A Modern Utopia (H.G. Wells)

(via Heretics)

Well, Chesterton is right.  Wells's utopia is utterly absurd and entirely unpracticeable.  The specific criticism Chesterton had of all utopian dreams was that they "take the greatest difficulty of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones."  In this case, Wells explains the administering of a one-world State without ever explaining how the entire population submitted to the State.  He describes the running of a world-class railroad without every addressing by what motivation any group of men actually designed, financed, and physically built the track.

(This insouciance concerning all economic matters, of course, drove me nuts throughout the book.  It is not possible for the State to provide to all the people the high standard of living they desire.  It must be worked for, and the motivation for that work must come from within.  Societies have tried to build a socialist utopia.  It don't work.)

Wells does mention the troublesome people who might get in the way of his single-State dream world.  But he always dismisses the problem of dealing with them-- either through banishment or, in the case of young undesireables, through death.  Simple!

In this, as far as I've gleaned from my other political readings, he typically reflects the views of the early-20th century progressives-- and their sentiments survive in the big-government impulses on the liberal side of the aisle today.  (I gotta read Liberal Fascism.)

But the biggest hole in the tale of Utopia is the lack of personal interaction with its residents.  There are maybe a total of four conversations with the citizens of Utopia.  One is with the narrator's double, in which he learns the rules of the samurai (we must know how the elites behave!), two are with the innkeeper and the government bureaucrat, who are more confused about the narrator's situation than anything else, and the last is with the fellow-traveller who the narrator dismisses as a raving lunatic.  That lunatic was simply not happy with the administration of the State, and the narrator pooh-poohed him for it.  But surely in the entire world there must be millions who are unhappy with their lives and the way things are.  Once again, the simple matter of disagreement-- which surely forms the central difficulty of political life-- is unacknowledged, unaddressed, unsolved.  But they've got cool trains, and the fares are free!

The botanist companion leans a little more to the realistic side, however, in that he obsesses over the woman who broke his heart-- even in Utopia, he can't let it go.  This will be a source of conflict in any world built by man.  And the narrator is exasperated by the botanist's inability to get with the program.  Sorry dude, you're just gonna have to to deal with it.

What I can't tell is to what extent the narrator's positions and attitudes are Wells's own.  He does give a warning at the outset that the narrator is a fictional character, and when the dream of the Utopia dissolves we are left seeing the narrator as an angry character living in dirty London.  But the design of the Utopia can only be a reflection of the author's desires, I think, even if he'd like to hide it.

Appendix

An essay on the limits of philosophy discovered by Wells's coming to logic after having learned evolutionary biology.  The crux of his problem is that he does not believe in the objectivity of universals-- all categories are fuzzy, subjective, provisional, and imposed on the world by the human mind.  This calls into question most of logic itself, as syllogism only works if categorical statements are possible.  Problem number two is the tendency of the mind to take the negation of an idea and turn the negation itself into a positive idea for the purpose of logical analysis.  And problem number three is our tendency to only pay attention to certain aspects of our disparate ideas when drawing comparisons between them.  Put this all together and you get the impossibility of moral reasoning.  And moral argument becomes an argument over mere aesthetic preference, with no proper or superior standard of judgment at all.

But does Wells know any of this?  Clearly not, by his own lights.  Materialistic philosophy eats itself whole.

My conclusion: If positivistic materialism conflicts with genuine human experience, so much the worse for materialism.  And everyone believes this, no matter how "rational" they claim to be.

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Incidentally, this is the first entry in the blog I read entirely from a Kindle edition.  I've decided that's an acceptable format for quick reads, especially for referred works that aren't classics in and of themselves.

The Killing Joke (Alan Moore)

I read this out of an Alan Moore collection from the library.  And I read a few of his Superman stories from that collection before this one.  It turns out that, for the most part, comic books are stupid.

This one wasn't, though.  Even if I didn't get the end.

The overall idea is an interesting one: how close are we each from giving up on our moral compass and devotion to the social ethic?  If we undergo an experience traumatic enough (caveat: it's more interesting when the Joker doesn't have a backstory.  But within this book, it's not clear if the backstory is true, anyway) how will we react in an attempt to process what has happened?

Batman himself is right on that knife's edge.  His traumatic loss of his parents has driven him to near lunacy.  The only difference is he holds himself to a self-imposed moral code, but it's not at all clear that he does this out of any kind of rationality, or if his own irrational response just happened to take the form that it did.  The Joker fell on one side of the line, Batman fell on the other, but the Joker is essentially right about the irrationality and amorality of the universe.

Commissioner Gordon, though, emerges as the moral rock at the center of Batman's world.  Exposed to the same kind of trauma (worse, probably), he holds to the same moral principles he has always held-- and is not being irrational when he does so.  He has always understood why Batman does what he does; he will not allow himself to fall into a similar gray zone of justice.

The Joker's adoption of the carnival freaks as his minions make an interesting symbolic point.  There really is an unexplainable unfairness in the universe, that allows innocent individuals to be born into such handicaps.  It is a condition that cries out for a justification.  And, if none is forthcoming, it is easy to conclude that there is no justice to be bound to in the first place.

The Dark Knight did a good job of exploring these influences on and implications of the Joker's actions, but this story nails down the themes in a very succinct and concrete way.

But the end of the book was lousy.

The Joke (Milan Kundera)

This is a nearly random one-shot novel that was referenced in one of Mark Steyn's National Review columns.  No association with anything else-- except, when I see well-read people refer to something, I feel like I should know what they're talking about.

For the first half of the book, I was viewing it as a terrifying illustration of the operation of a Communist state-- the point that Steyn was making.  But the introduction warned against treating it as a political novel.  The introduction was right.  By the end, I viewed it much more as an exploration of different viewpoints of life in general, and the paradoxes of filtering reality through our own subjective consciousness. 

It's also a good thing that I read the book in under 48 hours.  The shifting-narrator structure wouldn't have made sense otherwise, and I never would have caught on to the reemergence of characters from their fleeting mentions in prior narrations.  It felt like an episode of LOST at times.  Very effective.

Bullet points:

• Much romantic life-- at least each individual side of an unrequited love-- is a struggle to impose a coherent narrative on what is objectively unconnected events and actions.


• In a related way, the political project of Communism is the imposition of control of control and coherence on what is necessarily (because it depends on the actions of independent agents) a series of isolated social interactions.  In the same way the lover is seeking bliss, the Communist seeks to achieve social perfection.


• This involves the replacement of organic culture with a simulation instead-- a simulation designed toward the imagined utopia of the future.  It is believed that the artificial imitation can do the job of culture just as well as the genuine article, as long as it is simply successfully inserted into the correct social position.


• This is most notable-- and off-putting-- when religious ceremonies are stamped out in favor of Party social rituals.  The actions are drained of their content, leaving only a shell of an empty formalism.


• Perhaps the most drastic imposition is forced labor camps, designed to simulate acts of penance against a controlling moral authority.


• I was greatly impressed by the plot twists sprinkled throughout the story-- especially the revelation that Ludvik was pursuing Helena purely as revenge against his enemy Zemanek.  Hidden very well until the last name was suddenly mentioned.  It's also possible that Ludvik was originally marked for special attention by the Party at school because of his defense of Kostka's religiosity.  The only one that didn't work for me organically in the story was Lucie's relationship with Kostka after Ludvik's relationship with her ended  It was simply too coincidental that those two characters' paths would cross separately from their prior relationships with Ludvik.


• I would have enjoyed a chapter narrated by Zemanek, covering his perspective of Ludvik's trial, and the gradual lessening of his intense devotion to Party.


• I enjoyed the explanation that the next generation at the school was entirely uninterested in the battles fought by the prior classes and their devotion to the Party.  Another instance of an attempt to impose an overarching logic onto a reality that simply refuses to support our aims.  This was also illustrated well by Jaroslav's son blowing off the folk ceremony.


• Ludvik's final identification of the "mistakes" that controlled his life was also interesting.  What we call "errors" can only be so against a backdrop of correct actions-- defined in reference to the logic we're trying to impose or extract from the world.  But from the perspective of History, all events are simply events.  The "errors" are the history-- and there is nothing else.


• And this is the theme of the book: that the world does not react to our grand designs for it.
  

Yes, suddenly I saw it clearly: most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs).  Both are false faiths.  In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed.  The task of obtaining redress (by vengeance or by forgiveness) will be taken over by forgetting.  No one will redress the wrongs that have been done, but all wrongs will be forgotten.

 

Batman: Year One (Frank Miller)

Color me unimpressed.  Batman needs villains, and he didn't have any here.  The whole thing felt like it never got off the ground.  Yeah, yeah... Batman needs to be created, and he doesn't quite know what he's doing at first.  But ultimately, nothing is at stake except for some (mostly) petty crime.  I needed a bigger conflict to hold my attention.

I suppose this was a good exploration of the psychology of Lt. Gordon.  If that hadn't been delved into before, it was very nicely done.  And it nicely wraps together a whole slew of characters that I recognize from other references-- Harvey Dent, Carmine Falcone, Catwoman, and Det. Flass among them.

But Batman needs villains.

Though the overall theme made for one helluva movie.

The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Ludwig von Mises)

I felt like a needed a little background before getting into my Hayek books, and according to Russ Roberts, Mises was a big influence.  I don't think I'm up for academic tracts, though, so this was a relatively short sample (picked basically at random out of what was available in the library) of what I can expect from popular economics.

At first, I didn't appreciate Mises' hectoring tone, scolding the unsuccessful for their jealousy of the rich.  I mean, even if he's right, he doesn't have to say it like that.  But I realized throughout the book that Mises felt that tone was necessary to wake up his audience to the damage that could be done by the enemies of capitalism.  If he was writing this in the 70's, he was writing in a crisis moment.  There was no time for gladhanding the naysayers.  It was buck up the capitalists, or perish.

Bullet points I picked up on throughout the book:

• The consumer is ultimate sovereign.  If the public won't buy your product, your business will fail.  Economic growth (not to say success or moral goodness) only comes from serving the fulfilling the public's desire.
• The players that produce real progress are the saver who provides capital, the entrepreneur who attempts to create a product to sell to the masses, and the technologist who invents means of greater efficiency.  All other participants are bit players, essentially interchangeable parts.  Resentment at recognizing this leads to the anti-capitalist mentality, even as the successes of the progress-makers ("progressive classes") improve the lives of all (as witnessed by their eager consumption of those goods).
• SAVING is the primary act.  Growth can't come intially from spending, or from boosting demand as the first step in the chain (although all these actions are cyclically related to each other).  But saving is primary-- it gives the essential "slack" (my word) necessary to attempt something new, the success of which is the basis for real economic growth.
• Capitalism is accused of debasing the culture-- by flooding the market with trash literature, it crowds out real art and real profundity.  Poppycock.  Goodness and badness in art is independent of commercial success.  Commercial participation in the arts in no way precludes the possibility of great art.  Capitalistic participation merely indicates a desire of the public that was previously unmet-- THEY determine what sells.  And in prior days, profound art was unavailable for public consumption anyway, no less so than today.  Existence in a capitalistic society in no way precludes the pursuit of great art, if that is what the artist wants from his life.
• Capitalism and communism-- identical to socialism-- are diametrically opposed.  There is no middle ground, no waystation, in interventionism-- it is only a step toward communism.  The founders of communism certainly saw it that way.
• Anti-capitalist literature depends almost fully on a misrepresentation of the conditions of people-- both the poor it tries to inspire to rise up, and of the businessmen it accuses of unadulterated treachery.  It is silly not to recognize this as it is happening.
• Mises goes into a severe criticism of the concept of natural rights-- though it's not clear if he would disagree with Locke's concept of natural rights or the Founders' concept.  His main point seems to be only that there is no natural right to an even share in the  goods or the wealth within the society-- for where did that wealth arise from to begin with?  Only through the tortured application of reason and ingenuity on the part of human actors.  Nature provides nothing.  This is an argument against the concept of a natural right to freedom from material want as put forward by the early 20th century Progressives.
• Increased efficiency (either through improved technology or entrepreneurial insight) raises the marginal value of the labor employed in the process (possibly because it gets by with a lower total amount of it?).  That increase in value corresponds to rising wages within that industry.  In turn, this raises the wages of labor throughout society, for employers must pay more to prevent employees from leaving to enter the improved industry.  This is all possible system-wide essentially because of the gradual accumulation of capital-- that is, through the saving made possible by the increased efficiency.  And saving is sustainable only because useful production outpaces consumption-- and that happens through the application of human ingenuity.
• Me : Is this the ultimate argument against centrally planned economy?  A government CANNOT save; it will always insist on distributing for consumption ALL of its production.  Even a longer-term plan on the part of the government will have the eventual future consumption locked into law, undeferrable.  Capitalism, and the progress it generates, requires private property rights and private control of the means of production, because only a private actor can accumulate capital by saving-- by foregoing consumption-- in the first place.  Only a private actor can plan ahead and recognize an opportunity for future benefit through delayed gratification.
• The ultimate source of this idea is the concept of individual liberty first proposed by the Greeks (flawed as their concept was).  The modern capitalist age drew explicitly on the cultural tradition first laid down by the Greeks.  The actions of this century's perverted liberals-- adopting a sort of "super-liberalism" (Mises' word) that sought the emancipation of all people from the vicissitudes of Nature and of inequality (not recognizing how that inequality arose)-- first sought to overturn the primacy of the ancient cultural tradition from the public mind.  This is a complete reversal of real liberty.
• p. 101: "Freedom under capitalism means: not to depend more on other people's discretion than these others depend on one's own."  We ourselves make the rich rich by buying their products.  In turn we gain the benefits of the improvements they try to sell.  Everyone is reliant upon everyone else-- but everyone has skin and a say in the game as well.  What more do we want?
• The hectoring of the intellectual class, through their freedom to express their views, is the price we pay to secure the freedom required for the capitalists to do their thing without government interference.  What it requires in turn is vigilance, and active argument in support of our own point of view.

Wow.  I got a lot more out of this than I expected.  On to Hayek!

The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby (Tom Wolfe)

Las Vegas... demolition derby... self-promoting DJs... Jersey teeny-boppers... Phil Spector... custom cars... Cassius Clay... NASCAR country... Cary Grant... seedy gossip tabloids... the IT girl... urban archetypes... public trendsetters... conservative aesthetic crusaders... the Art Scene... men's fashion... nanny culture... the generation gap... Sunday leisure... rich divorcées...women's prison... doormen... status in the city.

America rocks.*

What I got out of this book is utter delight in and celebration of the strands of American culture.  I could also see Tom Wolfe dipping his toe into the stream-of-consciousness style.  Most importantly, he treats all of his subjects with glowing, genuine respect.  Only when he's writing about the ultra-rich does a wink sneak in to acknowledge the utter ridiculousness of their behavior.  (As opposed to his portrayal of the hippies in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, in which he never stopped winking.)

*(Except for Phil Spector.  On the other hand, anyone who could write this:



can't be all bad.)

The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller)

This is the first graphic novel I've ever read.  And it's the first comic book I've read since Dennis the Menace Learns the Our Father (the Protestant version, anyway).  The plan is to get a feel for the format with a few Batman titles before diving into Watchmen.  In any case, I'm impressed.

What surprised me the most was the inferences I had to draw as the reader from very few details in each panel.  And yet, the the implications were all fully there on the page.

Another aspect that I enjoyed: the critical commentary about many elements of modern society that I privately rail against as well.  Unserious media, relativistic reluctance to name evil as evil, hippie parents, therapeutic solutions to spiritual problems... it's all there.

I love Batman making fun of Superman.  Come on, you pansy.

So apparently it's well-established that Frank Miller wrote Batman as an explicitly Catholic character.  To that end, I loved the shout-out to Catholicism's devotion to absolute truth in the face of ever-changing worldly fashions:

The Pope today declared that the Church's stand on contraception will not change, despite yesterday's firebombing of St. Peter's Square.

That's right.

Speed-The-Plow (David Mamet)

What I love about Mamet's plays is the way the context of the conversation changes in a instant, but it's immediately evident what the new context is.

Excuse me.

Character 1: The thing about Mamet is, is the context turns on a fucken' dime...

Character 2: On a fucken' dime.

Character 1: Right, on a fucken' dime, but it's clear as day what everybody's state of mind is.

Character 2: Bullshit.

Anyway, you've got two producers who seem to be pleased with their work-- they're making a good deal on a movie project!

Boom.  Nope, they're only excited about the money.

Boom.  Nope, what they really want is to shove the money in the faces (or up the asses) of everyone who stood in their way.

Karen walks in, and the guys start showing off by being more vulgar than before.  What they actually want is sex-- but they're mostly insecure about it.  Enchanting.

At Gould's place, Karen makes her pitch (though she is unable to make the one-sentence pitch a movie deal requires.)  It doesn't work.

Boom.  She switches to seduction.  Gould doesn't notice.

In the office, Fox is livid.  (Actually, he goes through Denial, Anger, and Bargaining in about a page and a half).  He's actaully been jealous of Gould his whole career, but was willing to hide it as long as he could be dragged upward with him.

Ultimately, the movies are a business where everybody claims to be producing art, while in actuality it's entirely built on power plays.  "It's about people."  Still a half-truth.

Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers (Tom Wolfe)

It's all an illusion.  Government programs, class struggles, status-climbing, identity politics, community organizing-- all of it.

Those who design top-down programs and solutions think that they will make a dent in the problem.  What's the problem?  Well... clearly there is a problem, and clearly we have in mind that we will do something about it, and in the end, clearly that will indeed come to pass.  Because how could it not?

Every participant uses the system in place for ends other than what the system was put in place for.  Community leaders hand out favors to friends.  Government bureaucrats check boxes on a checklist, their assignments fulfilled.  Status-seekers see an opening and make a move for themselves.  Children are conscripted for image management purposes.  Teachers create lessons to raise awareness-- the most important thing that can be done for a learner.  Writers claim to have discovered The Answer, while cultural guideposts pick winners nearly at random.  Money is flung around because money is the only medium known to produce results-- the mere use of it must be part of the solution!

Is there an alternative?  Well... an alternative to what?  If you never define the problem you can insist that only your actions can possibly solve it.  Who can propose a better way?  How could they possibly show their way to be better?

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I guess I hinted at this same problem in the last post, but here it is again.  Trying to wrap my head around macroscopic sociological problems-- or even macroscopic descriptions of society-- drives me crazy.  Wolfe's style is very helpful in explaining why this might be so-- because the most likely case is that it doesn't make any sense.  The best way to realize that is to see whaat we actually see in our everyday experience of the world and the large society we live in-- only disjointed facts and impressions, that whirl around while the rational part of our brains try to tell some kind of narrative that makes sense.  It could very well be that we're not wired to make sense of that level of abstraction.

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On another note, I have noticed that my posts tend to be written in the voice of the author I just read-- or at least a facsimile of that voice.  This is not a new phenomenon.  Thinking back to high school and my first years of college, I often fell asleep trying to read whatever was in front of me (that I had put off until I was too tired to actually get through it-- some things never change).  Fiction, non-fiction, magazines, whatever.  And I always had dreams narrated in the style of whomever I had been reading.  I can distinctly remember this happening with Tom Clancy more than anything else.  Upon waking, I'd notice that whatever the narrator had been saying was utter, utter nonsense, and then the content of that narration would fade completely.  But the tone remained (even if I was unable to reproduce it while I was awake).

Anyway, it's happening again, especially in the entries for Chesterton and Wolfe.  I'm glad that it is.  In Chesterton's case, his tone is so lofty I want to capture it as my own.  In Wolfe's case, it would be impossible to take careful sequential notes of what he writes-- and I wouldn't want to anyway.  As I mentioned above, the free-wheeling style is the only way to make sense of his subject matter in the first place.

Radical Chic (Tom Wolfe)

Man, I love that stream-of-consciousness style.  It really does paint the room, and even the subjective experience of the room.  And I've found the less carefully you read-- the more you just let the words stream in-- the clearer the picture.

Maybe I just know a lot more than I did before, but it was surprising how familiar the names were in comparison to those in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  Leonard Bernstein, Barbara Walters, William F. Buckley.  Cool stuff.

Biting commentary on the whole idea of high society.  Intended that way?  Isn't Tom Wolfe a member of high society?

The political tensions are clear enough.  It's probable that social gulfs can't be bridged in one evening.  What progress did they actually expect to make?

Loved the continued insistence at the end that it was a "meeting, not a party."  Oh, but the white servants...

I was taken aback by the final turn of the tale.  In the end, the movers and shakers lost control of their image, and of the story.  A good lesson there: With status comes notoriety, but not necessarily a whole lot of power.  Trend-setters can set the trends within those arenas that others look to them to set trends.  But political trends come from elsewhere.  Or were they simply trying to plant the next flag against an up-and-coming new wave of high society-- was it merely a social experiment?  Simply a gamble-- within their own world-- that didn't pay off?

I'd like to see Buckley's essay about the meeting.

One theme that has bothered me more and more in general, and that struck me in particular in the essay (so I might as well bring it up now): I don't think I understand the psychology of identity politics.  Meaning, I genuinely don't think of myself as represented by, or representative of, any class at all.  That's easy enough to say as a white middle-class man, but it applies to those minority groups of which I am a part as well-- I never felt nor do I feel personally implicated in any criticism of the Catholic Church, for instance.  In the realm of abstraction, I'll think through arguments implicating the abstract idea.  And I'll take note of how other individuals within the group are treated as individuals.  But I never feel like the abstract idea has much of an effect on me.  In the end, I see myself as an individual who works and lives, and is treated in a certain way by the people I interact with, and take those interactions as significant only for myself-- because how could the other person actually be acting as if they are interacting with an abstraction?  How could I?

So what am I doing wrong?  Because given the way other people talk and write about the way they see and behave in the world, it often feels like I'm missing out on something big.

Sidelines (Ed.: Sidelights?)

It can get awfully boring limiting oneself to a set sequence of books.  And it can get mighty annoying reading just enough to outline in a post, and no more.  I'm getting a little sick of it at the moment.  Can't I just read?

So, a new addition.  Random insertions of non-classics, read quickly and immersively (well, more immersively).  Library books, many of them will be.  They'll get single entries, and I'll feel free to move on.  Capice?

Sudden panic, however: do I call these sidelines, or sidelights?  Apple's Dashboard dictionary says:

sideline - an activity done in addition to one's main job
sidelight - a piece of incidental information that helps to clarify or enliven a subject

They're both right!  Ummm..... sidelights it is.  (The whole damn blog is a sideline.)