, Freedom, and the Fight of Our Lives Inside the Trump White House (2020)
• Bill O’Reilly — The United States of Trump: How the President Really Sees America (2019)
• Sean Hannity — Live Free Or Die: America (and the World) on the Brink (2020)
• Jeanine Pirro — Don’t Lie to Me: And Stop Trying to Steal Our Freedom (2020)
• Michael Cohen — Disloyal: A Memoir: The True Story of the Former Personal Attorney to President Donald J. Trump (2020)

The cluster appearing in Fall 2020 suggest their publication was timed to influence the presidential election. It’s also safe to say (based on prior acquaintance) that these authors are worthless highly polemical. None of these titles will be found on my bookshelf, not even temporarily as books borrowed from the library. I saw only one title that might be categorized as originating from the opposing political perspective: Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism (2018), with a foreword by Michael Eric Dyson. (How did Dyson’s contribution escape my attention? Oh, I know: I absolutely refused to read it, especially after Matt Taibbi’s withering review.) Accordingly, the accurate charge of liberal bias in the academy, in media, and on newly censorious social media platform’s such as Twitter and Facebook might be inverted when it comes to book publishing. I admit the evidence for such an assessment is purely anecdotal.

My reading habits have shifted during covidtime. Whereas I used to commute to work and spend some time on a train or bus reading print from the page, I now find myself (half a year now and counting) working from home and drawn lazily to my computer screen, no longer having one or two reliable, daytime blocks away from my electronics. (I have steadfastly successfully refused to use my smartphone as my central vehicle for connectedness to the public sphere or adopted any sort of e-reader.) As a result, my reading, though not diminished in quantity, is somewhat more directed toward the hot, daily news cycle rather than the cool, more prosaic monthly (magazines) and yearly (books) time frames of print media. Daily newspapers, a legacy media product, also no longer serve me because they, too, have become polemical and thus abandoned the objectivity and truthfulness that made them worthwhile in the project of sensemaking.

/rant off

Making Sense and Sensemaking

Caveat: this post is uncharacteristically long and perhaps a bit disjointed. Or perhaps an emerging blogging style is being forged. Be forewarned.

Sam Harris has been the subject of or mentioned in numerous previous blog posts. His podcast Making Sense (formerly, Waking Up), partially behind a paywall but generously offered for free (no questions asked) to those claiming financial hardship, used to be among those I would tune in regularly. Like the Joe Rogan Experience (soon moving to Spotify — does that mean its disappearance from YouTube?), the diversity of guests and reliable intellectual stimulation have been attractive. Calling his podcast Making Sense aligns with my earnest concern over actually making sense of things as the world spins out of control and our epistemological crisis deepens. Yet Harris has been a controversial figure since coming to prominence as a militant atheist. I really want to like what Harris offers, but regrettably, he has lost (most of) my attention. Others reaching the same conclusion have written or vlogged their reasons, e.g., “Why I’m no longer a fan of ….” Do a search.

Having already ranted over specific issues Harris has raised, let me instead register three general complaints. First, once a subject is open for discussion, it’s flogged to death, often without reaching any sort of conclusion, or frankly, helping to make sense. For instance, Harris’ solo discussion (no link) regarding facets of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020, which event sparked still unabated civil unrest, did more to confuse than clarify. It was as though Harris were trying the court case by himself, without a judge, jury, or opposing counsel. My second complaint is that Harris’ verbosity, while impressive in many respects, leads to interviews marred by long-winded, one-sided speeches where the thread is hopelessly lost, blocking an interlocutor from tracking and responding effectively. Whether Harris intends to bury others under an avalanche of argument or does so uncontrollably doesn’t matter. It’s still a Gish gallop. Third is his over-emphasis on hypotheticals and thought experiments. Extrapolation is a useful but limited rhetorical technique, as is distillation. However, treating prospective events as certainties is tantamount to building arguments on poor foundations, namely, abstractions. Much as I admire Harris’ ambition to carve out a space within the public sphere to get paid for thinking and discussing topics of significant political and philosophical currency, he frustrates me enough that I rarely tune in anymore.

What Do You or I Know, Really?

Once in a while, when discussing current events and their interpretations and implications, a regular interlocutor of mine will impeach me, saying “What do you know, really?” I’m always forced to reply that I know only what I’ve learned through various media sources, faulty though they may be, not through first-hand observation. (Reports of anything I have observed personally tend to differ considerably from my own experience once the news media completes its work.) How, then, can I know, to take a very contemporary instance this final week of July 2020, what’s going on in Portland from my home in Chicago other than what’s reported? Makes no sense to travel there (or much of anywhere) in the middle of a public health crisis just to see a different slice of protesting, lawbreaking, and peacekeeping [sic] activities with my own eyes. Extending the challenge to its logical extremity, everything I think I know collapses into solipsism. The endpoint of that trajectory is rather, well, pointless.

If you read my previous post, there is an argument that can’t be falsified any too handily that what we understand about ourselves and the world we inhabit is actually a constructed reality. To which I reply: is there any other kind? That construction achieves a fair lot of consensus about basics, more than one might even guess, but that still leaves quite a lot of space for idiosyncratic and/or personal interpretations that conflict wildly. In the absence of stabilizing authority and expertise, it has become impossible to tease a coherent story out of the many voices pressing on us with their interpretations of how we ought to think and feel. Twin conspiracies foisted on us by the Deep State and MSM known and RussiaGate and BountyGate attest to this. I’ll have more to say about inability to figure things out when I complete my post called Making Sense and Sensemaking.

In the meantime, the modern world has in effect constructed its own metaphorical Tower of Babel (borrowing from Jonathan Haidt — see below). It’s not different languages we speak so much (though it’s that, too) as the conflicting stories we tell. Democratization of media has given each us of — authorities, cranks, and everyone between — new platforms and vehicles for promulgating pet stories, interpretations, and conspiracies. Most of it is noise, and divining the worthwhile signal portion is a daunting task even for disciplined, earnest folks trying their best to penetrate the cacophony. No wonder so many simply turn away in disgust.

Mutually Assured Destruction

/rant on

MAD is a term I haven’t thought about for a good long while. No illusions here regarding that particularly nasty genie having been stuffed back into its lamp. Nope, it lingers out there in some weird liminal space, routinely displaced by more pressing concerns. However, MAD came back into my thoughts because of saber-rattling by U.S. leadership suggesting resumed above-ground nuclear testing might be just the ticket to remind our putative enemies around the world what complete assholes we are. Leave it to Americans to be the very last — in the midst of a global pandemic (that’s redundant, right?) — to recognize that geopolitical squabbles (alert: reckless minimization of severity using that word squabble) pale in comparison to other looming threats. Strike that: we never learn; we lack the reflective capacity. Still, we ought to reorient in favor of mutual aid and assistance instead of our MAD, insane death pact.

The authoritative body that normally springs to mind when MAD is invoked is the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Ironically, it appears to be an independent, nonprofit 501(c)(3) entity, a media organization, not an actual collection of atomic scientists. (I’ll continue to italicize Bulletin as though it’s a publication like the New York Times even though it’s arguably something else.) I’ve blogged repeatedly about its iconic Doomsday Clock. In an otherwise astute post against sloppy appeals to authority using the increasingly meaningless term expert, Alan Jacobs takes to task the Bulletin for straying out of its lane to consider threats that are political in nature rather than scientific. Reminded me of when Pope Francis in his encyclical deigned to acknowledge climate change, recognizing that Mother Earth is our “common home” and maybe we shouldn’t be raping her. (OK, that coarse bit at the end is mine.) What? He’s not a climatologist! How dare he opine on something outside his official capacity? Go back to saving souls!

At the same time we desperately need expertise to accomplish things like building bridges that don’t fall down (yet still do) or performing an appendectomy without killing the patient, it’s inevitable that people form opinions about myriad subjects without the benefit of complete authority or expertise, if such a thing even exists. As students, citizens, and voters, we’re enjoined to inform ourselves, discuss, and learn rather than forfeit all opinion-making to, oh I dunno, the chattering classes. That’s intellectual sovereignty, unless one is unfortunate enough to live in a totalitarian regime practicing thought control. Oh, wait … So it’s a sly form of credentialing to fence off or police opinion expressed from inexpert quarters as some sort of thought crime. Regarding MAD, maybe the era has passed when actual atomic scientists assessed our threat level. Now it’s a Science and Security Board made up of people few have ever heard of, and the scope of their concern, like the Pope’s, is wide enough to include all existential threats, not just the one assigned to them by pointy-headed categorists. Are politicians better qualified on such matters? Puhleeze! (OK, maybe Al Gore, but he appears to be busy monetizing climate change.)

As a self-described armchair social critic, I, too, recognized more than a decade ago the existential threat (extinction level, too) of climate change and have blogged about it continuously. Am I properly credentialed to see and state the, um, obvious? Maybe not. That’s why I don’t argue the science and peer-reviewed studies. But the dynamics, outlines, and essentials of climate change are eminently understandable by laypersons. That was true as well for Michael Ruppert, who was impeached by documentarians for lacking supposed credentialed expertise yet still having the temerity to state the obvious and sound the alarm. Indeed, considering our failure to act meaningfully to ameliorate even the worst case scenario, we’ve now got a second instance of mutually assured destruction, a suicide pact, and this one doesn’t rely on game-theoretical inevitability. It’s already happening all around us as we live and breathe … and die.

/rant off

Channeling Contagion

Caveat: rather overlong for me, but I got rolling …

One of the better articles I’ve read about the pandemic is this one by Robert Skidelsky at Project Syndicate (a publication I’ve never heard of before). It reads as only slightly conspiratorial, purporting to reveal the true motivation for lockdowns and social distancing, namely, so-called herd immunity. If that’s the case, it’s basically a silent admission that no cure, vaccine, or inoculation is forthcoming and the spread of the virus can only be managed modestly until it has essentially raced through the population. Of course, the virus cannot be allowed to simply run its course unimpeded, but available impediments are limited. “Flattening the curve,” or distributing the infection and death rates over time, is the only attainable strategy and objective.

Wedding mathematical and biological insights, as well as the law of mass action in chemistry, into an epidemic model may seem obvious now, but it was novel roughly a century ago. We’re also now inclined, if scientifically oriented and informed, to understand the problem and its potential solutions management in terms of engineering rather than medicine (or maybe in terms of triage and palliation). Global response has also made the pandemic into a political issue as governments obfuscate and conceal true motivations behind their handling (bumbling in the U.S.) of the pandemic. Curiously, the article also mentions financial contagion, which is shaping up to be worse in both severity and duration than the viral pandemic itself.

God’s Eye View (redux)

The first time I wrote on this title was here. I’m pretty satisfied with that 11-year-old blog post. Only recently, I copped to use of reframing to either zoom in on detail or zoom out to context, a familiar rhetorical device. Here I’m zooming out again to the god’s eye view of things.

The launching point for me is James Howard Kunstler’s recent blog post explaining and apologizing for his generation’s principal error: financialization of the U.S. economy. In that post, he identifies characteristics in grandparents and parents of boomers as each responds and adapts to difficulties of the most self-destructive century in human history. Things destroyed include more than just lives, livelihoods, and the biosphere. After several centuries of rising expectations and faith in progress (or simply religious faith), perhaps the most telling destruction is morale, first in the reckless waste of WWI (the first mechanized war), then repeatedly in serial economic and political catastrophes and wars that litter the historical record right up to today. So it’s unsurprising (but not excusable) that boomers, seeing in unavoidable long-term destruction our powerlessness to master ourselves or in fact much of anything — despite the paradox of developing and obtaining more power at every opportunity — embarked on a project to gather to themselves as much short-term wealth and power as possible because, well, why the fuck not? Kunstler’s blog post is good, and he admits that although the masters-of-the-universe financial wizards who converted the economy into a rigged casino/carnival game for their own benefit are all boomers, not all boomers are responsible except in the passive sense that we (includes me, though I’m just as powerless as the next) have allowed it to transpire without the necessary corrective: revolt.

Zooming out, however, I’m reminded of Jared Diamond’s assessment that the greatest mistake humans ever committed was the Agricultural Revolution 10–13 millennia ago. That context might be too wide, so let me restrict to the last 500 years. One theory propounded by Morris Berman in his book Why America Failed (2011) is that after the discovery of the New World, the cohort most involved in colonizing North America was those most desperate and thus inclined to accept largely unknown risks. To them, the lack of ontological security and contingent nature of their own lives were undeniable truths that in turn drive distortion of the human psyche. Thus, American history and character are full of abominations hardly compensated for by parallel glories. Are boomers, or more generally Americans, really any worse than others throughout history? Probably not. Too many counter-examples to cite.

The current endgame phase of history is difficult to assess as we experience it. However, a curious theory came to my attention that fits well with my observation of a fundamental epistemological crisis that has made human cognition into a hall of mirrors. (See also here and here, and I admit cognition may have always been a self-deception.) In a recent Joe Rogan podcast, Eric Weinstein, who comes across as equally brilliant and disturbed (admitting that not much may separate those two categories), opines that humans can handle only 3–4 layers of deception before collapsing into disorientation. It’s probably a feature, not a bug, and many have learned to exploit it. The example Weinstein discusses (derivative of others’ analyses, I think) is professional wrestling. Fans and critics knew for a very long time that wrestling looks fake, yet until the late 1980s, wrestlers and promoters held fast to the façade that wresting matches are real sporting competitions rather than being “sports entertainments.” Once the jig was up, it turned out that fans didn’t really care; it was real enough for them. Now we’ve come full circle with arguments (and the term kayfabe) that although matches are staged and outcomes known in advance, the wresting itself is absolutely for real. So we encounter a paradox where what we’re told and shown is real, except that it isn’t, except that it sorta is, ultimately finding that it’s turtles all the way down. Enthusiastic, even rabid, embrace of the unreality of things is now a prime feature of the way we conduct ourselves.

Professional wrestling was not the first organization or endeavor to offer this style of mind-bending unreality. Deception and disinformation (e.g., magic shows, fortune-telling, con jobs, psyops) have been around forever. However, wrestling may well have perfected the style for entertainment purposes, which has in turn infiltrated nearly all aspects of modern life, not least of which are economics and politics. Thus, we have crypto- and fiat currencies based on nothing, where money can be materialized out of thin air to save itself from worthlessness, at least until that jig is up, too. We also have twin sham candidates for this fall’s U.S. presidential election, both clearly unfit for the job for different reasons. And in straightforward fictional entertainment, we have a strong revival of magical Medievalism, complete with mythical creatures, spells, and blades of fortune. As with economics and politics, we know it’s all a complex of brazen lies and gaslighting, but it’s nonetheless so tantalizing that its entertainment value outstrips and sidelines any calls to fidelity or integrity. Spectacle and fakery are frankly more interesting, more fun, more satisfying. Which brings me to my favorite Joe Bageant quote:

We have embraced the machinery of our undoing as recreation.