Rejection of Tomorrow

I keep seeing and hearing cynics sigh about how far we have "fallen." The disease is rampant, on both right and left. The striking thing to me is the inanity of cliches, like: "Isn't it a shame that our wisdom has not kept pace with technology?" This nonsense is spouted amid the greatest transformation of diversity, inclusion, acceptance, re-evaluation and tolerance in the history of our species! At no other time were so many hoary/awful assumptions - about race-gender and so on - pilloried by light and scrutiny! 

And if that is not ADVANCEMENT of our souls, I do not know what would be.

I go into this here: 2001: A Space Odyssey: Shining Light on How Far We've Come.

In pointing this out, I do not call for complacency. These trends - expanding our horizons of worry, exploration, concern, inclusion and so on - are the core essence of my life, in activism, science and science fiction. But it is important to note that this progress was not achieved by radical polemicists and cynics, who deny that we have already made great progress. 

It was propelled by science, which examined and demolished old taken-for-granted assumptions. It was propelled by millions who mixed idealism with pragmatism... the realization of the stupidity of wasting human potential by limiting options for women and minorities, for example. 

Some claim that we must let our wisdom catch up with advances in technology, suggesting that we would be better off if we slowed or suppressed changes in technology. I disagree -- I believe that technology has not yet caught up with our wisdom..

Indeed, there is no greater enemy of further progress than the cynics who declare that great progress HAS NOT ALREADY HAPPENED. 

Political correctness is not the driver of progress, but an unpleasant waste product of progress, unavoidable but to be navigated with high boots, while helping the best civilization in human history to get... and note this phrase... even-better.

See also my earlier posting: Who is worse? Those who think progress will be easy? Or those who deny progress at all?

==Future Primitive==

There are delightful moments when everything comes together: either you find a person who is right a lot and has expanded your horizons re: what’s possible… or you find the opposite extreme: a sublime rationalizer who induces stunned amazement at his universal wrongness, opening your eyes to the true diversity of the species we belong-to.

Here is an article  -- Why Do the Anarcho-Primitivists Want to Abolish Civilization -- about an anarcho-primitivist… once a confidant of the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski… who makes statement after statement that is not only retro-nostalgic, but absolutely, provably and universally false.

George Dvorsky writes, “Philosopher John Zerzan wants you to get rid of all your technology — your car, your mobile phone, your computer, your appliances — the whole lot. In his perfect world, you'd be stripped off all your technological creature comforts, reduced to a lifestyle that harkens back to when our hunter-gatherer ancestors romped around the African plains.”

Dvorsky does a good job leading Zerzan onto limb after limb, where Zerzan then saws them himself. Alas, George does not ask “what is the carrying capacity of the Earth in hunter gatherers?" That would have exposed Zeran’s prescription for what it is — a call for the death of billions.

And yes, as a LONG RANGE goal, convincing billions to have so few children that we equilibrate at a few hundred thousand, or a few millions, who superficially are hunter-gatherers but are augmented by science and background tools so that they avoid the true tormented and horrific life that our pre-agriculture ancestors *actually* lived? Well, that at least is something that could be argued, in a science fictional sort of way. (See the final episode of Battlestar Galactica). Wrongheaded, but nowhere near as much as Zeran.

Indeed, in my Brightness Reef Trilogy, I posit a strong reason why several galactic races might deliberately choose this path, diving into every-more primitive states in order to achieve a type of redemption. I do not refuse to contemplate such ideas! I just like them to be contemplated well and with sincere willingness to tradeoff reality-grounded ideas… not bizarrely reality-detached wish fantasies.

The important lesson here is that the crazy far right may be our biggest problem, today, with its campaign to restore the feudalism that oppressed 99% of our ancestors since agriculture. (There is a sub-movement on that side that openly seeks a return to lordship-rule). But retro-troglodytic-nostalgism also includes some who might be called “leftist,” who want the other kinds of oppression that preceded agriculture.

Both retro movements are crazy. Their common theme is rejection of tomorrow. But the enlightenment civilization that brought us science and wealth and education and positive sum games... and especially the much-smarter-than-us kids who might weigh the evidence better than we can -- is still the only way that humanity might choose to navigate the difficult path ahead.

==Denying Science==

Continuing re the march of the paranoids... In Stop Pretending That Liberals are Just As Anti-Science as Conservatives, Chris Mooney does service by cataloging in great detail the gone-mad American right’s War on Science. Here, he (on Mother Jones) attempts to prove that the American left is not “just as bad as the right” in reviling science. Mooney both succeeds and fails. On his side of the ledger...

(1) Yes, the crazy-wing of the left is smaller (though it include examples like Mr. Zeran), and...

(2) The flakiest types on the left have only picked a few topics, for example, GMOs and anti-vaccination. Most have not joined an across-the-board hatred of science, and...

(3) In each of those campaigns, there appear to be just as many conservatives.

Where Mooney stumbles is in trying to soft-pedal the blatant fact that America’s far-left does contain some anti-science tendencies. 

You can find one root source in the left’s bastion — several hundred university soft-studies departments, where mutant versions of that intellectual disease -- post-modernism -- still metastacize and thrive. Sure, that's a small sliver of American life, but an important one and a realm wherein their cult is just as horrifically loony and anti-future and conspiratorial as any corporate boardroom or Tea Party cult cell! If you have ever spent substantial time on campus, you know the lesson these infestations prove…

...that dogmatic bullies will gather, wherever they can get away with it. And then find rationalized incantations to justify their bullying.

(Especially irksome is the way so many (not all!) university literature and English departments have been reflexively hateful toward science fiction, the one branch of literature for which Americans should be most proud. This is starting to shift. But recent attempts to undermine a crown jewel — The University of California at Riverside’s Eaton SF Collection — serve as case in point.)

Two books that delve further into this subject: The Republican War on Science by Chris Mooney, as well as Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell (of the excellent science blogging site, Science 2.0)

Let me reiterate — there is no comparison of MAGNITUDE between the very-far-left’s little islands of cranky, highly specific, anti-future science hating… and the vastly, vastly larger and more deadly-to-us-all madness that has taken over the entire American right. Go ahead and read Chris Mooney’s article!

Just remember to keep a wary eye on your allies.

Modernism Part 15: Modernism & Science are assaulted from all sides...

Before resuming this long essay about modernism, here's a link to my big speech about libertarianism.  It's a cult classic... among the very few pragmatists in that sadly loopy movement. Sad because they could not even do to Bush what Nader did to Gore, even though their type of "conservatism" is far closer to the meaning of the word held by a majority of GOP voters. They could have become a strong force for freedom while undermining the drift of the New Right toward aristocratism. But year after year, libertarian purists blame the customers for not buying, instead of re-examining their product. It is pathetic, and a real betrayal of the movement's deeper potential. (Romanticism strikes again.)

Now onward.

                                                                            ***

Monsters to the Left of Us...


After Part 14, which discussed the obsessive neoconservative campaign against science and modernity, can we take it that the Enlightenment is principally under attack from the "right"?

Far from it! Let's take another example of this all-out reactionary frenzy, this time from the political "left."

Michael Crichton's apparent polar opposite would seem to be Margaret Atwood, the doyen of feminist fiction and well-known for her attacks on the white-male-financier power structure, in both fiction and polemical nonfiction. Oryx and Crake, Atwood's latest novel, portrays yet another world devastated by human greed, incompetence, and brutish oppression, this time nearly denuded of human life by scientific innovations gone awry.

Of course this is a familiar premise and one that I have used myself. Indeed, there is nothing wrong with some vivid extrapolative exaggeration in trying to make a point. The greatest 'self-preventing prophecies' have done it by showing how much we'd lose "if this goes on."

And yet, this motif can also become hackneyed, cliched, even a crutch. For example, nearly all feminist science fiction tales seem to begin with a scenario based on some (literally) manmade catastrophe. One can easily see why. The End of the World is such a bad thing - the very worst thing - that it offers a moral excuse for any author to pour opprobrium upon whole types who might be assigned blanket group-culpability. A neat trick, since you aren't really supposed to judge people in straw-man type-categories.

But that's what romantics inherently do, whether their particular ire is aimed left or right, at all commies or all capitalists or at all males. (See my article on Tolkien and the Modern Age) Romanticism is about one side being pure and good while the opposition is all-bad. And the attraction of this way of thinking is clear. Indignation feels good! It's lovely to disdain your opponents as-a class that is inherently immoral.

But even when your worldview officially promotes poilitically-correct hypertolerance? One way around this bind is to portray the enemy class (males, plutocrats, whatever) as all-powerful, and determined to bring about the end of the world.

(I expect grief from these paragraphs, so let me say very clearly that I consider myself to be a feminist and have written my own feminist utopia, Glory Season. Moreover, creating a cliched world holocaust and then assigning venal blame to conspiring corporate lords can seem less preposterous than Michael Crichton's recent attempt to call ecological activists the Great Illuminati! Here my criticism of the standard feminist fictional scenario is not aimed at the surface agenda of universal tolerance and opportunity - of which I deeply approve - but at a nasty undercurrent that many authors may not even be aware of.)

As part of this tradition, Oryx and Crake doesn't hold back. One of the book's key themes is the corrupting influence of commerce on science. When business interests dominate "you enter a skewed universe where science can no longer operate as science," Atwood says.

The book takes this to extremes. For example, biotech company HelthWyzer puts "hostile bioforms" into vitamin pills while at the same time marketing antidotes. "The best diseases, from a business point of view," the author writes with irony, "would be those that cause a lingering illness."

And it all goes to hell from there. Talk about a penalty for man's arrogance! The destruction of all art, all love, all hope. This is portrayed as the ultimate and likely outcome if we continue plunging forward with our insolent program of meddling with Nature's wisdom.

The crux: science cannot be trusted. Not while money or competition or self-interest are involved. (In other words, not while we are human.) Not anywhere as well as certain self-appointed artistic-elite guardians of Truth.

In effect, this is exactly the same lesson as that preached by Michael Crichton. Except replace "artistic" with "aristocratic." (The words even sound similar.)

Till now, I'd wager very few critics have even typed the names Michael Crichton and Margaret Atwood in the same article, let alone calling them allies and co belligerents in the same cause. And yet, having come this far in a lengthy essay, the reader can now see why I present them, side-by-side. True, they have probably never supported the same politicians, and never will. Their particular choice of villains will always be surficially different; so will their heroes and heroines. But those are superficialities and distractions.

Indeed, this pair of authors show countless eerie parallels. Both claim relentlessly, and rather defensively, to be pro-science. Crichton avows a scientific education while Atwood often refers to her father and brother, biologists of some prominence. Both Crichton and Atwood mourn that modern science is relentlessly corrupted by corrupt interests that destroy its credibility. Even the unscrupulous conspiracies are remarkably similar, differing only in the cosmetic surfaces that distinguish left-wing authoritarian bogeymen from right-wing authoritarian bogeymen.

Both offer doomsday scenarios that arise almost entirely because of secrecy that stifles the natural corrective, error-prevention of open accountability in a free, democratic and scientific society.

And yet they never call secrecy the culprit, per se.

No, it is always hubris.

Dig down, and you will find that these authors, and a myriad others like them, tap the mythic current described by Joseph Campbell. A river of tradition, nostalgia and fear of the future that watered nearly all of the great literature in our tortured past, from Homer and Murusaki to Joyce. A despairing sense of loss. A belief in eternal verities and traditional values under threat. The rightful superiority of a wise or all-knowing class. A sense that the past knew better and that today's citizens cannot be trusted with bold new tools to "improve" the world. To improve their children and themselves.

Don't be distracted by minor differences. While lefty postmodernists express contempt for money-polluted, power-driven science in principle, Crichton and his neoconservative friends rail against what they perceive as a liberal-activist tilt on the part of the modern scientific community in practice, proclaiming that humanity's smartest and best trained minds -- the entire vast and amorphous marketplace of skilled scientific competitors -- have been polluted and discredited by outrageously unprofessional mysticism and consensual bias.

These two positions are seldom laid side-by-side. The common aim of antimodernists - both neoconservative and ultraliberal - is to discredit the process and credibility of science itself, a process that benefits from relentless criticism of specifics , but that is undermined by broadbrush general condemnations, hurled without supporting analysis from fanatical extremes of both left and right.



...on to Part 16... how it spreads outward from the arts...

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The Radical Notion Of Modernism

I've been rather suprised by the traffic generated by this blog... and a bit ashamed of neglecting it. But trying to keep my head above water and get back to writing novels.

So, what I think I'll do is use this space to try out - in serialized segments - my next article. It's on a topic very closely related to my articles about Tolkien and the Modern Age and Star Wars: The Dark Side. Only those dealt with romanticism vs enlightenment thinking in the arts and in storytelling.

The new piece is more general. It is about the whole notion called modernism, which is the natural outgrowth of Ben Franklin's wing of the Enlightenment. I'll post it here in small chunks. Comments are welcome. Especially examples or counter examples. (e.g. I cannot recall the name of the urban planner whose misguided "modernist" notions made such a mish mash of urban renewal in NYC in the 60s.)

Anyway, here goes:

---------------

The Radical Notion Of Modernism:

Is it relevant for the Twenty-First Century?

by David Brin (First Draft: 12/04 limited circulation for feedback only)
http://www.davidbrin.com/

After 40 years in decline, modernism appears to be at a nadir, perhaps even suffering a fatal rout.

Even its supporters seem abjectly apologetic, that is, if you can find anyone who will admit using the word at all. The term is now largely associated with some outmoded and rather ugly architectural styles, far more than with its former meaning -- an over-arching dream of ambitiously making a better world through human creativity and will.

First, let me shrug aside “modernism” in the sense of an artistic or fancy intellectual movement. Grandiose theories serve largely to promote elitist snobbery and to undermine a worldview that is - at-heart - based upon gritty pragmatism.

Indeed, by anchoring the word to specific styles and decades, the opposing postmodernist movement has been able to call itself the rightful successor to something that is archaic, passe, even dead.

Modernism, to me, is about something much more fundamental than some trendy fads and formalisms. At its root, the movement has always been an expression of human confidence.

Confidence that rising knowledge, skill and creativity - propelled by both competition and cooperation - can empower each generation to confront a myriad challenges that their parents found daunting. A confidence that is easily ridiculed as either naive or arrogant, but that - in fact - grows out of the enthusiasm children often express, when they declare eagerness to “be something” when they grow up. To become something important. To do something meaningful.

This eagerness is all-too often punished by sneers on the playground, and later by dour scoffers in the world of adults. Nevertheless, it endures. Modernism is the grownup expression of our childhood dream to significantly change the world.

---&; onward to part 2.

David Brin

http://www.davidbrin.com

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