10 days of real-time reactions to:
How the Scots Invented the Modern World, by Arthur Herman
The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880-1980, edited by Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears
Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920, edited by Simon J. Bronner
1.
Is computing its own next stage in the means of production, or is it just a new color, a new blending, in the “commercial” society we’ve had since the 1700s? Industry managed to be adapted into the coffee and cacao-driven global empire version of commerce with only aesthetic tweaks, no large evolution into a higher form of values and life goals.
So are the philosophers of an age where “production” refers to dopamine responses to ethereal presentations on electronic screens going to remain those writing about the tobacco trade in Glasgow? This isn’t a leading question; the narcissistic assumption about the historic period in which anybody lives, rationalized for me by the Harari and “Transformations of the Human,” is that we are changing from the Book of Kells to printed flyers. But then some smart people want our economy to refocus on manufacturing. So I really don’t know.
2.
There seems to be a ceiling on creativity in society, which is set by: 1) how many people there are with talent to be creatively delightful or useful and 2) how much time and space exists for the consumption of created works.
But maybe the ceiling can be lifted. Malthus was pretty smart, but now we think of him as a short-sighted pessimist. He couldn’t observe how technology could change the fundamental limitations of group existence, allowing enormous populations with plenty of food. Who could blame him when the Highlands were full of starving people, with agricultural production that could support barely half the population?
If creativity is the higher form of living, won't technology find a way to unstop its limitations, whatever bottleneck there is around it?
3.
Jenkins’ Ear; his blood cry before Parliament. An early mention of the “public,” through “the press” aflame. Nation, war, populace, public demands, emergent of printing and reading and popular literacy they enabled. Modern society and culture as we understand them arising from 15th-century technology.
So as to many well-meaning critiques of a fixation on computer science education; true. Code is not a cheat code for usefulness, for creative inquiry and resilience.
But: the history of progress is warmest and kindest where the larger number of people learn the practical skills of building interpreting and manipulating the new ubiquitous tools and language. When everyone does this, like a preponderance of people in England and Scotland in the early 1700s, something extraordinary emerges on top of it. Fifty or two hundred years from now, if everyone can build, fix, and understand computing, what will we see? Let’s have it sooner.
4.
I think if there were any dramatic melody flying over my project, it’s to suck people into the idea that vulnerability, fear, suffering – sunken, darkened holes or patches in bodies of existence we want to imagine as supple and springy – are essential, or a part of, or at least does not stop, a life that is dazzling.
5.
I wonder if starting a bookshop in Glasgow in 1772 would be like starting a bootcamp or an incubator or coworking space today – an enterprise of popular caricature that yet is the forum for collecting and distributing and manifesting the progress (neutral term) of its era.
Is it possible to create enlightenment without being sneered at? Is insufferability the price of doing right by history?
6. A nice essay
“Fretful.” A ringing word, in the cab of the Suburban Tony Soprano is driving in his show’s 1999 pilot, when his to-Dr. Melfi voiceover says he feels like he came in at the end of things. The ubiquitous pre-phone swipe feeling that you don’t notice until you’ve been scrolling for five minutes. Me, when I sit up in bed, or right now, or when I think about how I’ve only had a sustainable job for 6 months and it could disappear at any time. A word that holds all the shakiness and forestalled terror of this time, between Bill Clinton and now, and all that is brought for this country and the world.
Except, as I see, in this book The Culture of Consumption, “fretful” is as much a word for the time of those bicycles with front wheels the size of elephants, of pith helmets, of steam engines, and of Vito Corleone, as it is for today. Such was the sensation of the mildly well-off Americans, more than 100 years ago, amid seeping Darwinism and disintegrating Protestant salvation.
Instead there was a “yearning for a solid, transcendent framework of meaning.” And a familiar cast of causes and symptoms of this yearning: moving from watchful agrarian communities into the anonymity of cities. The prevalence of “immobilizing depressions,” among urban bourgeoisie; context for how, though an “epidemic” of mental illness is described today like it’s new, actual figures are flat going back decades. Bowling alone, but for their own time. Our contemporary rage and ennui is maybe not as new as I thought.
And so in that time rose up the single, winding, sharp, lonely impulse; a fretful drive for selfhood, a not necessarily desperate, but holding some of the motivating qualities of real desperation, quest for self-realization. And to give it voice to broaden, amplify it, weave it together into a larger whole, risers what this book calls “consumer culture.” Reflected in different forms, with different keywords, by different authoritative speakers, what the book calls “therapeutic ideologues,” from ministers to psychologist to advertisers, all passing the same advice: now that the culture of work has passed; to feel better, revel in choice; participate in fantasies of stuff; buy whatever you want.
“Culture” isn’t a strong enough word; after all, you can go home from culture after leaving the theater. It’s something much more hegemonic; explosive; encompassing; something as correct-seeming as your current political ideological conventions, whatever they may be. It’s “society's conventional wisdom, the band of behavior outside of which is tasteless,” irresponsible, or otherwise unworthy of consideration.
True freedom reaches so far beyond the number of ways you could think of planning your adult life that wouldn’t make your internal personification of this culture say, “oh?” when you think of it, the way Queen Elizabeth says it in The Crown when Margaret tells her she's in love with a man she’ll never be allowed to marry. I heard that voice all the time myself, over the least two years, every time the fact arose for clear observance that I only had pay lined up for the next six weeks. Our homeostasis -- our drive for meaning -- is made narrow by the question, “what’s the minimum I need to do to be able to consume sufficient to my having free choice?”
Consumerism was and is good! Protestant work ethic was only a rationalization of physical misery; consumption is wonderful, with the freedom of spontaneous runs to Target or Home Depot; the sight of Amazon packages like it’s Christmas Morning; hell, Christmas morning. Decorating your home so that it’s just right. But as a response to the yearning, it's therapeutically incomplete.
Can we evolve – are we already evolving – the hegemonic culture, beyond what it’s been for a century? Can we address the yearning with something more? Can we augment our wonderful buffet of colors and tastes with calm attentiveness to vulnerability, connection, exploration, creativity, purpose? Can capitalism be constructed to better the happiness of workers, to serve what we’ve since 1910 come to scientifically learn are the answers to the existential yearning, the the depressions they spark? Or is it oxymoronic to suggest that markets can serve anything more – because creativity and connection, as with learning, can’t be bought or sold?
7. Hume and Smith were drunk; I meditate
I’m aware that I’m next, not even in my own place probably, in a multitude, so wide and disorderly that it can’t be called a succession, of hopeful souls who have been to Burning Man and wonder, hope, bank a decent amount of their calm about existence, whether humans can actually be better. The philosophies on which our systems of social organization have been built can’t just end with Kames and Hume, right? Surely new understandings of the nature of the mind, of perception, of reality; of the science of happiness; can underlie new systems that better take advantage of that knowledge of human needs? I feel like I’m holding up a pink cotton candy against a grey fog, smoke, a wall of blades and deadly cloud. Of every past philosopher and demonstrated certitude of everyone of any importance or solidity or prominence in the rapids of unfolding history.
But I really believe that undisturbed, with patience and healing, there is a basic quality of compassion underneath everyone’s sun-spotted personality, the unlearned low sound of the universe, the binding behind the stars, a disembodied underlying reality, bigger and wider and more fundamental against which all other demonstrations of personality rise up.
Meditation is what lets people be free of the passions that Hume was so worried about governing.
The part of modern society, per Herman’s interpretation of Hume, is to channel the passions we are enslaved by towards the greatest possible harmony. But what if we didn’t have to be enslaved to passions? (It’s easier when sober).
There is irony in that the fleshing out of authentic selfhood and expression requires the understanding that there is no self.
Really what I mean by self is whatever really comes out of my body, even if the “explainer/decider” that lets it out of my body is not, itself, the self.
Or maybe it’s just, what is shared alongside full acceptance of fear and shame, rather than in an effort to mobilize them.
7. From an “aesthetic of consumption” to the “practice of creativity”
Maybe I’m not demanding everyone be perfect, be their version of Gandhi, be kind and value connection and fit in at the Ashram. Maybe I’m just saying I think capitalism, markets, would continue to function at a high level, or thrive again, if the criteria we used to judge people and ourselves as rich or poor shifted; if we move from financial materialism to artistic or creative materialism.
We’d still have poverty and jealousy and absurd opulence. But, I’m arguing, it would be a “higher” materialism; at least offering that much deeper fulfillment and satisfaction to participants who are wealthy than today’s homeowners in Noe Valley how have no passion, no sense of unique self-exploration or expression. It would offer progress – a neutral value when you logic it out, except it seems that the human brain tends to get angry and frustrated when it doesn’t sense that we are moving in any particular direction. This applies to civilizations, too.
8.
This came out on the hike yesterday; it’s repeating itself a little bit but it’s a concise version of a lot of what I’ve been trying to say.
Around four to six hundred years ago a bunch of things were invented or discovered. There was the printing press, the solar system, there was Newtonian physics. These discoveries opened up crazy new realms of thought and consciousness, and new behaviors, taken together en masse to be new ideas about culture and humanity.
Among other things, the basic insights about reality that all the parts of the scientific revolution unleashed increased humanity’s understanding by like a million percent. This massive relative increase based entirely on what we would call rationality -- evidence, control groups, good sample sizes, all that scientific method shit -- understandably made us feel ourselves quite a bit when it came to the power of logic and reason. So rose up a series of philosophies based on the idea of the power, the sanctity even, of human logic and reason, and then political and social systems from that -- forms of capitalism and democracy, and consumerism.
But of course hard science doesn’t stop, and the weird thing about the crazy discoveries of the last hundred or so years is that they’ve served more to clarify what we don’t know rather than what we do. Quantum mechanics is real and also is irresolvable with, like, the physics of things normal humans can see and touch and conceptualize, and the only way to make the math works is to break our brains by imagining an infinite expanse of parallel existences where all outcomes are possible. It seems like the main thing neuroscientists will want to tell you if you ask them is not, how cool the basic functionings of the brain and consciousness are, but rather, that we basically don’t know anything about the basic functionings of the brain and what consciousness even is.
In terms of philosophies and social systems that reflect these new insights….well, these human-centric areas of endeavor haven’t really caught up with the idea that certain things, though we continue to learn more and more, are pretty unfathomable. Not, literally unfathomable, but at the very least, we’ve moved from the confidence of having recently increased our understanding of reality by a millionfold that enlightenment philosophers got to work with, with the realization that even that millionfold increase is, like, teeny-tiny relative to the overall nature of reality, and of the forces that shape who we are and what we do, as individuals and as communities and societies, far more than any choices we try to make with our wonderful, beautiful, rational brains.
This is a bit of a quandary for today’s groups of people who are trying to take what we know about the world and create philosophies, behaviors, cultures, institutions, and social systems to optimize our existence within it. Some people who never really fully embraced the findings of the scientific revolution and the philosophies based on it see this as evidence that the enlightenment was a mistake; that we need to go back to views of reality that existed hundreds or even thousands of years ago. To me that’s an obvious mistake; cosmic narratives and codes of behavior that arose out of conditions in which, among other things, it was difficult to guarantee access to clean water, seem to be rationalizations of suffering more than anything else.
But at the same time, it feels to be just a less-bad version of emotional reassurance in a confusing time to organize all our efforts in shaping the world around human rights and free expression and justice and other concepts that are really really important to living in a nice and good world but are political values that ultimately stem from the scientific certainties felt around 1750. Leaders today should have a “yes, and” attitude towards the enlightenment: yes to science and reason and the unambiguous reality of all humans being created equal; AND we need new philosophies and institutions that reflect the best of us based both on, the new understandings we have developed about ourselves as a species and the universe around us, in physics, psychology, genetics, and everything else; and that incorporates a little bit more of the humility and wonder with which we all should be looking at the world and our place in it (which does NOT require a personified God, sheesh).
For me, I’m most drawn to understandings of the mind that have emerged from Buddhist practice and philosophy. These intersect pretty nicely with research findings in other fields, such as psychology and medical science (esp. psychedelics). They incline me toward belief not only in a beneficence and compassion underlying all people, but also in the capacity for every person, through the expression of their unique qualities, to be delightful to others. This leads me to search for some kind of workable social/institutional models built around this sense of uniqueness and the capacity for people to delight one another by being themselves. Digital technologies, with their always-on ability to perceive very small details about people (for good or ill), and their ability to make it a lot easier for people to exercise their creativity, aesthetic and otherwise, seems like a big piece of the puzzle.
Others have different approaches. Yuval Noah Harari, who basically started me down this galaxy brain path with his whole-picture analysis of human history since the Neanderthals in Sapiens, has a kind of more dystopian view of how things will work out; the total idea of the self breaking down as we create new beings in the digital cloud and our own minds are chopped and spliced and controlled. I’m me, so I don’t think he’s totally right, but he goes on a two-month silent meditation retreat every year, so at the very least he’s definitely seen some wild shit that I haven’t.
The point is that everyone, but especially, the people I’ll call “leaders” -- a weird term, because this word has all sorts of ennobling connotations that I think really shouldn’t apply in a lot of cases to the people who have managed to rise to the top of today’s existing hierarchy-driven social organizations -- but leaders need to be thinking bigger. By which I mean -- they need to stop acting like the nature of reality and of human beings is already well-understood, and therefore, the political systems and ideals of Lincoln and Roosevelt are fixed goals based on that reality. And instead -- put on the philosopher hat themselves. Think and read about who we are, and why we’re here. Consider what we know -- and don’t know now -- that we didn’t know -- or thought we knew -- when we were little kids. And start thinking of social and political systems that might have seemed literally insane to Smith and Marx and Hume and all those wonderful folks -- but might just stand a chance of making things here better today and soon.