![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Sorry, No Clever Title for This Version of “What Is To Be Done,” 21st Century Update (“Chto Delat, Not,” Maybe?)
Perhaps it is the spirit of synthesis inspired by Sarah Sze’s Book of Parts, the vast, magical installation in the High Museum of Art’s “Fast Forward” show that presents a sort of Wunderkammer of transformed everyday objects, but I have been realizing anew how much we need the type of synthesis of complex systems that we largely do not have these days. (We do not have such syntheses for reasons I set forth in my own “Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again” exhibition in July at Whitespace Gallery, plus political and economic reasons I did not set forth there that would take us entirely too far afield for a single blog post.)
Or perhaps it is the juxtaposition of the NPR report on the demise of the print version of Newsweek (killed off by the shift to constantly updated online news sources) and the New York Times’ story yesterday about the collapse of safety enforcement in the factories of United States drug manufacturers squeezed by thin profit margins that encourage 24-hour production lines that cannot be shut down for maintenance.
In any case, it feels as though the world has gone through a fundamental phase shift that we have been looking at on a daily basis, and commenting on so often in its individual aspects that it seems pointless to point to it. But the world of the middle 20th century increasingly feels like an alien universe in which the myth of a uniform material and conceptual Progress was borne out by actual statistics: processes of production were creating a more satisfactory life for increasing numbers of human beings at the same time that technological and theory-based forms of knowledge were making possible a more abundant material universe and a more comprehensive mental universe concurrently.
Whatever arrogance and short-sighted lack of insight into the human predicament flowed from that (and that defect gave rise to the face-off between existentialists, Christian and Buddhist activists, Marxists et al on one side, and starry-eyed technological optimists on the other), there was at least evidence for the “man comes of age” mythos (the use of “man” instead of “humanity” indicating the pre-1970 origins of this particular mythic tale). What turned out to be just one more myth had facts on its side, as most myths in fact do.
We know the component parts of the forces that led to the breakdown of this humanistic synthesis that the late William Hamilton christened “the new optimism” in a 1965 essay.
Instead of the anticipated elevation of the entire world to uniform prosperity, globalization created a bizarre amalgam in which pockets of relative prosperity tended towards a decline in living standards in parts of the developed world to match the increase in living standards in parts of the hitherto underdeveloped...with the concomitant result that slender profit margins tended to create conditions of production that combined the latest technological innovations with whatever short cuts and postponements of maintenance would keep the enterprise profitable. (Never mind the question of how the profits were and are distributed. We are looking at how we got from the gleaming new world of mechanized production circa 1960—the rigorously sanitized food production lines that impressed an impressionable adolescent like myself—to a world in which spiders and fungi get into vials of injectable medication in advanced industrial societies.)
At the same time, the advent of digital technology not only changed the arrangement of economic forces, it changed the mindset of increasing portions of the planet. At the same moment, significant advances in the biological sciences coincided with increasing methodological sophistication in the human sciences (as continental Europe would call them no matter how much the Brits and ’Murkns insist that the “soft sciences” aren’t sciences at all). The result was a new model for the human condition, one with its own blind spots and unwarranted degrees of arrogance,
but one with a much greater degree of inbuilt pessimism instead of optimism. In fact, the existentialists and Marxists and Christian and Buddhist activists (and they are ever fewer in number) come off as the starry-eyed optimists in this scenario instead of the clear-eyed realists about human fallibility that they appeared to be fifty years ago. (They always were utopian with regard to the prospect of attaining the Good Society, they just didn’t share the mainstream belief that it would all come about automatically by the workings of human progress.)
Let us also omit from consideration what all this change is doing to planet Earth in terms of how the physical environment responds to the stresses put on it by increased industrial production—we are simply looking, for the moment, at how we ended up in a situation in which that production becomes increasingly ramshackle and/or inhumane at the same moment that advanced intellectual production becomes increasingly divorced from the physical environment, but indisputably advancing by the proverbial leaps and bounds. Whether the intellectual producers are adequately rewarded for these great leaps forward, we also bracket for our purposes here; as we know, some are, some aren’t, depending on what it is they produce and where and how they produce it.
To say these things is, as they used to say, to have a firm grasp of the obvious. And there are immense numbers of obfuscating surveys of all these topics.
But we don’t seem to be able to create a convincing picture of the early 21st century that would address all of these forces concurrently, and how their combined influences are creating a mindset that is as delusional as the mid-20th century myth of Progress was, but a mindset that doesn’t think of itself as delusional because it is wedded to the idea of not having a singular myth to live by, just a bunch of unrelated operational rules to govern interactions with the different aspects of the world.
This somehow seems more reality-based to the physical operating systems called “societies” and “minds and bodies,” which latter are capable of faster evolution than we used to think possible, but which really are still overly wedded to responses and reaction times that date back to the Paleolithic.
So how do we get from this myth that we don’t call one to some mode of living and thinking that actually is closer to being reality-based? Or how do we get all of the variables simplified sufficiently for us to keep most of them in mind at the same moment?
Various readers point and giggle every time I raise this issue in my obfuscatingly contorted way. Sorry. (Really.)
Perhaps it is the spirit of synthesis inspired by Sarah Sze’s Book of Parts, the vast, magical installation in the High Museum of Art’s “Fast Forward” show that presents a sort of Wunderkammer of transformed everyday objects, but I have been realizing anew how much we need the type of synthesis of complex systems that we largely do not have these days. (We do not have such syntheses for reasons I set forth in my own “Cosmology to Neurology and Back Again” exhibition in July at Whitespace Gallery, plus political and economic reasons I did not set forth there that would take us entirely too far afield for a single blog post.)
Or perhaps it is the juxtaposition of the NPR report on the demise of the print version of Newsweek (killed off by the shift to constantly updated online news sources) and the New York Times’ story yesterday about the collapse of safety enforcement in the factories of United States drug manufacturers squeezed by thin profit margins that encourage 24-hour production lines that cannot be shut down for maintenance.
In any case, it feels as though the world has gone through a fundamental phase shift that we have been looking at on a daily basis, and commenting on so often in its individual aspects that it seems pointless to point to it. But the world of the middle 20th century increasingly feels like an alien universe in which the myth of a uniform material and conceptual Progress was borne out by actual statistics: processes of production were creating a more satisfactory life for increasing numbers of human beings at the same time that technological and theory-based forms of knowledge were making possible a more abundant material universe and a more comprehensive mental universe concurrently.
Whatever arrogance and short-sighted lack of insight into the human predicament flowed from that (and that defect gave rise to the face-off between existentialists, Christian and Buddhist activists, Marxists et al on one side, and starry-eyed technological optimists on the other), there was at least evidence for the “man comes of age” mythos (the use of “man” instead of “humanity” indicating the pre-1970 origins of this particular mythic tale). What turned out to be just one more myth had facts on its side, as most myths in fact do.
We know the component parts of the forces that led to the breakdown of this humanistic synthesis that the late William Hamilton christened “the new optimism” in a 1965 essay.
Instead of the anticipated elevation of the entire world to uniform prosperity, globalization created a bizarre amalgam in which pockets of relative prosperity tended towards a decline in living standards in parts of the developed world to match the increase in living standards in parts of the hitherto underdeveloped...with the concomitant result that slender profit margins tended to create conditions of production that combined the latest technological innovations with whatever short cuts and postponements of maintenance would keep the enterprise profitable. (Never mind the question of how the profits were and are distributed. We are looking at how we got from the gleaming new world of mechanized production circa 1960—the rigorously sanitized food production lines that impressed an impressionable adolescent like myself—to a world in which spiders and fungi get into vials of injectable medication in advanced industrial societies.)
At the same time, the advent of digital technology not only changed the arrangement of economic forces, it changed the mindset of increasing portions of the planet. At the same moment, significant advances in the biological sciences coincided with increasing methodological sophistication in the human sciences (as continental Europe would call them no matter how much the Brits and ’Murkns insist that the “soft sciences” aren’t sciences at all). The result was a new model for the human condition, one with its own blind spots and unwarranted degrees of arrogance,
but one with a much greater degree of inbuilt pessimism instead of optimism. In fact, the existentialists and Marxists and Christian and Buddhist activists (and they are ever fewer in number) come off as the starry-eyed optimists in this scenario instead of the clear-eyed realists about human fallibility that they appeared to be fifty years ago. (They always were utopian with regard to the prospect of attaining the Good Society, they just didn’t share the mainstream belief that it would all come about automatically by the workings of human progress.)
Let us also omit from consideration what all this change is doing to planet Earth in terms of how the physical environment responds to the stresses put on it by increased industrial production—we are simply looking, for the moment, at how we ended up in a situation in which that production becomes increasingly ramshackle and/or inhumane at the same moment that advanced intellectual production becomes increasingly divorced from the physical environment, but indisputably advancing by the proverbial leaps and bounds. Whether the intellectual producers are adequately rewarded for these great leaps forward, we also bracket for our purposes here; as we know, some are, some aren’t, depending on what it is they produce and where and how they produce it.
To say these things is, as they used to say, to have a firm grasp of the obvious. And there are immense numbers of obfuscating surveys of all these topics.
But we don’t seem to be able to create a convincing picture of the early 21st century that would address all of these forces concurrently, and how their combined influences are creating a mindset that is as delusional as the mid-20th century myth of Progress was, but a mindset that doesn’t think of itself as delusional because it is wedded to the idea of not having a singular myth to live by, just a bunch of unrelated operational rules to govern interactions with the different aspects of the world.
This somehow seems more reality-based to the physical operating systems called “societies” and “minds and bodies,” which latter are capable of faster evolution than we used to think possible, but which really are still overly wedded to responses and reaction times that date back to the Paleolithic.
So how do we get from this myth that we don’t call one to some mode of living and thinking that actually is closer to being reality-based? Or how do we get all of the variables simplified sufficiently for us to keep most of them in mind at the same moment?
Various readers point and giggle every time I raise this issue in my obfuscatingly contorted way. Sorry. (Really.)
