Conspiracy Theories

A running joke in America. Perhaps partly because we all have our pet untried ideas about how the world works. Perhaps because it’s unfathomable that someone could be a zealot about something with so little support.

Really, conspiracy theories make perfect sense. Abstract thinking is very challenging. Abstract thinking that then becomes an emotional response is even harder to do. Anyone who has ever tried to diet knows this. The more abstract and isolated from context the thinking, the more difficult to translate it into an emotion. This is why we need reading and music. It is hands down the best way to invite an emotional response to an abstract idea.

Ideally, our public education trains us in the appropriate modes of abstract thinking. As the Oct 2015 Analog’s editor’s note shows, science trained minds grow bewildered at the habits of thought of those who do not adhere to the principles of those who (cannot/do not/will not) adhere to the tenets of scientific observation and rationality.

It seems clear that this requires new ways of thinking about how people think in our daily lives. The hatred I’ve seen expressed in slang terms about political parties is not condoned in any other area of our lives. I think it is ok if people do not value rationality. What’s not ok is not understanding it, because it is the dominant mode of thinking of crucial facets of 21st humanity. What does one do when one has a large segment of the population that does not want to listen to science?

One writes good stories, and finds ways to get people to be active readers.

One also strives to bring science into everyday conversations with everyday people. I’m only 26, from a small, distant segment of American society, but I have seen enough to begin to comment. People talk only to their people entirely too much for anyone’s good.

Of course there are many avenues in which we do grow to know strangers–primarily through introductions or forced encounters via a larger social mechanism (i.e. attending class, or working in customer service). We do not practice it naturally as children because our parents bar us this (for many reasons), as well as our school systems. Not talking to strangers is one way of coping with the lack of control that dominates the American psyche today.

However, why don’t we come to know strangers by sharing our opinions on the state of the world today? Codes of politeness make the road to conversations about things of import (both public and private) a tricky road to navigate.

More conversations ought be struck up between strangers. The chitchat of the people must include not only weather, celebrities and food, but also politics. Perhaps a heroic utopia is one in which Walter and Case and Babbitt all chat with the persons sitting around them in the places where they hang out.

Let’s take the time to strike up conversations with strangers. See if we can grow the conversation towards a better shared language of the American people.

“Metropolis”

Metropolis is a must-see for those interested in dystopian story-telling. It’s influence on later movies is easy to see (Blade Runner, Batman (1989), Gattaca and on and on).

H.G. Wells disdains Metropolis. Egbert, and those on imdb think it brilliant.

What is each side valuing that leads to such a rating? And why does Wells feel like a bit of a lone voice?

As Wells notes, it adds nothing to the conversation on the social and political trajectory of mankind. Hackneyed and oversimplified, it gives socialism a bad name and reinforces misapprehensions about the state of relations amongst classes, even in the time it was written. Yet it is now a “must-see classic,” and hundreds admire it for its aesthetic and story-telling brilliance. These quotes from Wells and Egbert sum up the difference:

Wells:

But a mechanical civilization has no use for mere drudges; the more efficient its machinery the less need there is for the quasi-mechanical minder. It is the inefficient factory that needs slaves; the ill-organized mine that kills men.

The whole aim of mechanical civilization is to eliminate the drudge and the drudge soul.

Egbert:

Lang develops this story with scenes of astonishing originality. Consider the first glimpse of the underground power plant, with workers straining to move heavy dial hands back and forth. What they’re doing makes no logical sense, but visually the connection is obvious: They are controlled like hands on a clock. And when the machinery explodes, Freder has a vision in which the machinery turns into an obscene devouring monster

“Metropolis” does what many great films do, creating a time, place and characters so striking that they become part of our arsenal of images for imagining the world. The ideas of “Metropolis” have been so often absorbed into popular culture that its horrific future city is almost a given (when Albert Brooks dared to create an alternative utopian future in 1991 with “Defending Your Life,” it seemed wrong, somehow, without Satanic urban hellscapes). Lang filmed for nearly a year, driven by obsession, often cruel to his colleagues, a perfectionist madman, and the result is one of those seminal films without which the others cannot be fully appreciated.

 

Metropolis evokes the feel of dystopia without mind to the practicalities of what it is like to exist in the complex chemical equation of capitalist-determined relations. It allows an opportunity for viewers to feel a sense of connection to those in a similar plight. The workday of the low class is illogical. The feeling of marching in to work in such misery is accurate. The blandness of the middle class goods is illogical. The feeling of boring same-ness is accurate.

Wells’s disgust for the movie stems from his intense commitment to furthering a complex and collective understanding about the state of society. Yes, that understanding is undermined by creating such blatantly false pictures of the relationship between power and science, and the relationship between those who wield power and those who are oppressed by power. We do need stories that help further our sense of how science, technology, mythologies of ‘normal’ etc help to create the world we live in and the world we will live in.

We also need what is powerful in its simplicity. We need stories that connect us to each other, and help us understand on a visceral emotional level what it is like to suffer.

I do wish, though, that as a culture concerned with dystopias, we were more interested in how these stories shape what we understand about science and technology. The madman scientist (or master manipulator of innovative technology) is limiting and dated, and yet continues to make appearances.

The emotional impact of a story and the intellectual impact of a story should not get measured by the same yardstick.

I don’t think Oryx & Crake is very good story-telling

This past week I picked up John Brunner’s Sheep Look Up, and my nebulous discomfort with Margaret Atwood’s hit Oryx and Crake trilogy finally became articulate in my brain.

I tore through Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake series, as I did with every other thing she’s written.

But this trilogy left me unsatisfied in a way that I’d been having trouble pinning down (other than being annoyed at the obsessed-with-love middle aged female protagonist of the third one. I mean, sure we are all hungry for the comfort of love, but too much text is devoted to sheer neediness). I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was troubling me. The prose was beautiful, I empathized with some of the characters (not Jimmy by a long shot). I mean, I didn’t love how doomsday it was, but it worked for the story. Then I started reading John Brunner’s Sheep Look Up (1972) and my distaste found sharp focus in the contrast.

• Atwood’s central characters all have varying degrees of narcissism.
• They are also all middle class. There is not really any low class perspective. Sure, the Adammites have all stepped out of society, but most of them stepped out of middle and upper class society. Where are the people who have simply struggled to survive through the political and social disasters? What little attention there is to this is just not as fully imagined as it really ought to be, but reflects more of how middle class people imagine poverty is like, rather than how it is actually lived. Dystopias and post-apocalypses really ought to incorporate a multi-class perspective.
• And for that matter, a multi-national perspective. Sure, Oryx is not from America, but big woop, she’s not actually a character so much as a body in which various characters’ fantasies can reside. Where is the sense of an interconnected world?
• Which connects back into the narcissim—America, in the novel, is the special one. It is special in that it is tortured and evil enough to sow the seeds of destruction, and yet good and pure enough to also have the seeds of redemption in the form of the Addamers and the Crakers.
• The storyline is one massive oversimplification of the scope of the problems facing us today and the potential futures ahead of us. I mean, my god what a fantastical unreality of how it will ‘all go down.’ Some special person in a privileged position makes a decision?

More like the masses continue to make mundanely selfish small decisions, content to ignore how people with power and money manipulate the government and ignore environmental consequences and indigenous rights… and doom creeps up on us, and people only really notice when their lives become worse, when their kids start being born diseased, or they can’t afford food or medical bills anymore. More like how it plays out in Sheep Look Up.

If we are going to have stories of how we get to doomsday, let’s look at how they connect with the everyday life, not these fantasized overblown characters who only have a semblance of being real people. In this day and age, we don’t need any more heroes. Heroes only allow us to continue to fool ourselves into thinking someone else will step up and make the sacrifice, instead of looking to where in our own lives we could stand to be a little more giving, a little less selfish.

Not to say we should all buy hair-shirts, or shoulder the responsibility of the world, just that it is incumbent upon all of us to avoid becoming complacent about our ‘goodness.’  Oryx and Crake, with its fantastical plotline, and narrow vision, invite complacency and wish-fulfilment fantasizing that is worse than the complacency and wish-fulfillment of comic book heroes because it pretends to be somehow in a morally superior position because ‘nothing was added to this book that isn’t drawn from reality.’

I don’t want to make this post too long, or I’d go into more detail, but Sheep Look Up is a much more realistic, complex picture, of how we might find ourselves teetering on the brink of destroying the planet than anything else I’ve ever read. Especially compared to recent hits such as Atwood’s series, and Bacigalupi’s Wind Up Girl.

Writers ought take more seriously the responsibility of writing in the space of the imagined death of our way of existing. John Brunner is an example of how it ought to be done—he looks at the systems and how they interconnect: police forces, t.v. personalities, race, parenting, our need to keep our jobs, insurance, medical costs, the market, international politics, etc.

He doesn’t just tell a story prettily, he tells it in sharp shocks that reflect a deep understanding of how freakin complicated a global system is.

A comment on dystopian scholarship

One of the ideas that didn’t make it into my thesis:

 

In reading through dystopian scholarship, there is a pervading belief that writing about novels that write about society’s ills somehow makes the world a better place. I’m not saying it doesn’t, but the high-falutin’ rhetoric is a bit much for my taste. Reminds me a bit of Vashti in “The Machine Stops,” where she and her friends spend all their time making and listening to ‘speeches’ in separate rooms.

or of the flappers in Gulliver’s travels

My problem with this rhetoric is it seems to assume that the sheer act of scholarly criticism is affecting the system. Having taught for 3 years as well as worked with students in a Writing Center, I have to say…….. it doesn’t. Most people do not learn very well solely inside abstractions. They need real-world, personal stuff as part of the conversation. Thinking that translating a dystopian novel into a set of shared abstractions will make things better is incredibly near-sighted on several fronts.

1) Marxist jargon is alienating and obtuse. It seems to like being this way. It serves as an unnecessary gate-keeper to important ideas.

2) A set of shared abstractions IS important, but circulating them inside scholarly journals in obtuse language has minimal impact on society.

3) The stories speak for themselves. The stories that have the most impact on people’s thinking are film. If we really care about monitoring stories for their viability as useful stories for the current problems, we should become a louder, more coherent voice responding to film, responding to the incredibly conservative rhetoric of Hollywood.

I also wrote about dystopian fiction because I want to ‘change the world.’ In writing it, in realizing how few people would read it, compared with how many people I interact with, let alone how many people I might interact with, it’s clear that if I really want my reading of some social critique novel to make a difference, it will be in every day conversations, or in my decisions to participate in protests, etc.

I would love to see the rhetoric surrounding dystopian interpretation become more realistic. If scholars do want to talk about how their interpretation helps, I want to see hard data–how are they using it in their teaching? How are they using the ideas in helping the world be a better place in some sort of activist role they are engaged in?

We have to quit pretending through our rhetorical conventions about literature that literature is an aorta. Part of the lifeblood of humanity, the aorta of a fair chunk of humanity, but it is not an aorta.

Investigating Dystopias: Trying to understand what it means when we talk about ‘being fucked’

Our culture does not understand responsibility (see: procrastination, b.s. libel suits, loving the badness of celebrities, the Middle East, plastic). Being steeped in Taoist philosophy, I firmly believe that it is sheer absurdity to take the weight and fate of the world onto our shoulders, sheer absurdity to take a firm stance on where the world is heading.

This is not to say that we are freed of the world, but that we grossly misinterpret the relationship between ourselves and the fate of the world. It should be pretty obvious that the end of humanity has been on humanity’s mind since, well, forever. We post WWII humans think we have a special lease on this because of the hydrogen bomb and other tech developments.

Thinking we are special about the potential to destroy life leads us to a strange kind of glorying in the particularities of the stories of ‘the end.’ Our belief in the specialness of the potential doom that faces us leads us to be all too amenable to perpetuating the things that lead to doom.

In other words, because we believe the environment is fucked, and that its a systemic evil that we have no real personal power to stop, we say, fuck it, and don’t think about the fuel we burn, or the plastic that is born just to be thrown away.

We use the global to hide the local. We weight ourselves down with the world instead of letting go of the world to take care of itself (as it has been doing  through dozens, hundreds of past doomsday predictions).

We take on this massive emotional burden when we improperly connect our lives to the ‘big picture.’

We pat ourselves on the back for being ‘so aware’ of the reality. But—who cares how well we intellectually comprehend the environmental crisis? We need other solutions than just finding new measurements for what is happening. We need a cultural shift that gets its energy from the grassroots level, and is supported and furthered at the political level.

Much better to let go of feeling responsible for the abstract ‘global society’ and instead use all that energy to get curious about how each of us can make small changes in day to day life. Taking on the psychological burden of the world is unproductive. Shrugging shoulders and calling it someone else’s problem is also unproductive. I think it is incumbent upon each of us to cultivate a personal sense of how we could shape our actions toward having a better relationship to our environments.

In WWII people gave up electricity, sugar, their free time. Today, people can’t even give up air conditioning on a beautiful day.

We all do it. All each of us can do is accept responsibility for our own process, our own citizenship.

We are not our words, but our actions.

This is why I am investigating dystopias: because when we talk about the ‘doom’ of society, or humans being fucked, it is a sign that we realize we are not being honest about our real relationship to the potentials of the future.

Nobody knows what tomorrow will bring. Lies hide other lies. Buying into the idea that ‘humanity is screwed’ is more a symbol of a personal, internal reality than it is about reality. Reality is waaay too complex for that. There are trends and phenomena that can be described with some certainty, but it is better to avoid over-projecting onto the future.