Review: Why Hope?

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why-hope-460x746Why Hope? The Stand Against Civilization
John Zerzan
Feral House, 2015, 136pp., $13.00

John Zerzan could be described as defiantly hopeful. In a time when a seed of nihilism has been germinating in the anarchist milieu, Zerzan has published a new book in which almost every essay has an element of hope. Whereas pessimism and despair are currently fashionable postures, Zerzan’s more optimistic perspective is both refreshing and vitally important.

The first and largest section of the book is titled Origins–a topic central to Zerzan’s larger body of work and critical to his general methodology. In the book’s opening essay, titled “In the Beginning”, Zerzan writes that:

“Without interest in [Origin], without a conception of what is involved, there is less of a sense of possible arrival. Origin can liberate the future insofar as it retrieves our relation to what has come before.” (3)

That is to say, that to seek out, uncover, and examine our origins–both the origins of our species and the origins of our oppressive, crippling civilization–provides grounds for hope. And not merely naive wishful thinking but hope solidly grounded in the knowledge that our current situation is a gross aberration and not representative of the wide swathe of human experience. We within civilization have effectively been denied the human experience in the same way that animals confined in a zoo are denied a genuine experience.

It should be noted that while anarcho-primitivists may frequently be accused of being unrealistic, they are somewhat unique in not seeking a heretofore unknown utopia but instead aim at what statistically may be called normal human life. Likewise, anarcho-primitivists are accused of wanting to turn back time but the hope in Zerzan’s book is definitively forward-looking with an eye toward future possibilities for resistance. Seeking a return to health when “dis-ease is the fact of modern life” (128) should not be construed as a nostalgic attempt to turn back time simply because it would constitute a return to a more desirable condition.

Yet, for many, to inquire into origins is taboo but the inquiry allows Zerzan to confidently and credibly make statements such as:

“civilization is failing on every level, in every sphere, and its failure equates so largely with the failure of technology” (94)

“the global system now shows itself to be failing at every level, shows itself to have no answers at all” (134)

It is declarations of this sort that provide ample grounds for hope or perhaps where his hope is most clearly on display. In an essay titled “Arrivederci Roma: The Crisis of Late Antiquity” Zerzan explains that “a climate of futility and decay could not be dispelled by government” and that “a sense of decline had long been underway, along with a lurking fearfulness” (46). Fast forward to the present and flip ahead to Zerzan’s “What Does it Mean to be Healthy?” and it is noted that the current empire suffers in similar ways as “passivity and a sense of doom have settled on modern industrial society” (128). While Rome was in “just one more civilization that came and went” (54) it provides insight as to why the now global civilization is ailing and how it might be vulnerable to attack. It is threads such as this that knit together Zerzan’s wide-ranging collection of essays into a whole.

Amongst my personal favorites in Why Hope? are the essays “Faster! The Age of Acceleration” and “Animal Dreams”. “Faster!” accurately describes the lived, nightmarish experience of finding oneself in an ever-accelerating civilization where “[t]ime cracks the whip and mocks everything that doesn’t keep up” (89); where “the always faster colonization of life by technology commands an ever-fluctuating environment in which the self is destabilized” (90). Works such as this one are important because it validates the anxiety and discomfort that many of us routinely feel, bringing it to the forefront, and explaining where it comes from. It asserts that life doesn’t have to be like this and, in fact, hasn’t always been like this. “Animal Dreams” provides a path out explaining, in one of the book’s most memorable lines, that “We are lost, but other animals point to the right road. They are the right road.” (106). Animals who come into contact and under control of the civilized are subject to cracking whips but those who have resisted domestication do not know the lash.

Hope is necessarily entwined with meaningful, effective resistance for it makes possibilities visible that pessimism and despair obscure and deny. Hope keeps us looking for ripe moments, feeling for points of vulnerability, and ready to exploit any cracks in the armor. Civilization aims to project an image of invulnerability; those who oppose civilization should not be so credulous as to believe it.

Internet Holdouts

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Not everyone in the United States is on the internet. In fact, recently released numbers from the Pew Research Center indicate that a full 15 percent of Americans do not use the internet.

Tech leaders often like to present these numbers in terms of access; as in “It is important that people have access to the internet.” Those who don’t use the internet are almost invariably said to lack access or to fall on the wrong side of a “digital divide”. I have even recently seen the term “online disenfranchised”. This is a shrewd use of rhetoric as it evades the question about whether such technologies are desirable; it erases the non-negligible part of the population that remains uninterested in what is being sold. The idea that someone does not want to use the internet is nearly unthinkable.

According to a 2013 Pew report, only about a fifth of those who don’t use the internet cite cost as their principle reason. A significantly larger number—over a third—of non-internet users say “they are not interested, do not want to use it, or have no need for it.”

This is a particularly difficult situation for tech promoters and peddlers because the straightforward solution of providing government subsidies and lowering the cost is not an incentive for those who may be able to afford internet service but simply lack interest. Aaron Smith of the Pew Research Center explained that “A lot of the easy adopters have already been converted.” Consequently, the number of internet holdouts hasn’t budged since 2013 despite efforts by many to convert them.

Brian Fung of The Washington Post has written that “encouraging the disconnected to hop online has become a national priority.” Multiple news sources reporting on the recent Pew report used the word “stuck” as in “Still Offline: Non-internet users stuck at 15 pct” clearly indicating a desire to lower that number and frustration that it hasn’t moved in several years.

The language employed strongly suggests that the decision to use the internet is not a freely made choice being left up to the individual and that there is more than just social pressure to get online. Indeed, getting people connected is said to be a “national priority”.

A brief look at the history of landline telephones is helpful. In 1985, Congress created a plan to subsidize landline phones having determined that phones had “become crucial to full participation in our society and economy, which are increasingly dependent upon the rapid exchange of information.” In similar fashion, the FCC is now considering subsidies for internet and HUD is considering putting high speed internet into public housing. Outside of the United States, Google is experimenting with balloons and Facebook is designing drones all aimed at getting the internet to people who aren’t yet connected. All these efforts not only provide “access” but as Angela Siefer of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance has said it “[builds] a nation of more consumers for broadband”.

Phones and now the internet were deemed “crucial to full participation in our society” meaning that the person who opts to forego either technology is severely penalized with a diminished role in society. It may be suggested that the penalty is not deliberately imposed but something on the order of a natural consequence; defenders of this technological hegemony may liken my position to refusing a life jacket and then complaining about the increased risk of drowning.

But the problem is in how governments and tech companies choose to respond; that is by insisting on one very specific flotation device and denying meaningful access to all others. The solution seized upon is to connect everyone to the internet even those who need to be cajoled, converted, or coerced. It is a strategy that betrays the notion floated with each new gadget that the technology is voluntary and need not worry those who are concerned or uninterested. “Don’t like it? Then don’t buy it.” goes the refrain.

An alternative solution instead of universal internet adoption would be to allow for multiple ways of fully participating in society. To belabor the analogy, the alternative would be to allow flotation devices of all sorts so that people may avoid drowning; to refrain from pushing people under who were doing just fine. But there is perhaps a catch.

Mass society cannot tolerate that level of diversity; it must have nearly everyone on the internet and cast the few holdouts overboard. Only at great personal cost might one be able to briefly opt out. What Lewis Mumford wrote of Rome is even more true of the current global technoculture: “Rome was the great sausage-grinder that turned other cultures, in all their variety form, and content, into its own uniform links.” To the extent that we remain animals we will resist entering the grinder; to the extent that we are alienated from our animality we will race toward the gears and call it liberation, transcendence, or perhaps the Singularity.

Cybernetic Revolutionaries

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Note: this was originally published in Fifth Estate #394 (Summer 2015)

Cybersyn control roomCybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile
Eden Medina
MIT Press, 2014, 344 pp., $20

Eden Medina’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries provides an account which is sympathetic to Chile’s Project Cybersyn. She uncovers and details the largely forgotten and extraordinarily fascinating history of how information and communication technology was seized upon as a way to realize President Salvador Allende’s socialist aspirations.

After his election in 1970, Allende led Chile on what he described as the “Chilean road to socialism” which was to differ from the revolutionary path charted by figures such as Fidel Castro in Cuba. In contrast to the Cuban example, the democratically elected Allende aimed to use already existing institutional channels to peacefully introduce socialist policies to his country. His plan was offered as a third way that did not explicitly align Chile with either of the two superpowers that were waging their Cold War and using smaller countries as pawns.

Similarly, Chile’s road to technological prowess was to differ from what conventional wisdom suggested. The generally accepted path forward for small lesser-developed states was to make big friends and then import modern technology and expertise from them. Instead, Allende took an interest in the emerging field of cybernetics as a way to more creatively think about how to use the computer technology they already possessed—which was far from the most advanced—to create systems that even the superpowers could not yet accomplish. They set out to build something akin to a nationwide internet before the existence of the internet.

With the help of eccentric British cybernetician, Stafford Beer, Chile launched Project Cybersyn to create an information network that would make a state controlled economy both feasible and efficient.

Those involved in Project Cybersyn sought a way to capture and manage the flood of information needed to be processed in real-time so that state officials could make informed decisions about how to most efficiently run the economy.

The current obsession with real time information was effectively being pursued in 1970s Chile. State officials would know if productions goals were being met, if raw materials were being delivered, if a work stoppage was interrupting their plans, and vast amounts of other such quantifiable data pertaining to the economy. They wanted models predicting how the economy would respond in the future based on current data.

With such information delivered in real time, the state could theoretically be able to shift and adapt so their desired end targets were achieved. Production quotas could be altered, raw materials could be rerouted, difficult workers could be circumvented, and so on. According to cybernetic theory, the state needed to be as homeostatic and as responsive as a living organism.

The political aspect of the project was highlighted in Allende’s intention to solve the dilemma between maintaining a stable state and allowing for personal autonomy. Individuals needed to have the freedom to live as they chose while at the same time not jeopardizing the stability of the state. Beer and his Chilean colleagues believed that cybernetics could ease this tension by creating a more dynamic state that could allow both. Medina’s book, however, fails to point out that this, in reality, is a sleight-of-hand trick which allows the individual to do as they wish provided the state can easily neutralize their efforts. One can do anything provided it is without consequence.

Since the Allende government defined its policies as socialism, it was also important to at least pay lip service to the notion of worker participation. The operations room of Project Cybersyn in Santiago was supposed to be accessible to even the uneducated rank-and-file. It included screens but only a few buttons. It included chairs but no tables and no paper.

Information was to be displayed graphically so it could be readily understood and acted upon. Keyboards were out because their presence would have implied secretarial work (and bureaucracy) which in turn implied the presence of women in the operations room which is not how the rank-and-file were generally pictured. Indeed, a gentlemen’s club was proposed as one aesthetic model for the design of the operations room. In hindsight, the completed command center has drawn comparisons with the War Room in Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove.

Yet as novel as Allende’s political supporters thought his road to socialism was and as innovative as the cyberneticians considered their system, the message of Medina’s book, when read from an antiauthoritarian or anarchist perspective, is that these are but nuances on the organization, development and administration of the industrial system on which a new label was tacked.

Although Allende may have dreamed of a different road or path, his cybernetic industrialism had more in common with Fordism and Taylorism than it did with humanity’s emancipation.

The 1973 U.S.-backed coup that ousted Allende from power and installed the Pinochet dictatorship prevented Project Cybersyn from ever being completed. This fact allows supporters of the project to keep their dreams intact as to what might have been if it had been free from interference. Even Medina seems to occasionally resist criticism in this fashion. But to advance this line of thought, to defend the project in this way, requires that at least some sympathy for its goals of a highly coordinated industrialism. It may have been wildly successful if it had proceeded unimpeded, but in a process which was fundamentally flawed.

Allende, like Marx, thought that socialism could modernize and ultimately be more productive than capitalism. But if that is not the desired destination, it is of little consequence which ideology will purportedly get there faster.

Capitalism and socialism are essentially two different strategies both seeking to make mass society possible. There is nothing radical about simply picking one side over the other; rejecting capitalism only to embrace socialism. The project of mass society needs to be rejected outright.

Seven Types of Shit

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There are seven types of shit. I mean that literally. There are seven types of human feces. Researchers have established a schema for sorting stools into seven distinctive types. The Bristol Stool Chart was developed in 1997 assigns a number one through seven to bowel movements. The numbers span a spectrum from watery, diarrhea on one end to hard, constipated stools on the other end. For those keeping score, numbers four and five and considered healthy stools.

Bristol

The Bristol Stool Chart has trickled down from researchers to medical professionals to caretakers and even to a small number of overly-fastidious laypeople. In fact, I had considered a joke about a future Bristol Stool Chart phone app but then soon discovered that it already exists. Those interested in the app may be disappointed to learn that it is really just the chart made available on your phone (“Brings the famous Bristol Stool Scale to your fingertips!” – hopefully you’re wearing gloves) coupled with a place to document (archive?) your movements and perhaps boast of your regularity. In the future one would hope that you might have the ability take a picture of your stool and have it categorized for you in the same way that someone can point their phone at a constellation in the sky and be told its name. This would go a long way toward minimizing the amount of subjectivity that still remains in using the scale.

More seriously though, the developers of the Bristol Stool Chart originally believed that the classification would correspond with the transit time of fecal material through the bowels. This claim has been called into question but the chart remains as a way for professionals and others to talk more precisely about the bowel movements of their patients and those in their care.

In the 2014 film The Giver starring Jeff Bridges (based on the 1993 book by Lois Lowry), one of the founding principles of the dystopian future society depicted in the film was “precision of language”. Mass society requires precise language in order to function. Indeed, complex phenomena may even need to be simplified for the purpose of capturing it with precise language. In the film, the protagonist uses the word “love” and is quickly reprimanded for deviating from the principle of precise language. To offer a real world example, in 1950 Alan Turing wrote that:

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

John Zerzan has often pointed out that this passage from Turing does not speak to the ability of machines to think rather Turing’s prediction concerns how people will have changed so as to more closely resemble machines. If machines cannot be made into brains, it may be far easier to make brains resemble machines.

The Bristol Stool Chart provides the precise language necessary for a society where many people are going to be discussing and in some way vested in your bowel movements and/or where you may need to report the nature, frequency, time, and size of your bowel movements to professionals of various sorts. It is easier to report having a “medium sized, type 4” than to get to vivid (the phone app claims to “make it easy to discuss your bowel movements with your doctor”). Furthermore, “medium sized, type 4” is something that can be (and will be) quickly entered into a form or computer program because not only does information have to be relayed from person to person, specialist to specialist, but it needs to be stored and tracked over time. Precise language allows things to be more readily quantified.

“The processing of large quantities of information is an essential aspect of complex societies, and indeed the need for this processing is probably one of the reasons that such societies came into existence.” (Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, p. 99).

In this way, this silly chart that compares shit to sausages and snakes, can be understood as a technology that makes mass society possible. In smaller scale societies, people obviously know that diarrhea and constipation are undesirable and that it may be indicative of overall gastrointestinal health and yet they are somehow able to make do without articulating seven categories of shit.

Lovebirds into Drones

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Agapornis_roseicollis_-Marwell_Zoo-8aA study from three members of Stanford University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering found that lovebirds (Agapornis roseicollis) can rotate their heads up to 2,700 degrees in a single second. This allows the birds to maintain their gaze even while executing complicated, turn-on-a-dime, flight maneuvers. Furthermore, it was discovered that the birds are able to coordinate head motion and gaze direction with the flapping of their wings so as to minimize the time that their wings obscure their vision. While this is particularly useful for lovebirds who are fortunate enough to remain in a “dense and cluttered environment like a forest” where “proximity information about tree trunks and branches is essential” the abilities are, of course, also present in the birds who are confined in a university laboratory where PVC piping is the only available perching place.

Now this is all very interesting and it might, for some people in some small measure, increase the amount of respect conferred on the birds. But animal experimenters are quite skilled at tolerating the cognitive dissonance that must seemingly occur when their experiments confirm something remarkable about the the animals in their labs. Experimenters often justify initial experiments by talking about benefits that are purportedly conferred on animals but will almost inevitably call for even more experiments on even more animals regardless of their results. In short, if one didn’t already respect lovebirds it is difficult to understand how precisely quantifying their head rotation would prompt such respect.

Indeed, in the present case, the authors do not bother to suggest that a greater respect for animals may result from their experiment. The study received funding from the Human Frontier Science Program (grant RGP0003/2013) and the Office of Naval Research (grant N00014-10-1-0951). In the abstract for the HFSP grant, experimenters include half a sentence on one putative benefit for animals predicting that “results from these experiments will have implications for the design of bio-inspired aircraft and of bird-friendly, man-made structures such as wind farms” [emphasis added]. It is debatable how “bird-friendly” a wind farm might be but it should be noted that there is no mention of bird-friendly anything in the published study; in the published study we learn that their findings “can inspire more effective vision-based autopilots for drones.” The purpose of the Office of Naval Research grant has been summarized as follows: “to develop a bird-sized, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)…capable of navigating both urban and forest environments using vision-based control.” This explains the interest and the money provided by the military.

That humans need to humble themselves enough to learn from other animals has been a point that has been repeatedly made on this blog but experimenting on captive lovebirds so as to design better drones isn’t really what I had in mind.

Note: more information on David Lentink‘s lab at Stanford, where these experiments are conducted, can be found at: http://lentinklab.stanford.edu 

David Wants to Fly: The “Mad Fantasies” of David Graeber

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jet pack 2In the second essay of his recently released book, The Utopia of Rules, David Graeber writes that “[t]here is a secret shame hovering over all us in the twenty-first century” and that “the feeling is rooted in a profound sense of disappointment about the nature of the world we live in” (105). The shame and disappointment that Graeber is referring to is not tied to ongoing mass extinction, climate change, famine, or warfare; it is not prompted by the degraded world we inherited or the degradation that we continue to be complicit in.

Instead, David Graeber is disappointed by the fact that contemporary society doesn’t align very well with what was portrayed by the science fiction of his youth.

The essay in question is titled “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit”. And while Graeber says “I don’t really care about flying cars”, he is seemingly upset about the lack of force fields, teleportation, antigravity fields, tractor beams, jet packs, immortality drugs, and the like. There are as of yet no colonies on Mars and Graeber feels cheated:

“we’re not nearly where people in the fifties imagined we’d have been by now. We still don’t have computers you can have an interesting conversation with, or robots that can walk the dog or fold your laundry” (106)

Graeber identifies as an anarchist but, if he is at all, he is clearly of an antiquated, Leftist variety and is fixated on capitalism as root problem. Capitalism is a disappointment, at least in part, because it has not delivered on these technological promises. Capitalism, according to Graeber, has both impeded the rate of progress and steered the direction of progress toward less and less exciting projects.

“the one thing I think we can be fairly confident about…is that invention and true innovation will not happen within the context of corporate capitalism–or, most likely, any form of capitialism at all. It’s becoming increasingly clear that in order to really start setting up domes on Mars…we’re going to have to figure out a different economic system entirely.” (146)

There are hints as to the economic system that Graeber is seeking but at a minimum we can conclude that it must include jet packs and must exclude hierarchy. Should those things come into conflict, my suspicion is that he’ll opt for the jet pack.

Poetic Technologies

Instead of jet packs, capitalism has brought us even more paperwork and growing bureaucracy; forms to fill out and facebook statuses to update. Technological progress is now largely oriented toward capturing data and manipulating images. Graeber explains that “in this final, stultifying stage of capitalism, we are moving from poetic technologies to bureaucratic technologies.” (141)

This dichotomy clearly strikes the reader as good technologies versus bad technologies. The poetic ones sound like what we might want and the trend toward the bureaucratic is presented as the problem to be addressed. But it’s not so simple when Graeber defines these terms:

“By poetic technologies, I refer to the use of rational, technical, bureaucratic means to bring wild, impossible fantasies to life. Poetic technologies in this sense are as old as civilization.” (141).

The key is that the technical ability serves a grandiose end. There is an incredible amount of technical knowledge necessary to send a human being to the moon but the technical knowledge is conceived of as a means to a “wild, impossible” end rather than an end in itself.

Graeber warns that “poetic technologies almost invariably have something terrible about them” (142). How terrible? Graeber cites Lewis Mumford and makes the point that the components of the earliest complex machines were slaves and that such machines were essential for building the Egyptian pyramids. “Bureaucratic oversight turned armies of peasants into the cogs of a vast machine” (141). But whether composed of slaves or inanimate cogs, the defining feature of poetic technologies is that their “rational, bureaucratic techniques are always in service to some fantastic end” (142). Building the pyramids relied on slave labor but the pyramids themselves are pretty fantastic and probably even seemed impossible when first being conceived…and so the machines that built them–with their human components–are poetic rather than bureaucratic.

In contrast bureaucratic technologies, according to Graeber, reverse means and ends. We may still have our “mad fantasies” but such fantasies are “free-floating; there’s no longer even the pretense that they could ever take form or flesh” (142). Bureaucratic technologies exist to make adminstration more efficient. In other words, we no longer aspire toward jet packs or something wholly different but rather a faster internet or a slimmer phone with a slightly altered screen size. Instead of a “world of wonders” we settle for “modest improvements” (145).

The Fate of the Earth

Perfunctory caveats aside, one cannot help but conclude that for Graeber the poetic technologies really are the good technologies. Indeed, he explains that poetic technologies may be our only hope of survival:

“[the United States] has spent the last decades telling its citizens that we simply can no longer contemplate grandiose enterprises, even if–as the current environmental crisis suggests–the fate of the earth depends on it.” (142)

We need poetic technologies to pursue grandiose enterprises to save the earth. It makes one wonder how poetic Graeber finds wind farms, nuclear power, or any of the schemes that are collectively referred to as geoengineering.

As an aside, it shouldn’t be overlooked that for so-called anarchist David Graeber:

“all those mad Soviet plans–even if never realized–marked the high-water mark of such poetic technologies” (142)

If only we anarchists could be more like the Soviet Union.

Conclusion: A Distinction Without a Difference

The distinction between poetic technologies and bureaucratic technologies is highly abstract and perhaps ultimately meaningless. Very often the same machine could fall under either definition depending on the intent of those making use of it. Are you developing a technology to realize a “wild, impossible” plan or a “mad fantasy” such as space colonies? Then it is most certainly poetic. Or are you developing a technology to more effectively capture and manipulate a vast amount of date and therby make a given bureaucracy more effecient? Then you are dealing with a bureaucratic technology.

Many technologies are introduced as the means to a “wild, impossible” goal but lose their luster with time. How would one categorize the printing press? the telegram? the airplane?

Ultimately, it is not the purity of our intentions or how “mad” our schemes are that will determine whether or not there is clean water to drink and fresh air to breathe. The fate of the earth doesn’t depend on more technologically grandiose projects. The poetic technologies of the Soviet Union were every bit as toxic–often moreso–than the current technologies that Graeber finds boring and bureaucratic. They wouldn’t be any less toxic if somehow implemented by anarchists.

Graeber offers no grounds for believing that such grandiose projects are even consistent with his espoused anarchism. He can say nothing more than that the future is unknown and undetermined and that maybe one day anarchists will run the zoo.

Finding Magic in the World

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Originally published by The Dark Mountain Project.

finding magic

Serious-minded people — rational adults — do not believe in magic… or so we are led to believe. To suggest that magic is in any sense real is often to disqualify one’s ideas from consideration. Even those who believe in burning bushes and talking snakes would likely be offended at the suggestion that what they believe in is magic. The phrase ‘magical thinking‘ is used for a variety of common logical fallacies and mistaken ways of thinking. The belief may be considered natural in children but almost pathological in adults. Belief in magic is amongst the ‘childish things‘ that we are supposed to shed. And, indeed, most do shed the belief but I suspect they do it because it is expected of them rather than through any carefully considered decision or gathering of evidence. As children the world is overflowing with magic but as adults we collectively pretend the world is more of a machine than an animal, more of an object than a subject, something to dominate rather than revere.

So am I suggesting that magic might be real? Well, I want you to keep reading and so, for moment, I’ll need to keep those cards close to the vest. But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to suspect that something may be up my sleeve.

Much like asking if God exists, the answer hinges almost entirely on the definitions being employed. He or she who defines the terms will surely win the debate. A world full of magic may look identical to a world completely void of magic if interlocutors are employing the term in radically different ways. Likewise, even the most zealous of atheists may happily concede that gods exist provided certain definitions. The assertion that ‘there is no god’ is often made within the context of traditional Western theism; stepping outside that context toward a radically different understanding of what is meant by ‘god’ makes for a significantly different conversation and different possibilities.

Returning to magic, consider the following dialogue from Richard Linklater’s recent film Boyhood:

Mason: Dad, there’s no, like, real magic in the world, right?
Father: What do you mean?
M: You know, like elves and stuff… people just made that stuff up.
F: Well, I don’t know, what makes you think that elves are any more magical than something like a whale, you know what I mean? What if I were to tell you a story about how underneath the ocean was this giant sea mammal that used sonar and sang songs… and it was so big that its heart was the size of a car and you could crawl through the arteries? I mean you’d think that was pretty magical, right?

The confusion is created by incorporating the idea of the supernatural into the very definition of magic. Many standard dictionary definitions will include the idea of the supernatural but this is not helpful; indeed, it’s a trap. It means that if something is part of the natural world that it is not, as a matter of definition, magical. We already know (or assume) that there is no magic in nature. So, for example, we know whales aren’t magical because we can go out and observe them or convert them into oil for lamps. Magic is supposed to be more elusive.

Anselm argued one need only to adequately understand the concept of God in order to know, with certainty, that He exists. For Anselm, God was ‘that than which nothing greater could be conceived’. To trace the consequences of this definition meant that God necessarily exists. If you are thinking of a being that is perfect in every way but lacks existence then you not thinking about God; you are not thinking about ‘that than which nothing greater could be conceived’. Anselm thought that to exist would certainly be greater than to not exist.

And yet Anselm’s Ontological Argument is not very convincing and is widely considered to be inadequate. The generally identified flaw was initially provided by Kant who pointed out that existence is not appropriately described as a characteristic or a perfection.

We ought not incorporate existence or (non-existence) into our definitions.

Returning to the natural world, Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass writes:

‘The very facts of the world are a poem. Light is turned to sugar. Salamanders find their way to ancestral ponds following magnetic lines radiating from the earth. The saliva of grazing buffalo causes the grass to grow taller. Tobacco seeds germinate when they smell smoke. Microbes in industrial waste can destroy mercury. Aren’t these stories we should all know?’ (Kimmerer 345)

While not explicitly about magic, Kimmerer breaks down the wall that many of us have erected in our minds that divides poems from facts. The former are often treated as fluffy and frivolous while the latter are regarded as solid, dependable, and gathered through the hard work of trained professionals. We entertain ourselves with poems and build spaceships with facts. But the divide is artificial and the characterisations of what can be found on each side nothing but stereotypes and superstitions serving to convince us that the divide makes sense, that it needs to be there, that something must be one or the other and not both.

So who is really guilty of the sleight-of-hand when answering this question about magic? No one and everyone.

Whether there is magic in the world is, on a certain level, purely a matter of definition. For most of my life I have defined magic out of existence. It is only in recent years that I have been finding it everywhere as a ubiquitous part of everyday life: as mundane and as exciting as the air.

Baseball, Steroids, and the Arms Race of Technology

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“As an advanced society full of technological wonders, perhaps it’s time we consider upgrading our idea of sports and rethinking what constitutes an exemplary athlete.” –Zoltan Istvan

ARod“Exemplary athlete”? “tainted slugger”? Whatever your judgment, Alex Rodriguez returns to baseball after being suspended for the entire 2014 baseball season. Rodriquez was suspended for using various “performance enhancing drugs” or PEDs which are prohibited by Major League Baseball. At the time of his suspension he was the highest paid player in the history of the game and his suspension remains the longest ever handed down. With his return, baseball once again attempts to turn the page on what has been called the Steroid Era.

The story of Alex Rodriguez could be told as a modern parable warning of a danger more relevant to those of us who can’t hit a baseball as far as Rodriguez can—with or without steroids.

Peformance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs)

Not everyone thinks that PEDs ought to be banned in professional sports. Like recreational drugs in widespread use, it is argued that regulation would be more effective and health risks could be minimized if PEDs were used openly and without penalty. Questions of fairness could purportedly be addressed by ensuring that all athletes have access to PEDs and therefore were competing on a level playing field. It is also argued that use is so widespread that prohibitions are ultimately futile; cheaters are going to cheat.

There are, no doubt, a lot of bad arguments for banning PEDs…but they are not all bad.

The most compelling reason for banning the use of PEDs by professional baseball players is that the use of PEDs by some creates undue pressure on others to do likewise. In order to remain competitive, many are compelled (would it be too far to say “coerced”?) to take what would otherwise be unnecessary risks to their health. It begins as a free choice by an individual and quickly becomes almost requisite for those who wish to play the game. And it does not only affect professional ball players, which is admittedly a fairly small group of people, but rather affects all who aspire to compete at that level—a considerably larger group of people. A study commissioned by the National Baseball Hall of Fame makes the point:

“Even if every single player in Major League Baseball used steroids, that would be approximately 1,300 users, when in contrast, considering that there are about 16 million private and public high-school students in the U.S., between 350,000 to almost a million are using steroids illegally,”

It may be suggested that professional athletes are well compensated for taking such risks but most young people with such ambitions will never be so compensated; they are gambling with their health for a payoff that more often than not will never materialize. Shockingly, many minor league baseball players earn poverty level wages.

Philosopher Jacob Beck has compared the use of PEDs in baseball to a vicious arms race in which “everyone winds up worse off than if the arms race had never begun”. Beck argues that preventing such an arms race is in fact the only good reason to ban PEDs in professional sports.

There is also a secondary arms race between drugs and drug testing. Alex Rodriguez wasn’t suspended because he failed a drug test; the drugs he took never showed up on tests that were administered. Drugs are developed and introduced with the intention that they will not show up on particular tests; tests are then developed to catch up to the drugs being used. The effect is that new drugs are regularly introduced and with each one a new set of risks is introduced.

Personal Electonic Devices (PEDs)

There is a parallel between the logic of using performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) in baseball and the way new personal electronic devices (PEDs) are introduced and adopted.

The newest phone, watch, tablet, or whatever it may be, promises a competitive edge to the user. But the promises often hinge on your having the device before it becomes completely ubiquitous. Once others catch up, there is no competitive advantage and yet there is no clear way of going back to life without the device. No one is better off and everyone is locked into a new state of affairs; a new state of affairs which will often represent a net loss in terms of health and happiness. It is yet another vicious arms race.

New devices are originally presented as voluntary—so as to silence critics—but quickly become almost obligatory. Performance enhancing drugs are voluntary but quickly become obligatory if one hopes to remain competitive or make it in the big leagues.

Not writing about steroids, Ted Kaczynski explains the general phenomenon:

“When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.” (“Industrial Society and its Future” published in Technological Slavery, p. 76)

Predating Kaczynski by approximately thirty years, Jacques Ellul writes:

“once an advanced technical product is created, the important thing is to force consumers to use it even though they have no interest in it.” (Ellul, Technological Society, p. 205)

As evidence for the point made by Kaczynski and Ellul, consider a recent New York Times headline (from February 2015): 

Apple’s New Job: Selling a Smartwatch to an Uninterested Publicsmartwatch

Steroids changed baseball in such a way so thateven those who might be disinclined to use them likely felt compelled. Personal electronic devices (PEDs) have changed society to such an extent that opting out is no longer a viable option for most people.

When Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Google’s Eric Schmidt speak of getting everyone online they are the equivalent of dealers setting up everyone’s injections; they have an interest in getting everyone hooked. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg explains that “Connecting everyone is one of the fundamental challenges of our generation.” In 2013, Eric Schmidt predicted that “everyone on Earth will be connected” by the end of the decade. Last January, Schmidt said that soon “the internet will disappear” explaining further that “there will be so many IP addresses…so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you areinteracting with that you won’t even sense it. It will be part of your presence all the time.”

You won’t even sense it.

Postscript: Steroids, Technology, and Transhumanism

Finally, there is another argument in favor of allowing performance enhancing drugs into professional sports: the games would supposedly be more enjoyable for spectators. Transhumanist Zoltan Istvan looks forward to a time when “humans will sprint faster than horses” and “athletes will swim entire races without taking a breath”; as evidence that we are on such a trajectory Istvan explains that “already, untainted urine samples have become as essential to top runners as their shoes”.

Istvan has gone as far as to call for a Transhumanist Olympics which he explains as:

“a place for athletes in the 21st Century who have modified themselves with drugs, technologies, and bionic enhancements. A place where the best human potential combines with the most advanced science to create the coolest competitions possible.”

Set alongside the transhumanist visions of Zoltan Istvan, Rodriguez’s steroids may appear as banal as Flintstone vitamins. But the transhumanist vision is the logical extension of the ongoing arms race.

 

Veganism as Religious Practice

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It would be an understandable mistake for those who know me to interpret the title of this post as the lead-in to a renunciation of veganism (such recantations have become something of an internet genre) for my relationship with religion has been largely hostile. But this isn’t a renunciation nor is “religious practice” intended as a slur or a trivialization. Indeed, understanding veganism as a religious practice may be a quite compelling rationale for persisting with an unusual lifestyle.

Consider that the most commonplace justification for (ethical) veganism, as far as I can tell, is that by refusing to purchase and consume the remains of animals one is reducing the demand for such products. In turn, lower demand purportedly means that fewer animals will be raised and sent to slaughter. My decision to be vegan saves lives—so the story goes.

But this rationale does not necessarily withstand scrutiny. The market signal sent by one person’s decision to purchase tempeh rather than turkey is too weak to effect the total number of animals killed. It’s not a drop in the bucket, it’s less than that. The economic system is not so fine grained as to register your every move and then subtly adjust an imperceptible amount. Unfortunately, an angel doesn’t get its wings and a chicken is not set free when you decide to go vegan.

Philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau effectively makes this point in his 1994 paper “Vegetarianism, Causation, and Ethical Theory” explaining that “philosophers writing about vegetarianism have often shifted subtly from an evaluation of the practices of current factory farming, to the existence of a requirement to refrain from purchasing and eating meat. These are separable issues.” More recently Robert Bass has addressed the problem in front of Yale University’s Animal Ethics Study Group. In 2014 Bass gave a talk titled “What Can One Person Do? Causal Impotence and Dietary Choice.” It should be noted that neither Shafer-Landau nor Bass conclude that eating animal products is morally acceptable, they simply do not offer the same simplistic rationale that is offered by most activists and large animal organizations.

Recognizing this economic fact leaves one searching for a less simplistic reason for his or her decision to maintain a vegan diet. I am tentatively suggesting the possibility that veganism may be appropriately construed as a religious practice and is therefore done both to reflect to others and remind oneself of values that are deemed to be of the utmost important.

Interestingly, this loosely parallels why Jewish people may opt for a kosher diet. In Judaism, God’s laws fall into three categories. Laws regarding diet are categorized as chukim, that is they are laws which seemingly lack a straightforward or self-evident rationale (such as the self-evident value in maintaining a prohibition on the murder of human beings) but rather are observed simply because God commands them (or perhaps based on faith that God’s commands have their own logic even if it’s not self-evident). It reflects one’s devotion outwardly and acts as a reminder for oneself.

It could be said that this has the somewhat unsettling result that veganism is, at best, only indirectly beneficial for nonhuman animals. But this objection reverses the order of things; it confuses cause and effect. It was the recognition that veganism is only indirectly beneficial that prompted this line of thought.

As an aside, understanding veganism in this way has—for better or worse—caused me to be less critical of those who are not vegan and be open to seeing them as capable of making meaningful contributions toward animal liberation. This may be the inevitable result of taking a more honest and more humble assessment of one’s own efforts.