Category: Culture

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Culture History Mythology Tech

Techno-worship, American-style

Likely more prescient in 2022 than it was when first published in 2011, Morris Berman cites the argument of British philosopher John Gray to support his (taboo) thesis that our unwavering, unquestioning commitment to technological progress has been a crucial factor in the downfall of American society. Whether by slow-burn or sudden death-knell, our end is certain because, as Americans, we are unwilling to abandon a myth.

Theories of progress, says Gray1, are not scientific hypotheses but rather myths, which—like the Christian myths of redemption and the Second Coming—answer to the human need for meaning. This is why we refuse to let them go, regardless of what the evidence might suggest. It is also why, in the United States, the commitment to technology goes much deeper than fueling consumerism, lubricating the socioeconomic system, and keeping a lid on class conflict. Without this belief system, Americans would have literally nothing, for it lies at the heart of the American Dream and endlessly vaunted American way of life. Strip away the illusion of unlimited growth and the country would suffer a collective nervous breakdown. (This is key to why Jimmy Carter had to go: he was pushing the limits of American psychological tolerance, asking a nation of addicts to confront their dependency and change course.) Globalization, along with neoliberalism, according to Gray, is merely the latest incarnation of this illusion, and its deep religious roots account for the ferocity of its adherents, even after the crash of 2008 gave the lie to the notion of unlimited development through the free market economy. We want to believe that the future will be better than the past, but there isn’t a shred of evidence to back this up. In particular, as I shall discuss below, scientific progress doesn’t translate into moral progress; one could reasonably argue that just the opposite is the case. Truth be told, concludes Gray, we are even more superstitious than our medieval forebears; we just don’t recognize it. Nor is it likely that we shall abandon these beliefs. It’s utopia or bust, even if the odds are heavily weighted toward bust.

Berman M., Why America Failed: the roots of imperial decline, 2011/2014, pp. 82-83 quoting Gray, J., Black Mass, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007

Categories
Being Culture Literature

What is Dignity?

Early in the story, the butler in The Remains of the Day, shares his initial conceptualization of dignity as one that stems from loyalty and pride. In his youth he believed dignity to be staunch adherence to the persona that one is expected to assume.

If one considers the difference between my father at such moments and a figure such as Mr Jack Neighbors even with the best of his technical flourishes, I believe one may distinguish what it is that separates a ‘great’ butler from a merely competent one. We may now understand better, too, why my father was so fond of the story of the butler who failed to panic after discovering a tiger under the dining table; it was because he knew instinctively that somewhere in this story lay the kernel of what true ‘dignity’ is. And let me now posit this: ‘dignity’ has to do crucially with a butler’s ability not to abandon the professional being he inhabits. Lesser butlers will abandon their professional being for the private one at the least provocation. For such persons, being a butler is like playing some pantomime role; a small push, a slight stumble, and the façade will drop off to reveal the actor underneath. The great butlers are great by virtue of their ability to inhabit their professional role and inhabit it to the utmost; they will not be shaken out by external events, however surprising, alarming or vexing. They wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let ruffians or circumstance tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when, and only when, he wills to do so, and this will invariably be when he is entirely alone. It is, as I say, a matter of ‘dignity’.

Ishiguro, Kazuo The remains of the day, Vintage International ed. 1993, pp 42-43.

Later on, another conception of dignity is put forth by another character whose life-experience is markedly different than the butler’s. Mr. Smith believes that dignity is produced through sacrifice to a worthy cause.

‘Mind you,’ put in Mr Harry Smith, ‘with all respect for what you say, sir, it ought to be said. Dignity isn’t just something gentlemen have. Dignity’s something every man and woman in this country can strive for and get. You’ll excuse me, sir, but like I said before, we don’t stand on ceremony here when it comes to expressing opinions. And that’s my opinion for what it’s worth. Dignity’s not just something for gentlemen.’ … ‘That’s what we fought Hitler for, after all. If Hitler had had things his way, we’d just be slaves now. The whole world would be a few masters and millions upon millions of slaves. And I don’t need to remind anyone here, there’s no dignity to be had in being a slave. That’s what we fought for and that’s what we won. We won the right to be free citizens. …’

Ishiguro, Kazuo The remains of the day, Vintage International ed. 1993, pp 185-186

Painfully, the butler faces some hard truths and he is not pleased reflecting on his past choices. His lifetime of dedicated service and professionalism did not produce within himself a sense of dignity. His prior belief proved false. On reading the passage below, the butler seems to be one of the saddest characters in modern literature in my opinion. Perhaps true dignity stems from being true to oneself.

‘Lord Darlington wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t a bad man at all. And at least he had the privilege of being able to say at the end of his life that he had made his own mistakes. His lordship was a courageous man. He chose a certain path in life, it proved to be a misguided one, but there, he chose it, he can say that at least. As for myself, I cannot even claim that. You see, I trusted. I trusted in his lordship’s wisdom. All those years I served him, I trusted I was doing something worthwhile. I can’t even say I made my own mistakes. Really — one has to ask oneself — what dignity is there in that?’

Ishiguro, Kazuo The remains of the day, Vintage International ed. 1993, p 244

After some reflection, the butler realizes that, for most of us, most circumstances in our lives are simply beyond our control. Dignity can also come from the pursuit of one’s aspirations, regardless of outcome.

The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.

Ishiguro, Kazuo The remains of the day, Vintage International ed. 1993, p. 244

Categories
Culture Libertad! Literature

Life and Debt

I dare not comment on David Graeber’s monumental anthropological investigation into the role of debt in human relations in Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Any attempt by this hard sciences guy would almost certainly prove embarrassing. My motivation for reading the 400 page text (plus 62 pages of end notes) stems from a desire to understand the axioms that underlie modern concepts of indebtedness and money. Perhaps my recent interest in this subject is a natural consequence of middle age. Or maybe my heightened curiosity manifested from living in a social system whose very existence seems more precarious with each passing day.

What exactly is money anyway? What is a debt? How did these ideas come about and why do we adhere to them? Can communities function without monetary exchange? Graeber provides compelling answers to these questions by connecting a myriad of observations from cultures around the world throughout history. Connections that can explain universal, recurring trends such as the cycle of slavery to mine metals to produce coins to pay soldiers (who, in turn, captured more slaves). This “slavery-coinage-military complex” prevailed in the Axial Age (800 BC – 600 AD) in Europe, India and China that coincided with great unrest in each. If you are a human being living on planet Earth, you should read this book. The extended quote below from the last chapter provides an apt summary:

If this book has shown anything, it’s exactly how much violence it has taken, over the course of human history, to bring us to a situation where it’s even possible to imagine that that’s what life is really about. Especially when one considers how much of our own daily experience flies directly in the face of it.  As I’ve emphasized, communism may be the foundation of all human relations—that communism that, in our own daily life, manifests itself above all in what we call “love”—but there’s always some sort of system of exchange, and usually, a system of hierarchy built on top of it.  These systems of exchange can take an endless variety of forms, many perfectly innocuous.  Still, what we are speaking of here is a very particular type of exchange, founded on precise calculation.  As I pointed out in the very beginning: the difference between owing someone a favor and owing someone a debt is that the amount of a debt can be precisely calculated.  Calculation demands equivalence.  And such equivalence—especially when it involves equivalence between human beings (and it always seems to start that way, because at first, human beings are always the ultimate values)—only seems to occur when people have been forcibly severed from their contexts, so much so that they can be treated as identical to something else, as in: “seven martin skins and twelve large silver rings for the return of your captured brother,” “one of your three daughters as surety for this loan of one hundred and fifty bushels of grain.”…

This in turn leads to that great embarrassing fact that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. More than anything else, the endless recitation of the myth of barter, employed much like an incantation, is the economists’ way of exorcising this uncomfortable truth. But even a moment’s reflection makes it obvious. Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and immediately assess them only in terms of what he could get for them in the market? Surely, he can only have been a thief. Burglars, marauding soldiers, then perhaps debt collectors, were the first to see the world this way. It was only in the hands of soldiers, fresh from looting towns and cities, that chunks of gold or silver—melted down, in most cases, from some heirloom treasure, that like the Kashmiri gods, or Aztec breastplates, or Babylonian women’s ankle bracelets, was both a work of art and a little compendium of history—could become simple, uniform bits of currency, with no history, valuable precisely for their lack of history, because they could be accepted anywhere, no questions asked. And it continues to be true. Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons, whether these are swords and clubs, or, nowadays, “smart bombs” from unmanned drones.

It can also only operate by continually converting love into debt. I know my use of the word “love” here is even more provocative, in its own way, than “communism.” Still, it’s important to hammer the point home. Just as markets, when allowed to drift entirely free from their violent origins, invariably begin to grow into something different, into networks of honor, trust and mutual connectedness, so does the maintenance of systems of coercion constantly do the opposite: turn the products of human cooperation, creativity, devotion, love, and trust back into numbers once again.

Graeber, David.  Debt: the first 5,000 years.  Melville House 2014. pp 386-387

A bit further down, Graeber explains a false, but ubiquitous, idea that by simply being alive we are in debt–a debt so great that we can never even hope to repay:

It’s hardly surprising that the end result, historically, is to see our life itself as something we hold on false premises, a loan long since overdue, and therefore, to see existence itself as criminal.  Insofar as there’s a real crime here, though, it’s fraud. The very premise is fraudulent.  What could possibly be more presumptuous, or more ridiculous, than to think it would be possible to negotiate with the grounds of one’s existence?  Of course it isn’t.  Insofar as it is indeed possible to come into any sort of relation with the Absolute, we are confronting a principle that exists outside of time, or human-scale time, entirely; therefore, as medieval theologians correctly recognized, when dealing with the Absolute, there can be no such thing as debt.”

Graeber, David. Debt: the first 5,000 years.  Melville House 2014. p 387.

Below, Graeber captures the potential paradox that I have felt–but have not been able to articulate–that has long fueled my contempt for the rampant materialism and iniquity that so plagues our modern age, especially in post-WWII United States. Bank-imposed FICA scores come to mind here:

For me, this is exactly what’s so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money–and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money.

Graeber, David. Debt: the first 5,000 years.  Melville House 2014. pp 389-390

Though Graeber’s aim in Debt was not to offer “concrete proposals” for change, the last line of the text is the crucial take away for this 21st century malcontent:

What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point, we can’t even say. It’s more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.

Graeber, David. Debt: the first 5,000 years. Melville House 2014, p 391.

Categories
Culture Nation

The Disneyfication of America

In his book America: the farewell tour, Chris Hedges argues that America finds itself on a course of “irrevocable decline”. Those who dare raise issue regarding our dying culture find their observations ignored and their conclusions dismissed. Such is our sociocultural stage in the first few weeks of 2020.

Magical thinking is not limited to the beliefs and practices of pre-modern cultures. It defines the ideology of capitalism. Quotas and projected sales can always be met. Profits can always be raised. Growth is inevitable. The impossible is always possible. Human societies, if they bow before the dictates of the marketplace, will be ushered into capitalist paradise. It is only a question of having the right attitude and the right technique. When capitalism thrives, we are assured, we thrive. The merging of the self with the capitalist collective has robbed us of our agency, creativity, capacity for self-reflection, and moral autonomy. We define our worth not by our independence or our character but by the material standards set by capitalism–personal wealth, brands, status, and career advancement. We are molded into a compliant and repressed collective. The mass conformity is characteristic of totalitarian and authoritarian states. It is the Disneyfication of America, the land of eternally happy thoughts and positive attitudes. And when magical thinking does not work, we are told, and often accept, that we are the problem. We must adjust. We must have faith. We must be positive. We must envision what we want. We must try harder. The system is never to blame. We failed it. It did not fail us.

Hedges, Chris. America: the farewell tour. Simon & Schuster, 2018. p. 44
Categories
Culture

Call to Keyboards

In her recent book Life in code: a personal history of technology, Ellen Ullman appeals to people of all races, genders, occupations and levels of socioeconomic status to learn how to program.  She argues that more diverse involvement in software creation will make digital technology more useful, less intimidating, and less biased as it continues to evolve and influence our everyday lives.  The following excerpt especially resonated with my views:

Later, when you are more skilled, I see you confronting the newly anointed oracles called data scientists, “experts” in scanning billions of data points.  You say, “The answers you arrived at are mired in the bias of the past.  Your information is based upon what has already happened.  Those of us who have not succeeded in the past are not in your databases–or, worse, we are, as bad risks.”

To my hoped-for new programming army: You are society’s best hope for loosening the stranglehold of the code that surrounds us.  Enlist compatriots.  Upset assumptions.  It will take time and perseverance, but you can do it.  Stick a needle into the shiny bubble of the the technical world’s received wisdom. Burst it.

Ullman, Ellen Life in code: a personal history of technology, Picador (2017),  pg. 247

Categories
Culture Interwebs

Man, online gamers really seem like friendly folks of high integrity…

The following excerpt is part of the legal agreement that users must accept to sign up for Sony Entertainment Network, a forum and hosting service for online gaming through PlayStation consoles.  It seems to me that many of these rules prohibit behaviors and practices that SEN has encountered, and had to deal with, over the course of their history hosting online games.  From this perspective, the code does not reflect well on the past conduct of online gamers.

3. COMMUNITY CODE OF CONDUCT

You must adhere to the following rules of conduct, and also follow a reasonable, common-sense code of conduct. Users are required to take into consideration community standards and refrain from abusive or deceptive conduct, cheating, hacking, or other misuse of SEN. Rights of other users should be respected.

The actions that are prohibited include the following:

You may not manipulate or inflate usage of SEN.

You may not engage in deceptive or misleading practices.

You may not abuse or harass others, including stalking behavior.

You may not take any action, or upload, post, stream, or otherwise transmit any content, language, images or sounds in any forum, communication, public profile, or other publicly viewable areas or in the creation of any Online ID that SNEI or its affiliates, in their sole discretion, find offensive, hateful, or vulgar. This includes any content or communication that SNEI or its affiliates deem racially, ethnically, religiously or sexually offensive, libelous, defaming, threatening, bullying or stalking.

You may not organize hate groups.

You may not upload, post, stream, or otherwise transmit any content that contains any viruses, worms, spyware, time bombs, or other computer programs that may damage, interfere with, or disrupt SEN.

You may not use, make, or distribute unauthorized software or hardware, including Non-Licensed Peripherals and cheat code software or devices that circumvent any security features or limitations included on any software or devices, in conjunction with SEN, or take or use any data from SEN to design, develop or update such unauthorized software or hardware.

You may not modify or attempt to modify the online client, disc, save file, server, client-server communication, or other parts of any game title, or content.

You may not cause disruption to or modify or damage any account, system, hardware, software, or network connected to or provided by SEN for any reason, including for the purpose of gaining an unfair advantage in a game.

You may not attempt to hack or reverse engineer any code or equipment in connection with SEN.

You may not take any action that SNEI or its affiliates consider to be disruptive to the normal flow of chat or gameplay, including uploading, posting, streaming, or otherwise transmitting any unsolicited or unauthorized material, including junk mail, spam, excessive mail or chain letters.

You may not introduce content that is commercial in nature such as advertisements, solicitations, promotions and links to web sites.

You may not introduce content that could be harmful to SNEI or its affiliates or their licensors, or players, such as any code or virus that may damage, alter or change any property or interfere with the use of property or SEN.

You may not upload, post, stream, access, or otherwise transmit any content that you know or should have known to be infringing, or that violates, any third party rights, any law or regulation, or contractual or fiduciary obligations.

You may not impersonate any person, including an SNEI or third party employee.

You may not provide SNEI or any third party company with false or inaccurate information, including reporting false complaints to our or our affiliates’ consumer services or providing false or inaccurate information during account registration.

You may not sell, buy, trade, or otherwise transfer your Online ID, SEN Account or any personal access to SEN through any means or method, including by use of web sites.

You may not conduct any activities that violate any local, state or federal laws, including copyright or trademark infringement, defamation, invasion of privacy, identity theft, hacking, stalking, fraud, stealing or using without purchasing, where payment is required, any content or service and distributing counterfeit software or SEN Accounts.

And always remember: have fun!*

*I added this.