Like Whoa, Dude
Here is what Neal Stephenson has to say about Revenge of the Sith (an interesting little piece of intellectual puddlestomping you can read in toto with free registration at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/opinion/17stephenson.html):
"Anakin wins that race by repairing his crippled racer in an ecstasy of switch-flipping that looks about as intuitive as starting up a nuclear submarine. Clearly the boy is destined to be adopted into the Jedi order, where he will develop his geek talents - not by studying calculus but by meditating a lot and learning to trust his feelings. I lap this stuff up along with millions, maybe billions, of others. Why? Because every single one of us is as dependent on science and technology - and, by extension, on the geeks who make it work - as a patient in intensive care. Yet we much prefer to think otherwise.
"Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.
"If the "Star Wars" movies are remembered a century from now, it'll be because they are such exact parables for this state of affairs. Young people in other countries will watch them in classrooms as an answer to the question: Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic."
I am, of course, a perfect example of this. I know stuff. Lots of stuff. More stuff than the average person and then some. But I don't know how to embed a link in this post. I know how to take the cover off my computer stack, but not much about what to do after I've exposed the motherboard. I know how to cook over an open fire but I'm very bad at starting them and couldn't tell you diddly about how to actually catch dinner. (Well, maybe in theory, but armchair survival? Come on.)
Like everyone else, I've thought about this stuff. Postapocalyptic survival (chaotic at first, then very Douglas Adams), whether I'd even want to survive (hell no), medicine (yay naturopaths - survivors should all move to the Pacific Northwest), food (highly contaminated), the state of knowledge (reset to zero), what culture would be like (my guesses are pathetically undernourished). The standard cave analogy applies to the ghost world we live on, sustained by the blank myth of invisible technology.
But I think Stephenson misses the point. We hate knowledge. We hate intelligence. We hate them because we hate things we can't understand, and the only reason we can get away with not hating technology is because we can pretend it doesn't exist. This is the dangerous game we've been playing since the 70s that has resulted in a presidential administration that can lie, be exposed in its lie, and not suffer any consequences. Baffled incomprehension produces indifference, and transfers the hatred onto the fucking loudmouth who called our attention to it in the first place.
Part of the problem is that in the 70s all was supposed to be free and natural (just like the Jedi), and being natural, purifying itself by being true to the underlying intuition. Discipline was bad, eating your spinach was bad, rationalization (read: intelligence) was bad, authority was bad. Now we have no relation to these concepts at all. Which means that we can't use them, control the things they make.
An interesting question I think links here: How can we create a knowledge-loving culture? One in which we can embrace and use these concepts? And if we can't, how do we get by without them? I would love to figure that one out.
But so the real question in all that swath of confusion: With all the innovation and the planned obsolescence etc., what really happens to us? Our reality shifts, the blank myth remains steady - static. What is that?
"Anakin wins that race by repairing his crippled racer in an ecstasy of switch-flipping that looks about as intuitive as starting up a nuclear submarine. Clearly the boy is destined to be adopted into the Jedi order, where he will develop his geek talents - not by studying calculus but by meditating a lot and learning to trust his feelings. I lap this stuff up along with millions, maybe billions, of others. Why? Because every single one of us is as dependent on science and technology - and, by extension, on the geeks who make it work - as a patient in intensive care. Yet we much prefer to think otherwise.
"Scientists and technologists have the same uneasy status in our society as the Jedi in the Galactic Republic. They are scorned by the cultural left and the cultural right, and young people avoid science and math classes in hordes. The tedious particulars of keeping ourselves alive, comfortable and free are being taken offline to countries where people are happy to sweat the details, as long as we have some foreign exchange left to send their way. Nothing is more seductive than to think that we, like the Jedi, could be masters of the most advanced technologies while living simple lives: to have a geek standard of living and spend our copious leisure time vegging out.
"If the "Star Wars" movies are remembered a century from now, it'll be because they are such exact parables for this state of affairs. Young people in other countries will watch them in classrooms as an answer to the question: Whatever became of that big rich country that used to buy the stuff we make? The answer: It went the way of the old Republic."
I am, of course, a perfect example of this. I know stuff. Lots of stuff. More stuff than the average person and then some. But I don't know how to embed a link in this post. I know how to take the cover off my computer stack, but not much about what to do after I've exposed the motherboard. I know how to cook over an open fire but I'm very bad at starting them and couldn't tell you diddly about how to actually catch dinner. (Well, maybe in theory, but armchair survival? Come on.)
Like everyone else, I've thought about this stuff. Postapocalyptic survival (chaotic at first, then very Douglas Adams), whether I'd even want to survive (hell no), medicine (yay naturopaths - survivors should all move to the Pacific Northwest), food (highly contaminated), the state of knowledge (reset to zero), what culture would be like (my guesses are pathetically undernourished). The standard cave analogy applies to the ghost world we live on, sustained by the blank myth of invisible technology.
But I think Stephenson misses the point. We hate knowledge. We hate intelligence. We hate them because we hate things we can't understand, and the only reason we can get away with not hating technology is because we can pretend it doesn't exist. This is the dangerous game we've been playing since the 70s that has resulted in a presidential administration that can lie, be exposed in its lie, and not suffer any consequences. Baffled incomprehension produces indifference, and transfers the hatred onto the fucking loudmouth who called our attention to it in the first place.
Part of the problem is that in the 70s all was supposed to be free and natural (just like the Jedi), and being natural, purifying itself by being true to the underlying intuition. Discipline was bad, eating your spinach was bad, rationalization (read: intelligence) was bad, authority was bad. Now we have no relation to these concepts at all. Which means that we can't use them, control the things they make.
An interesting question I think links here: How can we create a knowledge-loving culture? One in which we can embrace and use these concepts? And if we can't, how do we get by without them? I would love to figure that one out.
But so the real question in all that swath of confusion: With all the innovation and the planned obsolescence etc., what really happens to us? Our reality shifts, the blank myth remains steady - static. What is that?
posted by Kira at 7:08 PM
1 Comments:
I think a big part of the problem here is that Western society has kept expanding the pool of knowledge that our cultural commons contains, without really learning how to talk to ourselves about that knowledge.
When it was possible for a renaissance man to actually learn everything about the arts (defined much more broadly than the term usually is today) and sciences, we didn't really have a problem--you were either educated or not, and it was more a question of opportunity than ability.
Now that becoming educated in any particular area can be a life's mission, and even then there is no guarantee that you will be capable of understanding the current state of the art, the relationship of the individual to the knowledge pool is much more fraught with emotional issues.
I suspect that the important first step in creating a culture that values learning (note careful wording change there!) is to separate intelligence (ability to acquire and apply knowledge) from knowledge (stuff you can remember), and develop a mythology that values a generalist intelligence for all people. In essence we need to remove the stigma of ignorance-through-not-learning-it-yet (although we can leave the stigma for willfull ignorance), and foster a more general confidence in the ability to learn things as they are needed.
I.e. we need to change "rocket science" from meaning "something I will never understand" to "something I haven't taken the time to learn yet".
Such a change would, necessarily, cause a dramatic political revolution, though.
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