June 2009 Archives

"The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing." -Socrates

The nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw the culmination of a certain old way of thinking, the sort of thinking that led each and every intellectual of any repute to conclude his life with an epic work that basically boiled down to "Absolutely Everything in My Specialty". The works got longer and longer as time passed. An obsession with minutia and the meticulous detail of such works began to resemble that urge six year olds sometimes get towards comprehensive cataloging. "I'm going to write down every person/number/word in the world". Less reflective children continue the exercise until they get bored, but certain children reach a sort of elementary school epiphany that there is always more to write down. They wouldn't necessarily put it so succinctly, but that's the gist of their conclusion.

Just about every field of human thought suffered from the same malaise by the early twentieth century.

Historians would dedicate decades to compiling comprehensive histories. Edward Gibbons finished off the eighteenth century with the immense six volumes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a feat later topped by numerous historians embarking upon their own attempts to write comprehensive histories of absolutely everything. William and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization spanned eleven volumes and two million words. Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History topped out at twelve volumes. If a work could just be long enough it could capture the essence of everything that happened in all of human history.

Writers churned out longer and longer novels throughout the nineteenth century, taking twenty pages to describe a man getting out of bed in the morning. Dickens and Tolstoy took years off their lives just lifting their manuscripts. If a novel could just be long enough, it might capture reality itself.

Physicists reveled in the pinball universe. Every atom a billiards ball bouncing around in perfect accordance with physical laws. If you could measure just so precisely, you could know the precise position and vector of every atom in the entire universe. You could predict through humble Newtonian physics every event in all of history, every thought that ever flitted through a human brain. You could see the future. If the measurements could just be precise enough, you could know everything that ever was and ever would be.

Mathematicians spent half a century on the monumental project of comprehensively defining and proving all mathematical axioms, fitting them into a grandiose universal set. With enough volumes, you could annotate and define every possible bit of logic and its relationship with all other conceivable logic.

Children see the flaw in this societal hubris: there is always more. A history could always be more complete, until a volume was written on every single person who ever lived. A novel could always be more real, until it was as voluminous as what the historians aimed to produce. There was always another atom to measure, another axiom that didn't quite fit the existing ones. We thought the map could be as perfect as the territory.

The twentieth century tore down all those notions, one after another. Gödel's incompleteness theorem destroyed the idea of comprehensive mathematics, proving not only the impossibility of completeness, but also that any system included axioms that were true but not provable. Einstein ripped down physics with relativity and the genesis of quantum mechanics: it's not simply that we do not know whether an electron is here or there until measured, it's that the electron is simultaneously in both places until we do. Schrödinger's cat. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Our ideas of history itself disintegrated in the world wars of absolutism and the birth of atomic fire. Science fiction and horror were born as nineteenth century novels died. Lovecraft and Wells wrote of a vast and incomprehensible universe that dwarfed everything in human experience a mere few decades after writers focused their microscopes on cataloging the minutia of human experience.

We cannot know everything, but realizing that is the first step to knowing something.

"Relying on words to lead you to the truth is like relying on an incomplete formal system to lead you to the truth. A formal system will give you some truths, but as we shall soon see, a formal system, no matter how powerful--cannot lead to all truths." -Douglas Hofstadter

There's a phenomenon in certain circles known as the discovery of population. We're used to the idea of people being a national resource, familiar with the perception by both the extreme right and extreme left during the 20th century of the value of having more and more people in a state. More workers => more industry, more soldiers => more power. But this is a fundamentally modern perception of population. Prior to Napoleon, the huge population of France (larger than many other states combined, for centuries) was considered a liability. Three times the population didn't yield a multiple of power, but a multiple of burdens. It just meant more damned half starved peasants whose necks needed boots. And boots were expensive and more fun to use kicking other countries in the dangly bits.

Napoleon democratized warfare overnight. He realized that a hundred thousand eager volunteers kicked the crap out of ten thousand crack troops with years of training. And if they failed, it took him a couple weeks to round up another hundred thousand volunteers whereas it took another decade to train up a few regiments of shock troops. Napoleon fielded the largest armies ever seen in Europe and used them to conquer the better part of the continent. And every time disaster struck, every 400,000 man Grande Armée that disintegrated into the Russian wastes, more men waited at home to be handed a rifle and a uniform.

Napoleon was the most dangerous man to arrive in Europe since the Khan died at the gates of Vienna, not because he conquered (conquerors are a dime a dozen in European history), but because he woke the beast of the people. For all of history the power of the people was a force to be beaten down, not something to be tamed. It was too dangerous to tame, it could turn on the master's hand too easily.

That's democracy, shed of elections and millennia of elevated discourse on natural rights and freedom. Democracy in its rawest form, the beating heart underneath all those pretty words and infrastructure, is just the people moved to action. The institutions, the parliaments and congresses and republics and constitutions, are the bit and bridle and saddle that turn the strength of the people into something useful and constructive. It's a fine line that cynical governments walk with their people: break a mount and it's tame but worthless, be too lax with the whip though and it will lose fear and throw you.

Experts keep saying that Mousavi will negotiate and cut a deal and that will be the end of it. Experts don't understand democracy, they think that people follow leaders. If Yeltsin hadn't climbed on top of that tank, Russians wouldn't have returned to communism, someone else would have climbed onto the tank. In the mythology of westerns, wild mustangs will sometimes take a rider, but they won't ride with him forever, they will leave him if he becomes unworthy. You can chain a wild horse, but that doesn't make it a fucking toy pony.

Cities are unique from rural areas because they concentrate vast numbers of people into relatively small areas. The density of the population itself can be a factor in democratic development. Density is the concentration of power; it is why corporations and political parties can wield such extraordinary power: they concentrate and distill power down into a small enough tool that it can be wielded effectively. The more densely power is concentrated, the more easily it can be brought bear on a political pressure point. When a population is dispersed throughout the countryside it is vulnerable to the concentrations of entrenched power, but when a population draws together into a city, its concentration rivals the entrenched. But the concentration of political power is not sufficient to ensure political consciousness; else every city would be a center of democracy. Cities are unwieldy beasts, difficult to control even if they are not politically conscious. Their presence explains why even in autocracies, cities are correlated with increased democracy, even though their weight is not sufficient to sway the system as a whole to democracy. The concentration of raw political force in cities, even when not conscious, causes autocrats to tread lightly, warping the political system around itself with an almost gravitational field.

The concentration of population into cities also is significant because the density and proximity of the population encourages political consciousness. Proximity imposes limits on government actions, because suppressive action against even a small part of the population is clear and present to many people, whereas outside of cities, government action is distant or immediate, only observable if you and yours are the target. What is nearby is relevant, and for people in cities, that circle of nearness contains far more people and events than those in rural areas. It is one thing to hear of government suppression two towns over, but quite another to be able to hear the gunfire from one's own home. A second side effect of proximity is the simple matter of communication. Just as viral epidemics spread more easily through the tightly packed urban populations, so to do viral epidemics of memes. Word of mouth communication is the most powerful form of communication, relying on the strength of personal bonds and ties, bonds which are compressed and multiplied in cities. Modern communications make personal proximity less important than in the past, but only to a degree. Communications systems are the easiest for a state to suppress, whereas word of mouth communication, while suppressible, is impossible to entirely eradicate. In poor states, where communications technologies are less widespread, they are even easier for the state to suppress.

Population density also leads to the perceived radicalization of society. Statistically, occurrences that are extraordinarily unlikely are much less likely to occur in particular small groups. The larger a population is gathered together, the more likely it is for statistical oddities to emerge, although the overall rate of their occurrence may not increase. For example, if only one in a million individuals is likely to become a serial killer, there is a vanishingly small chance of a serial killer being present in any particular small town of a few thousand people. But in a city of several million, there is a statistical likelihood that at least one will be present. This is not to say that cities are inherently more dangerous, but that their size leads to them being bastions of statistical oddities.

This statistical quirk becomes important when combined with psychological factors. Even in cities with crime rates lower than rural areas, crime is invariably seen as an issue of primary importance. The difference is that crime of a particular rate spreads out over a much greater area in rural areas, whereas in a city, that crime is compressed into a small and familiar area. Humans do not associate risk with the statistical likelihood of an event within a population, but with the perceived proximity of the event. Understanding that one person in ten thousand is likely to be robbed each year means that a town of a thousand is unlikely to see a robbery much more often than once per decade, but a city street with ten thousand inhabitants is likely to have a robbery per year. The danger seems more palpable on the city street, despite the fact that the chances of a particular person being a victim are identical in the two situations. Humans have a sort of binary psychology based on centering the universe on themselves, eliminating probability as a factor. We do not see that there is a 0.01% chance of being a random victim of a robbery on our particular city street, but rather interpret hearing about a robbery happening on our street as meaning that there was a 100% chance that we could have been the victim of a robbery. Rural areas are less prone to this phenomenon because the statistical oddities are spread out over a much larger area, thus ensuring that the occurrences that do happen immediately impact the thinking of less individuals. What this means for government is that the populations of cities put proportionately more political pressure on the state for action on social and economic issues than the same population spread throughout a rural area.

Those same forces of radicalization work in another direction in cities, generating specialists. The larger a population gathers together, the more specialized its population can become, because there are more and more people to support particular rarely needed talents. A town of a thousand will not have a world renowned cancer specialist, not because of a lack of education or talent, but because cancer is rare enough that a town of a thousand cannot support its own specialist on the topic. The smaller a population, the more generalized the inhabitants. This applies not only to professions and skill sets, but also more broadly to life choices and culture. An obscure cultural interest valued by one in several thousand individuals will be effectively non-existent in the countryside, but can find a vibrant niche existence in a city. Groups that are larger than niches, but still minorities, see a similar advantage in cities. Without a statistical increase in their occurrence in the population, specialists (whether economic or cultural) grow in power in the densely packed populations of cities.

Specialization leads to subtle differences in the politics of cities in comparison to rural areas. Technical specialists have devoted time and energy into becoming specialists in their field, and thus have a vested interest in policy insofar as it affects their specialization. This is one of the first steps towards political consciousness. In addition, the proximity of specialists within a city allows their combination and focus towards particular issues. Instead of scattering like atoms throughout the countryside, their power base is a concentrated body of mass when gathered inside a city. Specialists also are distinct because they represent an investment of time and energy by society, in other words they cannot so easily be replaced as more generally equipped individuals. The value of specialists gives them power relative to the state, power that is magnified by the density at which they are present in cities.

A Question

A cat chases a model train as it loops a figure-eight around a Christmas tree, darting amongst wrapped presents and glittering electric lights. The situation is testament to the flexibility of the animal mind. There are neither model trains nor wrapping paper nor spark-filled bits of glass in the natural habitat of the domestic feline. The cat's behavior lends itself to two alternative interpretations: we can infantilize the behavior or we can anthropomorphize it. Infantilization concludes that the cat is profoundly stupid, and that it simply interprets anything small and moving as a mouse, any lumps in the way as rocks, and anything glittering as the stars overhead, if even worth noticing at all. Anthropomorphization suggests that the cat is profoundly intelligent, and that it adapts seamlessly to concepts utterly foreign to those wired into its brain. In this model, the cat chases the train knowing that it is not a mouse, but enjoying the similarity nonetheless.

Now consider a human being instead of a cat.

Telecommunications and global transportation intertwine six billion people only 500 generations removed from tribes of a few dozen drifting through the savannahs and jungles. Do our minds adapt any differently than that of the cat? That is, are human beings profoundly stupid or profoundly intelligent?

The answer is more complicated than the question, but holds insight into how individuals interact with society as a whole. It helps explain many of the contradictions and central conflicts of modern man. In short, the cat manages to be both intelligent and stupid.

Symbols

Symbols in and of themselves are arbitrary and meaningless. Their symbolic value comes from the combination of symbols together into a system. It is the pattern between the symbols that holds symbolic power.  These patterns in and of themselves should not rationally have any meaning or power since they are merely assemblages of proxies. Only proxies that are valued more than simple proxies take on symbolic value. This is of course the central dilemma of symbols: how can something we rationally know has no power, have any power at all?

The key is in understanding that the mind can be broken into two components for the purposes of this discussion: the rational and the sensual. The rational mind can appreciate and distinguish that a toy train is not a mouse, but the sensual mind responds to the toy train as if it were a mouse. In other words, the sensual mind has no concept of metaphor. If two items evoke similar emotional responses, to the sensual mind, they are the same object. The vagaries of simile and metaphor are left to the rational mind, bereft of emotional response. Symbols therefore become real, not because people are so stupid that they believe the proxy is the same as the actual, but because our brains on a sensual level respond to the proxy as if it were real. The rational mind appreciates the distinction between proxy and actual, whereas the sensual mind responds in kind to both.

This methodology explains why it does not matter what a symbol is, or even to a degree how irrational it is. Symbols can be arbitrary because their power does not reside in any sort of measure of merit, but simply as a binary calculation of emotional resemblance. A crucifix can manifest in an infinite variety of simple and complex forms, but to the believer, a cross's symbolic quality derives from the emotional reaction tied to it. That reaction may be limited to a specific orthodox cruciform, or it may be as broad as accepting anything close to the basic shape. The symbolism needs no rational basis, and in fact rational explanations for the quality of one symbol over another are gilding applied to mask the irrational from an increasingly rational world.

Empathy

The way the mind reacts to symbols also plays an important role in how societies are structured. Human relationships naturally grow out of small family and kin groups. In the natural world, the human brain does not deal with large numbers of individuals. There are a very limited number of metaphors for the relationships between individuals. These metaphors cannot always be readily applied to the complex social relationships that arise in modern society. The rational brain can invent and adapt to these logical structures at will, but the sensual mind does not have the same luxury.

The way that the sensual mind deals with concepts for which it is not wired is to shoehorn them into existing metaphors. Nations are families. Allies are friends. Other citizens are brothers and sisters. The state is both father and mother. These similar relationships are easy to dismiss as convenient but meaningless metaphors, but the sensual mind's incapacity for metaphor reveals these relationships as critical to understanding how and why individuals react in seemingly irrational ways to government and politics. It is the metaphor of "nation as family" that produces the ideological structures of contemporary conservatism and contemporary liberalism.

The basis for social relationships is empathy, the ability to see others as oneself. Recent developments in neuroscience suggest that empathy is born not of rationalization, i.e. thinking that another's pain is bad because it reminds of the potential for one's own pain, but from feeling some shadow of that pain in one's own brain.  Empathy derives from being unable to disassociate oneself from one's peers. The pain of one is the pain of all.
This is why sociopaths have the most rational of minds: the disconnection from others leaves nothing but rationality behind. The profound alienation felt by so many individuals in society is a result of an overly rational society dismissing the structural underpinnings of society itself. In other words, if the connections between people are fundamentally irrational in nature, then the prizing of rationality above all else in a society will inevitably lead to a society with no social structure.

The startlingly frequent occurrence of alienation in the most educated and most successful individuals is a logical consequence when society is viewed in this context. An oft-asked question is whether education causes depression and alienation or whether it is something inborn in intelligence itself. The answer is that alienation is a byproduct of fully embracing modern society's focus on rationalism. Ergo, those most successful at the embrace of society's rationale are most affected by the byproduct.

All the complexities of symbolic systems and elaborate social structures can be boiled down to the basic building blocks upon which our minds operate. The human mind functions like a multiple choice exam. When we are faced with anything, be it an idea, a political party, an acquaintance, et cetera, we fit it into one of the bubbles. There is no option for "none of the above." That bubble, or writing in your own answer, is the reaction of two types of minds: the entirely irrational or the entirely rational. The madman or the genius. A madman has no regard for the social and mental rules that force an accepted answer. A genius may take the same route, because if none of the answers fit, the only truly rational response is to choose none of them. An average individual will choose the bubble that feels most similar, that evokes the same emotional response. Each bubble is a symbol. A mind divorced from symbolism cannot comprehend the way the rest of society interprets the most basic of concepts, because that interpretation is inseparable from metaphor.

Politics

As historical forces, as opposed to their contemporary political buzzwords, conservatism and liberalism have championed opposite sides of the rational/sensual spectrum. Conservatism champions the return to the way things were, the embrace of traditional values and symbols. Liberalism champions the dismantling of the traditional in favor of the rational. Each taken to its extreme is dysfunctional and horrific. Fascism's worship of symbol consumes the actual. Communism's orgy of atheism consumes the symbolic.

Both forces can also be understood through the primal symbols they embody. Conservatives sees government fundamentally as a father. Liberals see government fundamentally as a mother. These archetypes exemplify the arbitrary nature of symbols: different individuals invest different meanings in the same entity depending on their own emotional reaction to the entity in question. One cat may chase the train/mouse, where another will flee from the train/snake. It is then a logical consequence that fascist soldiers fought for the fatherland even as communist troops defended the motherland.

Traditionalism

Traditionalism is a reaction to an overly rational society, a society that forgets or explains away its old symbols. The gist of the traditionalist mindset is that things used to be better, and that they can be again if only the symbols and values of that time can be restored. The two natural consequences of conservative ideology are scapegoats and eternal war. If the world used to be better, the logic inevitably goes, then someone must be responsible for the decline. Tied back to primal concepts, the father must discipline and take control in order to fix the social disorder of the tribe. The symbols and values of society once restored must be protected lest they be eclipsed again either by other symbols, or worse, a mindset of no symbols at all.

Two potent forces of traditionalism rage against each other in the world today: Islamic traditionalism centered in the Middle East, and American conservatism centered in the rural areas of the United States. These forces provide a valuable insight into the general pattern of traditionalism since they have in many ways defined themselves as each other's opposites.

There are two important notes about the uniqueness of Islamic traditionalism. First, it is unexpectedly centered in the most prosperous Islamic nations, particularly Saudi Arabia. Second, the violence is not directed at the governments the militants see as having failed, but at foreign governments in Europe and America. These two trends are explained best in the context of primal relationships expanded to symbolically encompass societal relationships. The relationship between the west and Arab oil states has produced a small group of nations with extraordinary wealth, but little in the way of an actual economy. Islamic radicals target the most blame within their society at women, and anyone westernized and liberal.

Rural America sees a similar streak of traditionalism, which at face value has little in common with Islamic traditionalism other than its association with religion (Protestantism in place of Islam) and its general alarm at the threat modern society represents to values. The conservative renaissance of rural America has followed along with the gradual collapse of the economies of rural areas, as industry and agriculture have been increasingly exported to foreign countries. The fascinating nuance of American traditionalism is that it finds fault not with big business taking these steps, or a conservative government for allowing them, but with two scapegoats: liberals and foreigners.  On this level, American traditionalists march in step with Islamic fundamentalists. Their variations are in the particular symbols in which they invest meaning, but the pattern of those symbols is the same in American and Islamic traditionalism. They follow the same metaphor.

The reaction of Islamic fundamentalists and American traditionalists is at its most visceral the reaction of children of a cuckolded father. The reaction of children to a father who through inaction allows his wife to be raped by another man, a father who furthermore cannot provided economically for his family, is not one of revolt but of rage and shame. The target of their rage would not be their impotent father, but the invader. The source of their shame is not the attacker, but the mother who invited the attack through immoral behavior.

Liberalism

Liberalism in the modern world has demons of its own to confront. The status of modern liberalism, be it anywhere on the spectrum from communism to socialism to the mild leftism of American democrats, can be summarized simply as bewilderment. Prizing rationalism in the place of symbolism, liberalism cannot comprehend the malice of the right wing. It cannot understand what motivates traditionalists of any stripe. Internally, it cannot understand why the most alienated and lost souls in society come from the ranks of the liberals themselves.

Liberal thought is ill-equipped to deal with problems fundamentally symbolic in nature. The alienation of intellectual liberals is essentially the alienation of a child without a father. The mystification of liberalism by the disillusionment of their own ranks, and the revolt of the right wing is the reaction of a mother mystified by rebellious male children.

Power

In the ubiquity of shared natural metaphors lies power to manipulate society. No metaphor can completely describe its associated real concept. These orphaned elements are items that have no linkage to a specific element of the metaphor. For example, in the metaphor of seeing a nation as a family, what metaphorical mapping can possibly apply to the space program, or to campaign finance reform, or to the balance of federal power versus states' rights? Concepts that do not map easily into the metaphor can be hidden, whereas concepts that readily map can take on disproportionate importance.

Metaphors can be used to control debate on political action by channeling the discussion through metaphors. Political victory is assured not through a rational victory of superior ideas, but through an emotional victory of empathy for a candidate's metaphors.

Final Thoughts

The power that symbols and metaphors hold over our minds seems irresistible, a force that controls our relationships with society, a force that can be manipulated, a force that undermines the rational revolution of liberalism that in fits and starts has come to dominate the world since the Renaissance. Are we nothing more than slaves to symbols then, captive to the whims of those with the ability to manipulate those metaphors? We are slaves only to the things to which we are blind. A harmonious society requires balance, but we cannot achieve that balance unless we understand that something is out of balance in the first place.

Some might say that sunshine follows thunder
Go and tell it to the man who cannot shine

With Tiller's murder, the various Fox News pundits who reviled him for years as a baby killing death mill Nazi ripped into a higher gear of spin. They did not apologize for a word that they had said, but reiterated that sickening excuse of modern journalism: we didn't incite violence, we merely reported that some people did.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a moment of clarity occurred when Fox News descended upon an Obama husband/wife fist bump as a "terrorist fist jab". It was so beyond absurd, such patent partisan hackery, one wondered how it could even be uttered with a straight face. Of course, it didn't matter that it was a fist bump, the copy was ready to go for the jihadist high five, communist handshake, and pedophile pat on the shoulder. The beauty of it though, the true triumph of applying Orwellian newspeak to broadcast journalism was in the semantic dance around the accusation. No Fox talking head ever said that Obama was a terrorist because he bumped fists with his wife, they insisted that some people were saying that to be true.

Oh the beauty of that simple innovation. What utter freedom a lack of responsibility and ethics can bestow upon you. Take the vilest, most insulting, most obviously untrue statement imaginable, but preface it with "some people are saying" and you are no longer a shit slinging extension of an interest group's organization but a responsible journalist dedicated to the truth. "Obama is a communist racist conspiring to destroy America" is name calling. "Some people say that Obama is a communist racist conspiring to destroy America" is responsible journalism. It reeks of junior high, when that one malicious brat feigns innocence after making a girl cry, "it's not my fault, I didn't call her a fat whore, I just told her that some people were calling her a fat whore." Remember that smug smile on that kid's face? The way all three of his neurons agreed that he was the smartest and most clever kid in the school for thinking of that loophole? Don't you just see Bill O'Reilly's face superimposed on that kid's smirk now?

Realizing that an entire news organization can espouse whatever political agenda it desires so long as it prefaces everything with "some people are saying" leads inevitably to the next step, the wholesale engineering of truth. If a journalist isn't responsible for reporting facts, but on reporting what people say the facts are, then our intrepid journalist cannot be held responsible if there is no factual basis for what people say. After all, they're just reporting on the fact that someone is saying something, not on the factual accuracy of the words coming out of that person's mouth. "Obama is not an American citizen" is a lie. "Some people say that Obama is not an American citizen" is an honest reporting of fact. It's like reading Soviet era newspapers. "The government says that harvests are at record highs this year" even while children starve all around and breadlines form a week in advance. It's not a lie, the government is saying those words.

And that leads to the final stage of the "some people say" rationalization, the one made so bloodily apparent by Dr. George Tiller's murder. "George Tiller should be killed" is an incitement to violence. "Some people say George Tiller should be killed" is just an honest reporting of the facts.

Some might say there's a better way.

Some might say they don't believe in heaven
Go and tell it to the man who lives in hell