The Compulsive Explainer

Unstable Human Societies

For hundreds of thousands of years humans lived in stable societies. But with the advent of Civilization, this changed abruptly. Civilizations came and went in endless succession. There have been no shortage of reasons for this, but none has even come close to being satisfactory. 

The reason for this is probably because human societies are extremely complex and difficult to understand - or in computer terms: difficult to model. Large numbers of feedback loops, both positive and negative, with different timings, and with different interactions, are in action at the same time.

Consider something much smaller: The Military's Plan For The Afghan War Surge, In One Giant Chart. Click on the image to get a full-size version. Five minutes looking at this, or even five seconds, will make you doubt Obama's war plan - if he even has one. You have to give the Pentagon credit though, for even trying to understand the problem. If it really tried to put it into operation, with some way to monitor what was going on in all these loops, I would be even more impressed. 

My next course from the Learning Company, my Christmas present to myself, will be Understanding Complexity. I did take the class on Chaos Theory, which is also useful. It says chaotic systems which had been considered unpredictable, actually actually are predictable, but in some strange ways: they tend to flip back and forth between different stable states. 

In human societies, these would be periods of increasing power, followed by disintegration and loss of power - and often even existence. The Babylonian Empire is been long forgotten, along with many others. 

Islam in Europe

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. This photo clearly shows the contrast between two worlds: secular Europe and religious Islam. A naked young woman, who likes showing off her body, and a religious young woman who wants to be covered up entirely. I don't have to tell you which I prefer - or which my mother would have preferred. She once said "No decent woman would ever expose her navel."

The article, from the December 17 New York Review, also draws the similarities between Islamic fundamentalism and Christian fundamentalism - both quarrelsome Abrahamic religions. 

Two books are reviewed, one, by a Britain, seeing the Islamic immigration problem in the worst possible light, and one by an Islamic scholar, trying to make them look nearly perfect.

America has a similar problem: Hispanic immigration: millions of Latinos desperately trying for a better life. Here again, there is a cultural clash, a fast-growing, culturally underdeveloped people who have no appreciation of American culture, but who are determined to get ahead - and who are sometimes violent.

Society has Become Evil

You may think that I have become pessimistic and paranoid - and maybe even senile. And no doubt this is true - especially the senility part. But I prefer pointing my finger in the other direction. One catalyst to this has been listening to I, Claudius, about the degeneration of Roman society about the time of Christ. As he keeps repeating: there were good Romans and bad Romans - but the bad ones got the upper hand, and easily out-smarted and and out-maneuvered the good ones - who seemed incapable of realizing what they were up against: evil. This was not something they could comprehend, being basically good themselves - and a little stupid.

Back in the earlier days of the Roman Republic, the good had the upper hand, but in the later days, just the opposite was true. Societies have inertia: once they start moving in a particular direction, they tend to keep moving that way.

American society has become evil - and this is no new observation. Obama's former pastor said "God damn America!", and he meant it. Obama, who had moved from the slums of Chicago to the White House, had to leave that honest, critical part of him behind.

The value of any social theory rests on its ability to describe social trends that were not obvious before. Evil is a concept we all understand easily, because we have all been exposed to it - and hopefully we have learned from our experience. As Freud discovered, we like to project evil onto external enemies - but we need to turn that finger around and point to ourselves - and I am no different. I am as evil as anyone else, because I am all too human.

The Revolt Against the Modern World

The modern world was formed by a series of events in Northern Europe: the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution - and it wouldn't be hard to add a few more. These can all be seen as developments in one long process: the building of the modern world - the most amazing development since the Greeks and the Romans.

We now live in a time when we are destroying this marvelous accomplishment - where we are returning to normal times: a highly stratified society with no interest in objective reality - only in our illusions. Where the individual is no longer important - only the organization. This last item is all-important, because everything was based on the development of the person - the human capital on which everything depended. It would be no exaggeration to say that people no longer exist, in any basic sense - only their social roles are recognized by themselves and others.

Just as in primitive societies, people who stand out are quickly knocked down - and the rich and powerful control everything. Ethics has been replaced by opportunism.

Tough Times are Good for Hollywood

Damned Pirates: Hollywood Sets $10 Billion Box Office Record

When times are bad, people console themselves with fantasies - created for them by the fantasy factory. This was true in the Great Depression, people went to the movies even if they didn't have enough to eat.

Despite these worries, neither the ever-increasing piracy rates nor the global recession could prevent Hollywood having its best year ever in 2009. With an estimated $10.6 billion in consumer spending at the US and Canadian box office, the movie industry will break the 2008 record by nearly a billion dollars.

In Costa Rica pirated movies are very common, and people can buy and rent them for very little. This strikes them as economic justice. Why should they help the rich get even richer?

The Long Decline of America

As I see it, America has been in decline for over a century. The evidence for this has been looking at me for some time, but I could not see it. Finally, it burst into my conscientious as a kind of revelation - but a revelation others are not likely to see.

I have been hearing about the multiverse for some time, and the two concepts seem to have jelled. The multiverse theory is from physics, and posits that there are many universes, more-or-less unknown to each other, but with some limited interaction between them. Each universe is structured differently, and the one we happen to live in is hospitable to life - not surprisingly. We seem to have chosen this one as our own, unaware of the rest. Or perhaps it is the other way around: our universe chose us.

It doesn't really matter, everything seems to be happening at the same time - the universe seems to be some kind of hologram, where everything affects everything else. Here again, before we discovered lasers and holograms, this kind of talk would have made no sense. We thought the universe was some kind of machine, as Newton did. Now we are not sure what it is, because 95% percent of it is composed of strange stuff: black matter and black energy, which is a mystery to us. I take this to be analogous to our human world, where we understand almost nothing about ourselves, and our global society - but are completely unaware of this ignorance.

In the same way, we are completely unaware of the long decline of America - and expend a huge amount of energy ignoring it. The parallel to the decline of the Roman Empire is instructive. The Empire wasted huge amounts of energy and material fighting wars all over the place - which, in retrospect, made no sense. What was going on in the minds of the Romans? We do not know, we can only guess - but it is clear they were not thinking very well, and did have well-thought-out overall goals. What was the Empire supposed to be for, what was it supposed to be doing? They never stopped to consider questions like these - but just rushed on to their doom. And the whole world suffered.

America is busy doing the same in one part of its multiverse: living out fantasies, while in another part the logic of decline is inexorably working. The two universes are unaware of each other.

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking, the skill that created the modern world, is fast disappearing. It is being replaced by a resurgence in religious fervor, and a distrust of science. Clear, logical thinking is now considered a social liability, not an asset - because it challenges they primary activity of our post-modern culture: the production and consumption of entertainment.

The reason for this is simple: the ascendancy of television over literature. We now spend much more time watching television. Its world has been adopted as our world, the way the world ought to be. Forces behind the scenes control the way things are: what we are supposed to see and what we are supposed to think: non-critically. Critical thinking is out: where no one wants to be.

McLuhan said it well: the medium is the message, and the message is don't think, just believe.

The young, who know that the modern world is over, are disgusted their elders, who are not with it. For them, the best world is simply the best illusion they can find - and they are looking for that constantly.

Entertainment can be analyzed, and often is: by critics; this is what critics are. But the young regard this with horror: this destroys the most important thing in their lives, the very reason for their existence. And the adults are not far behind.

I am a Successful Failure

I successfully evaded the collapse of America. I certainly did not plan this, I had no idea a collapse was going on. At one point, it looked like I would have to kill myself, because I was not employable, but that make me wake up and consider other possibilities.

This morning, it occurred to me that my history resembled that of a friend of mine in Silicon Valley. His family were German Jews. They did not take their Jewish identity or their German identity too seriously - and this enabled them to survive. When the Nazis came into power they simply moved to South America. When the war was over, and the German economy had recovered, they went back to Germany. As a result, my friend was tri-lingual: German, Spanish, and English. I knew a number of young people in Silicon Valley who were fluent in this combination. Their families had also gone with the flow: going where it was safest and where skilled people were needed. If their lives were weren't working in one country, they moved somewhere else.

I have urged some of my Silicon Valley friends to do something similar: to move to India and set up a software development business there - or in China. But they are horrified by the idea: they are too comfortable in America, and they are determined to stay on - as Obama says: stay the course, even if the course does not seem promising. That have not realized that America is collapsing - and they will not until it is too late. I have been fortunate: I was kicked unceremoniously out of the nest, and I had to fend for myself. They will struggle along, doing the best they can in a failing country, ignoring the obvious - and will end up nowhere.

How come I was so lucky? Because I have a strong sense of ethics. I couldn't put up with the unethical behavior in the high-tech world - and with its self-destructive behavior. And it couldn't put up with me either. If I could not conform, I could get out - which I did.

Fortunately, I had a safety net: my Social Security retirement benefits. These are not adequate for the States, but a handsome income down here - once you learn how to live as a local. This has also given me a new perspective on life in America: I can realize how lucky I am - and how unlucky America is. The Dollar is failing, but unless if fails completely, I will survive.

The Individual and the Organization

One of the most important effects of literacy was an emphasis on the individual: as writer and reader. Both writing and reading are solitary acts, where the individual is interacting with an abstract environment. When people started reading silently to themselves, back in the late middle ages, people were horrified, and tended to regard them as possessed by the Devil.

Very few could read, and any reading that was done was in a group setting, a monastery perhaps, where a someone would slowly read aloud to the assembly. And even much later, when literacy was common, people would read aloud to each other, perhaps from the latest novel, so everyone could savor it. My mother, for example, read aloud to us when we were children - and this taught us how to appreciate reading. We learned that reading was acceptable and important.

Now, in the post-modern world, the young once again avoid reading - and consider it strange, deviant, antisocial behavior. I am a big fan of audible books, but most are unable to focus long enough to listen them, or they put them to sleep.

I also watch videos of professors lecturing about their specialty - as an individual, of course. Often they reference other people in the profession - here again, as individuals, and only tangentially the organization they are affiliated with. If I send one of these videos to my friends, they don't know what to make of it: a knowledgeable individual organizing and sharing his knowledge. This is especially true if the lecturer is a woman.

In their world, the organization is everything and the individual is nothing. Anyone who stands out is promptly knocked down. Those in transition between the two worlds, have a hard time of it. An office environment does not tolerate people who want to go their own way. It's either their way - or the highway.

The Effects of Innovation

The following is from Niel Postman's The Disappearance of Childhood, page 23. He is a genius: he can pull in all kinds of things, seemingly unrelated, and make them coherent.
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We may take as a guide the teachings of Harold Innis. Innis stressed that changes in communication technology invariably have three kinds of effects: They alter the structure of interests (the things thought about), the character of symbols (the things thought with), and the nature of community (the area in which thoughts develop).

To put it as simply as one can, every machine is an idea, or conglomeration of ideas. But they are not the sort of ideas that lead an inventor to conceive of a machine in the first place. We cannot know what was in Gutenberg's mind that led him to connect a winepress to book manufacturing, but it is a safe conjecture that he had no intention of amplifying individualism, or for that matter, undermining the authority of the Catholic church.

There is a sense in which all inventors are, to use Arthur Koestler's word, sleepwalkers. Or we might call them Frankensteins, and the entire process the Frankenstein Syndrome: one creates a machine for a particular and limited purpose. But once the machine is built, we discover - sometimes to our horror, usually to our discomfort, always to our surprise - that it has ideas of its own; that it is quite capable not only of changing our habits but, as Innis, tried to show, of changing our habits of mind.

A machine may provide us with a new sense of time, as did the mechanical clock. Or of space and time, as did the telescope. Or of knowledge, as did the alphabet. Or of the possibilities of improving human biology, as did eyeglasses. To say it in James Carey's bold way: We may find that the structure of our consciousness has been reshaped to parallel the structure of communication, that we have become what we have made.
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I would only add that many of our innovations today are not, strictly speaking, machines, but new kinds of communication: such as the Internet and thereby: Facebook. Their impact is just as huge and unpredictable.