As I type these words, it looks as though the wheels are
coming off the global economy. Greece and Puerto Rico have both suspended
payments on their debts, and China’s stock market, which spent the last year in
a classic speculative bubble, is now in the middle of a classic speculative
bust. Those of my readers who’ve read John Kenneth Galbraith’s lively history
The Great Crash 1929 already know all about the Chinese
situation, including the outcome—and since vast amounts of money from all over
the world went into Chinese stocks, and most of that money is in the process of
turning into twinkle dust, the impact of the crash will inevitably proliferate
through the global economy.
So, in all probability, will the Greek and Puerto Rican
defaults. In today’s bizarre financial world, the kind of bad debts that used
to send investors backing away in a hurry attract speculators in droves, and so
it turns out that some
big New York hedge funds are in trouble as a result of the Greek
default, and some
of the same firms that got into trouble with mortgage-backed
securities in the recent housing bubble are in the same kind of
trouble over Puerto Rico’s unpayable debts. How far will the contagion spread?
It’s anybody’s guess.
Oh, and on another front, nearly
half a million acres of Alaska burned up in a single day last
week—yes, the fires are still going—while ice
sheets in Greenland are collapsing so frequently and forcefully that
the resulting earthquakes are rattling seismographs thousands of miles away.
These and other signals of a biosphere in crisis make good reminders of the
fact that the current economic mess isn’t happening in a vacuum. As Ugo Bardi pointed
out in a
thoughtful blog post, finance is the flotsam on the surface of the
ocean of real exchanges of real goods and services, and the current drumbeat of
financial crises are symptomatic of the real crisis—the arrival of the limits
to growth that so many people have been discussing, and so many more have been
trying to ignore, for the last half century or so.
A great many people in the doomward end of the blogosphere
are talking about what’s going on in the global economy and what’s likely to
blow up next. Around the time the next round of financial explosions start
shaking the world’s windows, a great many of those same people will likely be
talking about what to do about it all. I
don’t plan on joining them in that discussion. As blog posts here have pointed
out more than once, time has to be considered when getting ready for a crisis.
The industrial world would have had to start backpedaling away from the abyss
decades ago in order to forestall the crisis we’re now in, and the same
principle applies to individuals. The
slogan “collapse now and avoid the rush!” loses most of its point, after all,
when the rush is already under way.
Any of my readers who are still pinning their hopes on
survival ecovillages and rural doomsteads they haven’t gotten around to buying
or building yet, in other words, are very likely out of luck. They, like the
rest of us, will be meeting this where they are, with what they have right now.
This is ironic, in that ideas that might have been worth adopting three or four
years ago are just starting to get traction now. I’m thinking here particularly
of a
recent article on how to use permaculture to prepare for a difficult
future, which describes the difficult future in terms that will be highly
familiar to readers of this blog. More broadly, there’s a remarkable amount of
common ground between that article and the themes of my book Green
Wizardry. The awkward fact remains that when the global banking
industry shows every sign of freezing up the way it did in 2008, putting credit
for land purchases out of reach of most people for years to come, the article’s
advice may have come rather too late.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that my readers ought to crawl
under their beds and wait for death. What we’re facing, after all, isn’t the
end of the world—though it may feel like that for those who are too deeply
invested, in any sense of that last word you care to use, in the existing order
of industrial society. As Visigothic mommas used to remind their impatient
sons, Rome wasn’t sacked in a day. The crisis ahead of us marks the end of what
I’ve called abundance industrialism and the transition to scarcity
industrialism, as well as the end of America’s global hegemony and the
emergence of a new international order whose main beneficiary hasn’t been
settled yet. Those paired transformations will most likely unfold across
several decades of economic chaos, political turmoil, environmental disasters,
and widespread warfare. Plenty of people got through the equivalent cataclysms
of the first half of the twentieth century with their skins intact, even if the
crisis caught them unawares, and no doubt plenty of people will get through the
mess that’s approaching us in much the same condition.
Thus I don’t have any additional practical advice, beyond
what I’ve already covered in my books and blog posts, to offer my readers just
now. Those who’ve already collapsed and gotten ahead of the rush can break out
the popcorn and watch what promises to be a truly colorful show. Those who didn’t—well, you might as well get
some popcorn going and try to enjoy the show anyway. If you come out the other
side of it all, schoolchildren who aren’t even born yet may eventually come
around to ask you awed questions about what happened when the markets crashed in
‘15.
In the meantime, while the popcorn is popping and the
sidewalks of Wall Street await their traditional tithe of plummeting
stockbrokers, I’d like to return to the theme of last week’s post and talk
about the way that the myth of the machine—if you prefer, the widespread mental
habit of thinking about the world in mechanistic terms—pervades and cripples
the modern mind.
Of all the responses that last week’s post fielded, those I
found most amusing, and also most revealing, were those that insisted that of
course the universe is a machine, so is everything and everybody in it, and
that’s that. That’s amusing because most of the authors of these comments made
it very clear that they embraced the sort of scientific-materialist atheism
that rejects any suggestion that the universe has a creator or a purpose. A
machine, though, is by definition a purposive artifact—that is, it’s made by
someone to do something. If the universe is a machine, then, it has a creator
and a purpose, and if it doesn’t have a creator and a purpose, logically
speaking, it can’t be a machine.
That sort of unintentional comedy inevitably pops up
whenever people don’t think through the implications of their favorite
metaphors. Still, chase that habit further along its giddy path and you’ll find
a deeper absurdity at work. When people say “the universe is a machine,” unless
they mean that statement as a poetic simile, they’re engaging in a very dubious
sort of logic. As Alfred Korzybski pointed out a good many years ago, pretty much
any time you say “this is that,” unless you implicitly or explicitly qualify
what you mean in very careful terms, you’ve just babbled nonsense.
The difficulty lies in that seemingly innocuous word “is.”
What Korzybski called the “is of identity”—the use of the word “is” to
represent =, the sign of equality—makes
sense only in a very narrow range of uses.
You can use the “is of identity” with good results in categorical definitions;
when I commented above that a machine is a purposive artifact, that’s what I
was doing. Here is a concept, “machine;” here are two other concepts,
“purposive” and “artifact;” the concept “machine” logically includes the
concepts “purposive” and “artifact,” so anything that can be described by the
words “a machine” can also be described as “purposive” and “an artifact.”
That’s how categorical definitions work.
Let’s consider a second example, though: “a machine is a
purple dinosaur.” That utterance uses the same structure as the one we’ve just
considered. I hope I don’t have to prove
to my readers, though, that the concept “machine” doesn’t include the concepts
“purple” and “dinosaur” in any but the most whimsical of senses. There are plenty of things that can be
described by the label “machine,” in other words, that can’t be described by
the labels “purple” or “dinosaur.” The fact that some machines—say, electronic
Barney dolls—can in fact be described as purple dinosaurs doesn’t make the
definition any less silly; it simply means that the statement “no machine is a
purple dinosaur” can’t be justified either.
With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the statement
“the universe is a machine.” As pointed out earlier, the concept “machine”
implies the concepts “purposive” and “artifact,” so if the universe is a
machine, somebody made it to carry out some purpose. Those of my readers who
happen to belong to Christianity, Islam, or another religion that envisions the
universe as the creation of one or more deities—not all religions make this
claim, by the way—will find this conclusion wholly unproblematic. My atheist
readers will disagree, of course, and their reaction is the one I want to
discuss here. (Notice how “is” functions in the sentence just uttered: “the
reaction of the atheists” equals “the reaction I want to discuss.” This is one
of the few other uses of “is” that doesn’t tend to generate nonsense.)
In my experience, at least, atheists faced with the argument
about the meaning of the word “machine” I’ve presented here pretty reliably
respond with something like “It’s not a machine in that sense.” That
response takes us straight to the heart of the logical problems with the “is of
identity.” In what sense is the universe a machine? Pursue the argument far
enough, and unless the atheist storms off in a huff—which admittedly tends to
happen more often than not—what you’ll get amounts to “the universe and a
machine share certain characteristics in common.” Go further still—and at this
point the atheist will almost certainly storm off in a huff—and you’ll discover
that the characteristics that the universe is supposed to share with a machine
are all things we can’t actually prove one way or another about the universe,
such as whether it has a creator or a purpose.
The statement “the universe is a machine,” in other words,
doesn’t do what it appears to do. It appears to state a categorical identity;
it actually states an unsupported generalization in absolute terms. It takes a
mental model abstracted from one corner of human experience and applies it to
something unrelated. In this case, for
polemic reasons, it does so in a predictably one-sided way: deductions approved
by the person making the statement (“the universe is a machine, therefore it
lacks life and consciousness”) are acceptable, while deductions the person making
the statement doesn’t like (“the universe is a machine, therefore it was made
by someone for some purpose”) get the dismissive response noted above.
This sort of doublethink appears all through the landscape
of contemporary nonconversation and nondebate, to be sure, but the problems
with the “is of identity” don’t stop with its polemic abuse. Any time you say
“this is that,” and mean something other than “this has some features in common
with that,” you’ve just fallen into one of the corel boobytraps hardwired into
the structure of human thought.
Human beings think in categories. That’s what made ancient
Greek logic, which takes categories as its basic element, so massive a
revolution in the history of human thinking: by watching the way that one category
includes or excludes another, which is what the Greek logicians did, you can
squelch a very large fraction of human stupidities before they get a foothold.
What Alfred Korzybski pointed out, in effect, is that there’s a metalogic that
the ancient Greeks didn’t get to, and logical theorists since their time
haven’t really tackled either: the extremely murky relationship between the
categories we think with and the things we experience, which don’t come with
category labels spraypainted on them.
Here is a green plant with a woody stem. Is it a tree or a
shrub? That depends on exactly where you draw the line between those two
categories, and as any botanist can tell you, that’s neither an easy nor an
obvious thing. As long as you remember that categories exist within the human
mind as convenient handles for us to think with, you can navigate around the
difficulties, but when you slip into thinking that the categories are more real
than the things they describe, you’re in deep, deep trouble.
It’s not at all surprising that human thought should have
such problems built into it. If, as I do, you accept the Darwinian thesis that
human beings evolved out of prehuman primates by the normal workings of the
laws of evolution, it follows logically that our nervous systems and cognitive
structures didn’t evolve for the purpose of understanding the truth about the
cosmos; they evolved to assist us in getting food, attracting mates, fending
off predators, and a range of similar, intellectually undemanding tasks. If, as
many of my theist readers do, you believe that human beings were created by a
deity, the yawning chasm between creator and created, between an infinite and a
finite intelligence, stands in the way of any claim that human beings can know
the unvarnished truth about the cosmos. Neither viewpoint supports the claim
that a category created by the human mind is anything but a convenience that
helps our very modest mental powers grapple with an ultimately incomprehensible
cosmos.
Any time human beings try to make sense of the universe or
any part of it, in turn, they have to choose from among the available
categories in an attempt to make the object of inquiry fit the capacities of
their minds. That’s what the founders of the scientific revolution did in the
seventeenth century, by taking the category of “machine” and applying it to the
universe to see how well it would fit. That was a perfectly rational choice
from within their cultural and intellectual standpoint. The founders of the
scientific revolution were Christians to a man, and some of them (for example,
Isaac Newton) were devout even by the standards of the time; the idea that the
universe had been made by someone for some purpose, after all, wasn’t
problematic in the least to people who took it as given that the universe was
made by God for the purpose of human salvation. It was also a useful choice in
practical terms, because it allowed certain features of the
universe—specifically, the behavior of masses in motion—to be accounted for and
modeled with a clarity that previous categories hadn’t managed to achieve.
The fact that one narrowly defined aspect of the universe
seems to behave like a machine, though, does not prove that the universe is a
machine, any more than the fact that one machine happens to look like a purple
dinosaur proves that all machines are purple dinosaurs. The success of
mechanistic models in explaining the behavior of masses in motion proved that
mechanical metaphors are good at fitting some of the observed phenomena of physics
into a shape that’s simple enough for human cognition to grasp, and that’s all
it proved. To go from that modest fact to the claim that the universe and
everything in it are machines involves an intellectual leap of pretty
spectacular scale. Part of the reason that leap was taken in the seventeenth
century was the religious frame of scientific inquiry at that time, as already
mentioned, but there was another factor, too.
It’s a curious fact that mechanistic models of the universe
appeared in western European cultures, and become wildly popular there, well
before the machines did. In the early seventeenth century, machines played a
very modest role in the life of most Europeans; most tasks were done using hand
tools powered by human and animal muscle, the way they had been done since the
dawn of the agricultural revolution eight millennia or so before. The most
complex devices available at the time were pendulum clocks, printing presses,
handlooms, and the like—you know, the sort of thing that people these days use
instead of machines when they want to get away from technology.
For reasons that historians of ideas are still trying to
puzzle out, though, western European thinkers during these same years were
obsessed with machines, and with mechanical explanations for the universe.
Those latter ranged from the plausible to the frankly preposterous—René
Descartes, for example, proposed a theory of gravity in which little
corkscrew-shaped particles went zooming up from the earth to screw themselves
into pieces of matter and yank them down. Until Isaac Newton, furthermore,
theories of nature based on mechanical models didn’t actually explain that
much, and until the cascade of inventive adaptations of steam power that ended
with James Watt’s epochal steam engine nearly a century after Newton, the idea
that machines could elbow aside craftspeople using hand tools and animals
pulling carts was an unproven hypothesis. Yet a great many people in western
Europe believed in the power of the machine as devoutly as their ancestors had
believed in the power of the bones of the local saints.
A habit of thought very widespread in today’s culture
assumes that technological change happens first and the world of ideas changes
in response to it. The facts simply won’t support that claim, though. As the
history of mechanistic ideas in science shows clearly, the ideas come first and
the technologies follow—and there’s good reason why this should be so.
Technologies don’t invent themselves, after all. Somebody has to put in the
work to invent them, and then other people have to invest the resources to take
them out of the laboratory and give them a role in everyday life. The decisions
that drive invention and investment, in turn, are powerfully shaped by cultural
forces, and these in turn are by no means as rational as the people influenced
by them generally like to think.
