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calling all angels
Apr. 15th, 2008 08:17 amThis is a job for Tim Powers. (Or someone like him.)
I am in near despair over the inability of anyone to stretch the popular imagination (or their own) sufficiently to understand the multiple networks of causation that make things happen on this planet. I am not talking Buddhist or Hindu metaphysics: I am talking hard history and science.
The only novels that begin to stretch in this direction (I have discussed them in this blog before and will not name them again) are bad to the point of unreadability.
It could all be turned into fantasy fiction by the addition of just one non-existent explanatory element: let’s say, for starters, that human actions are determined by atmospheric pressure.
That would be enough to make a false correlation between the optimistic aggressiveness of the European colonizers at the precise moment when the arrival of El Niño-triggered droughts and massive famines facilitated their world conquests of the 1870s. It would let our novelist make up imaginary reasons for the concurrence of the global delusions of all parties that led to massive consequences for whole regions during the El Niño and La Nina events of 1896-1902. (Not all the causes were the same. But some of them were.)
Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocaustsbegins with a tedious summarizing chapter that I am happy I read later on, as usual. It is far better to see first how the collapse of social institutions in cultures the world over opened the channels through which networks of greed and delusional belief in the beneficent powers of the market rushed.
Rather than atmospheric pressure, it’s more likely the financial consequences of unusually good growing conditions (and maybe the good weather that permits crops to grow) that feeds the optimism that lets imperialists set forth with new technologies, to stomp the heathen into submission for their own good.
But fantasy novels need a simple governing fiction that allows them to set forth actually existing complex causes in the development of the plot line.
Anyway, the real point is that nobody sees that it isn’t simply imperial ambition or demographic disaster or religious fanaticism or the Oedipus complex of a dictator that sets immense historical forces in motion. The kinds of individual stress levels that Daniel Smail documents play a role in maintaining systems of domination, and the major accidents of weather allow grand schemes to play themselves out when prior social conditions are right.
Which is by way of saying that although newspaper stories sometimes try to follow the causes of our present dilemma, they hardly ever keep hold of all of them. A dozen separate stories are told as though they were taking place in isolation, which for the participants is exactly what is happening. The people affected can’t see a tenth of the forces involved. Neither can the people passing judgment on them or empathizing with them.
Thomas Pynchon could tell this story, but everyone would laugh and praise his capacity to make stuff up.
I’m fascinated by the amazingly parallel apocalyptic cults that sprang up across the world during the greatest El Niño cycle circa 1900. When the fellows with the machine guns show up at the same time all your oxen are dying, the natural tendency is to blame the latter event on the former, which sometimes is the case and sometimes is not.
But the structural parallels of the cults are more complex than a so-called vulgar materialism would allow. A fantasy novel could just line up similar historical facts, without having to contend with academic methodologists carping about lumping together causally unrelated events.
They are related, dammit; it’s just that we don’t know enough about human biology and its place in the dominant environment of the planet to understand what the real causes are. Some coincidences seem less than inexplicable, and more like uncomprehended medical symptomatologies.
I had, as so often before, sketched out the basics of this post before picking up the April 15 New York Times to find the front page littered with illustrative examples.
Even the story explaining that the Titanic probably sank because the shipbuilders couldn’t find enough skilled riveters, and skimped on iron quality because of budget, and farmed the rivet-making job out to less experienced foundries to meet deadlines, illustrates my point.
It wouldn’t just be that “cheap rivets led to the sinking of the Titanic.” The rivets were cheap because the shipbuilders were trying to meet demand (and maximize profit)s by doing too much at once; because their own capitalization only permitted so many top-quality rivets to be acquired at one time; because the price of top-quality iron was governed by available manufacturing technology and competing demands for the stuff; because available jobs and available men for training were in a particular balance; because the available potential riveters were instead going into other fields or barred from the requisite education, or whatever. (Many “whatevers.”)
In like fashion, a surprising number of passengers on the Titanic boarded the ship because they couldn’t get passage on a competing ship because trans-Atlantic crossings had been delayed due to coal shortages due to a miners’ strike.
Again, many mediocre have explored this kind of causation, to ironic ends.
But the ironclad irony of the Titanic rivets ends, if that causal hypothesis is correct, in a simple unadopted solution. The board of directors dictates in 1911 that standards come before other considerations, and one ship or the other is delayed so that high-standard rivets may be used throughout rather than saved for the likeliest points of fracture. Didn’t happen. General issues of this sort were addressed in board meetings. Adaptations to existing conditions were made.
And solutions in global history are not as simple as rivets, or o-rings and cracked tiles on a space shuttle, or wiring on a passenger jet. There are far more chains of causation.
And the op-ed page of the April 15 New York Times shows that almost none of our opinion makers understand that fact.
Calling the world’s great fantasy novelists. Stat.
I am in near despair over the inability of anyone to stretch the popular imagination (or their own) sufficiently to understand the multiple networks of causation that make things happen on this planet. I am not talking Buddhist or Hindu metaphysics: I am talking hard history and science.
The only novels that begin to stretch in this direction (I have discussed them in this blog before and will not name them again) are bad to the point of unreadability.
It could all be turned into fantasy fiction by the addition of just one non-existent explanatory element: let’s say, for starters, that human actions are determined by atmospheric pressure.
That would be enough to make a false correlation between the optimistic aggressiveness of the European colonizers at the precise moment when the arrival of El Niño-triggered droughts and massive famines facilitated their world conquests of the 1870s. It would let our novelist make up imaginary reasons for the concurrence of the global delusions of all parties that led to massive consequences for whole regions during the El Niño and La Nina events of 1896-1902. (Not all the causes were the same. But some of them were.)
Mike Davis’ Late Victorian Holocaustsbegins with a tedious summarizing chapter that I am happy I read later on, as usual. It is far better to see first how the collapse of social institutions in cultures the world over opened the channels through which networks of greed and delusional belief in the beneficent powers of the market rushed.
Rather than atmospheric pressure, it’s more likely the financial consequences of unusually good growing conditions (and maybe the good weather that permits crops to grow) that feeds the optimism that lets imperialists set forth with new technologies, to stomp the heathen into submission for their own good.
But fantasy novels need a simple governing fiction that allows them to set forth actually existing complex causes in the development of the plot line.
Anyway, the real point is that nobody sees that it isn’t simply imperial ambition or demographic disaster or religious fanaticism or the Oedipus complex of a dictator that sets immense historical forces in motion. The kinds of individual stress levels that Daniel Smail documents play a role in maintaining systems of domination, and the major accidents of weather allow grand schemes to play themselves out when prior social conditions are right.
Which is by way of saying that although newspaper stories sometimes try to follow the causes of our present dilemma, they hardly ever keep hold of all of them. A dozen separate stories are told as though they were taking place in isolation, which for the participants is exactly what is happening. The people affected can’t see a tenth of the forces involved. Neither can the people passing judgment on them or empathizing with them.
Thomas Pynchon could tell this story, but everyone would laugh and praise his capacity to make stuff up.
I’m fascinated by the amazingly parallel apocalyptic cults that sprang up across the world during the greatest El Niño cycle circa 1900. When the fellows with the machine guns show up at the same time all your oxen are dying, the natural tendency is to blame the latter event on the former, which sometimes is the case and sometimes is not.
But the structural parallels of the cults are more complex than a so-called vulgar materialism would allow. A fantasy novel could just line up similar historical facts, without having to contend with academic methodologists carping about lumping together causally unrelated events.
They are related, dammit; it’s just that we don’t know enough about human biology and its place in the dominant environment of the planet to understand what the real causes are. Some coincidences seem less than inexplicable, and more like uncomprehended medical symptomatologies.
I had, as so often before, sketched out the basics of this post before picking up the April 15 New York Times to find the front page littered with illustrative examples.
Even the story explaining that the Titanic probably sank because the shipbuilders couldn’t find enough skilled riveters, and skimped on iron quality because of budget, and farmed the rivet-making job out to less experienced foundries to meet deadlines, illustrates my point.
It wouldn’t just be that “cheap rivets led to the sinking of the Titanic.” The rivets were cheap because the shipbuilders were trying to meet demand (and maximize profit)s by doing too much at once; because their own capitalization only permitted so many top-quality rivets to be acquired at one time; because the price of top-quality iron was governed by available manufacturing technology and competing demands for the stuff; because available jobs and available men for training were in a particular balance; because the available potential riveters were instead going into other fields or barred from the requisite education, or whatever. (Many “whatevers.”)
In like fashion, a surprising number of passengers on the Titanic boarded the ship because they couldn’t get passage on a competing ship because trans-Atlantic crossings had been delayed due to coal shortages due to a miners’ strike.
Again, many mediocre have explored this kind of causation, to ironic ends.
But the ironclad irony of the Titanic rivets ends, if that causal hypothesis is correct, in a simple unadopted solution. The board of directors dictates in 1911 that standards come before other considerations, and one ship or the other is delayed so that high-standard rivets may be used throughout rather than saved for the likeliest points of fracture. Didn’t happen. General issues of this sort were addressed in board meetings. Adaptations to existing conditions were made.
And solutions in global history are not as simple as rivets, or o-rings and cracked tiles on a space shuttle, or wiring on a passenger jet. There are far more chains of causation.
And the op-ed page of the April 15 New York Times shows that almost none of our opinion makers understand that fact.
Calling the world’s great fantasy novelists. Stat.
