A rant in response to this interview of Bill Gates. A pertinent quote from the article: "As for what governments should do to prevent social unrest in the wake of mass unemployment, the Microsoft cofounder said that they should basically get on their knees and beg businesses to keep employing humans over algorithms."
What we need are institutions and communities committed to human values over machine values (in the terminology of the late Lewis Mumford). We need people to build communities redundantly, rather than efficiently, using technology that is old and outdated (from a mechanistic perspective). We need to make it possible to be happy as a poor person again (fed, clothed, sheltered, and contributing meaningfully to a community that makes this possible without enslavement, i.e. without owing anything to large industry outside the community). In terms of quantitative measurement, people may suffer or die more in these new poor communities. The quality of healthcare will be lower (by some evaluations: note that this need not mean that mortality rates rise). But qualitatively, our life with humanity will always be better than our life without it.
The future I see lies in disengagement and dispersion. Leave the global society, the national power grid, the Internet (as an alternative to the village square), regular international travel, industrial agriculture and medicine as backbones of society (propped up by markets "too big to fail," which really don't exist). Education should prepare us to live well and cheerfully with minimal reliance on industry and technology, particularly where these make our existence more miserable than not. If the rise of robots makes men miserable, then we must simply abandon the robots. Not reason with their masters. Not beg for more scraps from people who couldn't care less. Not look for dreams of expensive happiness that we are never going to achieve (many of our parents did not even achieve them, and their generation came closer than ours ever will). Bill Gates is the voice of a past that I don't want, leading to a future wherein I have no place. As I write these words using an operating system not designed by Microsoft (which I despise without hatred: it is simply shoddy) or Apple (which I despise without hatred: it is simply shoddy and pretentious), I am glad that Bill Gates and his like can never own the world, no matter how they might try. Nature is bigger than any of us. She does not make me live and die as Bill Gates, or the mindless minion of Bill Gates, not even when circumstances thrust me into a position where it is easy for me to imagine myself this way.
I think my own way to a death uniquely mine--uniquely tragic, uniquely comic, an intimate, personal experience I savor for myself with faculties that come to me from something much richer and more ancient than elite snobs with dreams of robots and rigid world-systems (wherein the future belongs to efficiency and algorithm rather than redundancy and imagination). I think Bill Gates is full of shit. As shit-stirrers go, he means well enough, and does his part to fulfil the little measure of that which he conceives to be virtue. For that I respect him--as a man (not a prophet, certainly not a prophet I am eager to follow, since his heaven looks like hell in my eyes). In his advice to governments, Bill Gates makes the same mistake that Occupy Wall Street did: you don't beg bureaucrats for anything you really want to get, ever, whether they serve private shareholders or pretend to represent the public. It makes no difference. To beg them is to give them power, to feed their dream at the expense of your own, to love the Devil more than God (waxing Christian again). I do not beg Wall Street for anything. I do not beg Uncle Sam for anything. I do not beg Bill Gates for anything. I expect nothing from them but death (and thus greet each new moment of my life with conscious wonder and gratitude, as the arrival of something blessed that I did not expect, that will certainly end soon).
Showing posts with label environmentalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environmentalism. Show all posts
Friday, April 18, 2014
Facing Mortality
I just found a kindred spirit in Paul Kingsnorth (who incidentally has given me a treasure trove of new writers to explore). Listen to these words I might have written (maybe even on this blog!):
Now I need to find a way to live in the mountains with a scythe, teaching myself and my kids to live without dependence on modern amenities that I see as fragile. I already accept that Social Security and healthcare do not exist for me; but I have to give my kids some way to live that does not presuppose reliance on defunct institutions, that does not demand global solutions that are (to be simple) impossible. I want to be part of something personal and little, something that isn't the empty worship of material success (especially large-scale political success, economic success, national success, global success). I have seen the gods of this generation, the gods that everyone worships (even those who claim not to, affecting to love poverty and suffering from positions of relative wealth and ease, itself a kind of decadent suffering and disease).
I don't want to commit suicide, though I see that as a viable option for some people with insights close to mine. But I do want to see my own mortality clearly. I want to die doing something I believe in. I don't think I can believe in politics, or religion, or education, or healthcare, or even civilization as it exists across something as large, fragmented, and impossibly incoherent as "American culture" (let alone global civilization). I see myself as having very little worth to America (the nation), to its markets, to its leaders (in politics, religion, and business, including my own business of education). I don't want to spend my whole life bowing and scraping to people who couldn't care less that I exist, or that the world is dying (while they fiddle and I fetch things for them, listening to music I don't like or feel inspired to play for myself).
I want to mourn the end of the world--and less pretentiously, my own end, my own mortality--in my own way, with my own music. I want to embrace Death as I find her, not as some leader demands (for reasons I have tried hard to see but still cannot manage to respect, to make my own).
I do not expect to be rescued. I do not expect salvation. I do not resent its absence. I see that I am futile, helpless in the face of destructive forces I could never hope to control or bend to my will (pray as I might, do what I will). I see that and I go on living anyway, enjoying each moment as something special and unique, a gift I can never repay (let alone understand).
This poem from Kingsnorth is really moving to me:
There is a fall coming ... After a quarter-century of complacency, in which we were invited to believe in bubbles that would never burst, prices that would never fall ... Hubris has been introduced to Nemesis.I have been slowly, painfully thinking my way into my personal version of Kingsnorth's position over the past decade or so--as I realize the extent of human ignorance, my own and that of humanity in general, and the extent to which civilization as we know it rests on a foundation riven by fragility, exposed constantly to risks of catastrophic blow-up that cannot be undone without death and serious suffering. No matter what anyone does, in any political or religious faction anywhere in the world, the coming years are going to be tumultuous and destructive. In the end, everything alive (including the human species qua species) will die. Maybe we will emerge as something new, somewhere new, or maybe not. That cannot be known. The immediate reality is that we are all going to suffer and die. I see this clearly now (after looking at it through a glass darkly for many years).
Now I need to find a way to live in the mountains with a scythe, teaching myself and my kids to live without dependence on modern amenities that I see as fragile. I already accept that Social Security and healthcare do not exist for me; but I have to give my kids some way to live that does not presuppose reliance on defunct institutions, that does not demand global solutions that are (to be simple) impossible. I want to be part of something personal and little, something that isn't the empty worship of material success (especially large-scale political success, economic success, national success, global success). I have seen the gods of this generation, the gods that everyone worships (even those who claim not to, affecting to love poverty and suffering from positions of relative wealth and ease, itself a kind of decadent suffering and disease).
I don't want to commit suicide, though I see that as a viable option for some people with insights close to mine. But I do want to see my own mortality clearly. I want to die doing something I believe in. I don't think I can believe in politics, or religion, or education, or healthcare, or even civilization as it exists across something as large, fragmented, and impossibly incoherent as "American culture" (let alone global civilization). I see myself as having very little worth to America (the nation), to its markets, to its leaders (in politics, religion, and business, including my own business of education). I don't want to spend my whole life bowing and scraping to people who couldn't care less that I exist, or that the world is dying (while they fiddle and I fetch things for them, listening to music I don't like or feel inspired to play for myself).
I want to mourn the end of the world--and less pretentiously, my own end, my own mortality--in my own way, with my own music. I want to embrace Death as I find her, not as some leader demands (for reasons I have tried hard to see but still cannot manage to respect, to make my own).
I do not expect to be rescued. I do not expect salvation. I do not resent its absence. I see that I am futile, helpless in the face of destructive forces I could never hope to control or bend to my will (pray as I might, do what I will). I see that and I go on living anyway, enjoying each moment as something special and unique, a gift I can never repay (let alone understand).
This poem from Kingsnorth is really moving to me:
when will i be free saes the cilde to the stagand the stag saes thu will nefer be freethen when will angland be freeangland will nefer be freethen what can be donenaht can be donethen how moste i lifthu moste be triewe that is all there isbe triewebe triewe
I also really appreciate his perspective on the Norman conquest of England (quoted from the article linked above, like the poem):
When he was a schoolboy, Kingsnorth told me, his teachers described the Norman Conquest, in 1066, as a swift transformation. An army of Norman and French soldiers from across the channel invaded England and swept away Anglo-Saxon civilization. The old ways vanished, and a new world emerged. He was surprised to learn, much later, that a resistance movement bedeviled the conquerors for a full decade. These resisters were known as the Silvatici, or “wild men.” Eventually William the Conqueror drove them from the woods and slaughtered every last one of them. They were doomed from the start, and knew it. But that hadn’t stopped them from fighting.
Personally, I do not fight to make the world better. I am not sure what a better world would be (though I suspect the quest for it lies through piles of dead corpses). I fight because I do not want to be involved in the process of making it worse. I don't care that my struggle is useless (useless to progress, as I am: I represent the face of those who turn away from progress, who do not desire to live forever or drive in flying cars or otherwise escape the limits of human mortality). Silvaticus sum.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Modern Apocalypse
"Prophets of Doom." History Channel, 2011.
As I prepare to hunt for a job puttering around like most academics, it is interesting to take a look at the big picture of what is going on in society. The world as we know it is crashing, as it always has, only it is bigger now, so it falls harder. I hope I can prepare myself to live in a world without all the things I depend on subconsciously.
I wish universities studied this stuff. I feel like this is really what I am interested in. What I really want to learn is how to live happily like the people in "less developed" economies, which are more sustainable than the cancerous, obese behemoth that is the imploding First World. My research into antiquity is an attempt to get back to something better than modern civilization, without making the same mistakes that were made. I want to return to the Bronze Age (or earlier), without being stupid the same way my ancestors were back then.
My journey into the past is also a journey into the future. It is not a "restoration" (in the Mormon sense) really; it is more of a cautious reformation. There is no Eden to return to. But there is a purgatory before the modern hell, and right now that purgatory is looking like the place to build if you want to last.
As I prepare to hunt for a job puttering around like most academics, it is interesting to take a look at the big picture of what is going on in society. The world as we know it is crashing, as it always has, only it is bigger now, so it falls harder. I hope I can prepare myself to live in a world without all the things I depend on subconsciously.
I wish universities studied this stuff. I feel like this is really what I am interested in. What I really want to learn is how to live happily like the people in "less developed" economies, which are more sustainable than the cancerous, obese behemoth that is the imploding First World. My research into antiquity is an attempt to get back to something better than modern civilization, without making the same mistakes that were made. I want to return to the Bronze Age (or earlier), without being stupid the same way my ancestors were back then.
My journey into the past is also a journey into the future. It is not a "restoration" (in the Mormon sense) really; it is more of a cautious reformation. There is no Eden to return to. But there is a purgatory before the modern hell, and right now that purgatory is looking like the place to build if you want to last.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
God vs. gods
Daniel Quinn. The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit. New York: Bantam, 1996. ISBN 0553379011.
In my last post, I included this quote but did not really say much about it (Quinn, The Story of B, 300-301):
In the world I live in, life consists of multiple mysterious systems in balance (from galactic star clusters down to atoms, with everything in between, including the planet's biosphere with its different ecosystems, and the bodies of individual plant and animal organisms, each of which is an ecosystem unto itself). I cannot know what keeps these systems running (hence the mystery), but I can see that they are all running at different rates, in different ways, with different points of interface linking them to one another. I see that when something disturbs the equilibrium of one system and not another (when someone runs my buddy over with a car but does not hit me, for example), the disturbed system suffers (and may die), while the undisturbed one continues on (to an inevitable dissolution: all systems are eventually recycled). So each system has its own unknown, its own mysterious center of balance that holds it together until it falls apart: its own "god" (if you will). My "god" (the unknown center of the complex of systems that is me) presides over the interface of several other "gods" within me (multi-organ systems, individual organs, cells, and independent organisms who live inside me), and is presided over in turn by other "gods" (which define the ecosystem that is my habitat, the planet that houses that ecosystem, etc.). These "gods" are real. I interact with them in a material and vital way every day. They are also vulnerable. As Quinn says, a flamethrower (or shopping mall) has the power to destroy or weaken them. Unlike the almighty God I imagined as a Mormon, they represent something I might actually destroy in a careless fit of whatever it is that causes people to detonate bombs, deplete soils, and generally waste resources wantonly.
I am not adamantly opposed to the idea of some almighty uber-controller managing all systems: I do not deny the possibility that a big "God" exists out there somewhere. But when I examine life as I experience it, it makes more sense to posit lots of smaller, more local, weaker "gods" who manage the mystery of life between them. When I look into the world, I do not see a grand, unitary purpose rolling forward to inexorable fulfillment: I see multiple purposes, some realized and some not, some great and some small. I do not know the causes for all things, but I do get the feeling that there are causes (in the plural) rather than a single cause (Aristotle's Prime Mover). More urgently, I see that my previous focus on the possibility (which I regarded as a certainty) of a single ruling cause led me to neglect paying too much heed to smaller causes. Since I assumed God was capable of restoring whatever havoc I might wreak in his world, I was not particularly worried about overtaxing the environment: I was philosophically down with killing many small (real) gods wantonly in the name of my big (imaginary) God.
Before you decide to ignore me as some kind of crazy, New Age hippie, you should know that I have no illusions about "saving the world" as it is. Like Quinn says above, there are no eternal, Platonic forms for life as we experience it: it is a journey, not a destination. Today's gods must die to make way for those of tomorrow. I know this fact, and embrace it: life is death (as Heraclitus would say). But I also know what follows from this: to waste death is to waste life. If we kill all the bison for sport today, there will be none left when our grandchildren are hungry tomorrow. If we strip all the soils down to bedrock today to feed our modern civilization, our grandchildren (billions of them) will have to discover some new life to take if the race is to continue. Based on our past experience (the lessons of history as I read them), we cannot subsist happily writing blank checks for unlimited resources and hoping God (the big one) will honor them with manna from on high. Rather than consume the small gods today and hope the big one sends us a fat paycheck tomorrow, picking up the tab for our indulgence, we need to cultivate the small gods: we need to refocus our efforts toward intelligent production. Make every life lost count for something valuable, something that preserves (as much as possible) the integrity of the whole system as it moves into eternity.
In my last post, I included this quote but did not really say much about it (Quinn, The Story of B, 300-301):
Let me begin with the great secret of the animist life, Louis. When other people look for God, you'll see them automatically look up into the sky. They really imagine that, if there's a God, he's far, far away--remote and untouchable. I don't know how they can bear living with such a God, Louis. I really don't. But they're not our problem. I've told you that, among the animists of the world, not a single one can tell you the number of the gods. They don't know the number and neither do I...What's important to us is not how many they are but where they are. If you go among the Alawa of Australia or the Bushmen of Africa or the Navajo of North America or the Onabasulu of New Guinea--or any other of hundreds of Leaver peoples [as opposed to Takers, the agriculturalists] I could name--you'll soon find out where the gods are. The gods are here...I mean here. Among the Alawa: here. Among the Bushmen: here. Among the Navajo: here. Among the Kreen-Akrore: here. Among the Onabasulu: here...
This isn't a theological statement they're making. The Alawa are not saying to the Bushmen, 'Your gods are frauds, the true gods are our gods.' The Kreen-Akrore are not saying to the Onabasulu, 'You have no gods, only we have gods. Nothing of the kind. They're saying, 'Our place is a sacred place, like no other in the world.' They would never think of looking elsewhere to find the gods. The gods are to be found among them--living where they live. The god is what animates their place. That's what a god is. A god is that strange force that makes every place a place--a place like no other in the world. A god is the fire that burns in this place and no other--and no place in which the fire burns is devoid of god. All of this should explain to you why I don't reject the name that was given to us by an outsider. Even though it was bestowed with a false understanding of our vision, the name animism captures a glimmer of it.
Unlike the God whose name beings with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb--silenced, driven away, enfeebled. Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin. Feeble, but not dead, not wholly extinguished. Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days the place will be pulsing with life again. Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons. The god knows how to take care of that place. It will never be what it was before--but nothing is ever what it was before. It doesn't need to be what it was before. You'll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived. This is nonsense. What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time. There is no such form and never will be any such form. Everything here is on the way. Everything here is in process.The picture of deity given here is one that appeals to me a lot in the wake of my faith crisis. Contrary to what many people seem to expect (and to what this blog may sometimes appear to indicate), my conversion to disbelief did not make me an immediate "expert" on life, the universe, and everything. When people ask me "why?" now, I give them guesses (like the one I posted in my last entry) not once-and-for-all answers (like the truth I was certain of as a believer). My lack of knowledge regarding the ultimate causes of things means that I am necessarily still comfortable with the idea of "unknowns" -- in theory, I have nothing against referring to these unknowns with names (like "God"). But in the wake of considering the world as I see it (and reading Quinn), I think "gods" is a better name for life's unknowns as I experience them than "God". Let me try to explain what I mean by this.
In the world I live in, life consists of multiple mysterious systems in balance (from galactic star clusters down to atoms, with everything in between, including the planet's biosphere with its different ecosystems, and the bodies of individual plant and animal organisms, each of which is an ecosystem unto itself). I cannot know what keeps these systems running (hence the mystery), but I can see that they are all running at different rates, in different ways, with different points of interface linking them to one another. I see that when something disturbs the equilibrium of one system and not another (when someone runs my buddy over with a car but does not hit me, for example), the disturbed system suffers (and may die), while the undisturbed one continues on (to an inevitable dissolution: all systems are eventually recycled). So each system has its own unknown, its own mysterious center of balance that holds it together until it falls apart: its own "god" (if you will). My "god" (the unknown center of the complex of systems that is me) presides over the interface of several other "gods" within me (multi-organ systems, individual organs, cells, and independent organisms who live inside me), and is presided over in turn by other "gods" (which define the ecosystem that is my habitat, the planet that houses that ecosystem, etc.). These "gods" are real. I interact with them in a material and vital way every day. They are also vulnerable. As Quinn says, a flamethrower (or shopping mall) has the power to destroy or weaken them. Unlike the almighty God I imagined as a Mormon, they represent something I might actually destroy in a careless fit of whatever it is that causes people to detonate bombs, deplete soils, and generally waste resources wantonly.
I am not adamantly opposed to the idea of some almighty uber-controller managing all systems: I do not deny the possibility that a big "God" exists out there somewhere. But when I examine life as I experience it, it makes more sense to posit lots of smaller, more local, weaker "gods" who manage the mystery of life between them. When I look into the world, I do not see a grand, unitary purpose rolling forward to inexorable fulfillment: I see multiple purposes, some realized and some not, some great and some small. I do not know the causes for all things, but I do get the feeling that there are causes (in the plural) rather than a single cause (Aristotle's Prime Mover). More urgently, I see that my previous focus on the possibility (which I regarded as a certainty) of a single ruling cause led me to neglect paying too much heed to smaller causes. Since I assumed God was capable of restoring whatever havoc I might wreak in his world, I was not particularly worried about overtaxing the environment: I was philosophically down with killing many small (real) gods wantonly in the name of my big (imaginary) God.
Before you decide to ignore me as some kind of crazy, New Age hippie, you should know that I have no illusions about "saving the world" as it is. Like Quinn says above, there are no eternal, Platonic forms for life as we experience it: it is a journey, not a destination. Today's gods must die to make way for those of tomorrow. I know this fact, and embrace it: life is death (as Heraclitus would say). But I also know what follows from this: to waste death is to waste life. If we kill all the bison for sport today, there will be none left when our grandchildren are hungry tomorrow. If we strip all the soils down to bedrock today to feed our modern civilization, our grandchildren (billions of them) will have to discover some new life to take if the race is to continue. Based on our past experience (the lessons of history as I read them), we cannot subsist happily writing blank checks for unlimited resources and hoping God (the big one) will honor them with manna from on high. Rather than consume the small gods today and hope the big one sends us a fat paycheck tomorrow, picking up the tab for our indulgence, we need to cultivate the small gods: we need to refocus our efforts toward intelligent production. Make every life lost count for something valuable, something that preserves (as much as possible) the integrity of the whole system as it moves into eternity.
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