Tag Archives: Democracy

Are freedom and complexity incompatible?

 

One of the most salient facts of the modern world is that what the individual gains in terms of power she simultaneously loses in terms of control and understanding over the mechanisms through which that power is bought. Given enough money in my pocket, I can fly to the ends of the earth while at the same time possessing no control over how I am brought there. Nor do I have anything deeper than a childlike understanding of how this miracle of flight has been brought about.

As individuals we are embedded in systems of finance, media, medicine and law, and much else besides, over which we exercise little control, even where we possess the supposed power to influence. A good deal of this powerlessness is merely a reflection of the fact that we are historical creatures born into a world with a long history before we got here, and, one should hope, that will long outlive our brief stay.

This human made world has a jerry-rigged quality, built over centuries and longer. Like its greatest representative, the city, it has emerged organically and piecemeal overtime on the basis of human responses to one set of problems added to the solution of another set of problems, and so on, until it constitutes something like a jenga tower in which we often are unable to undo past choices without bringing the whole structure down. These makeshift aspect is what computer programmers call a kludge- “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose.”

None of this is particularly original. Whole books have been written on the subject including the science writer Samuel Arbesman’s: Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension.

Arbesman lays out how new systems have been added to old ones, and are more often patched than replaced to give us structures no engineer in her right mind would have designed from scratch. The result is a human-made world over which we exercise only limited comprehension and control. As he puts it:

Even if our individual and collective cognitive faculties were up to the task of understanding massive complexity and its emergent behaviour – and they’re not – then there is the question of legacy. Much of what we use today has been designed incrementally and has been operating for a long time. It has been upgraded, patched, repaired and maintained. So, on top of everything else, the insoluble puzzle we have set ourselves is always changing. (90)

In a way the picture Arbesman presents is a pessimistic one, at least when compared to the manic optimism around human power that came before it. It’s a world where the Whiggish view of Enlightenment is supplanted by Danni Hillis’ “Age of Entanglement”. Instead of discovering that everything, including human nature, is the product of simple laws comprehendible to the human mind, the world we’ve built on the back of such laws has escaped our comprehension. To quote Hillis:

As our technological and institutional creations have become more complex, our relationship to them has changed. We now relate to them as we once related to nature. Instead of being masters of our creations, we have learned to bargain with them, cajoling and guiding them in the general direction of our goals. We have built our own jungle, and it has a life of its own.

And it’s not just our technological infrastructure that’s outgrown us- Arbesman quotes Philip K. Howard who thinks “Modern law is to dense to be knowable.” (22) The US Constitution is a brief and easily understood document. The US Law Code that has grown out of it “is now more than 22 million words long, with more than 80,00 connections between one section and another.” (34)

As our society becomes more complicated it needs ever more specialized individuals who are rendered incapable of knowing how its systems fit together. Even understanding very specific domains requires the abstracting away of details- otherwise we just don’t have the mental bandwidth to grasp anything at all. The problem with such abstraction, just as with the much more common human practice of storytelling, is that we inevitably gloss over important details, especially details would help connect one set of questions to another. Without knowledge effective action is rendered, if not impossible, at least much less likely.

A further addition to the problems of comprehension and control is that we’ve been moving away from a world where the most sophisticated human systems were merely what Arbesman calles complicated-  rube goldberg-esque constructions following some linear, if convoluted, pattern of behavior to one of systems that he characterizes as complex where a system is knotted together into mutually reinforcing feedback loops.

Arbesman thinks these complex systems have more in common with biological organisms than they do with even the most intricately constructed artifact.   Both complicated and complex systems are the products of accretion. Everything around us is the product of a complex and unique history stretching back 13.7 billion years or beyond, but with life comes a whole new order of complexity. What makes life, technology and culture different from mere matter is their superior memory which builds on itself over time. Such memory, genetic and otherwise, is both a boon and a curse. It gives us a world where many of the fundamental problems of human existence have been solved, which also means a world where our course of action is limited by the path dependency of past solutions.

Why is any of this a problem? Arbesman thinks that our failure to see that we have moved into- a world where human systems are complex rather than just complicated- can result in harmful policy responses (by both governments and corporations), and unreasonable expectations by the public. His solution is for us to educate more generalists who can communicate across specialties and to encourage social scientists and technologists to think more like biologists and less like physicists. As far as the public is concerned, he seems to suggesting that we not only accept that simple solutions will become increasingly rare, but that we will likely never be able to locate the origin of many of the problems generated by these systems (he uses the recent example break failures in Toyota’s) in the first place.

One problem I had with Arbesman’s otherwise intriguing book was that he nowhere addresses the issue of manufactured complexity. Governments and corporations needlessly making policy or products more complex than they need be- whether to exercise control, extract rents, or engender paralysis. It is an increasingly used strategy for creating ignorance, agnotology. A word that goes so ways to describing the current moment.   And sometimes added complexity for a proven technology, like automobiles,  seems to be akin to 1950’s era tail- fins on cars. An expensive feature that adds not one iota of practical benefit, whatever manufactures claim, and often leads to added headaches for the consumer.

Even leaving the issue of manufactured complexity aside Arbesman never looks at the historical thrust of complication and complexity or at their political implications. I think both are revealing and profound, so I’ll have a go at those issues myself.

First the deep history.

The kinds of wonder incomprehension at the things other humans have made would not have made sense to our hunter-gatherer predecessors, or rather, for them, this inscrutability, which gave rise to the oscillating responses of terror and placating worship, was their attitude toward untamed nature not, as is the case for us, the human made world, or so it might seem. As a hunter gatherer I would possess a great deal of autonomy over how I went about pursuing my ends, along with nearly complete understanding of the tools I used for doing so.

For moderns the situation is largely reversed: it is nature that is transparent and non-frightening not in the sense that most of us actually understand it, but that we realize it is “dumb” and largely (at least usually) incapable of deliberately doing us harm, whereas the human-made world is complex to the point of non-transparency. And yet- because we know it has been designed by other creatures capable of intention such as ourselves, we can never escape the dread that it has been so designed in order to serve the interests of those at its source.

What first made nature transparent wasn’t science but the replacement of gods with a single omnipotent GOD who, it was believed, had prescribed clear moral rules for us to follow- or else. Nature was regarded as rational in the sense that its attacks via famine, disease, and even death was understood as punishment for failure to live up to these rules.

Once God was gone from the scene nature’s arrows were robbed of any agency at all. They were just dumb luck and could be avoided or even changed once their mindless trajectory was understood. For us nature has been robbed of its fear because it has been robbed of its agency, not so the human made world, which we not only can’t fully understand, but know that it is has been designed by someone, somewhere, whose purposes are not our own.

Combine the general opacity of modern life with the fact that some (via superior quantities of money) can move without much friction through such systems (not to mention the billions of human beings who lack the resources to move through them at all) and one can see how life in a technological civilization, rather than puffing up the chests of the majority of modern humankind living in them with the recognition of the “godlike” powers they possess in comparison to our ancestors, instead are left feeling trapped in a labyrinthine machine and cursed with a inescapable, if low level, permanent sense of dread.  

Which leads us to the present moment.

The consequence of this history is an unsustainable level of alienation between individuals and the systems they have come to depend upon for existence. This alienation gives rise to a host of political and philosophical poses, which all revolve, in one way or another, around the question of how to respond to our dependence on incomprehensible systems we are unable to influence.

A list of these poses would include, in no particular order:

PROPONENTS of one version or another of dark ecology who propose abandoning technological civilization itself and going back to the “eden” of our pre-industrial, or even, pre-agricultural forebears.

On the other side of the scale from those who live in terror of the machine and its spiritual and environmental consequences are those technophiles who worship it like some ancient sky god full of faith that eventually it will lead us to the promised land.

RANDIAN LIBERTARIANS who see the distortions of THE MACHINE as primarily a creation of the state and the crony capitalists and dependents with which it is aligned. Related to the libertarians, but from the other side of the political spectrum, are anarchists who think the problem is power and therefore purging THE MACHINE of power relations, and decentralizing its functions, would leave us with human- made world that would re-emphasize the first half of that term. Among both the libertarians and the anarchists are found the tribe of the cyber-punks whose joie de vivre comes from out maneuvering the machine and its real and imagined puppet masters.

APOCALYPTIC DREAMING SURVIVALIST who imagine a day when the whole edifice collapses in on itself and we are finally given the chance to start over from scratch and during the rebuilding regain our sense of both autonomy and understanding. Aside them stand another apocalyptic group with a completely different understanding- accelerationist marxists who want us to propel the system’s contradictions forward until, after a painful birth, they believe our world will give way to something wonderful and new.

ANTI-SCIENTIST groups from both the left and the right who, often from lack of comprehension, do not believe that the scientific method or current scientific establishment gives us the closest approximation to truth when it comes to questions of health, nutrition or biology etc.

Related to these are CONSPIRACY THEORISTS who make an over-complicated world understandable, by projecting deliberate agency into every event at the price of giving up reality itself.

The New Atheists as well grow out of the bewildering complexity of science. For as the comprehensive view which the discoveries of the different branches of science when stitched together becomes less and less possible those who believe science can answer all questions come to resemble the adherents of a faith.      

Fundamentalists aim to replace the complexity of the world with the simplicity of a single text. Likewise ETHNO-NATIONALISM rears its ugly head in the search for lost autonomy where some of those cast out of THE  MACHINE seek to revive racist thinking as a means to restore organic ties- even if such ties can be shown to be nothing but modern fictions.

I’ll stop there.    

The strange thing is that the awareness of the crisis for human freedom posed by complexity not only isn’t new, it’s one which we actually tried to solve using one of two solutions proposed way back in the middle of the last century. Funnily enough, we seem to have temporarily forgotten we had the problem on account of thinking we actually had it licked. Our problem solver, or escape artist, in this case was the Austrian economist Charles Schumpeter.     

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What Schumpeter called “creative destruction” became for many, during the 1970’s, the  means of regaining autonomy in an inherited technological world, escaping stasis and starting anew. In this reading, the entrepreneur ,through technological or financial innovation, destroyed the old order and started a new one. The entrepreneur was an embodiment and enabler of freedom, not only bringing new forms of living into being, but also creating a moment of freedom for individuals in general as they adjusted to destruction and tried to establish a place in the newly created world. Silicon Valley, especially, would come to embody this Schumpeterian worldview. Computers which had been the penultimate symbol of a bureaucratic order in the 1960s as the students of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley when in protests they wore computer post-cards that mockingly read “Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate” became in the 1980s a vector of liberation from THE MACHINE.      

A combination of technology, deregulation and privatization was supposed to liberate us from the accumulated sclerosis of THE MACHINE and open open a space for individual initiative to make its comeback. The problem with this, in part, that Schumpeter’s most vocal proponents had read the man all wrong.

Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, where most of these ideas were drawn from, was more of a lament for a lost world than a strategy for getting out of our fix. Writing in 1942 he was certain the historic role played by the entrepreneur could not continue. The visionary was being replaced by THE MACHINE:

Technological progress is increasingly becoming the business of teams of trained specialists who turn out what is required and make it work in predictable ways. The romance of earlier commercial adventure is rapidly wearing away, because so many more things can be strictly calculated that had of old to be visualized in a flash of genius. (116)

With more than generation in which digital technologies have promised to liberate us from dehumanizing bureaucracy now behind us, we can see that their ultimate outcome  was instead to give rise to a form of ambient bureaucracy much more potent and inescapable than anything seen before. It is a world of inescapable protocols and procedures over which we have little if any control. Where the “rule- by- nobody” has become intimate.

If anything, technology is now being wielded, and creative destruction exercised, by those buttressing THE MACHINE rather than tearing it down. As an example, Amazon through digital retail and clerkless stores, may indeed end up creating a retail ecosystem that is entirely new, but Schumpeter would likely see it as ultimately destructive as it destroys much of the space for small scale businesses to operate and thus undermines the long-term support for capitalist economics itself.

The perfectly bureaucratized giant industrial unit not only ousts the small or medium-sized firm and “expropriates” its owners, but in the end it also ousts the entrepreneur and expropriates the bourgeoisie as a class which in the process stands to lose not only its income but also what is infinitely more important, its function. (134)

It would be one thing if Jeff Bezos were the primary type of entrepreneur thrown up by late-capitalism. It’s quite another to realize that what is much more common is a kind of faux- entrepreneur in the form of CEOs who demand the kinds of remuneration once reserved for true risk takers- the founders of companies- for themselves when they are in fact little but bureaucratic heads or media spokespersons. It’s of the nature of late capitalism to turn someone of Schumpeter’s genius into a mere marketing tool.

Perhaps the whole MACHINE is in the process of unraveling. The neoliberal world order that began in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s might be seen as a softer version of the kind of destruction that occurred in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union where a minority of individuals didn’t so much act like entrepreneurs as through connections and corruption secure for themselves a large share of the means of production in a society that was going through an acute period of consolidated deconstruction. Very few would claim that the type of “freedom” experienced in Russia is what we should be heading for, though the definition of freedom, and freedom’s role has become increasingly confused in the countries where it originated.

Freedom in the modern West is largely a surface phenomenon. Of course, this has always, and almost everywhere, been the case. Human beings are social and historical creatures whose fate is to become trapped in the webs their ancestors have weaved. This has been our reality since the rise of agricultural civilization when autonomy was restricted to those at society’s apex with the exception of the ancient Athenians who only expanded rather than universalized freedom’s scope. What makes modernity different is that we are conscious in a way those in the past that these inherited structures were not divinely ordained but the product of human choice. We live in a civilization that makes freedom its highest ideal and which simultaneously makes that ideal almost impossible to obtain.

What a minority of us do possess, and which we have made almost synonymous with freedom, is money. The effect of money is to give those who have it not freedom over the structure of THE MACHINE in which they, like everybody else, are stuck, but choices within the system and especially a kind of anti-viscosity that allows them to flow unimpeded through THE MACHINE. And wealthy individuals don’t just have the ability to move with much these friction through THE MACHINE they have the capability to locate and exploit opportunities within its complex topology- and they now have a vision and reach that is global in scope.  

The poor, and now increasingly the middle class’, lack of money translates into not only lack of choices but casts them into slow lanes whose only escape is through paying some sort of rent. Even absent mimetic explanations such differences between the rich and the poor can’t help but lead the latter into feelings of  ressentiment. Democracy and raging inequality do not make good bedmates.

So if technological and economic revolutions, or all of us becoming entrepreneurs, hasn’t proven an effective  solution to the seeming incompatibility of complexity and freedom, what might? Or better, do any of the poses listed above actually offer up a genuine solution to our problem.

I have to say that DARK ECOLOGY at least gets to the root of the problem, which in some sense is historical accumulation itself. What proponents of dark ecology propose is that we withdraw into simpler systems where not only freedom but our very humanity is preserved. The solution makes sense given that this is how we’ve solved the problems posed by complexity in every other era of our past.

Here’s the author Paul Kingsnorth, founder of the Dark Mountain Project  and one of the most articulate of the dark ecologists:

So I want my children to know what seeds are and how to plant them. I want them to know how to light fires and how to use knives and simple tools. I want them to know how to cook properly and how to ferment drinks. The more of those things you know, the more connected you are to life, the more control you have, and the more choice you have over how to live. I don’t want them growing up in a consumer economy that wants to teach them absolutely nothing about how living is done. Even if all that stuff doesn’t fall apart in their lifetime, which it might well, it’s a powerless way to live. You end up making yourself a slave. You are completely dependent on this destructive world-spanning machine, and you are not fully human. I want them to be fully human. So it’s an insurance policy but it’s also just a way of living. And it’s enjoyable. You can’t live this way from some puritanical notion. You actually have to enjoy it, which we do.

One major problem here is that dark ecology merely exchanges, to paraphrase Hillis, one jungle (a human made one) for another (one made without our input). That is, in “going back to nature” we’ll merely have exchange one world incompatible with human freedom for another that possesses the same exact problem.

But what if the whole idea of a jungle, or a wilderness with human beings in it is a myth? Then the quest to go back to nature isn’t so much an anti-technological one as a technological solution of another sort.This is a point forcefully made by Robert Moor in his recent book On Trails. As he puts it:

Wilderness looks different in the neon lights of technology. In the traditional framework of wilderness preservation, a techscape is merely a despoiled wilderness. But when viewed through the lens of technology, the wilderness can be seen as nothing more than an ultra-minimalist techscape designed to provide an escape from other, more baroque techscapes.”  (261)

And the problem might be even worse than Moor lets on, for those iconic landscapes we most associate with wilderness are now among the most technologically on earth. All in an effort to preserve them like living fossils from the new world humans and our technology have brought into being.

Given that they do not assume a world without human beings, nor should they, dark ecology is just another pose where everything about THE MACHINE becomes both alien and incomprehensible, as if it wasn’t human beings who built it and ultimately control it. It’s a view oddly similar to that Elon Musk has regarding AI. Yet THE MACHINE isn’t some evil metallic monster we can juxtapose to a truer world of living beings, THE MACHINE is us.

Human beings are certainly part of nature but it seem one of our distinctions is that while nature can be wild without us, we can not survive in a world that is truly wild and, of necessity, instantly set out to name, map, and change it. Here again is Moor:

In the beginning, there was chaos, blank fields. Out of them, meaning emerged: first one trail, then another. Then the trails branched and webbed together, until they reached a density and that again resembled (but was not quite) chaos. And so the wheel turned over. Benton MacKaye put it succinctly:  “Mankind,” he wrote, “has cleared the jungle and replaced it with a labyrinth.” In this maze, a higher order of path making emerges- written guides, signposts. Maps- which are them linked together and require yet higher orders of exegetical path making: written guides to the maps, and then guides to the map-guides, guides to the map-guide guides, and so on.   (278)

The quote further above from Kingsworth reveals an additional problem as well, which also suggests another alternative to the incompatibility of freedom and complexity.  He leaves us with the question of where to locate a “natural” form of history in time? Teaching my daughters how to farm or live in the forest would certainly be fun and empowering, but where in terms of technological history should I stop? If it were possible I’d like them to know how to make all kinds of tools, to produce potassium and phosphorus to fertilize their crops, to cultivate yeast for bread, to make soap, and pottery, and work metals. I’d want them to know how to make glass, deliver babies using forceps, and produce penicillin from mold. I’d hope to teach them how to make anesthetics from plants such as poppies to numb the pain of surgery, and how to make machines to free them tedious and backbreaking labor along with how to recover the wonders of electricity.

All these methods, and in fact much more, can be found in Lewis Dartnell’s excellent book The Knowledge and reading it certainly did make me feel empowered. Nothing that human beings do is magic, just the product of generation after generation of human tinkering, and such knowledge of fundamentals and experimentation is probably a better approach to education than Arbesman’s argument that we start to treat human systems in the same way we do biology.     

Yet, just as with Kingsworth seeing his children’s nature oriented education as a sort of “insurance policy”, there’s still a pose at the heart of Dartnell’s book. And that is if modern civilization collapsed a small group of us could actually rebuild it. It confuses civilization with hardware when it is mostly about software- the way in which humans organize the activity of “acting in concert”. Industrial civilization is not just, or even primarily, a matter of knowing how to build all the parts that go into a 747, it’s knowing how to coordinate the thousands of human beings who play a role in the plane’s construction.

Robert Moor, this time in an article not in his book, again captures something like this. American culture idealizes endarchy- radical, individual self-sufficiency- endarky– which Moor contrasts with our much more true to life condition of radical interdependence. Something he calls “exarky”.

The exarkic person, on the other hand, is utopian, the type who believes in improving systems, not rejecting them; who does not shy from asking for directions; who would rather rent or share or borrow a home than own one; who has no qualms uploading his digital memories to something called the Cloud; who welcomes the notion of self-driving cars. Exarks prefer a well-trained police force to a well-oiled firearm. They walk, nimbly, with a kind of holy faith, atop wires others have installed.

Yet it seems impossible to reconcile freedom with Moor’s “Age of Exarchy”, especially when our radical interdependence is actually one of near absolute dependence by the majority on the minority comprised of policy makers, technologists and owners of capital who design and control the various systems upon which we depend. A modern society is not, after all, a village.

The way to resolve this, I believe, involves the second solution, I mentioned earlier, the one we discovered in the 20th century and didn’t try. It’s the quest for humanity within THE MACHINE as embodied by the Port Huron Statement:

We oppose the depersonalization that reduces human being to the status of things–if anything, the brutalities of the twentieth century teach that means and ends are intimately related, that vague appeals to “posterity” cannot justify the mutilations of the present. We oppose, too, the doctrine of human incompetence because it rests essentially on the modern fact that men have been “competently” manipulated into incompetence–we see little reason why men cannot meet with increasing the skill the complexities and responsibilities of their situation, if society is organized not for minority, but for majority, participation in decision-making.

The issue is less one of all of us becoming technologists than making sure the technologists listen to us. The way to restore freedom in the midst of growing complexity is to ensure that citizens have the ability to see inside what are now black boxes and shape these structures in conformity with our values, including our value for future generations of human beings and the rest of life with which we share the earth.

Some form of liquid democracy might take us some way towards restoring freedom and humanity within the boundaries of the administrative state, including offering ways to grant future generations and the rest of life permanent forms of political representation, but it would not address the majority of ways we now encounter THE MACHINE because that is now in the form of private companies.

Here is a proposed solution to that problem: all companies beyond a certain size or who possess a certain share of some essential economic activity would face a choice. They could either be broken into smaller pieces as we have done with monopolies for nearly a century up until the 1980’s or they could enter some quasi-public status in which they are subject to democratic input regarding decisions that affect the public good. Such a system of democratic oversight might even be global in scope and represent a nascent form of global democracy.

Should we fail to find some way to democratize, humanize, and control the negative consequence for the human future and the rest of life of THE MACHINE, should we not succeed in gaining the ability for average citizens to peer inside, change, and shape it, the only alternative, barring some form of technological tyranny or global ecological collapse, may be the prescription of Mario Savio given to the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley only two years after the Students for a Democratic Society released their famous statement. As Savio put it:

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!

The choice is ours to make.

 

 

How we all got trapped in a Skinner Box

Sigmund Freud may be the most famous psychologist of the 20th century, but his legacy has nothing on that of B.F. Skinner. Step into your TARDIS or Delorean, travel back to 1950 and bring the then forty-six year old behaviorist to 2017, and much about our world would not only seem familiar to Skinner, he likely would realized how much his work had helped build it. Put a smartphone in his hand and let him play around for  awhile, then afterwards inform him that not only was the device not a toy, but that we were utterly dependent upon it, and the epiphany would no doubt come to him that all of us were now living in sort of globe-sized Skinner box.

Invented around 1930, an operant conditioning chamber, or a Skinner Box, is a cage in which an animal is trained via regular rewards and punishments to exhibit some targeted behavior. To Skinner it offered empirical demonstration that animals (including humans) lacked free will. For him and many of his fellow behaviorists, our sense of freedom, even consciousness itself, is an elaborate, psychological illusion. All of us are mere puppets of our environment.

Skinner wasn’t one for humility. He thought he had stumbled upon the true and final keys for controlling human behavior. Given this he felt the keys might fall into the wrong hands- communists, fascists, or advertisers for cola or face creams . In 1948 he published his utopian novel Walden Two (Thoreau would not have appreciate the homage). It depicted a “paradise” designed from above where only its architect was what we should recognize as free. It’s perhaps closer to the world we are living in than any of the dystopian-utopias written during the same period, even Orwell’s 1984 (also written in 1948), or Huxley’s Brave New World (1931).

The novel tells the story of a psychology professor Burris and a philosophy professor- Castle who along with a handful of Burris’ students, and their girlfriends, visit a utopian community named Walden Two established over a decade earlier by a colleague of Burris- T. E. Frazier.

The novel is all very 1940’s, filled with cigarettes and sexual innuendo, minus the sex. The book has the feel of Mad Men, and for someone who doesn’t believe in interiority, Skinner is surprisingly good as a novelist, even if predictably didactic.

In Walden Two you can find utopian tropes common since Plato invented the genre- the abolition of the family and at least some degree of equal property. What makes the book distinct and relevant to today is that Skinner’s novel imagines an entire society built around operant conditioning. It’s a society that shares some remarkable resemblances to our own.

Walden Two is a community where its inhabitants, gleefully “never have to go out of doors at all” (20 ). Designed on the basis of the maximally efficient use of space and time,  large-scale universally shared activities have been supplanted by the niche interests of individuals. Lack of mass interest in shared culture also translates into a lack of knowledge or involvement in areas of common responsibility and concern-  that is, politics.  Most people according to Frazier the utopia’s designer “want to be free of the responsibility of planning.” (154)

Walden Two’s efficiency has allowed it to reduce work hours to no more than four-hours per day. Housework has been commodified, and mass education replaced by individualized instruction that focuses on the student’s unique skills and interests. Mid-20th century sexual puritanism, especially for teenagers, has been supplanted by open sexuality and (writing twelve years before the introduction of oral contraceptives), biological parenthood (parenting itself being provided by the community) pushed back into ages ranging from the late teens to the early twenties.

Much of this readers will either find attractive or, seem more familiar to us in 2017 than it would to anyone in 1948. Yet it’s the darker side of Skinner’s vision that should concern us because he was perhaps even more prescient there.

Inhabitants of Walden Two still engage in the electoral politics of the outside world, they just do so at the direction of the community’s planners. The ultimate object is to spread their model from one city to the next- a kind of mondialist revolution.

In Walden Two it’s not merely that individuals have absconded political responsibility to experts out of lack of interest, it’s that they’ve surrendered all control over their environment to those who write and manage what Skinner calls the “Code” under which they live. An individual may lodge an objection to some particular aspect of the Code “…but in no case must he argue about the Code with the members at large.” (152)

Indeed, it’s not so much that the common individual is barred from challenging the Code that renders her essentially powerless in Walden Two it’s that the Code itself is deliberately obscured to those who live under it. As Frazier states it: “We deliberately conceal the planning and managerial machinery to further the same end.” (220)

Although Skinner justifies this opacity on the grounds that it promotes a sense of equality, in combining it with a deliberate inattention to history (justified on the same grounds) he ends up robbing the inhabitants of Walden Two of any alternative to the system under which they live, the very purpose that, as pointed out by the historian Yuval Harari, the study of history serves.

The purpose of Skinner’s Walden Two is to promote human happiness, but its design is one that, as his fictional stand-in Frazier openly admits, will only work if humans are no more free than a clockwork orange.

“My answer is simple enough”, said Frazier, “I deny that freedom exists at all. I must deny it- or my program would be absurd. You can’t have a science about a subject matter which hops capriciously about. Perhaps we can never prove that man isn’t free; it’s an assumption. But the increasing success of the science of behavior makes it more and more plausible. “ (257)

The world of Walden Two presents itself as one which is no longer concerned with the human-all-too-human desire for power. Yet the character who actually wields power in Walden, that is Frazier, is presented as almost manic in his sense of self- believing he has obtained the status of what in reality is an atrophied idea of God.

“Of course, I’m not indifferent to power! Frazier said hotly. “And I like to play God! Who wouldn’t under the circumstances? After all, man, even Jesus Christ thought he was God!” (281)

Perhaps Skinner’s real motive was sheer will to power masked by altruism, as it so often is.  Still, he gives some indication that his actual motivation was that the science his studies of pigeons and rats trapped in boxes, along with the susceptibility of “mass man” to propaganda as evidenced by the Nazis and the Soviets (along with liberal states at war), had proven human freedom a lie. Those in possession of even primitive versions of his science of human behavior were the true puppet masters capable of exercising control.  The future, for Skinner, if not populated by Waldens, would be dominated by totalitarian states or ad men.

Yet the powers offered by behaviorism ended up being much less potent than Skinner imagined, which is not to say, for limited purposes, that they didn’t work. Once totalitarian states passed from the scene the main proponents of behaviorism outside of psychology departments indeed did become ad men along with the politicians who came to copy their methods.

Manufactured behavioral addiction has become the modus operandi of late capitalism. As Natasha Dow Schüll points out in her book Addiction by Design about machine gambling, a huge amount of scientific research goes into designing machines, which optimize user addiction. Whole conferences are held to hawk these sophisticated slot machines while state revenue becomes ever more dependent on such predatory economics.

Now we all carry addictive by design machines in our pockets. Software is deliberately designed for the kinds of positive reinforcement Skinner would easily recognize.  It’s a world where everything is being gamified. As Adam Alter writes in his book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping us Hooked:

A like on Facebook and Instagram strikes one of those notes, as does the reward of completing a World of Warcraft mission, or seeing one of your tweets shared by hundreds of Twitter users. The people who create and refine tech, games, and interactive experiences are very good at what they do. They run hundreds of tests with thousands of users to learn which tweaks works and which don’t- which background colors, fonts, and audio tones maximize engagement and  minimize frustration. As an experience evolves, it becomes an irresistible, weaponized version of what it once was. In 2004, Facebook was fun, in 2016, it’s addictive. (5)

We are the inheritors of a darker version of Skinner’s freedomless world- though by far not the darkest. Yet even should we get the beneficent paternalism contemporary Skinnerites- such as Richard Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein who wish to “nudge” us this -way -and-that, it would harm freedom not so much by proving that our decisions are indeed in large measure determined by our environment as from the fact that the shape of that environment would be in the hands of someone other than ourselves, individually and collectively.

The man who wrote the most powerful work against behaviorism ever written, A clockwork orange, Anthony Burgess wrote this about even behaviorism of  even the best kind:

One may take the principle of evil as applying in areas of conduct where the destruction of an organism is not intended. It is wrong to push drugs among children, but few would deny that it is also evil: the capacity of an organism for self-determination is being impaired. Maiming is evil. Acts of aggression are evil, though we are inclined to find mitigating factors in the hot spirit of revenge (“a kind of wild justice,” said Francis Bacon) or in the desire to protect others from expected, if not always fulfilled, acts of violence. We all hold in our imaginations or memories certain images of evil in which there is no breath of mitigation—four grinning youths torturing an animal, a gang rape, cold-blooded vandalism. It would seem that enforced conditioning of a mind, however good the social intention, has to be evil.

It’s an observation that remains true, and increasingly relevant, today.

Why liberals might kill free speech

We’ve got a huge problem on our hands which the 2016 election, along with Brexit, has not so much created as fully exposed. What we’ve witnessed is a kind of short-circuit between the three pillars that have defined our particular form of democratic liberalism over the last century. Democratic liberalism over the 20th and into the 21st century consisted of a kind of balance between the public at large, mass media, and policy elites with the link between the three being political representatives of one of the major parties. As idealized by public philosophers such as Walter Lippmann, the role of politicians was to choose among the policy options presented by experts and “sell” those policies to the public using the tools of mass communication to ensure their legitimacy.

The fact that such a balance became the ideal in the first place, let alone its inevitable failure, can only be grasped fully when one becomes familiar with its history.

Non-print based mass media only became available during the course of the First World War and it was here that the potential of media such as film, radio, posters and billboards to create a truly emotionally and ideologically unified public became apparent- although the US had come close to this discovery a little over in a decade earlier in the form of mass circulation newspapers which were instrumental in getting the American public behind the Spanish- American War and that itself gave rise to real standards of objectivity in journalism.

During WWI it was the Americans and British who mastered the art of war propaganda transforming their enemies the Germans into savage “huns” and engendering a kind of will to sacrifice for what (at least for the Americans) was a distant and abstract cause. Lippmann himself was on the Creel Committee which launched this then new form of political propaganda. Hitler would write enviously of British and American propaganda in Mein Kampf, and both the Nazis and the Soviet would use the new media and the proof of concept offered by allied powers in the war, to form the basis of the totalitarian state. Those systems ultimately failed but their rise and attraction reveal the extent to which democracy, less than a century from our own time, was seen to be failing. Not just the victory of the Soviets in the war, but the way they were able to rapidly transform the Russian Empire from an agrarian backwater to an industrial and scientific powerhouse seemed to show that the future belonged to the system that most fully empowered its technocrats.

The Great Depression and Second World War would prove to be the golden age of experts in the West as well. In the US it was technocrats who crafted the response to the economic crisis, who managed the American economy during the war, who were responsible for technological breakthroughs such as atomic weapons, rockets capable of reaching space, and the first computers. It was policy experts who crafted novel responses to unprecedented political events such as the Marshall Plan and Containment.

Where the Western and Soviet view of the role of experts differed had less to do with their prominence and more to do with their plurality or lack of it. Whereas in the Soviet Union all experts were united under the umbrella of the Party, Western countries left the plurality of experts intact so that the bureaucrats who ran big business were distinct from the bureaucrats who ran government agencies and neither had any clear relationship to the parties that remained the source of mass political mobilization while the press remained free (if not free of elite assumptions and pressures) to forge the public’s interpretation of events as it liked.

Lippmann had hoped the revolutionary medium of his time- television- would finally provide a way for the technocrats he thought necessary to rule a society that had become too complex for the form of representative democracy that had preceded allowing experts to directly communicate with the public and in so doing forge consensus for elite policies. What dashed his hopes was a rigged game show.

The Quiz show scandal that broke in the 1950’s (it was made into an excellent movie in the 90’s) proved to Lippmann that American style television with its commercial pressures could not be the medium he had hoped for. In his essay, Television: whose creature, whose servant?   Lippmann called for the creation of an American version of the BBC. (PBS would be created in 1970, as would NPR). Indeed, the scandal did drive the three major US television networks- especially CBS- towards the coverage of serious news and critical reporting. Such reporting helped erode political support for the Vietnam war, though not, as it’s often believed, by turning public opinion against the war, but as pointed out back in the 1980’s by Michael Mandelbaum in his essay Vietnam: The Television War  by helping to mobilize such a vast number of opponents as to polarize the American public in a way that made sustaining the post-war consensus unsustainable. Vietnam was the first large scale failure of the technocrats- it would not be their last.

From the 1970’s until today this polarization was mined by a new entry on the media landscape- cable news- starting with Ted Turner and CNN. As Tim Wu lays out in his book The Master Switch, the rise of cable was in part enabled by Nixon’s mistrust of what was then “mainstream news” (Nixon helped deregulate cable). This rise (more accurately return) of partisan media occurred at the same time Noam Chomsky (owl of Minerva like) in his book Manufacturing Consent was arguing that the press was much less free and independent than it pretended to be. Instead it was wholly subservient to commercial influence and the groupthink of those posing to be experts. And hadn’t, after all, George Kennan, the brilliant mind behind containment and an unapologetic elitists compared American democracy to a monster with a brain the size of a pin?

Chomsky’s point held even in the era of cable news for there was a great deal of political diversity that fell outside the range between Fox News and CNN. Manufactured consent would fail, however, with the rise of the internet which would allow the cheap production and distribution of political speech in a way that had never been seen before, though there had been glimpses. Political speech was democratized at almost the exact same time trust in policy elites had collapsed. The reasons for such a collapse in trust aren’t hard to find.

American policy elites have embraced an economic agenda that has left working class income stagnant for over a generation. The globalization and de-unionization they promoted has played a large (though not the only) role in the decline of the middle class on which stable democracy depends. The Clinton machine bears a large responsibility for the left’s foolish embrace of this neoliberal agenda, which abandoned blue collar workers to transform the Democratic party into a vehicle for white collar professionals and identity groups.

Foreign policy elites along with an uncritical mainstream media led us into at least one disastrous and wholly unnecessary war in Iraq, a war whose consequences continue to be felt and which was exacerbated by yet more failure by these same elites. Our economic high-priests brought us the 2008 financial crisis the response to which has been a coup by the owning classes at the cost of trillions of dollars. As Trump’s “populist” revolt of Goldman Sachs alums demonstrates, the oligarchs now thoroughly control American government.

And it’s not only social science experts, politicians and journalist who have earned the public’s lack of trust. Science itself is in a crisis of gaming where it seems “results” matter much more than the truth. Corporations engage in deliberate disinformation, what Robert Proctor calls agnotology.

The three legs of Lippmann’s stool- policy experts, the media, and the public have collapsed as expertise has become corporatized and politicians have become beholden to those corporate interest, while at the same time political speech has escaped from anyone’s overt control. Trump seems to be the first political figure to have capitalized on this breakdown- a fact that does not bode well for democracy’s future.

Perhaps we should just call a spade a spade and abandon political representation and policy experts for government via electronic referendum. Yet, however much I love the idea of direct democracy, it seems highly unlikely that the sort of highly complex society we currently possess could survive absent the heavy input of experts– even in light of their very obvious flaws.

It’s just as possible that China where technocrats rule and political speech and activity is tightly controlled by leveraging the centralized nature of internet could be the real shape of the future. The current structure of internet which is controlled by only a handful of companies certainly makes the path to such a plutocratic censorship regime possible.

Returning to the work of Tim Wu, we can see the way in which communications empires have risen and fell over the course of the last century: we’ve had the telephone, film, radio, television and now the computer. In all cases with the noted exception of television new media have arisen in a decentralized fashion, merged into gigantic corporations such as Bell telephone, and then are later broken up or lose dominance to upstarts who have adopted new means of transmission or whole new types of media itself.

What perhaps makes our era different in a way Wu doesn’t explore is that for the first time diversity of content is occurring under conditions of concentrated ownership. Were only a handful of companies such as FaceBook and Google to pursue the task in earnest they could exercise nearly complete control over political speech and thus end the current era. Such rule need not be rapacious but instead represent a kind of despotic-liberalism that mobilizes public opinion behind policies many of us care about such as stemming global warming. It’s the kind of highly rational nightmare Malka Older imagined in her sci-fi thriller Infomacracy and Dave Eggers gave a darker hue in his book The Circle.

Hopefully liberalism itself in the form of constitutional protections of free speech will prevent us from going so far down this route. (Although the Courts appear to think that Google et. al’s  right to police their platforms’ content is itself protected under the First Amendment.) How our long standing constitutional protections adapt to a world where “speech” can come in the form of bots which outnumber humans and foreign governments insert themselves into our elections is anybody’s guess.

The best alternative to either despotic-liberalism or chaos is to restore trust in policy elites by finding ways to make such elites more accountable and therefore trustworthy. We need to come up with new ways to combine the necessary input of real experts with the revolution in communications that has turned every citizen into a source of media. For failing to find a way to rebalance expertise and democratic governance would mean we either lose our democracy to flawed experts (as Plato would have wanted) or surrender to the chaos of an equally flawed and fickle, and now seemingly permanently Balkanized, public opinion.

 

The lessons the left should (and shouldn’t) take from the victory of Macron

Anna Berezovskaya, Abduction of Europa (2015)

In 2016 populism burst upon liberal democracies like a whirlwind. Yet, since Trump’s election in November of last year the storm appears to have passed. There was the defeat of the far right presidential candidate Norbert Hofer in Austria (of all places) in December of last year followed by the loss of the boldly pompadoured (which seems to be a thing now on the right) Geert Wilders in parliamentary elections in the Netherlands a few months back, followed by the seeming victory of the Kutcher faction over the Bannon faction in the Trump administration, and now, the loss of Le Pen in France. Whew- glad that’s over.

Of course, it’s not over, for it leaves us with the same unaddressed problems that gave rise to popular discontent in the first place. The one and only danger of the populist fever peaking too soon is that it will feed the very complacency among elites that gave us this wave of destructive popular anger in the first place. The fever will just come back, and perhaps next time, in a form much worse should manage to sweep 2016’s craziness under the rug.

As of yet this wave of anger, despite its ugliness or the views of its more vicious fans, hasn’t been so much fascists as populists. This distinction, as distinctions often are, is important. John B. Judis, one of the first to see the populist wave coming in his book The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics.

I’ll get to fascism in a moment, for now, let me note that the distrust of elites driving the populist explosion makes perfect sense given the almost two decades of failure of the power elite from  9-11, to the Iraq war, to the 2008 financial crisis, to the Euro crisis, to the implosion of Syria and the refugee crisis. These acute crises are combined with more structural ones, such as the fact that elites have either twiddled their thumbs, turned the other way, or themselves enabled the erosion of the middle class and the flat-lining of that class’ income growth despite economic gains, in developed countries since the 1970’s. At the same time the political system has grown increasingly sycophantic and corrupt.

As Mark Leibovich pointed out in his book This Town, elites in Washington enact the play of hyper-partisanship even as both Republicans and Democrats engage in an incestious government-coporate revolving door. A problem that since the Global Financial Crisis became even worse to the extent that the former head of the IMF compared what happened in the US to a Third World coup. 

Trump twisted his way into the White House on the claim that “he alone” was able to overturn this system. Instead, what his election seems to mean is that the US is now fully and completely free to join other countries such as China where the distinction between the interest of the rich and the common weal do not exist. Wealthy classes in China and elsewhere understand the new American way of politics very well.

Macron who Trump-like staged his own coup against the declining French political parties was himself an investment banker and his candidacy was as much a desperate by the French elites as a move towards real and democratic reforms.

The fact that Trump’s populism has proven as artificial as the man’s skin tone, along with the fact that other populists, most especially the dangerous figure of Marine Le Pen, have lost in recent elections presents the left with an unprecedented opportunity. But it’s an opportunity that can be seized only if the left can come to understand that not all, or even most, of the supporters of Trump or Le Pen are fascists- a prospect that would require massive and likely violent political resistance in order to ensure the survival of our political and social freedoms.

It’s here where Judis’ book becomes so helpful. In The Populist Explosion Judis identifies the defining feature of populism as anti-elitism. He explains that the early 21st century populism which grew out of the financial crisis hasn’t just come from the right, but also from the left. The left-wing Podemos in Spain is a populist party, as is Syriza in Greece. Both left-wing and right-wing share a disdain for elites they believe have failed us.

For Judis what distinguished right leaning from left leaning populism is that the former adds the category of an enemy minority – Muslims, Mexicans etc that elites supposedly coddle to the detriment of the larger population. (The first step right-wing populism takes towards becoming fascist.)

To step away from Judis for a moment, one of the ideas now becoming dangerously popular among liberals is that populists’ distrust of experts is equal to ignorance and a disdain for science and even rudimentary facts. What liberals don’t acknowledge is their own role in the growth of such mistrust. Elites have promoted the idea that economics is akin to science when it’s closer to astrology. The scientists perhaps best known to the public are those who have made careers out of attacking widely held beliefs by making claims beyond science’s purview.

The mainstream media, the bane of populists everywhere, has indeed been guilty of colossal failures- such as the run up to the war in Iraq, and continues to have a disturbing fetish for American bombs and power.  The last few years have revealed an intelligence apparatus not only frequently incompetent- having missed 9-11, and the Arab Spring to name just two recent failures, but a bureaucratic machine seemingly uninterested in preserving our constitutionally guaranteed rights. In conditions as they stand, mistrust of elites is no vice.

As Judis explains it, populism was invented in the US in the 1890’s in the revolt of mid-western farmers against their economic strangulation by financial powers in the East. The drama even gave America what is perhaps its most outstanding fairy-tale- The Wizard of OZ.  

Since then, the US has had a whole series of populist movements and figures- most from the right. In the 1930’s there was Huey Long and Father Coughlin, in the 1960’s there was George Wallace, in the 1990’s Ross Perot (perhaps) and Pat Buchanan. Now we have Trump- the first populist to actually break his way into the White House- a fact that is surely a symptom of just how decayed our political system has become. Judis points out how, since the 1970’s this formerly uniquely American form of politics became a global affair. So here we are.

Judis, in my view rightly, is at pains to distinguish right-wing populism from its ugly cousin fascism. What made fascism of the 1930’s variety, which remains our template, distinct from populism and so incredibly dangerous was that it used the full powers of the state to hunt down and destroy its internal enemies- fascism was born in states that were in conditions of revolution and civil war. Fascism, also unlike populism, was characterized by an openly expansionist foreign policy that aimed to overturn the geopolitical order rather than merely withdraw from it. Populism isn’t fascism so much as it points ” to tears in the fabric of accepted political wisdom” as Judis so sharply puts it.

This is not to say that right-wing populism cannot morph into fascism, or that left-wing populism can’t evolve into communism (more on that another time) it is that a perhaps greater danger that the system can not be shocked into fundamental change at all- that we seem incapable of freeing ourselves from the ultimate logic of the economic and political artifice in which we are embedded- despite the fact that we are acutely aware of the depth of its unsustainable contradictions.

Judis was among the first to see 2016’s wave of populism coming, yet I think his much needed attempt at drawing a line of historical continuity between populism in the last two centuries and our own perhaps obscures what makes populism in its current manifestation unique. For that we can turn to another recent book on the subject, David Goodhart’s Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. In that book Goodhart makes the case that what is perhaps today’s primary political cleavage is between those who have thrived in, benefited from, and identify with, globalization and those who define themselves in terms of place. He calls the former group “Anywheres” because they seem to have fully embraced global mobility in the search for success as individuals, which does not mean they have abandoned all collective identities such as culture or religion and especially family, only that they see their range of action encompassing the whole earth.

Somewheres by contrast are communitarian rather than individualistic in their identities. They remain deeply connected emotionally to their homeland, their culture, and sometimes, their ethnicity and derive their self worth primarily through this collective identity rather than their own personal accomplishments.

Obviously these are ideal types and all of us in the modern world have some of each about us. Yet Goodhart’s two types does seem to capture something essential about politics not just in the US or the UK but globally. We have these great global cities interconnected with one another and more diverse in their populations than ever before while at the same time possessing neglected hinterlands where the growth engendered by globalization largely does not flow.

It’s quite clear that the Anywheres have the moral high ground over the Somewheres when it comes to their embrace of diversity. What is much less clear is if Anywheres can actually be the basis of a functioning social democracy for they seem to lack the kinds of communitarian virtues a thriving democracy requires as they remain focused on their own material and social advancement. It might be the case that the type of political order that best fits a world of globally mobile self-seeking individuals happens to be something other than a democratic one.

The economists Dani Rodrik actually has a name for this- he calls it the globalization trilemma, which goes like this:

…countries cannot have national sovereignty, hyper-globalisation and democracy; they can only ever choose two out of the three.

Given the huge global economic disparities between regions and cultural differences and disputes we could have hyper-globalization with open markets and the free movement of peoples under either a system of empire and enlightened/liberal despotism or under a democracy that was truly global in scope. From where I sit the former seems much more likely than the latter.

For whereas the latter would require peoples embedded in democracies to willingly surrender their control over their own affairs to other people’s who did not share in their history- a transformation of politics that would probably require something like a global civil war- the former can emerge from mere inertia as the power of democratic and other states is slowly eroded away making global actors and individuals the de-facto if not dejure seat of sovereignty.

If the European Union is our best current, if geographically limited, experiment in what hyper-globalization might ultimately look like, then Macron’s defeat of Le Pen offers us a second chance to test whether such integration can also be made truly democratic in the way we currently have with nation-states. Should the EU not embrace democratic reforms in light of his victory and learn to create a new home for the Somewheres this chance might just be its last.

 

In the birthplace of democracy

“The mortgage-stones that covered her, by me Removed, — the land that was a slave is free;
that some who had been seized for their debts he had brought back from other countries, where
— so far their lot to roam, They had forgot the language of their home;
and some he had set at liberty, — Who here in shameful servitude were held.”

                                                                                                                      Solon, Plutarch’s Lives

When the history of the conflict between the market and democracy is someday written, the events in Greece this Sunday will almost certainly be seen as a major victory for market forces. There, the Greek parliament, under enormous pressure from the financial markets along with Germany and France committed what may amount to political suicide in the upcoming Greek elections. Members of the Greek parliament are willfully taking the country into what is in effect a deflationary induced depression in order to avoid the default and exit of Greece from the Euro-based economies.

Opposition to the draconian cuts necessary to secure funding support by bond holders, European governments and the ECB quite literally set Greece ablaze.

As in the ancient myth, Greek society is caught between Scylla and Charybdis.  Their only choices seem to be that of the chaos that would likely be the result of  a default, and a self-induced economic depression. The latter might prove preferable if it were likely to work in the long-run to restore, and  therefore secure the long term prosperity of Greece.  Such an outcome, is sadly unlikely.

The democratic process is now dictated by the electric speed of the international markets. Greek politicians were in a race against the clock before markets opened on Monday.

 Despite the German’s ridicule of the Greeks’ spendthrift ways, the Greek social system has its origins in the history of the country, which for decades endured brutal right-wing rule opposed only by a defiant left. The social-rights of Greeks were in effect the price to be paid for the left’s acceptance of the fact that Greece was to be a normal rather than a revolutionary country. Dismantling this system is a denial of history, and on par with the most utopian of top-down social transformations. Here the market is at war not just with democracy, but with history itself.

The German view of “lazy” Greeks also fails to take into account the very structural imbalances between Germany as an export economy and almost everybody else in Europe as playing a major contributing  role in the crisis. German exporters are greatly helped by the weakness of a currency they share with backward countries such as Greece. The Greeks get no such benefit, suffering a much stronger currency than would otherwise be the case. The real gain of Greece sharing a currency with mighty Germany has been Greek access to cheap debt. That is over now, and turned out to be not such a good thing, after all.

Rather than being isolated, the Greek crisis is symptomatic of the current state of capitalism, both globally and in Europe. As Robert D. Kaplan pointed out way back in 2009, as Greek riots were already starting to occur before the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street movements had even been imagined:

It’s tempting to dismiss this as a purely Greek affair that carries little significance to the outside world. But the global economic crisis will take different forms in different places in the way that it ignites political unrest. Yes, youth alienation in Greece is influenced by a particular local history that I’ve very briefly outlined here. But it is also influenced by sweeping international trends of uneven development, in which the uncontrolled surges and declines of capitalism have left haves and bitter have-nots, who, in Europe, often tend to be young people. And these young people now have the ability to instantaneously organize themselves through text messages and other new media, without waiting passively to be informed by traditional newspapers and television. Technology has empowered the crowd—or the mob if you will.

Likewise, a European Union that could have served to shelter the European social system from the relentless leveling of market forces has shown itself instead to be the most powerful instrument in the hands of such forces able to bring, despite the resistance of history, whole governments, and the societies upon which they rest to heel.

 ,

The Dispossessed

The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself. 

(240)

I just finished The Dispossessed, a 1974 novel by Ursula K. Le Guin. This wonderful book tells the story of an “ambiguous” anarchist utopia. Though written during a period much different from our own, The Dispossessed  might have lessons for us today, especially for those in the OWS movement whose political philosophy and hopes represent what might be seen as a triumph of anarchism.

The novel is set on the anarchist colony on the moon of Anarres, founded as a breakaway settlement of a movement called Odonianism- a moral and political philosophy created by Odo a woman who railed against the capitalist system of Urras, the rich and beautiful mother planet.  The two worlds under “The Terms of the Closure of the Settlement of Anarres” have interactions limited to a space freighter that exchanges necessities between them 8 times a year. There is a “wall” between Anarres and Urras, and it is the efforts of the protagonist of The Dispossessed,  a brilliant physicist named Shevek to brake down this wall between worlds that form the essence of the story.

Without doubt, Odonianism has created a moral utopia. The inhabitants of Anarres, constantly subject to a harsh climate and in constant danger of scarcity and famine, are bound together tightly and suffer continuously for one another. The needs of the whole community come before all others, even those of family. As Shevek and his loved partner Takver separate in the name of the needs of the community.  Anarres is an organic community that in the words of Shevek arguing with a Urratzi social Darwinist:

Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species are those who are the most social. In human terms the most ethical. (195)

The people of Anarres have no real government, though it can not really be said that they have politics either. Like Saint-Simon had suggested, without the class war endemic to the state, politics would become the mere “administration of things”.  A series of councils/syndicis make important decisions such as the allocation of work (though an individual is always free to refuse to go where a work syndic requests.  To my ears, these councils sound much like the “working groups” of the OWSM each tasked with a very particular need or goal of the movement. On Anarres they are a place where rotation and openness to debate mask the fact that they can be manipulated for political ends such as the machinations of the scientist Sabul who uses his ability to control the flow of information between Anarres and Urras, and even to control the publication of scientific papers to use the brilliance of Shevek for his own advantage, and take credit for what is mostly Shevek’s work.

It is this ability and desire to control the flow of knowledge and insight (including the insight brought by travelers from other worlds) whether stemming from the flawed human condition of someone like Sabul, or the tyranny of the majority implicit in an egalitarian society, that is the sin of Anarres. For, when combined with an internalized moral code that commands them not to be egoist, the Anarrresti are unable to express their own individual genius. Whether that be in a case like Shevek’s where he is constantly thwarted from constructing a theory that would allow faster- than- light communication, and therefore the enable the strong connection of interstellar peoples to become possible, or the comedy of a non-conformist playwright, such as Tirin, who writes a play about a comic character coming from Urras to Anarres. This suffocation of the spirit of the soul is the primary, and growing, flaw of Odo’s utopia.  As Shevek says:

That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience instead of striking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate –we obey. (291)

In an effort to break free from the control of knowledge, Shevek and those around him set up a printing syndicate of their own. This syndicate eventually starts communicating with the outside, with the Urratzi, which ultimately results in the ultimate attempt to breakdown walls- Shevek’s visit to Urras itself.

The capitalist nation of A-Io invites Shevek out of the belief that he is on the verge of discovering a unified theory of time which they will profit from.  Shevek’s journey is a disaster. What he discovers on Urras is a beautiful yet superficial world built on the oppression of the poor by the rich. Not surprising for the time period the novel was written, a Cold War rages between capitalist A-Io and the authoritarian communist nation of Thu. The two-powers fight proxy wars in less developed nations. When the poor rise up to protest the rich in A-Io they are brutally massacred, and Shevek flees to the embassy of the planet Earth. The ambassador of earth shelters Shevek, but expresses her admiration for Urras, with the civilization on earth having almost destroyed itself. Explains the ambassador:

My world, my earth is a ruin.  A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and gobbled and fought until there was nothing left and then we died…

But we destroyed the world first. There are no forest left on my earth. The air is grey, the sky is grey, it is always hot.

She admires Urras for it’s  beauty and material abundance, which has somehow avoided environmental catastrophe. She does not understand the moral criticism of Shevek- a man from a desert world of scarcity, and famine.

Earthlings were ultimately saved by an ancient, sage like people the Hainish. They return Shevek to Anarres, along with a member of the Hainish that wants to see the world anarchist have built. The walls Shevek sought to tear down continue to fall…

What might some of the lessons of this brilliant novel be for our own times? Here are my ideas:

1) For the OWSM itself: that the “administration of things” always has a political aspect. That even groups open to periodic, democratic debate are prone to capture by the politically savvy, and steps make sure they remain democratic need to be constant.

2) One of the flaws of Le Guin’s view of utopia is that it seems to leave no room for democratic politics itself.  Politics, therefore can only be in the form of manipulation (Sabul) or rebellion (Shevek) there is no space, it seems, for consensual decision making as opposed to a mere right to debate and be heard.

3) There is a conflict between the individual (the need for creativity, love of family) and the needs of the community that is existential and cannot be eliminated by any imaginable political system. The key is to strike the right balance between the individual and the community.

4) That the tyranny of the majority is a real danger for any consensus based community and not just a mere bogeyman of conservative forces.

5) The most important thing we can do to preserve the freedom of the individual and health of the community is to keep the lines of communication and connection open. That includes openness to the viewpoints of ideological rivals.

All quotes from: The Dispossessed, An Ambiguous Utopia, Ursula K. Le Guin, Harper and Row, 1974