The Limits of Extremes

Every month or so, I see some story titled something like: So-and-So Says Capitalism Is Not Compatible with Democracy. The implication is always: so much the worse for democracy. As far as it goes, in arguing that uncontrolled capitalism is incompatible with unalloyed democracy, the statement is true, but it is a statement based on idiotic and false assumptions. We have never experienced an atmosphere of capitalism or democracy in pure form, and, as with most things, such as oxygen unmixed with other gases, life would immediately become impossible. 

For reasons unclear to me, we live in a time in which "purity" and "the extreme" matter to people. One of the results is that the lessons of the past are simply ignored. If we have never had pure capitalism nor pure democracy (nor pure communism, totalitarianism, theocracy, etc.), then it remains possible for some to argue for the utopia that would result from the extreme, pure application of the chosen ism or ocracy. Never mind, that, whenever a society has approached one of those ideals in pure form, the results have been catastrophic. John Gray has done a wonderful job of documenting the causes and diseases of these would-be paradises in his book, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). To put it bluntly, and far too simply, Gray argues that we have not escaped from Christianity, or any other religion, but have simply carried over religious thought patterns into our application of religious and political notions. Now, of course, we have religion nakedly obtruding into both realms again, for as Gray notes people need meaning in their lives, and that is one of the roles of religion. But that is the beneficial role it plays. The thought processes we have carried over from it are all too present today. As Gray notes (page 6), " If a simple definition of western civilization could be formulated it would have to be framed in terms of the central role of millenarian thinking."

Millenarian thought has been the bugbear of my existence for decades. It's appeal has always escaped me and always worried me. Growing up surrounded by ICBMs (14 in my county alone) it always caused that reaction as a child and young adult. What we are dealing with today with the desire for a pure application of -isms and -ocracies is often shaped by the basic structures, if not the content, of Christian millenarianism. Somehow, pure capitalism is held by some to be the key to a perfect world. For others it might be pure democracy, or pure communism, pure environmentalism, or the total domination of one religion or another. None of those can, of course, bring about utopia or paradise, none can bring about the millennium, which. (I am not writing as an atheist, but, if one wants to accept that God - any deity in fact - operates in unknowable ways, and is all powerful, then the belief that one can understand its will, through the correct interpretation of prophesy, and then force that god to execute some sequence of events to bring about the desired outcome is not religion, in the modern sense but the crudest divination and magick - and I use the Crowley spelling of that advisedly.)

The way out, of course, has always been moderation. That has also always been present in some religious and political thinking, though often ignored. In a sense, we teach the wrong book by Machiavelli in colleges and universities. Whether The Prince was really conceived as a practical joke or not, its message of absolutism achieved by any means is clearly the wrong one. We would do much better to teach his longer work, The Discourses, with its messages of mixed and balanced government.  Even Machiavelli, who was quite radically opposed to absolutism, by the way, preached moderation in practice. 

The great successes of Victorian Britain and of America, during its Century, were due to moderation in government and religion. Neither was anywhere close to perfect, neither came anywhere close to utopia, but both were successful by many measures (though clearly not environmentally nor in creating true equality for citizens or subjects). Both did well enough to foster at least the illusion of human progress, and in many ways did so. Now we face a dire future, but the accomplishments of both these mixed, moderate states and the worlds over which they exerted hegemony suggests ways forward. (If you are convinced that no progress has been made in the world, please take a look at Hans Rosling's last testament, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better than You Think. New York: Flatiron Books, 2018, written by a doctor who had worked in some of the poorest countries in the world with the most rudimentary health care, and who approached the world with an openness that neither prophets of doom or utopian idealists could blind.)

What kind of moderation do we need, though? Much of the talk of moderation comes from those with extreme views, people who want compromise on their terms. Some of it comes from real moderates who fail to see that what political parties and religious groups offer is not compromise but, again, simply a move in their direction. I cannot call myself a moderate anymore. At one time I was but I have both moved far from the supposed center, but also become uncomfortable with every camp. 

What I think we need is a a spirit of personal moderation as well as a societal one. That does not mean we need to compromise with Nazis, Fascists, Dominionists, Communists, or any other set of extremists. If possible, we should try to get them to compromise with us, or abandon their views, but trying to work with any totalizing philosophy is a dead end, in fact it is partly how we got into our present mess. 

In, The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity: Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture (New York: Norton, 2018), Kwame Anthony Appiah writes (p. 211): "Values aren't a birthright: you need to keep caring about them." He says much the same about identity. To Appiah, both values and identities, which, after all, are intimately connected, are the work of a lifetime, hard work at that. We have to attend to them, they are what we are, and "attention must be paid" to them, and to their environment, as surely it had to be paid to Willy Loman. 

This is directly related to the state of the world in which we find ourselves. We have to pay real attention, both to who we are, to what the world is, and to what it may become. We cannot settle into an -ism or an -ocracy. They are not mirrors that reflect the world, nor prisms that refract it, but inner illusions, too self-consistent to engage with the world as it is. Everyday is a struggle not to fall prey to one or the other of them. Each hour must see us attempting to engage with the world within whatever physical or mental limits we can and to broaden our perceptions. But we must also learn to live with others, their values, identities, and perceptions, not by ignoring them, but by trying to engage and find a common path forward whenever possible. 

Belief as a Constraint

One of the biggest categories of constraints on our behavior, on our ability to solve problems, answer questions, and generally find our way through the labyrinth of reality, is belief. I do not just mean religious (or at least supernatural) beliefs, though those are close to the core of most people's belief systems, or political and economic beliefs (though those tend to be almost as central as religious beliefs), but our fundamental beliefs of how the world works. Belief is a constraint because it filters reality for us. Let me put it this way. Whatever is out in the "real world" is accessible to us only through our senses, which represents the first level of filters, is processed by our minds (for the sake of argument, let's call the mind brain plus existing content, though that is clearly a simplification), and then brought to consciousness. Our bodies may be reacting to unconscious content, we can certainly act on such implicit understanding, as we do with most skilled or repetitive tasks, but for understanding the world, and acting with intention, we need to bring the things in our environment into consciousness. Belief acts as a filter as soon as we bring something to consciousness, because our conscious mind craves consistency and seeks to fit any new information into an existing pattern.

To start with, here is a non-religious, historical example. The notion of racial superiority was deeply ingrained into most white Europeans and Americans in the first half of the last century with a certainty that few whites could muster today. The certainty came in large part from a century of rapid and successful colonial expansion, reinforced by both Darwinism and a variety of Christian interpretations of the Bible on race. White Europeans and Americans were a much more dominant force in the world than they are today, and their form of Christianity, their systems of politics and economics, were spreading with breathtaking speed. Prior to the Second World War, there were few things to challenge this sense of superiority. 

So it was that in 1941, the United States, the British Empire and Commonwealth, and the Dutch Government in Exile (including the Dutch East Indies) got a rude awakening. The beliefs about the cultural and physical inferiority of the Japanese were so deeply ingrained that it was thought that their soldiers were far inferior to their larger, western counterparts, their eyesight was deemed so bad that their fighter pilots were assumed to be nearly unable to hit a target (something the on-going air war in China should have negated), and it was presumed that all of their best equipment was of foreign design but inferior construction. So deep were these prejudices that the US military actually assumed that the accurately reported speed and range of the soon-to-be-dreaded Zero fighter was a propaganda ploy, even though they were reported accurately. No other country possessed a fighter with those characteristics, so it was impossible that the "backward" Japanese could have created such a machine. Likewise, the early operations of the Japanese Army and Navy completely overwhelmed the defenses of the British, Americans, and Dutch because the operations were so audacious, so daring, so innovative, and so heavily predicted on the toughness of Japanese soldiers and battle-honed skills of their pilots that they seemed beyond belief. From Pearl Harbor to the Gin-Drinker's Line of fortifications guarding Singapore, the allies paid the price for their hubris, for their racist beliefs. In the long run, most in the West eventually learned the lesson, or at lest had this part of their belief system so shaken by these, and by repeated blows from later events in Malaya, Korea, and Vietnam, that the old certainty could never be recovered by most. 

The Japanese, of course, also suffered from a similar set of beliefs, built up by from their mythology, from the political manipulation of their native religious traditions of Shinto, and through highly effective indoctrination through the school system and mass media. They saw the West as too soft and indecisive, certainly as too pleasure loving. A few, such as Yamamoto, may have understood what the industrial strength of the Anglo-Saxon countries meant, or the moral effect that a surprise attack would have, but even they were willing to take the risk, for their belief system also held that it was better to go down fighting than ever surrender. The leaders understood that they had either to compromise with Roosevelt over the war in China or risk all-out war by seizing the oil-rich French Indochina and Dutch East India. Within their belief system, only the second possibility was possible. This was made so, as Ari Hatta has shown in her excellent Japan 1941 because the highest levels of political decision making emphasized unity and discredited opposition. Because they shared the same basic beliefs and values, and had grown up in a political system that severely limited frank discussion and debate, war with the West became almost inevitable, even if the form of the initial attacks was not. 

Both sides had such a strong and settled belief in their own superiority that they could not understand things as they were or as they unfolded. The Western beliefs began to crack before the Japanese (suffering from what they some called "the victory disease," a kind of collective ego inflation brought on by the lightening victories of the first six months), though it took repeated post-War blows to finish them off as mainstream ideas. The Japanese beliefs may have begun to deteriorate, but their political culture and their industrial weakness made it more difficult for them to recover than than it was for the United States and the British Commonwealth. 

One of the things about beliefs is that they tend to be self-reinforcing, so that anything that seems to confirm them, no matter the real cause, strengthens a given belief, while those things that contradict them are explained away or ignored, sometimes even when the evidence is overwhelming. I suggested above that the European and a American experience of colonialism had served to reinforce white racism.  The coincidence of European technical advances and the senescence of the Chinese Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and several other Asian states gave Europeans a false sense of superiority.  Indeed, superiority of Victorian technology, and the comparative stability of Europe's governments in that era, were simply seen as manifestations  of racial and religious superiority.

The blindness of belief to other causes and forces in the world is itself an important constraint on belief that both allows it to grow unchecked while blinding believers to alternatives. In some cases, the constraints on our thought and behavior are nested. Both the nesting and the mutual reinforcement of constraints for future posts.

Embeddedness

We were so fixated with the big threats of war and annihilation in the last century, of titanic conflicts and threats of conflicts, that we missed much of what was happening below the level of Great Power and Superpower conflicts. We were blinded not just by the global threats, but also by advertising and propaganda, and by our unwillingness, at least in America and Western Europe, to look at certain trends. Our liberal ideologies divided politics and religion more or less cleanly. Unless a politico-religious movement obtruded too sharply, we ignored it. We failed to recognize not just that such movements were brewing under the surface and gaining strength until late in the century. We also failed to recognize how much both religion and politics in America were splitting and fragmenting. Theology and ideology were both fragmenting and influencing one another in ways we rarely and dimly glimpsed. The interactions should have troubled us, but, we were so committed to them being separate spheres that we were blind.  Karen Armstrong calls this mutual influence, "... the 'embeddedness' of religion and politics, which works two ways: not only does religion affect policy, but politics can shape theology." (Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood, 2014, p. 127.)

Before I proceed, let me note that this is not merely a few bad people corrupting religion or politics. This has been a very broad phenomenon. Likewise, I am not limiting this to one religion or ideology, it has happened across the board. It has affected the "new religions" as well, and we find it just as much in the New Age communities as in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or Hinduism. 

Theology and ideology are two of the main keys to our understanding of the world and reality. As we move away from having two or three broad consensus versions of religion or politics, we move also away from consensus reality. We move into a field of realities more fragmented than any we have seen in centuries, but their effects are magnified more than ever before by our large populations and communication technologies. Even at the time of our Civil War were we so fragmented, for the religious and political divides were divided into two or three big blocks. 

Religion and ideology, whether inherited or adopted later in life, not only reflect our values, our understanding of causality, and our attitudes toward authority, but they are central in shaping them. And it is those three things, plus our experiences (especially our social ones) that shape our sense of reality, that is to say, of how the world works and what we expect from it. 

Constraints

In our present multi-crisis, a systemic crisis that seems to penetrate every sphere from the personal to the global, we are apt to ask what caused it or how to fix it, but are soon compelled to settle for a too simple answer to either question, or just give up and place our faith in God or authority (which comes down to much the same thing in practice). In the past two years, I have heard a lot of questions asked, but I have not heard anyone ask a very basic one: what factors have constrained the paths that led us here and continue to keep us from finding answers and solutions. In other words, we need to ask not why and how, but why not and how not. 

Some factors are very big and beyond our control. One set of constraints is environmental and ecological. Along with the laws of physics, these are things we cannot control or transcend. These are things like the amount energy available in the Solar System and Earth, the quantities of minerals and gases there, and the amounts of all of those that are available to sustain life. For a subset of them, we may be able to manipulate nature to work around the limits for a while (as we have done with so many diseases), but need to recognize that nearly every one of those work-arounds has had unintended consequences, some of which are beyond our abilities to cope. 

There are also a huge set of technological constraints. A few of those are beyond our capacity to change, such as the amount of energy required to move a given quantity of freight by a given means, but most of the technological inevitabilities in which we believe simply are not. Too often we are made to believe this by those who have a vested interest in those "inevitabilities." We can say no, or a qualified yes, or explore alternatives, but we have to be aware of the possibilities and the paths we might take, and there is where the main set of constraints on our finding answers comes into play. 

Most of our constraints are built into our behavior and thinking by the societies and cultures in which we have lived our lives, and in which our parents, grandparents, and ancestors back to the dawn of behaviorally modern humans have been confined. There has been change and evolution over time, generally much more than we are willing to admit, but they constrict us and keep us staring at the wall of Plato's Cave. 

Let us ignore the personal ones, for the moment, and look at some of the bigger ones that entrap large groups, whole countries, and entire civilizations. These are mostly at the level of religions and ideologies. Has it ever struck you that virtually all of these are based on one of three things (or, more usually, a combination thereof): attitudes towards the supernatural, attitudes towards money, or attitudes towards race and gender? Anyone who tries to push against these constraints is a dangerous heretic, radical, or deranged person. Why are our political ideologies constrained by these things? Can we think of nothing else to use as a basis for society than shared beliefs, economics, or prejudice? How about a society based on celebration of difference, on ecological principles, and mutual admiration? (Sounds utopian, does it not, but what have we to lose when the alternative is increasingly dystopian?) All of these are human creations. Humans create theologies to explain how they feel about their gods and the supernatural. Humans created money about 5000 years ago (which is also when they seem to have begun codifying sophisticated theologies) and coins only about 2700 years ago. As to racial prejudices, while those have always existed, our modern "scientific" racism is only a couple of centuries old. Gender roles have fluctuated a great deal over time and space. Most aspects of how we thinking about gender is clearly within our control. 

There are a lot of lower-level obstacles to change, from gerrymandering to skewed media, to lack of education. All of those were put in place either intentionally or unintentionally by humans. There is a lot to undo, but it can be undone, it is humanly possible. And there are lots of things at the personal level too. Asking ourselves about the forms we follow in our daily living or the ways we think about reality. We need to start asking ourselves every day why we do the things we do and think the things we think, but, even more so, ask ourselves what keeps us from doing and thinking things differently. It is hard, never easy, but necessary. These are things that are very deeply ingrained in us, much of it from infancy, but often, as in the case of phobias and prejudices, based in multigenerational patterns of thought and behavior within a family or group. Perhaps some of it is even epigenetic.

If we are to find our way out of all of our messes, political, environmental, diplomatic, etc. we have to begin thinking about all of these things that constrain us, that keep us from taking other paths, or even knowing that other paths are there. We have to do it on multiple levels at once, but we have to start with the personal and the group, simply to find the most basic changes we can make, even if each of us has to start with the tiniest of steps. 

Thinking the Past

We do not think in the same way our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents did. We cannot. It is impossible. Our minds, their contents and their processes, are shaped by the times in which we live, and the same applies to our ancestors and predecessors. We have changed on every level that might affect our ability to think like them.

It is obvious that the contents of their minds and ours are greatly different. Many of the things we now accept as incontrovertible (assuming you are not a flat earther) are things like plate tectonics (completely unknown to our Civil War ancestors, and which still remained controversial and unproven among geologists during the Second World War). Some will of course reject it on religious grounds, but they are aware of the idea and are forced to adapt their justifications of scripture to account for it. Even in the most conservative aspects of our thinking and knowledge, we are living in a different thought world. Fundamentalists today accept pre-millennialism as an article of faith. Their pre-fundamentalist predecessors (Fundamentalism was given its name and was codified as a set of doctrines only around 1915) largely did not. Thomas Nelson Darby began to formulate and propagate the doctrine before the Civil War, but it was only toward the end of the century that it was popularized. On most of the main moral issues, and many basic points of doctrine,we have seen almost continuous change over the last two hundred years.

Our technologies have also changed what we think about and our perceptions of the world. That had already begun in the 1850s and has only continued like a metronome periodically reset to a faster beat. They have changed us in several different ways, even in the past few decades. We rarely think about this in terms of mind, but even the chemical composition of our bodies and brains are being changed. Consider just the proliferation of psychoactive chemicals that we take voluntarily and involuntarily (as they are now in both our water and food supplies). In 1860, excluding ethnobotanicals that were not widely known to Europeans and Americans, you could have taken alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, hashish, opium, or morphine. I suppose we might add coffee and tea to that. By the Second World War, that had been expanded to include heroin, cocaine, barbiturates, and amphetamines (which had a significant effect on the war at a tactical level), and experiments with LSD were underway in Switzerland. Compare that with the wider array of benzodiazepines, anti-depressants, and psychedelics we possess today, many of which may be having minor effects on us simply because of their environmental presence. And that is to say nothing of the many chemicals that we take or are permeated with that affect levels of hormones and levels of neurotransmitters as side affects. 

Of course neuroscience has shown that our brains are not the same as they would have been in the past. I do not mean that we have rapidly developed new structures, but, what the past two or three decades have revealed is that the media we use, how we use it, and how intensively we use it, stimulates the growth and development of different areas of the brain. This gives a physical confirmation and basis for the earlier arguments of Walter J. Ong, that modern media technologies had changed us from a literate culture to a culture of "secondary orality." These changes occurred between the Civil War and the Second World War, in fact partially between the World Wars, and constituted a new cognitive style. Were he still alive, I wonder if he would not be seeing the rise of another cognitive style in the past decade or two. 

This matter of  historical cognitive style is important, though it is often ignored. When I began exploring this thirty years ago, as I was writing my dissertation, there was a small literature on the subject, but little more has emerged since. What I came away with from my clumsy attempts to discuss it then were two things. One is that it is difficult to discuss in English; our language is not well equipped to talk or write about processes of thought. The other, is that we have to look well beyond media technologies, but also at our whole technological world, to understand the forces that shape cognition. For example, try considering not just how printing, but also things like clocks (and other clockwork devices like gunlocks) affected Renaissance and Reformation mental processes. If you change your basic perception of time, from a flexible, natural one, to an inflexible, mechanical one, as urban Europeans did in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, you have changed a major component of your perception of the world and how you can think about it. If you add in the extent that clockwork devices gave Europeans of all classes a more complex mechanical model for causation than they had previously, the changes in how Europeans began to understand their world in these centuries becomes a matter of the interplay between modes of thought and the technological environment. And of course, simply changing the times at which you rise, eat, work, and sleep, based not on clocks and not the sun, will have affected things like melatonin levels and how disrupted circadian rhythms may become.

This was not simply something that happened centuries ago, it has been an on-going process of development and change, just as it was long before the invention of clockwork and printing. An argument could be made that the course of the Second World War depended not just on the technical equipment of the various countries, but the degree to which the combat commanders had absorbed the characteristics of those technologies. This is perhaps most evident in France in the Spring of 1940,when the French, wed to their concept of the "methodical battle," their telephone lines, their slow-moving and short-ranted tanks, and their paucity of radios, could not comprehend the German mode of warfare, so dependent not just on the mobility of Panzers, but also on the flexibility that ubiquitous radio sets gave them, and on the sense of being untethered that the radio and their tanks conferred, that the telephone and the tanks of their enemies did not. It is interesting that the older German generals and Hitler, used to the static telephone war of their youth, were made nervous by the likes of Guderian and Rommel, who had thoroughly absorbed the world of speed of the internal combustion engine and the freedom of the radio.

Since the War, the computing revolution has changed our cognition not just through its transformation of media, but also through its central paradigms of feedback loops, and programming. One of the most significant things to come out of the latest round of scandals, such as Cambridge Analytica, is that there is a whole generation of entrepreneurs, engineers, and programmers who have so completely internalized the programming paradigm that they view it as the proper way for society to work and to describe human relations.

This takes us close to the realms of embodied and extended cognition. The former argues that we cannot think simply in terms of the brain but must situate mind in the body and its interactions with its environment,while the latter actually includes the environment and the individual into a single unit of cognition. These make it even clearer that our minds are qualitatively different from those of our ancestors. If  we take the idea that our thought processes are embodied, then we are affected by a whole variety of things, from chemicals to cars to computers, that have shaped our bodies differently from those of our ancestors. We would have to subject ourselves to a different physical and chemical environment, not just a media environment, to recapture cognitive styles past, but even that is not enough, if the actual unit of mind is our embodied brains plus the environment. 

There are a number of implications to all of this. For one thing, it means the past is more of a foreign country than we generally believe. It raises the question of what we can and cannot understand, because it raises questions about just what aspects of our humanity are universal and which are environmentally influenced. To some extent, we can get into the head of someone in the past to a limited extent, if we work hard enough to try to understand their environment and all of the environmental factors that influenced their development. But we simply cannot shed the baggage of our environment and development. We can, and do, of course, use those to throw light on how they thought and on the differences between their minds and ours.

But it also suggests that too many of our historical judgments may be ill founded or terribly incomplete. Historians are well aware of this,but the general public too often takes the opposite tack, acting as if historical judgments are immutable.There are subtleties that I think we have given too little attention. The comments I made above about the mental effects of motor vehicles and radio are the sort of thing that we need to develop more fully. The same sort of thing has played out time and again in human history and development. Trying to trace the mental, as well as the physical changes in the environment, is an area where we have barely scratched the surface.

Two Centuries of "Phantom Terror"

There are books you read and quickly forget, ones you think about for a while and remember, and those you reread and mull over for a long time. For me, one of those is Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848, Adam Zamoyski's 2014 exploration of how European elites came to be obsessed with wild conspiracy theories during and after the French Revolutionary Wars, how those beliefs contributed to a series of repressive ideologies and policies, which themselves were important in the creation of the modern state, and how some responded to oppression by creating revolutionary organizations modeled on those conspiracy theories. Put bluntly and simplistically, the thesis of the book could be stated as: conspiracies created the modern political world. The book is considerably more nuanced than that, but putting it that way makes it clear why it is so relevant in our present situation.

We do not like to face or contemplate the irrational strain in government or leadership, but it is there, and influential all the same. The beliefs of the power elites inform and dominate their actions. If they pass through a phase of paranoia, or dwell there year after year, that becomes encoded in their actins and the structures they create to govern. In the case of Metternich's generation, the one that fought the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and rebuilt national and international political systems afterward, it manifested itself as the desire for absolute surveillance, absolute knowledge, and absolute control of thought, word, and deed. For Metternich, and many others, it was the only way to ensure that the conspiracies they saw behind every lamppost and around every corner, and which they believed continued the hated Jacobinism of the Revolution, at bay. 

Caught in an era of profound change in every aspect of life, much of w2hich they attributed to dangerous underground currents, they reacted by taking the idea of the police state, founded by Napoleon and his Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché, and creating the beginnings of western surveillance culture. Even those states, like America and Britain, that were lightly touched by it, and rejected most of the extreme trappings of Metternich's world, found it useful later when concerns about Socialists, Anarchists, and Communists grew after the Paris Commune. They likewise found it useful in governing their overseas empires, whether in Ireland, the Sub-Continent, Africa, or the Philippines. They developed tools there, just as the Continental powers honed the skills of their police and secret police at home, and then reimported them when business and financial elites felt threatened by real or imagined radicalism. In Britain, America, France, and Germany, surveillance culture grew in partnership  with, and driven by the rise and requirement of capitalism. 

It was also driven by fear of the Other; of the Black, or the Irish, or the immigrant, of those who supposedly lacked the Anglo-Saxon and German sense of self-control, or the French sang-droid, reflecting, one supposed, the fear of the elites of losing their own sense of self-control and bloody mindedness themselves. Over time, these beliefs became institutionalized and passed largely unquestioned. Those who were responsible for embodying them and enforcing them came to believe in them, in this country men like J. Edgar Hoover,  John J. McCloy, and Harry J. Anslinger. (One almost begins to wonder if using the initial "J" in one's name somehow makes one susceptible to belief in this kind of conspiracy and in the powers of surveillance - there is probably some wild conspiracy theory that would could hatch out of that.) Their subordinates came to believe the same things, and in following generations, it was more widely and deeply internalized. Now the mechanisms of surveillance, analysis, and control have become deeply integrated as a "necessary" aspect of government, and of an increasingly dominant business model and ethic, but their origins are in the wild ravings of certain authors written in the wake of the guillotining of the Bourbons in 1792, and of the willful gullibility of those who wished to uphold the old order, but who did so only by distorting it with new and irrational institutions of oppression. 

Entire Universes

There is not room enough in the world for everything we carry in our hearts. There are entire universes in our souls. Yet we allow ourselves to be trapped in the narrowness of the everyday, the tumult of business and politics, and in the narrowness of false religion. The tragedy of history is that those worlds are lost to us, and we may catch at most the ghosts of them, veritable palimpsests of past being. We try to reveal, try to reconstruct, but we can do little more than dust them off, preserve what little is left, and imagine what they must have been, and what forces contained and constrained them.

Media Viruses

Twenty-odd years ago, I read Douglas Rushkoff’s, Media Virus: Hidden Agenda in Popular Culture (Ballantine, 1994). In essence, Rushkoff was writing about memes, a term coined in the 70s by Richard Dawkins, though serious study of memes was just beginning in the years Rushkoff was writing. It’s a book that has always stayed with me. At the time, I was given hope by it that we would be able to understand the power of media viruses and perhaps even turn them back on their originators. Things look much darker now that media viruses have come to thrive in a new ecosystems that few of us could have envisioned. Now Rushkoff, together with David Pescovitz, and Jake Dunagan, have produced a remarkable new view of the topic in a short paper, "The Biology Of Disinformation: Memes, Media Viruses, and Cultural Inoculation" (Institute for the Future, 2018, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 INTL).

The biology in the title is both metaphor and reality, but it is probably not meant in the way you are most used to thinking of biology. The authors are thinking in both environmental and phenomenological terms. "So, biology is best understood as systems acting within and in concert with other systems. This is true for brains and mental systems." (p. 24) Nor should we be thinking of these memetic viruses as just content, which is the tendency we have seen in the press; instead, the authors arguer, we must see them as having two parts, "a novel media shell" to carry it and "provocative memetic material" as content. (p. 10) Equally important, they argue that we must look at it very much like a biological virus, meaning that we have to look at its relationship to its environment, its hosts, and other memes. Essentially, they are arguing that we have been looking at parts of the picture, when we need to see the whole. 

The different parts include: (1) the content, which in the recent memetic attacks are not meant to convey a sophisticated meaning, but to act on the emotions and sow distrust and division; (2) novel ways of exploiting different kinds of networked media (not just social media); (3) societal and cultural problems that provide pathways for the virus; (4) the social and networked media themselves, of which there is too little understanding; and (5) human psychology, particularly our cognitive habits. Only by paying attention to all of them can we handle the onslaught.

Perhaps if we had paid more attention to the work of the original cybernetic pioneers, who were not just concerned with engineering and control systems, but all aspects of life and thought in an environment that included machines, we might be better placed to deal with our present situation, but we were lazy and left cybernetics too much to the engineers and scientists without sufficient exploration of its possibilities or its moralities. Rushkoff, Pescovitz, and Dunagan did not suggest that, but I do. Too much of our present troubles are rooted in the failure to understand context, relationships, and feedback in systems. By failing to do so, we have let ourselves open to exploitation through our technologies, have failed to humanize them, and have sacrificed too much of our own humanity. 

I am picking and choosing from the paper, not trying to summarize it, but I will leave you with one specific thought from it, one that we need to take to heart and adopt immediately: "But each extension of our social reality into a new medium requires that we make a conscious effort to bring our humanity along with us." (p. 30)

A Maelstom of Surveillance

Our world of surveillance began a little over two centuries ago in the secret police that Joseph Fouché created for Napoleon. Secret police were not entirely new, but they only assumed something like their modern form in the years of Napoleon's empire. They were soon copied with varying degrees of success, frequently with dark comedy, by most of the rest of Europe. We could tell much of the history of the last two centuries as the growth of surveillance, the building of files and profiles of citizens by governments and later by businesses, and the attempts to classify and pigeonhole every person and their every action.

We are in a golden age of surveillance now. Himmler, Beria, and Hoover never had the ability to collect, record, profile, and classify that any police department and many businesses have today. It took multiple streams to bring us to this pass today. Only a few of them grew out of the activities of the police or weaved in and out of their realm. The growth and expansion of banking and credit required the creation of fixed, fiduciary identities so that persons could be pinned down and tracked for monetary purposes. The police could more easily deal with someone who's identity changed as revealed by aliases, but the flow of credit, the creation of wealth, the identification of property, could not tolerate aliases. Neither could conscript armies, which again required the correct registration and classification of citizens for military training and service, or skilled work in munitions factories, etc. Armies and banks could be comfortable only when a person's identity was as fixed as a bug pinned in a collection.

Of course the armies also wanted to know something about the health of the citizen, so that had to go in the record too, but the medical profession was also doing more recording and classifying, trying to understand health and disease. Public health was the great medical triumph of the 1800s and early 1900s, and it increasingly relied on record keeping, classifying people, and making observations about their environment. That also merged into the activities of the early social scientists, and of the reformers who set out to help and educate the poor.

There were other streams too, technical ones. The growth of the size of the United States and the desire for more information about the country quickly overburdened the decennial census. That led to the origins of modern information technology in the form of the punchcard, key punches, punchcard readers, and sorters, all of this decades before computers. Parallel to their growth was that of card indexes, often looking like nothing so much as the library card catalogs that many of remember from libraries. Cards with written information on possible subversives, enemy aliens, and their cronies, were maintained by all major governments until they were eventually automated with punchcard and then computers. Fear of Anarchists and Communists made them seem vital to many governments and security firms.

Banks, mortgage companies, and business of all kinds found it convenient to keep records on their customers and employees with the same technological innovations. The time clock was the most visible manifesto on of this to employees, though the card indices were used to track and control them too. Customers were increasingly tracked by department stores and catalog companies so they could be better targeted for advertising.

Computers began to add more and more power to these kinds of systems, but it would take the Internet to make possible the kind of data harvesting and exploitation we see now. Meanwhile cameras, CCTV, audio recording, the bugging of phones, but also just tracing what phone numbers were called and what credit transactions made, and later GPS began to allow governments and businesses build up more detailed profiles and gather ever more data.

Meanwhile the sciences were given us more and more to track and profile. Fingerprints were long the most full-proof means of identification, but blood type, hair, and other means were used as well, until DNA and biometrics began to dominate identification, fixing our identities ever more effectively. Psychology was also hard at work in these years, testing, diagnosing, classifying, and profiling. They were creating psychographic methods that could, when given enough data, describe and anticipate the behavior of individuals or groups.

All of these streams have begun to coalesce in the past two decades. The needs of government, business, finance, and medicine to identify and classify, to detect and predict; the technologies for collecting, sorting, and communicating; the psychological techniques for profiling and controlling have all come together into the nightmare world of modern surveillance. It took us two centuries to reach this point, two decades to Brian the disparate streams together into a mighty ocean, and about two years to begin to comprehend the consequences. Around the world the shape of the future is taking shape, whether in the Social Credit scheme being imposed on China, the commoditization, monetization, and weaponization of psychographic profiles in America, the attempts to put the brakes on in Europe, the targeted use of false information for internal control and external warfare by Russia, or scores of other experiments by government and business that are barely on our radar in every corner of the globe, sweeping us up in a  maelstrom from which their seems no escape and in which direction seems to become meaningless. The ideals of those who created our world of surveillance have created a world that even Orwell would scarcely recognize, in some cases it seems to give those in power more control, but the truth may be that it is spinning out of control at a rapid accelerating rate. When it spins off its axis no one can say where we will be left, or with what.

The End of Gutenberg

The quincentenary of Gutenberg's earliest publications, those of which we are certain, occurred in the midst of the television revolution of the 1950s and was accompanied by the commercialization of computing technology. We know from the studies of Walter Ong, and others, that literacy had already begun to change in the preceding decades, under the influence of radio and talking pictures. The printing press itself had done much to change the nature of literacy in its early centuries. It facilitated, though did not cause, the spread of silent reading, of standardized spelling and punctuation, mass literacy, and greatly expanded the descriptive power of illustrations, maps, and diagrams. In the early years of electronic media, the changes perhaps had less effect on reading habits, but provided both alternatives and competitors, and possibly changing some aspects of the way our brains dealt with written and visual information. 

Still, the world we knew in the last century had plenty of space for books as we had known them for hundreds of years. If, by the 1960s, we were beginning to conceptualize tablet-like devices for reading and writing, we still tended to think of them as pretty well rooted in the world of print. What we actually got was something a lot more complex. Think about Star Trek for a moment. They had computers, or specifically they had huge computers that were coterminous with starships and building complexes, they had some sort of tablets (PADDs) which just seem to be digital clipboards in the original series, but seem more adaptable in TNG, they had Tricorders, which seem to have had a lot of memory (based on what Spock was able to recover from his in City on the Edge of Forever), and they had Communicators. 

What they did not have was a single, unified device. Roddenberry and company simply could not conceptualize a device with more computing power than any machine that existed in the 1960s, that could fit in the palm of the hand, display any type of media, have built-in sensors and cameras, could be connected and communicate basically anywhere, and be cheap enough for almost anyone to afford. They continued to fail in this regard in the 1980s, but then so did the more advanced cyberpunk writers. William Gibson is humbled by the fact that he failed to anticipate wireless and cellular. He assumes students who study his early writings today will think that the need to be plugged in was a deliberate plot device. 

When we reach the next centenary of Gutenberg's invention, which is still a few decades away, we cannot anticipate what books will be. We truly do not know whether paper books will survive, recent trends indicate they might be alive and well for decades to come, or what kinds of other devices we might have. Will we sit and read with our glasses or contact lenses (in an odd visual parallel to people walking down the street with nearly invisible earbuds talking and gesticulating to thin air), or perhaps we will have implants that allow us to bypass the eyes all together. 

I really have no clue, but we can be sure that the changing technologies of reading will lead to more changes, more evolution of our minds, how we balance visual, auditory, and linguistic realms of knowing (not forgetting the tactile, and perhaps even involving taste, smell, and even proprioception) to allow us to experience the world differently. How we consume media, and the kinds of media we consume, has a lot to do with how we perceive the world, and what kinds of constraints are placed on our cognitive abilities. 

We have co-evolved with the written word for about 5000 years. Successive kinds of writing and media have colonized our brains and our minds. Just as language shaped us over millions of years, writing has shaped us for  fifty centuries. It became more than the exteriorization of memory that Plato had Socrates fear. It became the exteriorization of imagination, of logic, and of emotion. It is arguable that peoples using alphabets, abugidas, abjads, syllabaries, and logographic systems all produce different mental worlds, and represent a great deal of the differences we see in the world between major blocks of culture. We are only just beginning to understand how writing and reading have affected us as a species. Now we are having to learn to comprehend a world where writing and all other forms of communication are running together. We do not know what it will do to us. We do not have any idea where it will lead, but then who could have predicted where moveable type, or phonographs, paintings, photographs, maps, prints, movies, or any of the other communication technologies would change us. What is certain is that we are encountering the very end of Gutenberg's epoch. 

I will hazard a few predictions. Neuroscientists will see changes in the organization of the synapses and distribution of white and gray matter in the brain as our means of reading and consuming media change. Religious interpretations will change a great deal as holy books move beyond being stand-alone texts and are perceived in different relations to one another and through more and more media. That could lead to a backlash and a greater fundamentalism, to greater religious understanding, new religious movements, or, more likely, all three. Politics, policy, and law will be unable to keep up. Our current ideas of intellectual property and privacy will be radically changed, as the political and legal world struggles to cope. This will create dynamic tensions that may server to both stifle and encourage creativity. And just as the modern state was transformed as more and more men and women learned to read and write, and then had access to cheap media, so will the shape of the post-modern state be molded and carved into new forms.

The end of Gutenberg is not then the end of the world, nor of a given culture, but it is a major part of the path of our evolution. 

First Amendment Conflicts

Earlier today I attended a panel discussion at the Unbound Book Festival( http://www.unboundbookfestival.com/panels) on: "Is the First Amendment in Crisis." It was a good discussion and covered a number of topics, but in 2018, a title like that covers a lot of ground, more than the panel could touch on in the time allotted. Not surprisingly it focused on free speech, with some reference to freedom of assembly and protest, but nothing on the other, and increasingly contested part of the Amendment, freedom of religion, which is actually the first part of it:

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.

There was an interesting bit where Lee Wilkins (MU School of Journalism) began talking about how social media is inherently divisive. This was echoed by David von Drehle (Washington Post). Drehle did make note that this was not a new phenomenon, talking some about the political fragmentation of Victorian newspapers. Had the session lasted longer, perhaps there would have been more on this. What struck me, though, was that there was no discussion of how freedom of religion, and freedom of speech and the press, have helped create the underlying fragmentation and tension that have facilitated the rise of division. I had not considered this before, at least not in this way, and I want to explore it for a moment.

For much of the past half-millennium, religion has been the most divisive force in Europe and America. We were taught at mid-century to think of it as a unifying force, but that is largely illusory, an assumption made possible by the corporate and government-sponsored civic religion of the 1950s and early 1960s. The divide between Black and White Protestantism was always largely ignored. That, in itself, would have given the lie to the portrait of unity. The mid-century revival did manage to paper over some of the differences of Catholicism and Protestantism, and it at least made anti-Semitism unfashionable and publicly unacceptable. What it did not do was to erase the divide that had appeared between liberal and conservative Protestantism decades earlier, a divide that had largely been invisible with the withdrawal of fundamentalists and other conservative Protestants from the public arena after the Scopes Trial.  

I am not an historian of American religion, so what follows may be a bit sketchy and off in some details, though I believe the main outline is correct. Before, during, and after the Civil War, there had been a thriving religious press of newspapers and magazines in this country. These continued to thrive up through at least the First World War. Freedom of press and religion had interacted in these. In their pages, and also in religious conventions and conferences held regularly, as well as in books and seminaries, what amounted to new doctrines were introduced and worked out. New religious movements were emerging. One of these gave rise both to conservative Evangelicalism and to Fundamentalism, while another gave rise to Pentecostalism. Fundamentalism itself was largely the result of Bible conferences and the press, culminating in the publication of an important series of pamphlets (gathered up in book form) during the first part of the World War, called The Fundamentals. These gave their name to the movement. These writings and conferences also began a trend that later grew more important, certain words and phrases began to take on specialized meanings within the group. 

The First World War was a religiously shattering experience for much of the world including the United States. Millennial expectations came into play, as did prophecy, and a real sense that Christianity was under attack in the West from Social Darwinism (with which the Germans were held to be especially enamored) and Bolshevism, and, in the East, by the Ottoman onslaught as the Armenian Genocide and the destruction of many of the oldest Christian communities in the world was revealed. The groups on the Protestant right moved further in that direction, splitting ever more decisively with the liberal Protestants in the mainstream churches. 

The Scopes Trial subjected these groups to public ridicule on a national stage, particularly from the barbed pen of H.L. Mencken. (The Mencken character in Inherit the Wind was played by Gene Kelly in the film version; suffice it to say that it is the least sympathetic role he ever played, and certainly the most cynical.) The ridicule stung, I suspect it still stings today. It also showed how far from the religion and beliefs of the urban elites they had come. These groups moved ever more to the right and largely kept their own counsel. Their thoughts, beliefs, and means of expressing themselves became more insular and difficult for liberal Christians and others to comprehend. It would be decades before they would emerge into the political arena in a meaningful way. 

What I want to point out is that all of this occurred through the interplay of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. It is possible it could not have played out in any country outside the British Common Law and constitutional tradition. In the 1600s, such conflict had torn England apart and led to what used to be called the English Civil Wars and are now more commonly referred to as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the bloodiest and most tumultuous period in modern British history. The slow emergence of these key freedoms was an evolutionary result of those wars, and their aftermath a generation later, the Glorious Revolution. 

But to return to my main theme, the interplay of these three freedoms both helped created a serious, long hidden or dormant divide in America, but when that divide did become visible, slowly in the 1960s and 1970s, and then became a major preoccupation in the 1980s and after, it was driven by these three freedoms interacting, so that the difference became magnified and solidified. We lived in a world where liberal and conservative Protestants no longer easily understood one another, where liberals could become incensed over Biblical literalism, while conservatives (and even not so conservatives) fumed over John Lennon's lyrics. Television and the other media found them to be good press, and sometimes good comedy (I especially recall a couple of episodes of WKRP built on the differences), but almost always the emphasis was on difference and rarely on reconciliation or understanding. As with most things, pundits found it easy to get good ratings by exaggerating differences and manipulating the biases of audiences. 

If we now find ourselves divided into camps on social media, I would like to suggest that this has a long history, a history rooted in religion as much as politics, of the need for newspapers and television for profits and ratings, and in the difficulty of basic communication that arose from the history of different religious movements, on both left and right, that developed their own meanings for words and phrases, so that free speech itself came to divide instead of uniting us. Social media may be dividing us more, but it magnifies existing fissures; it did not create them. 

Eulogy for Jane Wilson

This is the eulogy I gave at my mother's funeral. The reference in the text to Vi, is to Viola Rhoads, her long-time friend, who conducted the service. A photograph of the painting mentioned is at the end. All quotes may be found on Brainy Quotes (https://www.brainyquote.com/) with the exception of the Ira Gershwin line from the song of the same name. 

Outwardly, my mother led an average life. She married, taught school, raised a child, attended church for decades, painted, drew and read. That was one side of my mother, but not what I saw day in and day out. I have been looking through quotes from some of her favorite author that highlight other sides of her personality and beliefs. I found a few that capture aspects.

Teilhard de Chardin wrote: "He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed." As Vi will tell you, mom would not let her mind or soul be limited by anyone or any book, not even the Bible. She could live "in the question," as some philosophers put it. That is to say, she could live with the questions that mattered most to her open, always subject to inquiry, with no fixed solution. There was, in the end, very little that was conventional in her belief or world view. Or, as she herself sometimes said, when confronted with the need of someone to decide exactly what God was or meant, "you can’t put God in a box."

Thomas Merton wrote: "Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time." Even when she was not painting or drawing, which she ceased to be able to do after her stroke fourteen years ago, she was always immersed in an artist’s way of seeing the world. It is a very different way than a businessman, a scholar, a lawyer, or doctor has. It informed everything she did and thought. The artist's way of seeing is, I think, closer to that of the mystic. It is about more than looking at things; it is, at its best, looking through them, into their nature, and at that to which they point.

May Sarton wrote: "We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be." Mom was unafraid to be herself, to understand who she was and might become, and to tell others when they were wrong. It wasn’t always comfortable and sometimes maddened people. She wanted to be true to herself, her beliefs, and to her intellect, seeing no inherent conflict between the things of the mind and the things of the soul.

All of those capture aspects of her, but I finally realized the other morning that my favorite Miles Davis quote was the most appropriate. I don’t claim she liked all of his music or or the way he lived his life, but she did love his Sketches of Spain. Miles famously said: "Don't play what's there, play what's not there." The silences and potentials in a piece of music, in a book, or in a life, not the things that are obvious on the surface or the things that are easy, those are what are most important.

Those of you who know her paintings, know the one that has alway hung in the living room above the divan. She renamed it at least once, but it is about a person trying to break free of a box; about those who also know they are in boxes and are waiting to see what happens; about those who think themselves superior, but who are unaware that they too are boxed in; and about how we can never break out of all the boxes, only breakthrough into larger and less confining ones. This is one of the keys to understanding who she was and what she taught me.

Another key is the way she constantly watched and tried to understand the needs and the things that drove others. This was a life-long habit, a product of her childhood, and always being aware of the spoken and unspoken currents in the relationships she saw around her. She refused to stop at what she saw on the surface. She rarely took any statement at face value. It maddened people, but she was always trying to dig deeper and  connect what had just been said or done with what she knew of that person’s past. She missed very little, and she forgot very little, and her memory stretched back to her second year and the day she moved to Sedalia. Those memories and, I think, her curiosity about others persisted to her last days.

This was also the source of her empathy. It was deeply rooted in her desire to listen and understand, but also in her memory and ability to identify what was happening to others through her own store of experiences. It was also all tied up with her artist’s eye, the ability to observe, to analyze, and to see the whole picture without missing the small details that made someone or something unique.

I never doubted her love for me, nor the love of my parents for one another. I tried to ensure that she never need doubt mine. I grew up very loved, very wanted by both my father and mother. She always encouraged me to follow my dreams, follow my reading, and my thought wherever it took me. Those are gifts I would wish for every child.

Mom loved no one's music like George Gershwin's, whose death she mourned for eighty years, so let me end with the line that Ira Gershwin wrote on his brother’s death, "Our love is here to stay."

Remember the Day The World Ended?

Do you recall July 1, 1997, the day the world ended, or should I say the day a world ended? Neither do I, no clue at all what I did that day. It was an important day, at least symbolically, and for China, Britain, and Hong Kong, of vital importance. July 1 was the day Britain returned Hong Kong to China. Metaphorically, it was also the end of the Age of Vasco da Gama, whose voyage to open up the sea route to Asia had begun on July 8, 1497. Carlo Cipolla used the term to refer to the age of European world dominance, which really began with the voyages of Columbus to the west and da Gama to the east. They were made possible in part by recent advances in technology - better ships, better guns, better navigation aids, better information technology - and by evolving world views in Europe. 

European dominance did not come all at once, nor did it end all at once; it grew, it flourished, and it decayed. You could argue that the mortal blows were struck by the Japanese between December 1941 and the end of February 1942, beginning with the attack on Pearl Harbor and the assault on the Gin Drinkers Line (outer defenses of Hong Kong on December 7/8), The Destruction of Force Z (HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Renown) two days later, and the fall of Singapore towards the end of February. Still, the terminal decline was protracted. Decades passed as the colonial powers withdrew from Asia and Africa, while fighting rearguard actions with their American hegemons. Even the Soviets tried their hand at empire in Afghanistan, having disregarded hard-won British lessons about that country, just as three successive American presidents have done.

We are still behaving as if we are living in that world, but we are not; we are transitioning to a new world system, and it is not just a matter of international politics and trade. What we are seeing, I believe, is the breakdown or rapid evolution of a number of systems that we identify with modernity and Western Civilization. These include:

• Gutenberg's information revolution, 
• the nation state, 
• business and banking, 
• the military revolution, and 
• post-Reformation Christianity. 

All of these have their roots in events that occurred between about 1450 and 1550, have long dominated aspects of the world to the point where no alternative to them long seems possible, have been going through a prolonged period of difficulty or decay, and which appear to either be on the brink or replacement or of evolving into something else. We are undergoing an epochal change - literally, a change of epochs, and have no reason to expect that the transitions will be any easier, any more peaceful, any less disturbing from those that came a half-millennium ago.