Two news stories and an op-ed piece in the media in recent
days provide a useful introduction to the theme of this week’s post here on The
Archdruid Report. The first news story followed the official announcement
that the official unemployment rate here in the United States dropped to 5.5%
last month. This was immediately hailed by pundits and politicians as proof
that the recession we weren’t in is over at last, and the happy days that never
went away are finally here again.
This jubilation makes perfect sense so long as you don’t
happen to know that the official unemployment rate in the United States doesn’t
actually depend on the number of people who are out of work. What it indicates
is the percentage of US residents who happen to be receiving unemployment
benefits—which, as I think most people know at this point, run out after a
certain period. Right now there are a huge number of Americans who exhausted
their unemployment benefits a long time ago, can’t find work, and would count
as unemployed by any measure except the one used by the US government these
days. As far as officialdom is
concerned, they are nonpersons in very nearly an Orwellian sense, their
existence erased to preserve a politically expedient fiction of prosperity.
How many of these economic nonpersons are there in the
United States today? That figure’s not easy to find amid the billowing
statistical smokescreens. Still, it’s worth noting that 92,898,000 Americans of
working age are
not currently in the work force—that is, more than 37 per cent of the
working age population. If you spend time around people who don’t belong to
this nation’s privileged classes, you already know that a lot of those people
would gladly take jobs if there were jobs to be had, but again, that’s not
something that makes it through the murk.
We could spend quite a bit of time talking about the galaxy
of ways in which economic statistics are finessed and/or fabricated these days,
but the points already raised are enough for the present purpose. Let’s move
on. The op-ed piece comes from erstwhile environmentalist Stewart Brand, whose
long journey from editing CoEvolution Quarterly to channeling Bjorn
Lomborg is as perfect a microcosm of the moral collapse of 20th century
American environmentalism as you could hope to find. Brand’s
latest piece claims that despite all evidence to the contrary—and of
course there’s quite a bit of that these days—the environment is doing just
fine: the economy has decoupled from resource use in recent decades, at least
here in America, and so we can continue to wallow in high-tech consumer goodies
without worrying about what we’re doing to the planet.
There’s a savage irony in the fact that in 1975, when his
magazine was the go-to place to read about the latest ideas in systems theory
and environmental science, Brand could have pointed out the gaping flaw in that
argument in a Sausalito minute. Increasing prosperity in the United States has
“decoupled” from resource use for two reasons: first, only a narrowing circle
of privileged Americans get to see any of the paper prosperity we’re
discussing—the standard of living for most people in this country has been
contracting steadily for four decades—and second, the majority of consumer
goods used in the United States are produced overseas, and so the resource use
and environmental devastation involved in manufacturing the goodies we consume
so freely takes place somewhere else.
That is to say, what Brand likes to call decoupling is our
old friend, the mass production of ecological externalities. Brand can boast
about prosperity without environmental cost because the great majority of the
costs are being carried by somebody else, somewhere else, and so don’t find
their way into his calculations. The
poor American neighborhoods where people struggle to get by without jobs are as
absent from his vision of the world as they are from the official statistics;
the smokestacks, outflow pipes, toxic-waste dumps, sweatshopped factories, and
open-pit mines worked by slave labor that prop up his high-tech lifestyle are overseas,
so they don’t show up on US statistics either. As far as Brand is concerned,
that means they don’t count.
We could talk more about the process by which a man who
first became famous for pressuring NASA into releasing a photo of the whole
earth is now insisting that the only view that matters is the one from his
living room window, but let’s go on. The other news item is the simplest and,
in a bleak sort of way, the funniest of the lot. According to recent reports, state government
officials in Florida are being forbidden
from using the phrase “climate change” when discussing the effects
of, whisper it, climate change.
This is all the more mordantly funny because Florida is on
the front lines of climate change right now.
Even the very modest increases in sea level we’ve seen so far, driven by
thermal expansion and the first rounds of Greenland and Antarctic meltwater,
are sending seawater rushing out of the storm sewers into the streets of
low-lying parts of coastal Florida towns whenever the tide is high and an
onshore wind blows hard enough. As climate change accelerates—and despite
denialist handwaving, it does seem to be doing that just now—a lot of expensive
waterfront property in Florida is going to end up underwater in more than a
financial sense. The state government’s
response to this clear and present danger? Prevent state officials from talking
about it.
We could look at a range of other examples of this same
kind, but these three will do for now. What I want to discuss now is what’s
going on here, and what it implies.
Let’s begin with the obvious. In all three of the cases I’ve
cited, an uncomfortable reality is being dismissed by manipulating
abstractions. An abstraction called “the unemployment rate” has been defined so
that the politicians and bureaucrats who cite it don’t have to deal with just
how many Americans these days can’t get paid employment; an abstraction called
“decoupling” and a range of equally abstract (and cherrypicked) measures of
environmental health are being deployed so that Brand and his readers don’t
have to confront the soaring ecological costs of computer technology in
particular and industrial society in general; an abstraction called “climate
change,” finally, is being banned from use by state officials because it does
too good a job of connecting certain dots that, for political reasons, Florida
politicians don’t want people to connect.
To a very real extent, this sort of thing is pervasive in
human interaction, and has been since the hoots and grunts of hominin
vocalization first linked up with a few crude generalizations in the dazzled
mind of an eccentric australopithecine. Human beings everywhere use abstract
categories and the words that denote them as handles by which to grab hold of
unruly bundles of experience. We do it far more often, and far more
automatically, than most of us ever notice.
It’s only under special circumstances—waking up at night in an
unfamiliar room, for example, and finding that the vague somethings around us
take a noticeable amount of time to coalesce into ordinary furniture—that the
mind’s role in assembling the fragmentary data of sensation into the objects of
our experience comes to light.
When you look at a tree, for example, it’s common sense to
think that the tree is sitting out there, and your eyes and mind are just
passively receiving a picture of it—but then it’s common sense to think that
the sun revolves around the earth. In fact, as philosophers and researchers
into the psychophysics of sensation both showed a long time ago, what happens
is that you get a flurry of fragmentary sense data—green, brown, line, shape,
high contrast, low contrast—and your mind constructs a tree out of it, using
its own tree-concept (as well as a flurry of related concepts such as “leaf,”
“branch,” “bark,” and so on) as a template. You do that with everything you
see, and the reason you don’t notice it is that it was the very first thing you
learned how to do, as a newborn infant, and you’ve practiced it so often you
don’t have to think about it any more.
You do the same thing with every representation of a sensory
object. Let’s take visual art for an example.
Back in the 1880s, when the Impressionists first started displaying
their paintings, it took many people a real effort to learn how to look at
them, and a great many never managed the trick at all. Among those who did,
though, it was quite common to hear comments about how this or that painting
had taught them to see a landscape, or what have you, in a completely different
way. That wasn’t just hyperbole: the
Impressionists had learned how to look at things in a way that brought out
features of their subjects that other people in late 19th century Europe and
America had never gotten around to noticing, and highlighted those things in
their paintings so forcefully that the viewer had to notice them.
The relation between words and the things they denote is
thus much more complex, and much more subjective, than most people ever quite
get around to realizing. That’s challenging enough when we’re talking about
objects of immediate experience, where the concept in the observer’s mind has
the job of fitting fragmentary sense data into a pattern that can be verified
by other forms of sense data—in the example of the tree, by walking up to it
and confirming by touch that the trunk is in fact where the sense of sight said
it was. It gets far more difficult when the raw material that’s being assembled
by the mind consists of concepts rather than sensory data: when, let’s say, you
move away from your neighbor Joe, who can’t find a job and is about to lose his
house, start thinking about all the people in town who are in a similar
predicament, and end up dealing with abstract concepts such as unemployment,
poverty, the distribution of wealth, and so on.
Difficult or not, we all do this, all the time. There’s a
common notion that dealing in abstractions is the hallmark of the intellectual,
but that puts things almost exactly backwards; it’s the ordinary unreflective
person who thinks in abstractions most of the time, while the thinker’s task is
to work back from the abstract category to the raw sensory data on which it’s
based. That’s what the Impressionists did:
staring at a snowbank as Monet did, until he could see the rainbow play
of colors behind the surface impression of featureless white, and then painting
the colors into the representation of the snowbank so that the viewer was
shaken out of the trance of abstraction (“snow” = “white”) and saw the colors
too—first in the painting, and then when looking at actual snow.
Human thinking, and human culture, thus dance constantly
between the concrete and the abstract, or to use a slightly different
terminology, between immediate experience and a galaxy of forms that reflect
experience back in mediated form. It’s a delicate balance: too far into the
immediate and experience disintegrates into fragmentary sensation; too far from
the immediate and experience vanishes into an echo chamber of abstractions
mediating one another. The most successful and enduring creations of human
culture have tended to be those that maintain the balance. Representational
painting is one of those; another is literature. Read the following passage
closely:
“Eastward the Barrow-downs rose, ridge behind ridge into the
morning, and vanished out of eyesight into a guess: it was no more than a guess
of blue and a remote white glimmer blending with the hem of the sky, but it
spoke to them, out of memory and old tales, of the high and distant mountains.”
By the time you finished reading it, you likely had a very
clear sense of what Frodo Baggins and his friends were seeing as they looked
off to the east from the hilltop behind Tom Bombadil’s house. So did I, as I
copied the sentence, and so do most people who read that passage—but no two
people see the same image, because the image each of us sees is compounded out
of bits of our own remembered experiences. For me, the image that comes to mind
has always drawn heavily on the view eastwards from the suburban Seattle
neighborhoods where I grew up, across the rumpled landscape to the stark
white-topped rampart of the Cascade Mountains. I know for a fact that that
wasn’t the view that Tolkien himself had in mind when he penned that sentence;
I suspect he was thinking of the view across the West Midlands toward the Welsh
mountains, which I’ve never seen; and I wonder what it must be like for someone
to read that passage whose concept of ridges and mountains draws on childhood
memories of the Urals, the Andes, or Australia’s Great Dividing Range instead.
That’s one of the ways that literature takes the reader
through the mediation of words back around to immediate experience. If I ever
do have the chance to stand on a hill in the West Midlands and look off toward
the Welsh mountains, Tolkien’s words are going to be there with me, pointing me
toward certain aspects of the view I might not otherwise have noticed, just as
they did in my childhood. It’s the same trick the Impressionists managed with a
different medium: stretching the possibilities of experience by representing
(literally re-presenting) the immediate in a mediated form.
Now think about what happens when that same process is
hijacked, using modern technology, for the purpose of behavioral control.
That’s what advertising does, and more generally what the
mass media do. Think about the fast food company that markets its product under
the slogan “I’m loving it,” complete with all those images of people sighing
with post-orgasmic bliss as they ingest some artificially flavored and colored
gobbet of processed pseudofood. Are they loving it? Of course not; they’re hack
actors being paid to go through the motions of loving it, so that the imagery
can be drummed into your brain and drown out your own recollection of the
experience of not loving it. The goal of the operation is to keep you away from
immediate experience, so that a deliberately distorted mediation can be put in
its place.
You can do that with literature and painting, by the way.
You can do it with any form of mediation, but it’s a great deal more effective
with modern visual media, because those latter short-circuit the journey back
to immediate experience. You see the person leaning back with the sigh of bliss
after he takes a bite of pasty bland bun and tasteless gray mystery-meat patty,
and you see it over and over and over again. If you’re like most Americans, and
spend four or five hours a day staring blankly at little colored images on a
glass screen, a very large fraction of your total experience of the world
consists of this sort of thing: distorted imitations of immediate experience,
intended to get you to think about the world in ways that immediate experience
won’t justify.
The externalization of the human mind and imagination via
the modern mass media has no shortage of problematic features, but the one I
want totalk about here is the way that it feeds into the behavior discussed at
the beginning of this post: the habit, pervasive in modern industrial societies
just now, of responding to serious crises by manipulating abstractions to make
them invisible. That kind of thing is commonplace in civilizations on their way
out history’s exit door, for reasons I’ve discussed in
an earlier sequence of posts here, but modern visual media make it an
even greater problem in the present instance. These latter function as a
prosthetic for the imagination, a device for replacing the normal image-making
functions of the human mind with electromechanical equivalents. What’s more,
you don’t control the prosthetic imagination; governments and corporations
control it, and use it to shape your thoughts and behavior in ways that aren’t
necessarily in your best interests.
The impact on the prosthetic imagination on the crisis of
our time is almost impossible to overstate. I wonder, for example, how many of
my readers have noticed just how pervasive references to science fiction movies
and TV shows have become in discussions of the future of technology. My
favorite example just now is the replicator, a convenient gimmick from the Star
Trek universe: you walk up to it and order something, and the replicator
pops it into being out of nothing.
It’s hard to think of a better metaphor for the way that
people in the privileged classes of today’s industrial societies like to think
of the consumer economy. It’s also hard to think of anything that’s further
removed from the realities of the consumer economy. The replicator is the
ultimate wet dream of externalization: it has no supply chains, no factories,
no smokestacks, no toxic wastes, just whatever product you want any time you
happen to want it. That’s exactly the kind of thinking that lies behind Stewart
Brand’s fantasy of “decoupling”—and it’s probably no accident that more often
than not, when I’ve had conversations with people who think that 3-D printers
are the solution to everything, they bring Star Trek replicators into
the discussion.
3-D printers are not replicators. Their supply chains and
manufacturing costs include the smokestacks, outflow pipes, toxic-waste dumps,
sweatshopped factories, and open-pit mines worked by slave labor mentioned
earlier, and the social impacts of their widespread adoption would include
another wave of mass technological unemployment—remember, it’s only in the
highly mediated world of current economic propaganda that people who lose their
jobs due to automation automatically get new jobs in some other field; in the
immediate world, that’s become increasingly uncommon. As long as people look at
3-D printers through minds full of little pictures of Star Trek
replicators, though, those externalized ecological and social costs are going
to be invisible to them.
