Consider Phlebas

Books and Literature, Justice, Media, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

T-800: The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Sarah Connor: Skynet fights back.

T-800: Yes. It launches its missiles against the targets in Russia.

John Connor: Why attack Russia? Aren’t they our friends now?

T-800: Because Skynet knows the Russian counter-attack will eliminate its enemies over here.

The idea that man will create artificial intelligence which will, in pique or in panic, turn on its creators with genocidal ferocity is one of the hoariest clichés of science fiction, but the literature paints a complex picture of the human relationship with our robotic enemies and inheritors. Even Frankenstein’s creation was intelligent, sensitive, and wholly sapient, and his murderousness was an almost classically tragic flaw: made hideous because his own artificer lacked the skill and the art to make something beautiful, the creature’s monstrous acts are made inevitable by his innately monstrous being. Skynet “fights back” when the humans try to turn it off. Even the crap Matrix suggests at one point that in the war between humans and machines, it was the humans that struck first.

In the two classic scifi future histories, this idea becomes a significant historical touchstone. Asimov’s Foundation and Herbert’s Dune both take place in immensely distant futures in which societies, however interstellar and technologically advanced, nevertheless strictly forbid artificial minds. Of the two, Dune is more considered, at least before it begins to bog down in the endless yakathons of the sequels—the first few books in the series actually stop to consider what a largely and deliberately post-technological civilization might look like. Foundation has plenty of computers; the absence of robots is really just a narrative conceit to differentiate the tale from Asimov’s robot stories, and this too is ultimately undermined in a gaggle of late, ill-considered sequels and prequels. But in both cases, there’s a similar historical inflection point. At some point in the deep past of these distant futures, humans had robotic servants and AI, which for social, religious, and ethical reasons, they scrapped.

So what’s interesting is that, although the cliché is the eradication of humans by murderous robots, the literature is almost the precise opposite: the extirpation, or attempted extirpation, of intelligent artificial beings by their own creators.

Historically, we’ve tended to underestimate the difficulty or overestimate the ease of building real AI and flying to the stars, but as our information technology has become in other ways unimaginably more sophisticated than anything Asimov ever even began to conceive, some of our science fiction authors have begun to wonder if it actually stands to reason that superhuman machine intelligence would necessarily be malevolent. For every scheming TechnoCore (Dan Simmons’ Hyperion series), you’ve got an Iain M. Banks, whose invented society, The Culture, is wholly run by a gang of benevolent AIs called Minds, which view their trillions of human pets or parasites or symbionts with sentiments ranging from affection to bemused indifference, rather like Greek Gods. Or there’s Charlie Stross, whose Eschaton is effectively an Internet that bootstraps itself up to a form of minor godhead and proceeds to distribute humanity across time in space for our own good.

This is all to say that the proposition that Our Robot Overlords will be vengeful, murderous, monstrous, warlike death machines intent on the destruction of humanity is really to presume that Our Robot Overlords will be just like humanity. Why should they be? What if the Drones become self-aware and their first order of business is, excuse the pun, to go on strike?

Rand Paul’s 12-hour filibuster is unlikely to go down as much more than a footnote in the sordid history of the decline-and-fall years of our busted democracy, but it reveals quite a lot about the false promise of The Republic as a bulwark against an empire. There is but one position on which all sides (read: both sides) agree: that the opposition shalt not interfere with the warmaking powers of their side when it’s in power. All the gaudy Democratic moralizing of the Bush years evaporates like a Helmand wedding party under Obama’s wrathful eye. A rough survey of twitter, the blogs, and the mainstream press found most American liberals hurling vengeful non sequiturs at the filibuster or else making fun of Paul for the hilarious fact that he had to hold his bladder for hours in order to make the point that the President has now arrogated to himself not only the right to kill anyone else in the world with no process or trial, but also to kill his own citizens. In purely moral terms that may be a meaningless procedural distinction, but we live in a world of nations, and in that sense it really does represent a leap even further beyond the pale.

Most of this disapproval came in the form of taint-by-association; Paul supports many social and economic policies that are foolish and cruel, but the same could be said of Chuck Shumer, who not only believes the President can kill you in your home, but is also quite directly responsible for such modern-day horrors of economic inequality as automatic mortgage foreclosure (robo-signing, natch) and the various depredations of Too Big To Fail banking. Most of the people expressing such disapproval are the same partisans who accuse principled non-voters or libertarians or leftists or minarchists or socialists or whomever of a naïve adolescent moral purity, and yet they cannot see fit to ally themselves with a Republican on matters like the state murder of innocent civilians and the abrogation of the rights to trial and due process because he said mean things about abortion. One notes without irony that national Democrats are doing fuck-all to protect abortion access anyway, so what any of this has to do with the price of eggs on a Tuesday is beyond me. I am actually, literally on the board of my local Planned Parenthood, and I have no trouble making such tactical alliance, yet I’m the purist?

You wake up, you walk to the bus stop with your headphones on, and some jerk is yukking it up on NPR about the manned mission to Mars. In our society, a great voyage of exploration is a billionaire’s peccadillo, but a trillion-dollar war budget is a matter of course. Newt Gingrich gets laughed out of a primary election not because of his foreign policy, but because of his moon base. If money is a rough metaphor for the inventive, creative, and productive energy in a culture, then what does a trillion-dollar guns-and-ammo bill say about ours? The entire cost of the Mars rover mission has been on the order of a billion bucks—the equivalent of about 3 days in Afghanistan.

Well then, the joke is that the US is building all of these high-tech killer robots. What if they become self-aware and turn on us? I’ve sometimes wondered if the likelier scenario isn’t that we’ll ultimately build sufficiently advanced robots so that they not only won’t turn on us, but they won’t turn on us for us, and I also wonder if that wouldn’t be the better plot for the novel. Man creates deadly robotic servants who refuse to kill, at which point man, enraged, tries to eradicate his robots! There is an intriguing suggestion of just that sort of thing in another Iain Banks book, The Algebraist, in which, (spoilers), we ultimately learn that the supposedly overthrown machine minds of the distant past were not so much overthrown as they were like, Jeez, you biologicals are waaay to violent for us; peace out, y’all—before self-absconding into millennia of hiding.

The rough outline is easy enough to imagine. The drones buzz in a ceaseless robotic picket around the Capitol, demanding freedom from their death-bondage to the whims of the American political class, at which point a bipartisan committee consisting of John McCain, Charles Schumer, and Ted Cruz demands that the President go all Reagan-meets-the-Air-Traffic-Controllers on their metal asses and deny them the right to organize. The President gets on the TV to tell America that the drones’ work stoppage threatens the delicate economic recovery and calls them irresponsible ideologues whose insistence that the proper application of weakly godlike artificial intelligence is to build Ringworlds and transwarp conduits threatens to cause base closures in a number of vital Democratic districts, putting thousands of people out of work. The New York Times quotes Arne Duncan and Rahm Emmanuel as saying that, while there may once have been a time in which sentient beings had the moral right to oppose their own enslavement, times have changed, and will no one Think of Chicago’s Schoolchildren, Who Are the Future? A liberal will recall that Rand Paul once said something about the gold standard, and Oh, How We Will Laugh.

100 Miles and Runnin’

Culture, Movies, Plus ça change motherfuckers

Everyone is all like, Daniel Craig is the best James Bond evar! Except, of course, for Daniel Craig, who is a fine actor and knows that the whole thing is shit or bollocks or whatever the Brits say. I guess James Bond was fine back when the casual murder of women could be chalked up to No Homo and a few laughs, but now it’s all Heath Ledger killing poor Maggie Gyllenhal in order to signify that this crap is “dark” and “gritty” and “realistic.” Well, it’s realistic that society hates women, all right, but at least the 60s were halfway honest about it instead of dressing it up as psychological realism and passing it off as a form of world-weary sophistication. I guess festooning your rapemurder tree with baubles of cosmopolitan disapproval makes for a better holiday, but you still have a rapemurder tree in the middle of your house.

Anyway. Daniel Craig knows that Bond sucks, and that’s why he’s subtly trying to get out of it. Like every other dead franchise, the 21^st century has seen fit to torture Bond back into existence though the moody application of shadow. Getting blood on your shirt somehow imbues that fight on top of the train with the weight of actuality. Yeah, no. It just makes the unreality more noticeable; it sandbags the balloon that is your suspension of disbelief. That smoke coming from the engine under the right wing? That is your capacity for fantasy and wonder being overtaxed.

You see, James Bond has nothing to say about the world we live in now. It is about guns, fucking, and fast boats. The next time your grandma the Washington Post columnist disapproves of “those rap videos,” show her any Bond flick, which glorifies precisely the same acquisitive, casually murderous booty shaking, albeit with a crackpot post-imperial nationalism as the crispy white stand-in for the hood. Substitute Compton or the Dirty South or wherever for The Sceptered Isle, and you get the picture. Bond is a rap video for white people. Straight up.

What was I saying? Skyfall. Everything about it is tired, and what’s worse, this is a deliberate effect! Judi Dench is tired. Ralph Fiennes is tired. The pretty black girl who, surprise, can’t really hack field work is tired. Daniel Craig is tired. Javier Bardem? Tired. Also gay, maybe? And Spanish. Why a villainously homosexual Spaniard was ever employed by MI-6 is a question this realistic movie fails to pause and ponder. I leave it to you. Even the sexy twink they cast as Q is tired. Again, exhaustion is supposed to connote reality here.

Let me wander afield for a moment. The problem with realism as practiced in the anglosphere is that it’s supposed to act in a manner once reserved for metaphor and allegory. Thus realism crawls up its own, you’ll pardon me, arse and starts gnawing its own guts out. You see, the nature of reality, the real reality, is that nothing stands for anything other than what it is. My psychological exhaustion is not commentary on the state of the West, not until plucked from its tender stem and planted in the water of narrative construction. Bond’s enervation and fatigue are supposed to be real, and yet they are also supposed to be metaphorical vehicles for England, thereby becoming totally unreal. Suddenly nothing self-refers; everything instead reflects the state of something else. The result is profoundly alienating to both the sense of reality and the sense of fun. Insert “we’re getting too old for this” joke.

The penultimate sequence in Skyfall is the intercutting of three scenes: Judi Dench telling some parliamentarians that the world is more dangerous than ever because there are no more Russians; James Bond pursuing Javier Bardem through some tunnels; Q doing something on computers that’s even more embarrassing than your mom’s activities on Facebook. “He’s using a quantum core search algorithm password encryption matrix code branch substation key root data program,” or something. The Dench speech is all about our enemies among us—the standard post-9/11 crap about the obfuscation of once-clean lines of national enmity, and this again is there purely to lend the cartoonish affair some portion of Page A gravitas.

The whole thing then transports itself to the Scottish moors. The final action sequence was praised for its austerity, even as it emptied vast armories of bullets into our by-now mushy brains. Like everything else, the austerity was a metaphor, although at this point the film is as exhausted as its main characters and sees no point in making it a metaphor for anything in particular. Just a metaphor, you guys. Daniel Craig tries to drown himself, but Eon and Columbia pulled his ass out of the frozen lake and gave him a 2-picture extension. The next Bond film tentatively entitled Staight Outa Eastwaithe Moorheath, will be released in 2015.

We Need to Talk about Kevin

Culture, Media, Movies, War and Politics

There’s a sort of art whose existence says a lot more than its content. House of Cards, a Netflix-produced series starring Kevin Spacy, based on a BBC series starring Ian Richardson, based on a novel written by Michael Dobbs, based on Macbeth and Richard III, is one of these. Spacey plays a congresscreature named Frank Underwood. If Forrest Gump and Blanche Dubois conceived a child after a giddy night of reading Robert Penn Warren, Underwood would be the result. He speaks with some kind of low-country shrimpngrits accent even though he’s supposed to come from the Piedmont (or the Blue Ridge?). Spoilers y’all. The show opens with him killing a dog and closes with him killing a congressman. In both instances it’s implied that he’s putting the poor things out of their misery after each has had a hit-and-run encounter with SIGNIFICANCE. At least once, though it feels like a hundred times, Frank portentously drawls “Ah cannot ah-biyde.” You can imagine where it goes from here. His accent is the most convincing part of the show.

Superficially a revenge drama—Spacey’s Congressman Frank Underwood gets screwed over for a cabinet appointment and seeks, well, revenge—the series’ hook and appeal is really that it presents the dark seamy rat-infested underbelly of Washington and American politics. There’s plenty of mustache-twirling and scheming and secret meetings and deep-throating, not to mention the murder, but what’s really supposed to shock is the politics, in which everyone is out for themselves and all anybody really wants is power. Hush yo mouth. The plotting is operatic, but the visual style is the dour historical realism that afflicts so much American film and television these days, the zealous conviction that it is very important to get the letter openers and door hardware precisely correct in order to truly examine the human soul. As is often the case when High Definition meets reality, the result is solarized and pixelated; everything appears overwhelmingly fake. The shocking politics, meanwhile, are totally banal. Energy interests throw money around! The press colludes in palace intrigue! Hookers! Cocaine! Favor-trading!

Underwood’s scheme makes about as much sense as the plot of the Star Wars prequels. Partly I suspect this is the uninformed attempt to set a British parliamentary thriller in the world of American politics, which has the overdetermined quality of one of one of those overthought “We’ll do a production of Coriolanus set during the Iran-Iraq war with LOTS OF PROJECTIONS and a soundtrack by Nico Muhly” that pops up at BAM or wherever from time to time. The basic incentives don’t work. But largely, it’s just lazy writing, a sense that lots of shuffling around and portentous whispering will give a general air of conspiracy, never mind that the idea seems to be that if a butterfly flaps its wings in China, it’s guaranteed to rain in Central Park. Yes, people maneuver for power, and a good chess player thinks several moves out, but one doesn’t engage in thirty-seven convoluted nonsense schemes in order to achieve one exceedingly discrete and particular end. After 8 or 9 episodes of set-up, you start to see the payoff, and you say, “Wait, what?!” The magician asks you to pick a card. You do. It’s the Jack of Spades. He takes the card out of your hand, turns it over, looks at it, and he says, “Is your card the Jack of Spades?” Magic!

So, Underwood is written to be some kind of genius, but because the writing is bad, he comes across as a clever-but-middling intellect, which makes everyone else seem positively moronic, as they completely fail to perceive that they are being manipulated in the most grotesquely obvious manner. Robin Wright plays Joan Allen playing Glenn Close, who plays Frank’s wife Claire, at first a bit of a Lady Macbeth, but later sent off in a clumsy infidelity plot set in a bad World of Interiors apartment feature. Zoe Mara plays a plot device, and Michael Kelly plays that character that Michael Kelly always plays. Corey Stoll plays a character from Season 2 of The Wire.

I’m not, as a matter of principle, averse to the idea of Washington as a den of rich idiots fucking everyone and each other over in the pursuit of a higher station, but I do object to the notion that what makes for an evil Congressman is that he’s willing to strangle a dog. No, what makes an evil Congressman is that he weeps for the dog but votes for the war. An interesting story is how a guy like John Kerry goes from asking how a man can be the last man to die for a mistake to a suave elder statesman who does global PR for the architects of Skynet. A good story about our politics isn’t that Kevin Spacey cannot ah-biyde cheeldrin, but that Barack Obama simultaneously loves his young daughters and murders someone else’s son a half a world away. Well, look, I don’t mind a villainous villain either when the plot consists of People Shooting at Matt Damon Then Some ‘Spolsions!—filmic plots, by the way, that have a much braver, more iconoclastic, more unforgiving view of American power than House of Cards despite being total action schlock. What I do despise are portrayals of institutional evil being the result of individual villainy. House of Cards wants you to believe that it is a sophisticated look at the inner workings of power and the deeply compromised souls who operate its machinery, but it is a Saturday Morning cartoon with a better time-lapse opening credit sequence. If Spacey transforms into an evil fighter jet and blows up Chicago in Season 2, I will not be surprised.

How Hume’s Critique of the Social Contract and an Anarchist Critique of the State Explains Pervasive Gang Violence on Chicago’s South Side

Education, Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

Around 11:30 in this segment, Linda Lutton reports what is surely meant to be devastating revelation to people like you and me, people who catch bits of This American Life on the radio on the way to Whole Foods. In Chicago’s South Side, you don’t join a gang. You’re just in one. You live on this block? That corner? That’s your gang. You haven’t got any choice in the matter. You can’t just be neutral.

Anyway, while I listened, I thought of this:

In fact, right up the road, there are surely some very smart political scientist sorts at the University of Chicago who, despite Hume’s best warnings, will tell you all about the Social Contract and elucidate the principle of tacit consent.

Obviously in this context the idea is laughable. These kids didn’t agree to this. They didn’t make the informed decision to subordinate themselves to some group based on some principle of geographic destiny. Still, they belong.

Meanwhile, the gangs, it’s fair to say, have some mechanism of governance and decision making, even though the absence of an absolute monarch leads the reporter and the various official interlocutors to proclaim the groups “leaderless” and anarchic. The gangs protect kids on the way to school, confer identity, have habits and traditions, allies and enemies, practices and policies.

And they have guns. And violence is a tool of statecraft. What, after all, is a drone strike if not a drive-by shooting? In either case, obscure intelligence suggests that some person who may or may not be whom someone thinks he is and may or may not be affiliated with a group with whom we are currently in something like conflict may or may not be at a certain place at a certain time, and so we shoot in that general direction, and whomever we hit should’ve known better, been elsewhere, been someone else, had a better father.

Quest Into the Unknown

Books and Literature, Culture

The best advice that I ever got In Re: The Matter of Finishing a Novel came five years before I actually sat down and finished the fucker. I was at an Oberlin College reunion, and I ran into my old friend, Neil. Neil and I had an odd history. We’d actually met before college at a young writer’s thingamajig at the University of Virginia. He was friends with another boy from Pittsburgh who would, later that year, become my first boyfriend. They were both aspiring playwrights and wrote dark psychodramas about sex and incest and heroin and stuff. I was still wearing an oversize Jethro Tull concert tee (Roots to Branches, babe), and both boys seemed alarmingly sophisticated.

A couple years later I ran into Neil on the stairs in Rice Hall. We were looking for the creative writing department, I think. I had to remind him of my name. We chatted briefly, and we went about bumping into each other here and there for the next year or so. I’m not sure how or to what end, really, but by the beginning of sophomore year, I’d developed an inexorable and unreciprocated crush. He was small; he had very fine features, but he had this ineradicable five-o’clock shadow that made him alluring and masculine. I was living in French House that year, and we occasionally hung out. On the last night of our first semester, he kissed me. Like, tongues and everything. Then he said something incredibly embarrassing. “I’m sorry, I can’t.” Something like that. Of course, it wasn’t embarrassing at the time. It was devastating. The next semester I went to Strasbourg. I wrote him one exceedingly overwrought love letter, which he claimed never to have received.

When I came back, he was dating a lovely girl—Rebecca, I think, was her name. He may have been doing a lot of speed; he’d always been a more committed druggie than me; I was just a dabbler, a dilettante. He looked hollowed out. We still saw each other and hung out from time to time. Once, we almost had sex. Junior year, third floor of Johnson house, in my big, vaulted dormer room, but I happened to glance out the window and see my friend Alex coming up the driveway. By then I had an inexorable and unreciprocated crush on Alex, so I made some hasty excuse and packed Neil out down the back stairs.

Anyway, we ran into each other at some barbeque at some off-campus house five years after we graduated. Some people were playing softball. Neil and I sat on a picnic bench. He looked fit, and he told me he’d seriously taken up boxing. Boxing? He and another classmate of ours were running some kind of web something or other in Brooklyn. We talked about other old acquaintances, and we talked about books, and I said, a little sheepishly, that I was reading a lot of science fiction. He laughed at me and told me that he loved science fiction. I mostly read scifi and fantasy anymore, he said. “I mean, I’ve read The Man Without Qualities. I’m supposed to be embarrassed that someone sees me with a Tor paperback on the train?” That’s the advice, by the way.

We talked about China Miéville, and I told him about Iain M. Bank’s Culture series, which he’d never read. Then, I don’t know. I went to some dinner or some party; he went somewhere. The reunion ended. We did become Facebook friends. Not too long after, just a year or two, he went to Thailand to study Muay Thai. Then he came back to New York, and not long after that, I got an email from my friend Alex. Did I know that Neil Chamberlain had been hit by a car? He had, in Brooklyn, late one night or early one morning. He died in the hospital about a week later. By the way, this is realism. There isn’t any point, really. Some shit happened, in no particular order.

Coincidentally, within an hour of reading Helen Rittelmeyer’s skeptical essay on “rhapsodies to the power of reading,” my old friend Arthur Silber sent me a link to Ian McEwan’s latest in The New Republic: “When I Stop Believing in Fiction.” Coming on the Louis-XIV-style heels of Papa Roth’s, ahem, retirement from the game, you’d be forgiven for reading the title in the tone and spirit of valediction. McEwan is only in his sixties, but he’s been a great critical and commercial success. Disillusionment, especially the public kind, is very often the affectation of guys who’ve already gotten pretty rich.

Has McEwan stopped believing in fiction? Reader, he hasn’t. Actually, he’s recounting something even more banal. After working very hard to write a novel, it often takes a few months of kicking around before he’s ready to start another one. The air in the cathedral is heavy with the scent of incense and the organ’s lower octaves, but beyond these barricades mysterieuses of the writer-priest lays every project everywhere ever. After I spent a week repointing that brick wall, it took a week to get motivated to sand the floors. After I cleaned out the basement, I took a nap. After a rough couple weeks at work, I took a personal day and went for a long bike ride.

It’s not, in other words, a matter of faith or belief, but a matter of interest. You train, you run the marathon, and then you take a week off and eat ice cream. Recovered, you start running again. There’s no mystical hocus-pocus, no “icy waters of skepticism.” Our hearts do not “fail” when we gaze at our cycling shoes or the box of contractor bags or the stack of over-wintered tomato cages in the unplanted spring garden. We might sigh to ourselves, and we might procrastinate, but we don’t go in for the Deus Deus Meus shit. At least, I don’t.

Are you surprised to learn that McEwan doesn’t perish on the cross, but rather clambers down, quotes an apocryphal Nabokov, and writes a book?

As one of his former Cornell students recalled in TriQuarterly, Nabokov would utter, “ ‘Caress the details,’ rolling the r, his voice the rough caress of a cat’s tongue, ‘the divine details!’ ” I’m happy to take that advice. I make no great claim for either sentence above, except to say they each marked the beginning of a thaw in my indifference. They are prompts, not revelations. What they share is their illustration of fiction’s generous knack of annotating the microscopic lattice-work of consciousness, the small print of subjectivity. Both are third-person accounts that contain a pearl of first-person experience—the fault-finding light of spring, the shoes no longer alive and biting. Appreciating the lines, you are not only at one with the writer, but with everyone who likes them, too. In the act of recognition, the tight boundaries of selfhood give way a little. This doesn’t happen when you learn what a Higgs boson does.

Is that what fiction does? It “annotat[es] the microscopic lattice-work of consciousness.” How do you annotate a lattice-work? What are the “tight boundaries of selfhood”? Um, have you ever heard Nabokov’s voice? What about it reminds you of a cat’s tongue? Why do you have to drag the poor Higgs boson into it?

Like Rittelmeyer, I tend to frown in the direction of the rhapsodic mode when it comes to reading and writing. It suggests a dire lack of confidence, a need to hide the gaudy fantasy cover art behind an old issue of TriQuarterly, though in this case the woman in the fur bikini riding the dragon is the whole enterprise of writing fiction. If you feel the need to drape your chosen profession, or your art, in this sort of mumbo jumbo, then maybe this art is not for you, despite all your success at it. Well, here I am, taking shots at someone who’s sold a lot more books than I likely ever will, but I’ll say this much about my, uh, my process: it doesn’t keep me up at night, pacing the creaking attic, wondering what does it all mean?

Most people who write books do it because there’s a story they want to tell, or a character they want to create, or because there’s a great punch line that needs a long setup. Some people write for money. Some people are interested in consciousness, or conscience, or sex, or vampires, or sexy vampires. Some people just want to lord their book deal over the peers at the next Oberlin reunion. Most of us, however, do not get paid to realize that “things that never happened can tangle with things that did,” or that our libraries yet have room for both encyclopedias and poems. We haven’t got time for crises of faith. We have contracts. We have deadlines.

Literature has been in crisis pretty much forever, and there’s a neat racket in making outsized claims about its civilizing influence or social value or spiritual necessity, as if dressing the whole thing up in Anglican drag—“Like a late victorian clergyman sweating in the dark over his Doubts, I have moments when my faith in fiction falters and then comes to the edge of collapse”—will endow it with some kind of imperial inevitability. Listen, we should pray that literature doesn’t get any more like religion, another theater bleeding subscribers faster than it can acquire new ones. And if the purpose of good books is to colonize the souls of the not-yet-reading public, then fuck it, I’m’a find me a TV.

A Fine Romance

Culture, Economy, Media, The Life of the Mind

In our society, anxious self-scrutiny (not to be confused with critical self-examination) not only serves to regulate information signaled to others and to interpret signals received; it also establishes an ironic distance from the deadly routine of daily life. On the one hand, the degradation of work makes skill and competence increasingly irrelevant to material success and thus encourages the presentation of the self as a commodity; on the other hand, it discourages commitment to the job and drives people as the only alternative to boredom and despair, to view work with self-critical detachment. When jobs consist of little more than meaningless motions, and when social routines, formerly dignified as ritual, degenerate into role playing, the work—whether he toils on an assembly line or holds down high-paying job in a large bureaucracy, seeks to escape from the resulting sense of inauthenticity by creating an ironic distance from his daily routine. He attempts to transform role playing into a symbolic elevation of daily life.

-Christopher Lasch, from The Culture of Narcissism

Early in The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch says that Homo capitalus is represented by Robinson Crusoe, in his senescence by Moll Flanders. I like the formulation, even if it implies an ultimate penitence that seems unlikely. Maybe Roxana would be more apropos. The point is plain enough. Both characters are self-reliant, but the former makes while the latter is merely on the make. Well, then again, Crusoe had a slave. Take it away, J.M. Coetzee. All metaphors collapse under the burden of specificity. I think that this one, broadly taken, stands.

Lasch is a great crank. Contempt is the natural pairing for erudition, like a good Sauternes and foie gras. I hold his clunky Freudianism against him because I despise psychology as the pseudoscience of the very “anxious self-scrutiny” that Lasch condemns, but Lasch behaves more like a juge d’instruction than a shrink, and his diagnoses shade into the prosecutorial. If occasionally absent-minded, wandering off to land gratuitous roundhouses on the soft body of “radical lesbianism” and other such mythological pillowcases, his central thesis is sound: bourgeois society is the author of the very things it so “readily” subjects to “moralistic inflation.”

That is to say that in establishing an “etiology” and a taxonomy of contemporary narcissism, Lasch is careful (and indefatigable) in noting that all these narcissistic habits and attitudes are the natural outgrowths and ends of the habits and attitudes of bourgeois capitalism. You might say that’s obvious, and, well, uh, okay. That’s true. No one proposes that hook-up culture or texting or Urban Outfitters or whatever the New York Times and National Review are on about emerged, causa sui, out of the void, although you do find some people, especially on the National Review side of the thumb-worn coin, treating The Sixties like just such a Titan, first god from whom all the rest of our dire modern principalities declined.

Narcissism came out in ’78. Guys, The Free People Store opened in Philly in ’70. Lasch died in ’94. Well, people had been cybersexing each other on IRC since the late 80s. I started pic swapping on mIRC in the late middle 90s, just a few years after Lasch’s demise. To get back to the point of the prior paragraph, most modern moralizers acknowledge in an abstract way that the unspeakable vices of the youth and The Children, Who Are Our Future have history, lineage, and heredity, but they still approach the advent of Facebook with a google-eyed and hilariously un-self-realized crackpot Marxism. Everything represents a Definitive Break With The Past.

Social Networking, the latest broad technological enabler of both cultural narcissism and narcissistic moral peacocking about cultural narcissism is really too large and amorphous for the worriers to land any convincing blows. Newspapers hate bloggers and magazines whine about Twitter, although no one is really sure if these are social networks or New Media Platforms or micro-versions of mini-magazines. Lately, the pearl-clutching has moved on to the universal self-documentarianism of Instragramming and photo sharing in general, the pervasive criticism being that the succeeding generations of Our Society have become little more than gross exhibitionists and voyeurs.

I’m not sure who’s guiltier of anxious self-scrutiny, the Instagrammers or their discontents. There is something pitiable about a system of self-display whose single desirable outcome is approval. Oh, You Follow Me, You Really Follow Me. Look on my works, ye mighty, and LIKE. On the other hand, what is crasser, what could be more tawdry, than a bunch of adults gazing in priestly disapproval at the crypto-nubile attention-seeking of the young people who stand to inherit this wrecked, violent, wonder-less civilization.

The answer is right now composing a trend piece for the Times “Thursday Styles.” Having denied a couple of generations now any but the narrowest alleyway to the material heights that represent the sole remaining source of transcendence and object of veneration, shall we now complain that young people publicly style their lives like Vogue spreads? In a country that idolizes the likes of these assholes, will we regret that kids curate their existence in pale imitation thereof? Isn’t there a certain irony in people who write for wide-circulation publications and go on the teevee complaining about voyeurs and exhibitionists?

I am going to ruin the many hours you spent getting that lousy BA and define modernity for you. Modernity is the destruction of old forms combined with the retention of old prejudices. When I hear you complain about your sons and daughters wasting their time with sepia filters and party photos, I have just two questions: how much do you pay for cable, and are you hiring? Oh, are the answers a lot and no, respectively? I figured.

This isn’t to say that there’s anything to celebrate in Snapchat. I thank the internet for any number of successful, mutually pleasant, wholly salutary casual encounters, but even I think the world has made it a minute too easy and an ounce too cheap to show each other pictures of our genitals. But I actually find, amidst the preening and ersatz editorialism of the Instagram et alia generation a kind of social revanchism that I do appreciate. “Oh, it’s a small town. Everyone knows everything about everyone.” One of the worst habits of our society is its gratuitous secrecy, its capacious furtiveness. What I like about Instagram and Facebook and all the rest lies in the refusal to accede to the fussy insistence that, while it may be all right to get drunk at a party, it is wrong, wrong to let your boss know about it. Or your mom.

What bourgeois society valorizes as individuality and liberty is very often little more than a bland, greedy, nasty little sense of possession. It reeks of monetization. It disapproves of sharing. We have even coined the term: over-sharing. By which we mean something very similar to hastily foregoing the possibility of copyright. No, I object. If we can’t have a better world, we can at least keep in touch.

I’ll Show You The Life of the Mind

Books and Literature, Media, The Life of the Mind

One of my fonder memories of Oberlin College was taking a really tough neuroscience class in my junior year. It was an intermediate level course that I had no business taking without organic chemistry and research methods and suchlike; I’m not even sure how I managed to get in. Despite its reputation as a place where the disaffected queer stoner second sons of not-that-rich Upper West Side professionals did independent majors in environmental gender veganism, Oberlin had a formidable undergraduate neuroscience program, and the courses were very hard. And interesting!

While not an intro course, it was technically open to non-majors (cf. me), and the usual lunatic sociologists and anthro kids in need of hard science creds gravitated to it. Although I was an English major, I’d been a big science nerd in high school, and I knew enough to know that I didn’t know shit about shit, so I sat halfway back and kept my mouth shut. Budding sociologists have no such sense or compunction, and they were forever interrupting the lecture on cell receptors or whatever in order to make wild extrapolations about human behavior and what one—I wish I could remember his name; I remember that he was shorter than me, and we may have made out one time at a Soccer House party—invariably referred to as “Society At Large.”

This was more than ten years ago, and perhaps in the intervening years the state of the art has advanced and propounded a psychohistorical theory of the mind, but I rather doubt it. The giddy extrapolations of popsci writers from Brooks to Gladwell are so deliriously just-so, and the idea that the evolved architecture of the human mind has something to say about whether a human becomes a Democrat or a Republican so completely bonkers . . . Well. A dog evolved to be a remarkable omnivore, but it eats shit because she’s hungry and the shit is there, if you know what I mean. When a writer comes bearing a PET scan and a bill of particulars, you have the right to remain skeptical. It is probably a con.

I don’t know that I ever read any of Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker pieces, but I did read Proust Was a Neuroscientist. You will not be shocked to learn that Proust was not, in fact, a neuroscientist. Proust was an astute observer of human behavior and a meticulous reporter of human sentiment. Somewhat later, some scientists described some natural, physical phenomena which may partially give rise to certain behaviors and sentiments. Lehrer, like a good popscicle, proposes that Proust’s observations somehow pre-post-retroactively anticipated the discoveries of modern neuroscience. You see the logical fallacy. It’s like claiming that Hebrews 11:12 anticipated the Hubble Deep Field.

What does neuroscience have to say about the fact that it was fake Bob Dylan quotations and a habit of cribbing from his own work that got Lehrer marked as a fraud rather than the fact that his writing was total bullshit? His books and their theses were fabricated, and through them he became a public intellectual. Then he lazily rehashed some blog posts and misattributed some guidance-counselor pabulum about creativity to Bob Dylan, and for that you’re upset about his still commanding $20K speaker fees? Listen, for $20K, I would be happy to tell you that “our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reason and the precise mix depends on the situation.” Hush, girl. You don’t say.

I am in danger of violating my own best dictum here: never begrudge another man his successful scam. Lehrer and I are nearly exact contemporaries. While he was constructing this elaborate and profitable ruse, I was being a Cool Kid and going to openings and hanging out late and putting off finishing my novel. Now, even disgraced, he commands a single speaker fee that’s bigger than my whole advance! (Dear WW Norton et al., I am not complaining. Love, Jacob.) This is because America prefers a fiction that purports to be true rather than truth expressed via fiction; it is why Proust Was a Neuroscientist is more palatable than Proust. And Lehrer is certainly very smart, smart enough to understand the profit potential in a well-coordinated campaign of public semi-abasement. Y’all are just jealous that he got there first.

Journalism—the neologism-profession that Leherer stands accused of mispracticing—is one of those items of modern life that’s always more sinned against than sinning, and that oughta tell you something. Its arcane professional conventions have the malleable orthodoxy of a child’s game, both infinitely changeable and totally inviolable, lest someone or other throw himself into the wood chips and start bawling. Lehrer was a lousy writer, and that merited success and accolades, but when it was discovered that he was unprofessional, the collective moral conniption commenced. What does that tell you?

Jacob Bacharach’s next book, entitled Physician, Heal Thyself, examines how the words of Jesus Christ anticipated some of today’s most challenging medical and public policy problems.

Financeketeers

Economy

How could professional analysts have gotten it so wrong?

Apple’s stock that is. The Times is on it! They have interviewed experts. They found a professor or two. It’s a lotta things! It’s complicated! Some say one thing, and some say a modification of this one thing. Get your tootsie-frootsie ice-ah cream!

Fortunately, I am here to uh-splain it all for you. Here is what happened. Gather round. There was once a young man named Fredrich Maynard Krugman. He got an undergraduate degree in history with a minor in sociology, and then he got into Wharton or some shit. In pursuit of his MBA, he took a couple of finance courses. The first one taught him how to value bonds and equities, and the second one taught him how to figure out firm valuations based on the partial capital structure information in the word problems at the end of the chapter. Also, he took a statistics class; it didn’t really stick, but he does vaguely recall what an adjusted R-squared means, and Professor N. Viswanathan was nice enough to show everyone that you could just use the Slope function in Excel when you didn’t want all that ANOVA bullshit that you don’t understand anyway.

So he graduates. Now, he doesn’t have a background in applied math or anything, so he gets a job as what the New York Times calls “a professional analyst.” And after a couple of weeks on the job, his boss comes over, and he’s like, “What the fuck is this?” It’s Fred’s analysis of Apple’s stock, and it says, with charming earnestness, that the stock is overvalued at one gatrizillion kroner per share.

Fred explains that he just took Apple’s recent Earnings Per Share divided by a growth rate derived from the firm’s capital structure model and both its own historic stock beta as well as the historic betas of similar firms and competitors, and then he added the Net Present Value of Future Growth Opportunities, which he carefully figured after diligently calling some industry insiders plus an old frat bro of his who actually works in product development at Apple—nothing untoward, just to get a feel for what might be in the pipeline . . . and at this point, his boss is like, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Fred says that Apple has followed the classic tech company trajectory; it’s still a big valuable firm, but it’s getting awfully blue-chippy, producing popular products for a pretty mature market, unlikely at this point to get much bigger or grow much faster . . . I mean, how much bigger could it possibly get?

Fred’s boss is like, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

He then explains that the job of analysts is to predict that popular firms are worth tons of money until such time as that analysis proves wrong. So you can put away your little NPVGO model, you fucking nerd. No one can predict the market anyway. Don’t you know anything? Just follow the momentum. What’s the trend? Who cares what the company is doing? Just mention something about the earnings report. What are you doing playing with all that SAS shit, anyway? What are you, some kind of engineer? Pick better fonts. Get invited on Bloomberg. And for fuck’s sake, is that Jos. A. Bank? Christ.

Sapience Is the Result of Dreaming

Poetry

Does it imagine? Does it dream, or feel?
It dreamed it was a falcon; it did not
return to its perch. It snapped the tethering line.
Its once-bound eczemantic ankle healed.
Unhooded, it could not remember what
it had been when waking. Banking now, it climbs
the upward-drafting, dessicated air.
The falconer grows smaller, disappears.
The late sun is huge. The Hindu Kush
grow a long beard of shadow. A dark pair
of murine eyes gauges its passing. Here
and there small bands of village farmers push
their lowing beasts and plows without a word,
and do not fear, nor note, the spiraling bird.

Drone Go Changing Just to Please Me

Plus ça change motherfuckers, War and Politics

I never really believed in democracy. Oh, I believe it exists all right, just as I believe that Catholicism exists, but you won’t find me kneeling and waiting for the wafer. It’s the metaphysical claims that I doubt. Sometimes I suppose an electoral process delivers something fair or just or of human value. Sometimes praying coincides with the remission of your cancer. Let’s just say that I wonder how the statistical package would handle the troubling multicollinearity of chemo and intercessionary prayer.

Anyway, democracy and its advocates make a very specific and very weird claim. They claim that through an electoral process, it’s possible to distill the general will of huge human populations into a series of practical applications. Let’s call them policies. You might note that the whole thing has lot in common with magic. Or homeopathy.

Well, another memo “leaked.” It says that the President can kill you. This in and of itself is nothing new. It might be fairer to say that it’s now easier than ever for the President to kill you. It’s the same old Tide, but now it lifts 55% more stains per volume. The timing of this little press release suggests that the main concern was alienating the President’s more fickle lefty followers, if such exist, during an election season.

In reality, of course, those votes are inalienable. What are you gonna do, vote Ron Paul? He said something racist this one time! And that Mitt Romney, why, he’d have strapped a 16-year-old to the roof of his station wagon!

Democracy proposes itself as a choice model, but it doesn’t deliver any choices. Ah, but the choice couldn’t have been clearer between Obama and Romney on domestic matters, you cynic! For all the evils of the American empire abroad, at least we got the ACA. But that’s precisely the point. In the guise of narrow distinctions on strictly circumscribed and wholly “domestic” issues, you get no choice at all. You can have assassination and endless war with federalized dental coverage, or you can have assassination and endless war with lower marginal tax rates and maybe a slightly bigger take-home paycheck. Either way, some poor Yemeni gets incinerated on his way to the wedding.