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.