Barbarism certainly sounds not very desirable. But perhaps the decay of civilization can also lead to something like a flowering tree in a wasteland, *if* we are prepared, spiritually, morally, physically.
Great stuff. I certainly hope you're right about the first image not being our fate, though I've come to suspect many people would walk right into that future, shrugging and chanting "it's not happening, and besides, it's a good thing that it's happening."
A future (getting closer by the day) were every aspect of civilisation is based on a quantitative measure, will never outlive a qualitative species. The man that blindly cuts the tree down for firewood, missed the acorn that would provide firewood for the rest of his life. We can all easily count the number of seeds in an apple, but the number of apples in a single seed is something else! Long live barbarism......
Finitude is the inevitable leveller. And entropy is the only insurmountable force in the universe. They necessarily work in harmony. Which bodes well for this prognosis.
If mankind did not create itself, and what mankind creates is merely the creator creating through mankind, then is not the civilized world too an environment that man did not really create?
As you say yourself, the machine, though it knows it not, is an organism. Just as is the world in which it came to be.
Can the barbarian not therefore be inadvertently succored within the machine, if one knows where to look?
I think of the Hellenes, who saw themselves as aspiring to the best of barbarism, while maintaining the best of civilization, a happy median between the hard savagery of the Scythians and the soft servility of the Persians. Perhaps the problem is not the machine (or rather our particular machine, for there have been others, and will be others), but the use to which it is put, arising from the false image the culture that created it has of its identity and purpose.
- Can the barbarian not therefore be inadvertently succored within the machine, if one knows where to look?
I think so, to some degree; but man is a social animal and it is hard to stay attuned to contingency and a natural limits in a social world that has forgotten they exist.
I think the 'false image' is intrinsic to the Machine and to civilisation though, at least so far as the civilisation is top-down and coercive. Of course, as both are natural developments, both are also natural limits to what we can do in our current world; so the barbaric response should be to simply adapt to their existence. Insofar as they are natural, though, they will also die.
Presumably the barbarian might also respond, not just by adaptation, but as the Sea Peoples did to the bronze age states.
False image may be intrinsic not just to civilization, but to language itself. A word necessarily strips away the particular in order to attain the general. No flame is identical to itself from moment to moment, nor are any two flames interchangeable, yet the same word is used for both.
In any case, waiting for the machine to die may be a long wait indeed. Even the Sun will burn out, but not in our lifetimes, nor in the lifetime of our species. An active program of rebarbarization, a rewiliding of the soul that seeks to plant itself in the primal essence of the deep past while also appropriating that which is useful from the machine. Even Conan made use of metallurgy after all. As you say, such a project is intrinsically a social project; we're a tribal animal and cannot do anything in isolation.
The tricky step is that if the rebarbarism is too much a program, it will become an arm of the machine. Of course, that is not to say that a few cannot gather together and whisper.
I like your diagram of overlapping knowledge / power - and the lack thereof - triangles. I've thought about that concept quite a bit over the years and it's nice to see it visualised. A 'heuristic device' nonetheless. Where does it come from originally? Or, if it's it your own devising then well done.
Is it possible to have both knowledge and power though? That could be our salvation - or a pocket of salvation. I can see examples of 'good' power through history (no names - possibly they weren't really so great and have been airbrushed by time's passage) but I guess 'good power' is generally stymied by the system/machine. Especially nowadays.
I don't think so, or at least not at scale and not for any great length of time.
It's not what you do, good or bad, with coercive power that causes other to hide the truth from you. It's the fear of what you could do. The bigger the scale, the more impersonal the power; so, rightly, the bigger the fear.
Even if someone is so good that they are not tempted by coercion, and so obviously good that others can see they are not tempted (which is, at best, a rare), then all humans die fairly quickly in the scheme of things. When they die the power will inevitably pass to someone who is less good. Usually, it passes to someone who wants power for its own sake, and they will soon know nothing at all.
I can only agree that our current civilization is committing suicide in one form or another. Every solution itself partakes of the problem. It is only a matter of time, it seems. I have been reading Girard and if he is right--and I tend to think he is, for the most part--post-civilized life will see the return of some disturbing human tendencies, including human sacrifice. None of it will be pleasant.
I don't think it is entirely futile to start to think of forms and practices that might alleviate some of that. Though considering how chaotic the detransition might likely be, it might be to little effect. It isn't likely that most who survive will start living according to the Tao Te Ching. Maybe some of whom survived might. It is worth living that way now and as far outside the population centers as is possible. Any eccentric billionaires out there willing to fund such, let me know. Otherwise, we are on our own.
“I am a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist of the first order when it comes to this.”
And I have tried very hard not to be. But it’s difficult when, increasingly, one can almost spot the manipulative tentacles of the mega-system inserting themselves into a situation to pass out the blue pills and put all the hard questions and uncomfortable facts to sleep again.
Thank you for this piece of reflection. There are a number of points I have enjoyed. It touches upon one highly annoying and ubiquitous phenomena: how administrative and management procedures across a vast array of institutions are becoming more kafkaesque, inefficient, dysfunctional and overall stupid.
I too believe the Machine will not be able to fully accomplish its cannibalistic vocation. The metaphor you have used of the leaf it’s tantalising. In my view its embedded defeat also rests on the impossibility to fully apropriate/control “emergence” (the handmaiden of chaos) and the “qualitative” (as opposed to quantity) as inherent ontological properties.
Another point: “Empires (…) Either way, they die. It would be better to learn acceptance.” I have read that in Ancient Egypt the temples and monuments that sustained the kingdom were at times carefully and methodically effaced and destroyed (by those with a fair amount of power and knowledge). Apparently, this was not about revolution. Nor was a contingent political manoeuvre but a procedure dictated by reading death signs in the dispassionate heralds of the stars.
I don’t think I agree with the closing statement. But it’s meaning seems fairly undisclosed.
Civilization is Barbarism with manners. Literate Hannibal Lector and the psychotic serial rapist/killer one cage over. We already must adapt daily to the barbarism of civilization.
I am trying to work out the relationship of the state to the commons. We have seen the commons enclosed, at much cost to human beings and to nature, but these deep denominators of the human experience do not only rise or fall, they rise and fall, swinging in vogue with energy, technology, and the tolerance of Gaia for the depredations of the hungry one. Surging energy supplies surge technologies and armies - who can be distracted from farming because of the energy and technology - but neither can persist forever. Unless I am wrong. I worry I am wrong. I worry the Tech-Lords who plan summer vacations on Mars will build their thoreum reactors and will build fusion reactors, And once they build smelters in orbit, they will begin their Dyson spheres. It seems improbable, but the maximum power principle favors it - evolution accelerates from genes to memes and then into the labs of AI robotics. Soon there is nothing left of the organic - life has become metal, plastic and silica. The unanswered question is whether they can fire the cycle of self-reproduction before we unplug it.
Just wonderful.
Barbarism certainly sounds not very desirable. But perhaps the decay of civilization can also lead to something like a flowering tree in a wasteland, *if* we are prepared, spiritually, morally, physically.
i never lived in a "barbaric" society, but I do live in a barbaric society.
Also, it's lovely to see you back.
Thanks. It's good to be back!
Great stuff. I certainly hope you're right about the first image not being our fate, though I've come to suspect many people would walk right into that future, shrugging and chanting "it's not happening, and besides, it's a good thing that it's happening."
I choose to believe the machines in that image are defunct.
A future (getting closer by the day) were every aspect of civilisation is based on a quantitative measure, will never outlive a qualitative species. The man that blindly cuts the tree down for firewood, missed the acorn that would provide firewood for the rest of his life. We can all easily count the number of seeds in an apple, but the number of apples in a single seed is something else! Long live barbarism......
Like the plane at 40,000 feet, from where we see everything and know nothing, it has to fall to earth. Satan like lightning ⚡️
Finitude is the inevitable leveller. And entropy is the only insurmountable force in the universe. They necessarily work in harmony. Which bodes well for this prognosis.
If mankind did not create itself, and what mankind creates is merely the creator creating through mankind, then is not the civilized world too an environment that man did not really create?
As you say yourself, the machine, though it knows it not, is an organism. Just as is the world in which it came to be.
Can the barbarian not therefore be inadvertently succored within the machine, if one knows where to look?
I think of the Hellenes, who saw themselves as aspiring to the best of barbarism, while maintaining the best of civilization, a happy median between the hard savagery of the Scythians and the soft servility of the Persians. Perhaps the problem is not the machine (or rather our particular machine, for there have been others, and will be others), but the use to which it is put, arising from the false image the culture that created it has of its identity and purpose.
- Can the barbarian not therefore be inadvertently succored within the machine, if one knows where to look?
I think so, to some degree; but man is a social animal and it is hard to stay attuned to contingency and a natural limits in a social world that has forgotten they exist.
I think the 'false image' is intrinsic to the Machine and to civilisation though, at least so far as the civilisation is top-down and coercive. Of course, as both are natural developments, both are also natural limits to what we can do in our current world; so the barbaric response should be to simply adapt to their existence. Insofar as they are natural, though, they will also die.
Presumably the barbarian might also respond, not just by adaptation, but as the Sea Peoples did to the bronze age states.
False image may be intrinsic not just to civilization, but to language itself. A word necessarily strips away the particular in order to attain the general. No flame is identical to itself from moment to moment, nor are any two flames interchangeable, yet the same word is used for both.
In any case, waiting for the machine to die may be a long wait indeed. Even the Sun will burn out, but not in our lifetimes, nor in the lifetime of our species. An active program of rebarbarization, a rewiliding of the soul that seeks to plant itself in the primal essence of the deep past while also appropriating that which is useful from the machine. Even Conan made use of metallurgy after all. As you say, such a project is intrinsically a social project; we're a tribal animal and cannot do anything in isolation.
The tricky step is that if the rebarbarism is too much a program, it will become an arm of the machine. Of course, that is not to say that a few cannot gather together and whisper.
I like your diagram of overlapping knowledge / power - and the lack thereof - triangles. I've thought about that concept quite a bit over the years and it's nice to see it visualised. A 'heuristic device' nonetheless. Where does it come from originally? Or, if it's it your own devising then well done.
I made it with my extremely limited computer art skills!
Is it possible to have both knowledge and power though? That could be our salvation - or a pocket of salvation. I can see examples of 'good' power through history (no names - possibly they weren't really so great and have been airbrushed by time's passage) but I guess 'good power' is generally stymied by the system/machine. Especially nowadays.
I don't think so, or at least not at scale and not for any great length of time.
It's not what you do, good or bad, with coercive power that causes other to hide the truth from you. It's the fear of what you could do. The bigger the scale, the more impersonal the power; so, rightly, the bigger the fear.
Even if someone is so good that they are not tempted by coercion, and so obviously good that others can see they are not tempted (which is, at best, a rare), then all humans die fairly quickly in the scheme of things. When they die the power will inevitably pass to someone who is less good. Usually, it passes to someone who wants power for its own sake, and they will soon know nothing at all.
Great piece!
I can only agree that our current civilization is committing suicide in one form or another. Every solution itself partakes of the problem. It is only a matter of time, it seems. I have been reading Girard and if he is right--and I tend to think he is, for the most part--post-civilized life will see the return of some disturbing human tendencies, including human sacrifice. None of it will be pleasant.
I don't think it is entirely futile to start to think of forms and practices that might alleviate some of that. Though considering how chaotic the detransition might likely be, it might be to little effect. It isn't likely that most who survive will start living according to the Tao Te Ching. Maybe some of whom survived might. It is worth living that way now and as far outside the population centers as is possible. Any eccentric billionaires out there willing to fund such, let me know. Otherwise, we are on our own.
It's not billionaires we lack. It's faith. If we had that, the billionaires will come and we wouldn't need them.
Lovely to be reading you again. Fascinating piece, thank you.
“I am a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theorist of the first order when it comes to this.”
And I have tried very hard not to be. But it’s difficult when, increasingly, one can almost spot the manipulative tentacles of the mega-system inserting themselves into a situation to pass out the blue pills and put all the hard questions and uncomfortable facts to sleep again.
I am glad you are back, hopefully with a mended or new (small 'm') machine.
Thank you for this piece of reflection. There are a number of points I have enjoyed. It touches upon one highly annoying and ubiquitous phenomena: how administrative and management procedures across a vast array of institutions are becoming more kafkaesque, inefficient, dysfunctional and overall stupid.
I too believe the Machine will not be able to fully accomplish its cannibalistic vocation. The metaphor you have used of the leaf it’s tantalising. In my view its embedded defeat also rests on the impossibility to fully apropriate/control “emergence” (the handmaiden of chaos) and the “qualitative” (as opposed to quantity) as inherent ontological properties.
Another point: “Empires (…) Either way, they die. It would be better to learn acceptance.” I have read that in Ancient Egypt the temples and monuments that sustained the kingdom were at times carefully and methodically effaced and destroyed (by those with a fair amount of power and knowledge). Apparently, this was not about revolution. Nor was a contingent political manoeuvre but a procedure dictated by reading death signs in the dispassionate heralds of the stars.
I don’t think I agree with the closing statement. But it’s meaning seems fairly undisclosed.
Civilization is Barbarism with manners. Literate Hannibal Lector and the psychotic serial rapist/killer one cage over. We already must adapt daily to the barbarism of civilization.
I am trying to work out the relationship of the state to the commons. We have seen the commons enclosed, at much cost to human beings and to nature, but these deep denominators of the human experience do not only rise or fall, they rise and fall, swinging in vogue with energy, technology, and the tolerance of Gaia for the depredations of the hungry one. Surging energy supplies surge technologies and armies - who can be distracted from farming because of the energy and technology - but neither can persist forever. Unless I am wrong. I worry I am wrong. I worry the Tech-Lords who plan summer vacations on Mars will build their thoreum reactors and will build fusion reactors, And once they build smelters in orbit, they will begin their Dyson spheres. It seems improbable, but the maximum power principle favors it - evolution accelerates from genes to memes and then into the labs of AI robotics. Soon there is nothing left of the organic - life has become metal, plastic and silica. The unanswered question is whether they can fire the cycle of self-reproduction before we unplug it.