Books Read 2020 - My Favorites

I have not read nearly as many books cover-to-cover as I have the past couple of years. Started reading a large number, but between the disruption of everything by COVID and changes in the programs I support at work, a tendency to burrow deeper into articles, and the tiredness that came from major blockages of three coronary arteries and then recovering from the resulting surgery, I have been both more scattered and just had less energy and time finish books. That said, these are my favorites from those I did finish in 2020, though many of them are older. I am sure that some will find things to which to object in this list or my comments.

Priya Satia, Time’s Monster: How History Makes History (Harvard, 2020). In her previous books, Satia has looked at various aspects of British imperialism and its effects. In Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (Penguin, 2018) she dealt with the largest private gun manufacturer in Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, who just happened to be a Quaker. In reviewing the personal history of Samuel Galton (grandfather of the more famous Francis Galton, founder of eugenics and one of the founders of modern statistics), she was confronted by what seemed to us, and increasingly to his contemporaries, with a set of personal beliefs that justified his actions to himself. Instead of simply looking at him as a hypocrite, which she found not very useful, she began to wonder about the mechanisms that he used to "manage his conscience." The new book is the result, and she puts the evolution of history as a discipline in Britain front and center. Starting with the loss of America and then the trial of Warren Hastings that led to changes in how Britain saw its Indian empire, she looks at how historians created ideas about Britain, and about its subject peoples, that helped colonial administrators, soldiers, businessmen, and missionaries tell themselves they were doing good when then were doing just the opposite. The details changed greatly over the course between the 1780s and 1790s and the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, but there was little dissent from historians or anyone else until the years after the First World War. Satia traces an interesting thread from that down to modern studies of colonialism and imperialism, showing how, as historians moved away from championing empire, economists took over. She brings the story down to the present, where the old and new ideas about empire and colonialism have collided in Brexit. There is a lot to unpack in this book, and I know it is one I will reread. 

Paul Hannebrink, A Specter Is Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Harvard, 2018) is a study of the ways that Anti-Communism and Antisemitism have conflated the two great bogeymen of the last century, Communism and unfounded beliefs in global Jewish conspiracies. This is one of those books where the devil is in the details. You may know a lot about aspects of this, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an unholy mess cobbled together from various nineteenth-century political tracts and novels (some of them having nothing whatsoever to do with Jews) in the bowels of the Okhrana, the old Tsarist secret policy, and popularized so well by American military intelligence and Henry Ford, but there is a lot more too the story. There were the French brothers, travel writers of a sort, who greatly exaggerated the Jewish influences in Béla Kun's revolutionay government in post-WWI Hungry. There was the whole way in which Stalin's decision to pay less attention to the Holocaust and more to the way all of the peoples of Eastern Europe were persecuted by the Nazis, combined with a few high-profile Jewish Socialists and Communists in the new Soviet Block governments that helped keep Antisemitism alive and well in those countries, allowing them to reemerge hydra-headed after the fall of the Soviet Union. We really do have to look back to events a hundred years ago, and other events after 1945 to understand how the Far Right has reemerged.

Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). Rid, who lectures on cybersecurity at Johns Hopkins, takes a stab at producing a scholarly overview of information warfare ("active measures" was a Soviet term for it). from the end of the First World War down to the 2016 election. Within the limits of a single volume, he has to pick and choose his materials and examples. His choices may displease some readers but he has stuck to what he can document through archival sources and interviews. Because of what has become available from former Warsaw Pact countries, and perhaps because of changing methods or policy by the CIA, the focus is mostly on Soviet Block disinformation projects. There are a few important lessons that he has for readers. These include the difficulty of measuring the success of most active measures, the tendency of the press to actually amplify the success of disinformation by spreading it, while simultaneously over-estimating the original influence of a particular campaign, that, since the 1980s, the main focus is simply to create chaos and undermine belief in institutions, rather than convince people of something in particular. This last is important, for it explains the extremely heterogenous nature of recent campaigns, and also some of the effects we are seeing now. Also of note for anyone in 2020, with its COVID conspiracies, is his chapter on Soviet exploitation of disinformation already available in the American press about AIDS, and the ways they both amplified and supplemented it. I cannot trace a complete path from the 80s AIDS disinformation to 2020's COVID disinfo, but it seems like a real possibility. 

Kathryn Olmsted, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, 2nd edition (Oxford, 2019). In a year in which conspiracy beliefs and politics have wrought such chaos, this is a good book to read. Originally composed about a decade ago it represents some of the best of the new scholarship on the topic, moving beyond the simplistic thinking of Richard Hofstadter's work in the fifties and sixties, and eschewing a viewpoint that simply condemns conspiracy theory. Olmsted set out to explain why the nature of conspiracy thinking changed in the United States with World War I and then evolved in the particular way it did. Her answer comes down to an alternation of conspiracy beliefs between those in government and those outside of it. In other words, she contends that the paranoia over "hyphenated citizens" and Bolsheviks in government and business circles in and immediately after the War (inspired in part by a very real German sabotage campaign), led to a persecution against those whose political beliefs were seen as a threat, including some of those, like Charles Lindbergh Sr. who had previously written about banking conspiracies. That led to a reaction by those like Lindbergh (and his eventually more famous son) to see conspiracies where they may or may not have existed. Olmsted traces this alternation of conspiracy ideation, in some cases justified, in many or most not, across succeeding decades. This is a great over simplification of her text. 

Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (Verso, 2016). (This was originally published in 2013 as L’événement Anthropocène. La Terre l’histoire et nous.) I have been reading more and more about the Anthropocene, starting with Amitav Ghosh's book, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago, 2016), but have really started to try to understand it in a more systematic fashion in the past few months. This book seeks to challenge how the Anthropocene is presented and the orthodoxy that seems to be emerging around specific "solutions." There is no challenge here to either the concept of the Anthropocene or to the science behind it and climate change. What they are arguing, in part, is that we are too trapped in specific ways of thinking, derived from the World Wars, the Cold War, and from our economic modes of thinking that are both limiting how we understand our present situation and constraining the range of options we consider for "solving" the problems confronting us. 

Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). I finished this a couple of weeks ago and am still absorbing it. It ties in very well with arguments made in The Shock of the Anthropocene. Basically this is a work of Object-Oriented Ontology that tries to explain why we have such trouble comprehending things like global warming, the Anthropocene, or evolution. His argument, which is rooted in part in Einsteinian Relativity, is that we are dealing with objects (even ideas and concepts are objects in OOO) so large and long-lived that we can only observe an interact with small parts of them and not comprehend their full aspect. It is something like the metaphor from Flatland of a three-dimensional object moving through a two-dimensional space, but with time as a dimension as well. I'm not doing justice to this book, I just do not have the vocabulary to spell out the implications. Definitely one I will need to reread. 

William Gibson, Agency (Penguin 2020). Anyone who knows me well knows that I have difficulty reading novels these days and that the exception is William Gibson's work. Like The Peripheral, this is about what might be best described as time travel via the internet, though it is really exploring themes about politics and the anthropocene, and also about artificial intelligence (for once, one that has absorbed part of the personality of an African-American, female Marine). It is not easy to describe, but it is hopeful. The sections where Rainey, a woman from 22nd-century London tries to explain to Verity, who lives in an alternate 2017 (where Hillary won), both how the Anthropocene escaped our notice and created her future, at once high-tech and fragile. 

Frederick Taylor, 1939: A People's History (Pan Macmillan, 2020). This is not about WWII per se, but about the year between the start of the Munich Crisis in 1938 and the outbreak of war in 1939, focused on the experiences of the British and German peoples. Some of the most interesting bits are about how the Kristalnacht and its aftermath helped lead to the German resistance to Hitler. There is also a lot of material on how people (and businesses such as travel agencies) tried to maintain a sense of normality in the face of one crisis after another. It is part of a growing body of work about the "people's war" that have been appearing in this century and deal with both World Wars. This would be a good book to pair with Daniel Todman's 2016 book, Britain's War: Volume 1, Into Battle, 1937-1941. 

Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago, 2010). Back when I was teaching Early Modern European history so many years ago, I was fascinated by the rise of the witchcraft persecutions and the interplay by what we would think of as the occult and science. After reading James Webb's two volumes from the 70s on The Occult Underground and The Occult Establishment (about the culture and politics of the Occult in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, respectively), and Jason Josephson-Storm's recent, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, in 2019, I've gotten interested again in the irrational in modern life. Kripal write sympathetically about four modern authors who have explored the impossible in influential and intellectual ways. Starting with Frederic Myers of the Society for Psychical Research in the nineteenth century, Charles Fort (whose influence has seeped so deeply into popular culture), Jacques Vallée, the French astronomer and computer scientist who inspired François Truffaut's character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Bertrand Méhuest, a French academic exploring aspects of both UFOs and the paranormal. If you don't want to deal with the complexities of our modern fixations on these topics, don't read it. This is about the ways that mysticism, psychological experiences, and the irrational(not conceived here as a derogatory term) have intersected and interacted with the modern world. Those are themes that very much preoccupy me, as I do not buy too deeply into either the religious or the scientific world views.

Active Measures and Conspiracism

This is going to be speculative, as all too much of what is written today is, as well as a partial book review. It is about a pattern and trying to understand it. It is provisional and may be far off base - more thinking aloud than serious research at this point. 

One of the most interesting, and I think important, historical works of the year is Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), a detailed history of disinformation and political warfare and its transformation into the "cyberwarfare" of today. It is largely successful in documenting his main point. 

The phrase "active measures" is an old KGB term for disinformation campaigns, while "political warfare" is the term the CIA preferred in the fifties and sixties. 

The book starts with the early days of the Soviet Regime and its operations, largely against its exiled opponents and the Western intelligence services that supported them. These were launched under the auspices of the head of the Cheka, (the predecessor the the later alphabet soup of Soviet and Russian security and intelligence service), Felix Dzerzhinsky himself. That disinformation campaign was spectacularly successful, dividing and neutralizing the movement and resulting in the entrapment and death of the most famous spy of the century, Sydney Reilly. 

Rid does not just focus on the Soviets, having a great deal about mid-century CIA operations,; however, it is the later portions of the book, dealing with Soviet and Russian campaigns since 1980, that are present interest. This was the period when Soviet disinformation began to change and focus as much on sowing disinformation (which could be complete forgeries, partial forgeries, or even real documents obtained by other means but taken out of context) to creating an atmosphere of general distrust, division, and disbelief, breaking down the shared sense of reality on which democracies depend. 

The most interesting chapters in the book may be the ones dealing with Soviet operations against the peace movement of the 1980s and on the rise of disinformation about AIDS. Given recent events, the AIDS story is particularly relevant. (There is also an excellent article that goes into more detail of part of what Rid covers that appeared recently: Douglas Selvage, "Operation 'Denver': The East German Ministry of StateSecurity and the KGB's AIDS Disinformation Campaign, 1985–1986 (Part 1)," Journal of Cold War Studies, Volume 21, Number 4, Fall 2019, pp. 71-123 - Part 2 has not yet appeared. Rid gives more overall context while Selvage delves more deeply into the specifics of the campaign.) 

The AIDS conspiracy story seems to have first emerged in an article by Charlie Shively in the 9 July 1983 issue of the Gay Community News in Boston citing another article from the New York Native, suggesting that HIV had originated in the African Swine Fever Virus, supposedly imported as a bioweapon for use against Cuba by the CIA. Shively took this further and asked one of those hypotheticals so dear to conspiracists, wondering if the CDC and/or Pentagon, had deployed it as a genocidal weapon against homosexuals, Haitians, and drug users. (Rid, 302; Selvage, 78-79) This was a home grown theory, but it came at a time when the Soviet Union was smarting under US reports of widespread and illegal chemical weapons use in Afghanistan, and was already retaliating with a story that a University of Maryland malaria research lab in Lahore, Pakistan, was actually a US government lab weaponizing encephalitis and dengue fever to be transmitted by mosquitos. (Rid, 300-301) 

Shively's piece was apparently picked up by the Soviets, unless it was just a coincidence, and the KGB-backed Indian Patriot published a similar piece eight days later. That had little affect, but is the first bit of disinformation from the Eastern Block that appeared on the subject. The real offensive started with an article in the Literaturnaya Gazeta (LG) by Valentin Vasilevich Zapelov in October 1985. This quoted the Patriot article and was the first salvo in a disinformation campaign coordinated by the KGB and Department X of the East German HVA. Selvage documents how this coevolved with developments in the West, where Lyndon LaRouche was arguing for AIDS being a Soviet bioweapon and John Seale in London was making the case for it being a bioengineered weapon. There were also a series of articles by Nathaniel Lehrman, a psychiatrist who was quoted by the New Amsterdam News. He was initially spread by a series of experiments carried out by the CIA on gays, African Americans, and drug users.  He denied say that, but did suggest that the CIA might have intentionally spread the disease in Africa. (Selvage, 88-89, 91; Rid, 308)

These were not Communist plants, but the ideas were picked up and modified in Moscow and Berlin. The campaign really took off in 1986, when the East German biologists, Jakob and Lilli Segal produced a pamphlet, "AIDS - Its Nature and Origin" which was passed around at a major summit in Harare, Zimbabwe. This pinned the development of HIV squarely on the US Army Medical Research Institute at Fort Detrick in Frederick Maryland. (Selvage, 93, 100-114; Rid, 308-310) From that point, the campaign began to attract attention in major Western media outlets and spread. There was much more to the campaign, and there were other factors, not just the formal active measures of this disinformation campaign, but I want to keep it in site for a bit longer. 

The belief in HIV/AIDS as an American (or occasionally Russian), engineered, bioweapon targeted at specific ethnic, sexual, or other marginal groups has persisted, as have a lot of other myths about the causes of the disease. For some it is likely a deeply held belief, for others, it is just politically convenient. We are now living through a new pandemic and wild ideas have been floated about the causes and origins, among the most common being that COVID-19 is either a Chinese or American, engineered, bioweapon targeted at specific ethnic groups. That sounds very familiar. We do know that belief in one conspiracy often primes an individual to believe in similar conspiracies, as well as in apparently unrelated conspiracies.  (See, for instance, Thomas Milan Konda, Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How Delusions Have Overrun America, Chicago, 2019, 277-278; Rob Brotherton, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories, Bloomsbury, 2015, 88; Jonathan Kay, Among the Truthers: A Journey Through America's Growing Conspiracist Underground, Harper Collins, 2011, 51; and more generally, Michael Barkun, A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, 2nd ed., University of California Press, 2013, 231ff.) 

This is the first bit of speculation on my part, something I cannot prove at this time and would likely require a lot of digging to document one way of the other, so from one point of view, I am simply using a common tactic of conspiracy mongers. I strongly suspect that there is a carry over from the older set of conspiracy theories about HIV/AIDS to the current conspiracy theories about COVID-19. 

I am not suggesting that these are being spread by a Russian disinformation campaign. What I am suggesting is that both the habits of mind and the tropes that appear in today's conspiracy memes are inherited not only from the conspiracy theorists of the last century (and the one before that), but also shaped and influenced by a century of active disinformation campaigns by major governments (and, though Rid does not explore them, of corporate and other groups). 

Beyond that, there are parallels between formal disinformation campaigns and the spread of conspiracy theories in America and Britain, particularly in the age of the internet. As Rid notes in his last chapters, the art of disinformation has gotten easier (due to social media), operations have generally gotten sloppier (he is particularly critical of both the GRU and the Russian company IRA), and it has become much harder to measure their effectiveness). I think the same may be said for today's conspiracy pundits. Social media has facilitated their message, but that message often makes no sense at all to outsiders or is internally contradictory. I am not sure that it is more difficult to measure their effectiveness than it was, it has always been a nightmare to figure out how much influence a conspiracy theory has had.

One of Rid's themes is the extent to which disinformation campaigns have played into the strengths and weaknesses of the media. He quotes more than one former Eastern European intelligence officer regarding the importance of Western journalists in spreading their material. What he describes sounds in some ways like a symbiotic relationship. Often he sees the coverage of the story by the press, even when the lies have been exposed, as equally or more important than the message of the intelligence agencies, for it facilitates the atmosphere of distrust and confusion that had become one of the goals of active measures. 

In the course of the last two months, the New York Times has pursued this in a different way through its Rabbit Hole Podcast, which, as of this writing, has eight episodes, (https://www.nytimes.com/column/rabbit-hole). The journalists who created the podcast are also exploring the effectiveness of conspiracists in a new way, as far as I can see. The focus is mainly on YouTube, though some other forms of social media are discussed, and it is a deep dive, a series of case studies. They interview people who have been caught up in fringe belief systems (including QAnon) through YouTube and have emerged as skeptics, but also people who have a deep understanding of how YouTube's algorithms and policies have evolved. The result is the beginning of an understanding of the relationship between successful purveyors of these beliefs, their audiences, and the way the algorithms function, reinforcing certain behaviors. This is not itself a conspiracy theory, rather, they document how changes that were made to YouTube for business or political reasons, inadvertently ended up reinforcing the beliefs and encouraging community formation, around these conspiracies. 

With QAnon, we see something that really does look more like a disinformation campaign than a traditional conspiracy, in fact it looks more and more like a cult as well. Whether consciously or not, the person or persons behind Q seem to have internalized a lot of the lessons that earlier disinformation campaigns have taught the world. That would make sense if the perpetrators are intelligence professionals as they claim, though I doubt that. They may simply be following a track laid down in the 1990s by Bill Cooper, the most important conspiracy pundit of the era, sometimes compared to Alex Jones, but really a very different sort of character altogether. Over the course of twenty years, he went from promoting the truth about UFOs he claimed to have learned from secret intelligence documents in the Navy, to proclaiming that UFOs were a hoax, part of the New World Order conspiracy that sought too take over the world, became a key part of the Patriot and Militia movement, influenced both White and Black Nationalists (he claimed not to be racist), and ended his life in 2001 as one of the very first 9/11 Truthers. Perhaps they have picked up lessons from David Ickes, who at various points in his career has claimed to be the Second Coming of Jesus and developed a large following for his wild ideas that we are controlled by shape-shifting, baby-eating lizards, such as the Queen of England, Henry Kissinger, and Bob Hope. Or maybe they have learned their lessons from any number of religious and cultic movements of the last two centuries. 

Whatever the case, QAnon has created a kind of pocket reality, split off from the mainstream, even splitting families. At their best, the KGB and HVA never achieved this kind of thing. Q emits cryptic messages that his (he always seems to be seen as male) interpret in their community of chat rooms and message boards. The messages are frequently disproven as dates pass and events do not, but the belief and the movement continue on. In some regards this does not look like any of the classic active measures that Rid discusses, but it might have a shared philosophy with them. 

I noted earlier that the direction of Soviet disinformation broadened around 1980 to include not just targeted disinformation, but also to sow confusion and erode the consensual reality on which democracies must rely, or as Rid puts it, disinformation is not just a matter of epistemology for democracies, but an existential threat. (Rid, 425-426) It would be very easy to see QAnon as exactly that, as a tool not to spread a particular piece of disinformation, or even one particular viewpoint, but to create an environment in which no truth from outside could be accepted, in which everyone had their own, particular truth and unique reality, and the consensus needed to maintain a healthy democracy, let along a healthy society, no longer existed. 

I am not saying that QAnon is some foreign operation against the United States. For one thing, it would require a level of understanding of American culture that Rid argues the Russian intelligence agencies never attained, and which he argues has actually declined. It may be nothing more than a game that someone is playing, something that got out of hand, or, as the ex-Q-believer in the eighth episode of The Rabbit Hole suggests, a group of people out to exploit the followers and make money in the process. Whatever it is, it seems to take the idea of eroding civil society, present in so many active measures, to its logical extreme. Whether as has been suggested lately, it will evolve into a religion, remains to be seen, but for now, it has the hallmarks of something the KGB could only have dreamed of. 

We are not good in dealing with disinformation, we never were. Recognition and exposure are useful, but are not enough. QAnon may appear to be the most dangerous example today but that may change. Both disinformation and the belief systems that enable it are mutable and constantly in flux. The lie is always with us. 

Not Saving the Appearances

The great tendencies of the modern age have been reductionism and objectification. The result has been a drive to find the simplest explanations of everything.

We can see this in economics, where the tendency has long been to convert everything to monetary value, regardless of the violence this does to society and to humanity. We can see it in religion, where fundamentalisms of various sorts represent simplified and increasingly materialist paradises of odder beliefs. The nuclear age reduced strategy to the very material idea of Mutual Assured Destruction. 

In the earliest phases of modernity, medieval ideas of witches as individuals deluded by the the illusions of the devil were turned into beliefs among the most educated in satanic pacts, cults, night flights, and the most incredible rites and blasphemies. Perhaps 50,000 were killed in the resulting persecutions.

In our own times, we have seen Satanic panics, the creation of false memories that can be documented as impossible, the introduction of Satan and his followers into a wide variety of conspiracy beliefs and even into mainstream political discourse, and even becoming justifications for voting against candidates. 

The basic principles on which the modern world is supposed to operate are the closely linked Occam's Razor and Saving the Appearances. In modern times, the former is usually phrased in terms of the simplest explanation being the correct one, while the latter reminds us that our explanations must account for (save) all of the apparent aspects of an event or phenomenon. In theory, and in some formulations, Saving the Appearances is included in Occam's Razor, as in Ernst Mach's: "Scientists must use the simplest means of arriving at their results and exclude everything not perceived by the senses." Of course, we must also explain everything that is perceived by the senses, all of the data, associated with the phenomenon in question. 

One of our main problems is that we have followed the principle of reduction, but have excluded much of the data. Humans (at least modern Western humans) tend to focus on one thing, or a narrow range of things, at a time, excluding all else. Thus Adam Smith could exclude all of the domestic labor that was necessary to support those making pins or any other product. (For more on that, see Katrine Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith's Dinner? A Study in Women and Economics, Pegasus: 2016.) In other words, half or more of economic activity was excluded even in the early days of the discipline, creating conditions in which abstraction (both in the sense of reducing an object to its fundamental form, but also of removing it from the context which gives it meaning, and that allows it to impart meaning to other things) has long dominated economic thought.

Protestant Fundamentalism (and to different extents and in different ways other kinds of religious fundamentalism) have followed a similar path. The specific event that gave the Protestant movement its name was the publication of a collection of pamphlets called The Fundamentals at the behest of California brothers and oil men Lyman and Milton Stewart. Even at the very beginning, the authors, editors, and publishers defining what they believed to be vital to Christianity were already picking and choosing, selecting what suited their particular worldview in the Bible, and what did not. (Malise Ruthven, Fundamentalism: The Search for Meaning, Oxford: 2004, 17-18.) Of equal import, the struggle to prove the inerrancy of scripture has led to trying to smooth over conflicting passages, view obvious errors in chronology as multiple instances of similar events, and even downgrade miracles to God simply manipulating natural phenomena. Fundamentalists have transformed the supernatural and the mythic elements of Christianity into a material and history lie. It is religion devoid of both imagination and understanding in danger of becoming an empty shell devoted to Christian fascism.

Strategy has followed a similar path over the past two centuries. In the military sphere, Napoleon in his heyday, particularly in the period from Austerlitz to Frieldand (1805-1807), is seen as the epitome of strategy. (That he was not so good at grand strategy is also realized but since that failure is most evident after Friedland, it is easy to miss the view expressed by Kipling in his "St. Helena Lullaby," where he wrote: "'How far is St. Helena from the field of Austerlitz.' / You couldn't hear me if I told - so loud the cannons roar. / But not so far for people who are living by their wits.") After his fall, he became very much a cult figure and attempts were made to codify strategy in his image, both by Jomini and Clausewitz. While there have been brilliant strategists since, such as Grant, the elder Moltke, and Nimitz, the realm of grand strategy has essentially turned into a set of rules. Perhaps the last great grand strategist in America was Lincoln. Since then there has been little but improvisation alternating with sets of rules founded in either Clausewitz or game theory. We have tried to reduce a very complex and dynamic discipline to rules and algorithms. Who can have any faith in military and foreign policy strategies that can conceive of nothing, nor produce anything, but chaos and war without end?

These all seem very different things, but they have common causes, an over-dependence on reductionism, and an unwise filtering out of unwanted facts and events. We have become ever so good at doing just that. This is not something that just happened in the present century, in fact it is largely what happened to Jefferson Davis' Confederacy and Adolf Hitler's Germany. Everything was reduced to race. In both cases, the leaders had convinced themselves of the scientific basis of racial superiority and inferiority, and of the righteousness of their cause. This is readily evident in the latter case, but it was already present at the founding of the Confederacy as well. In his infamous Cornerstone Speech, delivered three weeks before the firing on Fort Sumter, Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens effortlessly combined both early scientific racism with the religious variety to present racial inequality as the "great truth" on which his government was founded, unaware of how much of both scientific data and Biblical texts he was excluding. Both states were undermined by their founding principle.

We cannot continue to reduce and objectify the world around us while excluding anything that is inconvenient or does not suit our felt needs. We have founded our present world system too much in economics and realpolitik while the reaction against it has been founded too much in religion or spiritualities with equally limited fields of vision. We have to break out of it all. 

Things We Do Not Tell Ourselves

All cultures and subcultures have their myths. Many of these revolve around exceptionalism, around the things that make that culture special and unique. They become incorporated into the psyches of those who grow up in or adopt a culture or subculture. It is terribly hard for us to escape them, many never even try, and the effort can never break all the vestigial connections. One reason might be because every myth of this sort has its shadow, a negative impression, an ill-perceived set of Things We Must Not Tell Ourselves. In breaking free of the myth, we must confront those Things, but it may be that we never see or understand all of them, or at least not well enough. 

In America, those Things long included our racism and gender prejudices, the causes of the Civil War (which for a century must not be spoken lest it break the Union apart again, and which still seems to hold some threat), the reconstruction of religion by capitalism and nationalism, the depth of our effects on our environment, and of its effects on us. There must be many others, but that list will do for the present, as it is a list of the Things that large parts of the American body politic have awakened. 

As we begin to tell ourselves about these Things, there are dangers. One is from those who still will not acknowledge them, something we often see in the denialism of the Far and Alt-Right, but also in the simple actions of Boards of Directors to protect their economic hegemony. An interesting things happened this week when JP Morgan issued a report on the economic and existential risks of climate change but then drew back from it, indicating that it was an independent report and not a "commentary" on the bank and its behavior (which has been to poor money into fossil fuels investments). The Guardian notes that metadata in the file indicates that it originated with JP Morgan's Executive Director, that is from the very top. Perhaps this is an example of a corporation beginning to tell itself unpleasant things. It will be interesting to see how that plays out. 

That is not the only kind of denialism about which we need to worry as the Things surface around us. One is that different people will focus on different Things and still deny others. A lot of that seems to be going on in the Democratic Party right now, where part of the Party is looking at unpleasantness about race, gender, climate, and capitalism, while another part does not want to does not want to look at the Things about capitalism, and would rather not look too closely at climate or one of the others. The Republican Party is officially refusing to look at all of those, though it is clear that there are very real fault lines under the surface on the first three. 

We need to start asking ourselves harder questions. It appears that subcultures are forming, or have formed, around different positions. What myths are they creating, and what Things are they burying so they will not need to face them? What dangers do those repressed facts and ideas hold? Will they prevent necessary compromise? What will they prevent us from seeing? 

We also need to ask what remains unseen, what has lurked in the American psyche for decades or centuries but not yet emerged into the light? What is still there from earlier subcultures? Of course the cultures and subcultures of other nations and religions have their own Things. Some repress more than we do, others less, and they are repressing other things. Perhaps each nation even has its own style of not telling itself things. Sometimes it seems so when we look at the way things are denied in Russia, or China, or predominantly Arabic countries. Maybe we can better see our own denialism better by holding them up as mirrors? Perhaps we need to watch too that, in our globalized communication ecology, we do not begin to adopt styles and even the Things of others. That may actually have happened in the past two centuries as Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu Fundamentalisms have arisen and taken on a very similar cast and set of values. 

We need to figure out the Things We Still Do Not Tell Ourselves, what new Things we may be adding, and how we are changing the ways we do not talk about them. We are facing existential dangers with division and a lack of clarity because of what we do not know about ourselves. Our cultures remain enigmas to ourselves and to others. We may no longer be able to afford that, may no longer have the time to discover those things that divide us. 

Worldviews as Constraints

It is often difficult, impossible for some, to see how the ideas and prejudices that form our core beliefs, comprehensively shape our reality. Like fish swimming in water, we do not notice the limits of the world and the medium that defines them. These are aspects of our life that are formed early and constantly remolded as we age. For Americans, this tends to include a fundamental (or in recent decades, fundamentalist) faith in capitalism, deeply mixed into our religion, our patriotism, and every aspect of our identity, including race and gender. For those who break free of capitalism, it is difficult to escape a worldview that is built on, and encompassed by, economics of one sort or another. In America, to question capitalism may be considered evil or unpatriotic, but to question economics entirely is to be insane.

To understand how totally a worldview controls reality, we have to look for ones that exaggerate aspects of ours, or that are based in a different set of values. The recent past gives us several examples, but the clearest, because one of the most extreme, is that of Nazi Germany. I am not trying to liken the our present worldview to that of Hitler's followers, rather, I am using its extremism as an example and argument about the narrowness and danger that comes from failing to recognize the limitations, or even the existence, of one's worldview.

The thing that we have to understand about the Nazi worldview is that everything was made to depend on their ideas about race or Volk, which was more narrowly defined that it was even in the United States at the time. The nation essentially became a tribe, and anyone, or anything that originated outside of it was suspect, if not actually evil. The individual was nothing, the race was everything. This was how the Germans were able to justify sterilizing and euthanizing the "unfit" - whether physically, mentally, or morally. Morality itself was based in their ideas of racial purity and the needs of the Volk. Every academic subject had to conform to these ideas. Since the Nazis held that all real human progress originated with the Aryan race, which they defined as essentially or Nordic, any progress in the past had to be shown as having come from Aryan individuals. Not only did they rewrite ancient history to show that the early Greeks and Italians were Germanic in origin, gradually overcome by those of inferior blood (for the Nazis, any non-Aryan, but particularly Jewish), but they went so far as to argue that certain important characters, most notably Jesus and Confucius, were really of Aryan descent, no matter how ridiculous that appeared to non-Nazis.

Every aspect of life was conditioned on being an Aryan. Huge efforts were put into determining who was and was not sufficiently Aryan. The census was bent to its needs. It affected employment, education, healthcare, finance, and every other aspect of life. It affected whether one could even live. Contrary to America, where race has played a huge part in our public life and worldview, but economics has been central, economics was secondary. It simply had to function, and wealth was some protection, but even before the War, the German economy was kept afloat in part by cooking the books at the highest levels.

Of course this racial obsession was incapable to correctly evaluating the military and industrial potential of enemies. This was catastrophic when it came to Slavic states, such as the Soviet Union, or to "mongrel" countries such as the United States. As they were not Aryan, or not sufficiently Aryan, then they could not fight well and their industrial capacity was held to be nothing more than propaganda. (Even during the War, the Nazis refused to believe the huge numbers of ships and planes being produced in America, which, among other things, meant that they thought they were winning the Battle of the Atlantic far longer than they were.) The narrow focus on false-ideals of race was blindly self-destructive. Even had the Nazis had no war, or had won, their ideas of purity would have bred a humanity without necessary genetic diversity and an even greater fragility in the face of the climatological and ecological challenges we face now.

Today, Americans remain mired in old ways of thinking about race, but the key component of our worldview is economic, specifically capitalistic, with race, I would argue a second and highly restrictive component. We are aware of at least some of the characteristic racial thoughts as a nation in ways that we are not with capitalism, which remains. Most of us are able to look at the world and understand how race distorts our views, but, when it comes to capitalism, we have difficulty evaluating events or capabilities in any other way. As I suggested above, those who break free of capitalism's hold still remain within an economic framework. This is reflected in our reactions to things such as climate change, environmental degradation, the rise of antibiotic-resistant bugs, health issues, inequality, and many others. Even in the face of existential crises, we are, as a society, doing cost-benefit analysis and making decisions on our future, or the future of individuals, more on financial considerations than anything else.

Americans may proclaim all sorts of values, but the value that holds the most water in our country is monetary. It has been for a long time.  Proto-capitalism crept into our religious discourse with the Puritans and it molded even our ideas of race from the earliest days of the Virginia planters. It has worked its way into our philosophy and every aspect of life. We are saturated with the goodness and wisdom of capitalism at every turn by our media, our ministers, and the goods our money buys. As with the Nazis and race, we are scarcely able to think in any other way, and we are prohibited from acting in any other way by the very structure of society and the values of our culture.

It acts to restrict our view, to constrain us into certain patterns of action. It is the decisive factor in our elections. We have difficulty looking at anything else. Yes, we know climate is changing, that mass extinctions are under way, that the air and the water and the land is becoming more polluted, but we explore only those pathways that will not dislocate the economy too much, that can be pursued as potentially profitable businesses, and do not disturb the markets or the wealthy too much.

Do most of us even realize that there have been different ways of looking at the world in the past, and, that if we survive, there will be very different ones in future? At the moment, we appear constrained to take any actions to save ourselves by the straight jacket of our beliefs.

Constraint and Crisis

I have written in the past of the role of constraints on how historical events and periods unfold. There are many sorts of constraints, for instance technological ones (e.g., while the Victorians like Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace could conceive of computers, their era lacked the mechanical or electrical skills and infrastructure to build a practical machine), cultural beliefs (for instance the ways Anglo-Saxon assumptions of Japanese racial inferiority led them to ignore accurate intelligence on aircraft such as the Zero and on the capabilities of their military and naval aviation coming from the war in China), or structural (as when the highly flexible structure of the French Revolutionary armies, based on theories going back several decades, were able to defeat one professional European army after another, which, arguably, took 15 to 20 years to restructure from their older models of linear tactics and class-based, draconian discipline). Perhaps much of our present situation is due to the breakdown of one set of constraints, and to the failure to internalize and act within another, emerging set. 

Suppose, for a moment, that the present political crisis in America, as well as in much of  Europe, is due to the collapse of an old paradigm of control, one based in an alliance of white, patriarchal groups in business, religion, education, government, the military/security establishment, and the press. In America, this old paradigm was able to convince the population to believe in the sanctity of capitalism and the nation (though not necessarily the state), to ignore and demonize any competing economic system, to believe in a special, sacred mission for the country, and to oppress or repress anyone who fell outside certain ethnic, gender, economic, or political norms. It probably reached its pinnacle between the Spanish-American War and Black Friday, though it continued to be fairly robust for many decades. It adapted when it had to, as it did by allowing women to vote (but finding many ways to prevent black ones from doing the same), or to technological advances (such as the contraceptive pill, which may have eventually helped defeat it), and to economic conditions (as when it managed to tolerate the New Deal). 

From the 1960s onward, though, it has remained under sustained assault. Today it retains much of its power, but it seems constantly poised on the edge of destruction, unable to cope with changed racial and gender relations, ignoring the senescence of the economic theories and practices that it generated to protect itself after the turbulent Sixties and Seventies, and overwhelmed by both technological change and the evolution of belief systems outside the mainstream over the course of the past hundred years. As it falls into ruin, divisions in society that were previously hidden have emerged, and its very decline has helped generate new ideologies of considerable virulence. At the same time, its failure, and the lack of anything to replace it, has created a moral and ethical crisis permitting the growth of corruption and lawlessness from some of its deeper and more secretive means of control. 

We find ourselves in an ecology of crisis not only because the old control structures have been broken and not been replaced, but also because of a failure to recognize, or at least internalize, the constraints of an age of declining natural resources, degraded and toxified environments, population levels novel in human history, and climate change, in short a set of existential threats. Even the most enlightened tend to behave in ways that aggravate the situation, while many, caught up in the broken rubble of our cultural control systems, ignore it entirely. Whether one acknowledges it or not, this is the source of a new set of constraints on our culture, society, and economy at the very time when he failure of another set of constraints makes unified and necessary action nearly impossible. 

It would be easy to give up. It would be equally easy to say that we need to return to a race-based patriarchy, which is what many seem to want, but that would be catastrophic, not only for individuals, but also as a return to the conditions that facilitated and accelerated the present environmental and climate crisis. If we have time, a new set of institutions and beliefs will create a new set of constraints, in conjunction with the constraints of environment and climate, that will either deepen all of our crises or allow us to cope an begin to respond in creative and positive ways without imposing great hardships on any group in society. Of course we may also respond in creative ways that alleviate the existential nature of the threats to humanity and life, but that are highly repressive and destructive of our humanity. Or we may fail entirely. 

What is necessary is the widespread understanding of the constraints we have lived under, whose failure has released the destructive, as well as the creative forces in our society, and the new constraints under which we must necessarily live. Just because we live in the Anthropocene does not mean humans are in control. We have to learn to live now within the limits of a nature shaped, hitherto unknowingly, by human needs and actions. 

Singularity & Agency

In William Gibson's new novel, Agency (Penguin Random House, 2020), repeating a long-standing habit, he drops in a little conversation that stays with you long after the book. In the following bit (p. 275), one of the two protagonists, Verity, is living in an alternative 2017, while Rainey, wife of the other protagonist, Wilf, speaks to her from 2136, and what is presumably our timeline:

    "I thought that was supposed to change everything," Verity said, "The Singularity?"

    "We were in our real singularity all along," Rainey said. "We just didn't know it."

From what Rainey said just prior to this, it maybe that the singularity began as long ago as the Industrial Revolution, but certainly by our own time. 

Nor has Verity been thinking about the Singularity in anything like the terms Rainey sees it. The one is preoccupied with her San Francisco-Silicon Valley worldview and thinks about AI and nanotechnology; the other looking back from a future that barely survived climate change and cultural breakdown, and may yet succumb, sees it very differently. 

There are different ways of looking at this. Nor am I the first to note Rainey's statement, which seems likely to become as important as Gibson's definition of cyberspace over thirty years ago, or his oft-quoted line, "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." 

We live at a juncture where/when different pasts and futures compete. The Singularity is attractive to some, some kind of geek Rapture, but poisoned and dark to others. Count me among the latter.  

The idea of the Singularity made its way into popular culture as a technological singularity via mathematician and science fiction author Vernor Vinge in 1993. He had several views on how it might occur, but all were rooted in computing or biotech. None of them resemble anything that has really happened yet, and we may be past the point where some could occur. A lot of people still believe in a technological singularity, and it is possible that some scenario related to technology that Vinge imagined, or with other technologies that others have imagined, may come to pass. 

Gibson is hinting at a non-technological singularity (though one that produces amazing technologies simply to ensure human survival) triggered by climate change and societal breakdown. Right now, that seems a much more likely scenario, even if some aspects of his future, e.g., time travel via the internet and quantum computing, are likely impossible. Of course Gibson is not about trying to predict the future, no matter how much his fans think he is good at it, but observing the present. (His famous definition of cyberspace was based on watching kids playing video games in arcades in the 70s and early 80s.) The other thing to realize is that Gibson does not regard technology, culture, and, I think nature, separately. In his novel Spook Country he effectively killed cyberspace, with one character suggesting there is no such thing as cyberspace, "There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction." (Spook Country, 86). 

It maybe that Agency will help us reorient our ideas of the Singularity. It may be, as I wondered at the time, that we entered a singularity in the early hours of November 9, 2016. (Gibson suggests that the election of Trump and the yes vote on Brexit were critical to the development of the Jackpot, his singularity.) It may be that we entered a singularity much earlier - 1947/1948 seems a likely start date, or perhaps 1914. Of course it may be that every day is a singularity, as we have no real way of predicting what will happen, however much we believe we may. 

The truth is that we live in an era in which destabilizing the future, breaking things, and throwing up technologies, policies, and business models without any thought of consequences and larger connections is the norm. In other words, we live in an era of continuously manufactured attempts at creating a singularity. Their cumulative effect has created a singularity of considerable duration and almost certainly catastrophic consequences for most of humanity and life on earth. 

Much of Agency is about singularities, and it does revolve around both the climate/societal singularity of the Jackpot that is described by Rainey, but also around the technological singularity of an emergent and highly unorthodox AI named Eunice in an alternate timeline. As I think back on the novel's action and its climax, I have to wonder if the singularity around Eunice is about her technology, or the direction her personality takes. I do not want to give away much more about the plot, so I will leave it at that, but the other aspect of the novel is about how those involved in a singularity act and react, that is, Agency - as in in the etymological precursor of the word, agere, implying the ability to act, to move, to produce change (see https://www.etymonline.com/word/agency). 

When we think about the Singularity, it is often as something just imposed on us and inevitable in its outcome. Much depends on the behavior both of those initiating a singularity and about the behavior of those caught up in it. Many question whether we have any agency at all as individuals, or even whether the collective mass of most of humanity (as opposed to the presumed "geniuses," who often behave more like imbeciles, who supposedly will trigger the Singularity) are capable of meaningful action. That is very convenient for those who do not like to think, whether they are those in power who deceive themselves with fantasies of control, those who just want to follow those in authority or with wealth, and also to those who cater to their fantasies with conspiracies or fawning accounts of the faux-great-and-good. 

The thing with agency is not that any of us have great quantities of it. Certain positions and certainly wealth can amplify the agency of an individual a great deal, but no one has that much. Our reality is complex and chaotic. Actions do not necessarily have equal and opposite reactions, as they interact with a myriad of other actions and their consequences each second. The Butterfly Effect is real. Bifurcations are real. No one can predict which actions will push a situation past a tipping point, nor can one predict how an action will propagate over time. It is possible to trace them retrospectively, but at the time, it is impossible to know which are important and which are not. 

When I was a child, I often heard the phrase, "what's that got to do with the price of tea in china?" As it turns out, a great deal of our present world situation depends on the price of tea (and opium), in China in the late 1830s. In many ways, it spawned a singularity. The actions of the Chinese Commissioner Lin Zexu and the British administrator Sir Charles Elliot in 1839 and 1840, conditioned by the British market for tea and the Chinese market for opium, not only brought about the First Opium War, which neither wanted, but became drivers for the history of both countries, of international relations, and of drugs down to the present day. If you want to know about anything from current US-Chinese relations to the war in Afghanistan, to Pugs (the dogs, I mean), you have to look at the tensions between those two men, but also even minor incidents, such as brawls between British sailors and Chinese laborers. 

Gibson gives us a demonstration of agency in his new novel, of how contingent it is, even for those with a great deal of power and wealth, and how much of it may be unconscious. In doing so, he recognizes that both apparently momentous events and seeming trifles move the world. For him, agency, both of his characters in 2017 and 2136, human and not-so-human, agency and the ability to work within and on singularities, resides in relationships and trust. As we confront the seeming lack or impotence of our own agency, remembering that the powerful have less agency than they seem, and that we retain our own agency, even in the face of a singularity, is a vital point, one we must remember and use.