Posts Tagged ‘ Post-Modern ’

Being Products

Products seem perfectly natural to us, we cannot imagine being without them. But before the Industrial Revolution they did not exist.

Many of the same things existed – medieval clothing, for example, was more elaborate than our own. And their castles and churches are marvels to us even today. But their lives were entirely different – so much so that to an outside observer might conclude that they were a different species.

People today dismiss this difference, and refuse to consider its significance – just as they refuse to consider the significance of their own  world.

I am listening to A Distant Mirror, a history of the 14th Century – the century immediately proceeding the beginning of the Modern world. The author, Barbara Tuchman, is doing a very thorough job of explaining it, and I will be listening to her explanation for some time.

But I can see, looking over a summary of her work – that she, like everyone else, does not understand our obsession with products and productivity. Perhaps this is where I come in.

First of all, and I cannot stress this enough, what we are dealing with here is a complex – a situation where many interacting forces are at work. This idea would not have seemed strange to a Medieval man, who lived in a complex world himself.

But Modern man became used to simpler ways of explaining things – as chains of cause-and-effect (where only two variables at  time were involved – such as mass and distance in the theory of gravitation).  Post-modern man (which is what we are) is baffled by his world and cannot understand much of anything at all.

I now return to the subject of products and productivity. The main effect of the Industrial Revolution was to change men – and focus them on what we now call business (or Capitalism) and products. And to produce people completely unaware of this – mass man.

Once again, we are describing a complex, where a key component of this complex is the people involved themselves.

Are you still with me? If so, congratulations! You are one of the minority in any age that is different, and sees things differently. Allow me return to my historical summary.

The first emphasis (or obsession) in the Modern world was on trade. But trade using a new technology (or product) – the Sailing ship. Which produced the world’s first technical boom. Immediately, an Industry was born – building, maintaining, and staffing these ships. And in organizing their usage – ways of financing them, for example, became very ingenious – and made immense fortunes.

But even more importantly, something that escaped notice altogether – the population boom that produced mass man. I repeat: this was not noticed at all by the people who should have noticed it – the thinkers of the age. Emerson, it is true, said Things are in the saddle, and ride man. And everyone agreed with him. But no one thought to examine the changes to men themselves – which were too shocking to be believed.

Mass men was taking over – simply because there were so many of them. They were making a few at the top very rich – and they had no desire to change the way things were.

But the process was just beginning. Wind power was replaced by Steam power – and the consumption of fossil fuels. Manufacturing was born – ordinary people became nothing but poorly-paid attendants to manufacturing machines. And automatically became like machines themselves.

But the process continued, at an ever-faster pace. Electricity when combined with Photography (sometimes called the Second Industrial Revolution) produced new products – and more importantly, new fascinations – the Cinema, and then Television. And made mass control possible. People were relegated to the role of consumers.

The produce-consume cycle was born, and took over the economy. People demanded eternal growth to accommodate this – something that was clearly impossible.

But the process continued with yet another revolution, which has not yet been recognized as one – the computer/software/internet. We are now in the process of serving it – and have forgotten completely that our technologies are supposed to serve us.

This should complete my analysis, but I want to note one more thing – the young. who are clearly different. They are not interested in being productive – or even, it seems to me – in being. What they are I have no idea, and I suspect no one else does either.

2012
02/02
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
History
Philosophy
Technology
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Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

I am listening to this now, and it is freaking me out. I don’t see how anyone could see this as entertainment. It makes 1984 seem like an optimistic  fairy tale. From Wikipedia:

A never named father and his young son journey across a grim post-apocalyptic landscape, some years after a major unexplained cataclysm has destroyed civilization and most life on Earth. The land is filled with ash and devoid of living animals and vegetation. Many of the remaining human survivors have resorted to cannibalism, scavenging the detritus of city and country alike for flesh. The boy’s mother, pregnant with him at the time of the disaster, gave up hope and committed suicide some time before the story begins, despite the father’s pleas. Much of the book is written in the third person, with references to “the father” and “the son” or to “the man” and “the boy”.

The link to Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction helped me to understand what is going on. It is literature, in the sense that it makes a standard scenario even more real.

Even so, listening to this, at least for a sensitive person like me, probably has more impact than watching it in a movie. My mind can fill in the details and make it more real than real.

Definitely not the last thing to do before going to sleep.

2012
01/06
CATEGORY
Literature
Morality
Religion
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Bad Faith

This is one of Sartre’s key concepts, and one of his most important ones. On an impulse, I just looked it up on Wikipedia:

Bad faith (Latin: mala fides) is double mindedness or double heartedness in duplicity, fraud, or deception.[1] It may involve intentional deceit of others, or self deception.

The expression “bad faith” is associated with “double heartedness”,[1] which is also translated as “double mindedness”.[2][3][4] A bad faith belief may be formed through self deception, being double minded, or “of two minds”, which is associated with faith, belief, attitude, and loyalty. In the 1913 Webster’s Dictionary, bad faith was equated with being double hearted, “of two hearts”, or “a sustained form of deception which consists in entertaining or pretending to entertain one set of feelings, and acting as if influenced by another”.[1] The concept is similar to perfidy, or being “without faith”, in which deception is achieved when one side in a conflict promises to act in good faith (e.g. by raising a flag of surrender) with the intention of breaking that promise once the enemy has exposed himself. AfterJean Paul Sartre’s analysis of the concepts of self deception and bad faith, bad faith has been examined in specialized fields as it pertains to self deception as two semi-independently acting minds within one mind, with one deceiving the other.

I can hardly improve on this, but you should read the whole link – and then read Sartre, who has an amazing ability to combine highly abstract reasoning with concrete examples.

Coming from a religious background, my early life was saturated with this - hypocrisy on a massive scale. But as a very senior citizen, I can see the US, and Obama in particular (and the Pentagon, Congress and the Courts), indulging in the same thing to their hearts content.

I can also see the Evangelicals here in Costa Rica doing it – gaining all kinds of converts by associating themselves with prosperity – something Latinos cannot resist.

2011
11/23
CATEGORY
Morality
Philosophy
Religion
2 comments

History Repeats Itself?

I have an easy life. I am reading 1848 a turning Point?, a used book I picked up for practically nothing on Amazon, with the edges turning  yellow with age – and drinking the local cheap wine (which packs quite a wallop). Meanwhile, my cleaning lady cleans my apartment, making a hell of a racket cleaning my little carpet with a cheap vacuum cleaner.

Life down here has its little dramas – this morning the door fell off Ray’s refrigerator (my landlord who lives in the same house), making a hell of racket, dumping all all kinds of food on the floor. I help him fix it; earlier he had fixed the flush chain on my toilet.

But to get back to the book – it has two key phrases: revolutionary and reactionary. In the 1800s in Europe these two fought it out, back and forth – a history which has been largely forgotten And also, it might be said, in America – where the Founding Fathers were succeeded by Andrew Jackson, and then the Civil War. And even in the Middle East now, with the Arab Spring. The following are quotes from the Introduction:

While the revolutionaries disputed among themselves, the reactionaries gradually recovered their strength.

Fears of social upheaval had made the people willing to exchange liberty for order and entrust executive power to man who symbolized dictatorship (Napoleon III).

The cleaning lady has left, and I continue to read my book.

Earlier, I went for a long bicycle ride, which left me nice and tired. What more could I want?

2011
11/18
CATEGORY
History
Philosophy
1 comment

The Spoiled Child

This is one of Ortega y Gasset’s most famous similes, and you are struck by it the first time you hear it. This is like his depiction of mass-man – immediately you know what he is talking about – something you already knew about, but had no words for.

I am still reading Human Existence as Radical Reality, which is about Ortega’s philosophy. Pedro Blas Gonzalez, the author, tries to make Ortega too much of a philosopher, in my opinion, when I would prefer him to be an acute, intuitive observer of the post-modern scene – more of a psychologist or sociologist. What follows begins on page 122. He starts with technology, which is indeed part of this complex.

The practical applications of the technology have immense dangers for the mass-man because these advances in science are not understood or appreciated by the masses. This only brings about what he calls the “psychology of the spoilt child”.

This spoiled child as such has no self-imposed limits to his caprice and desires. These desires are perpetuated by even more demands without consideration to any sense of obligation on his part…The spoiled child naturally assumes that everything is always ready-made, and therefore always available on demand…They are only concerned with their own well-being, and at the same time remain alien to the cause of that well-being.

They do not see behind the benefits of civilization, marvels of inventions and construction, which can only be maintained by great effort and foresight, the imagine that their role is limited to demanding these rights peremptorily, as if  they were natural rights.

On the other hand:

Man must confront his own life reflectively prior to affecting any meaningful and dutiful engagement with society at large…Life is always presented to us first and foremost as a differentiated self. The discovery of this self allows for an existential understanding of “myself” as being something that is not merely biological.

On page 125:

Ideology for Ortega represents the best example of the vulgarity of mass society…the ideals of ideologues are bent on the destruction of institutions, and not with instituting internal reform.

But, as we begin the twenty-first century, sensitive minds in both philosophy and science are beginning to wonder if in fact man is not truly a teleological “infinite synthesis,” as Immanuel Kant so beautifully expressed it…all forms of “revolt” that are not anchored in a reflective self end up by simply promoting cultural decay and moral nihilism.

A reflective self – how rare that is!

2011
11/16
CATEGORY
Philosophy
Psychology
Sociology
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The Non-Linear World

We have moved from a linear to a non-linear world, and the shock of this has been more than we can handle. What do I mean by this? I am talking about rate of change. Previously, this was manageable, now it is not. I am reminded of a Sixties song “Stop the world, I want to get off!”

This is related to the impact of technology on our lives – technological innovation has gotten faster and faster, with the result that social change got faster and faster. We did not see this as a problem – quite to the contrary, it seemed very exciting and profitable. Innovation was seen as a good thing – and the more there was of it, the better.

We actually thought everyone was going to get rich – in the new economy. Instead, everybody got poorer – except the very rich, who had too much already. This was innovation, but not the kind we wanted.

What I am going to do now, is what we all should be doing – but are not – going back over our past in an attempt to understand it. And to see where we got off the track.

I am hardly the first to try this, everybody and his brother has had his hand at it – and many of the are far better qualified. But one more voice in the crowd cannot hurt.

First, a definition. It started with a development in mathematics, which effected physics, which caused the Industrial Revolution. Isaac Newton, like everyone else of his time, was trying to understand the world. Then a strange idea occurred to him: that the world must be governed by mathematical laws. What a strange idea, right?

The math necessary for this had not been invented yet, so he, along with Leibniz, invented it – what we now call calculus. The basic idea here is simple: change could only happen so fast and this rate of change could be expressed by a mathematical formula, using a new notation. To this day, few can understand this – including the math instructor who taught it to me in a religious college I was sent to by my parents.

The impact of this was amazing: Newton had broken the code of how nature worked! The world (later dubbed the clockwork universe) was simply mechanical, through and through! The social implication was also amazing: people knew they could figure out how things worked, and use things to their own advantage, because the world was linear (it didn’t have any hidden surprises)!

For two hundred years this was thought to be the way things were. Then two things happened about the same time: modern society broke down, and so did Newtonian physics. The 20th Century experienced WW1 and WW2 – part of the move, as it turned out, towards Globalization. Einstein saved Newtonian physics with Relativity, but also helped invent Quantum Mechanics – which he later regretted, and fought against all the rest of his life.

Why was this? Because Quantum Mechanics was non-linear, things could jump from one state to another, and not change smoothly. No one was comfortable with this, but it quickly because obvious that this was how the world of the very small worked – not at all as larger things worked.

But that was not all: digital computers took over. When I was going to Electrical Engineering school in the Fifties, they did not teach digital computers, but analog computers – something you only see now in science museums. They were linear, something they were comfortable with.

But that didn’t matter, digital computers took over, and this opened up a whole new world. A short review is in order: in digital computers, only two states are allowed: a zero or a one – and nothing in-between. The real world, the analog world, has to be digitized before a digital computer can work with it. Digital computers needed software to run them, and eventually the Internet (completely digital) showed up to form an entirely new complex: the computer/software/internet (CSI). It quickly took over our world, and took control of it.

It should seem strange to speak of a technology controlling the world – but there is no better way of saying it. People have become addicted to their things – and, as with any addiction, it controls those addicted to it. In our case, our technologies, which have gotten out of control.

2011
11/16
CATEGORY
Economy
Education
Sociology
Technology
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What Went Wrong

Something is wrong with the world, and that something is us. It’s not the birds, the bees, or the trees – it is us. But we refuse to acknowledge this, and keep insisting it is something else – this, that, or the other thing. This is understandable, because what has happened to us is something we would not have wished on our worst enemies. And it happened, strangely enough, with the best of intentions.

It is not hard to understand, once you get over the horror of it all - because what happened was indeed horrible. We ended up not being human, but something else we have no word for, and no understanding of. But only the desperate defense “What ever you are talking about, it never, never happened. We are basically the same as we always have been. The world may be in desperate condition, but that is not our fault.”

The denial is even more basic than that: we cannot see any Big Problem. But only isolated problems here and there, and no overall pattern. Whatever happened to us, it has destroyed our ability to understand our world as a whole. Instead we sing, as a massive chorus, “Nothing really bad has happened! Things are better than ever!”

And our intellectuals are no better, they are not swimming against this current – probably for the same reason: they are scared to death – as indeed everyone is. The one overwhelming emotion of this time is a fear so intense it cannot be overcome. We now have a society where only complete conformity is acceptable. Some discussion of this or that is permitted, but not the Big Problem. We cannot even say that it does not exist – because that would involve some tentative admission that it might.

However, I will continue my reasoning, whether I have an audience or not. This requires an historical review – a review of what happened in the Modern world. Others far more qualified than I have written about this – but not that many. The most important event in the history of mankind is a complete mystery to most because our educational system has omitted this study – but has concentrated on making us comply with what has happened instead. It did not make us better thinkers, but better conformists instead.

The key process in the Modern world was Mass Production, which began with the Printing Press. Once set up, it could produce unlimited copies of any document. This was not an innocent, isolated incident – it set a pattern that everything would follow. Soon we would be mass-producing everything imaginable – including copies of ourselves.

But I need to discuss something else: the explosive growth of technology – of which the Printing Press was a part. The first dominant technology of the age was the sailing ship – which was developed to a peak of perfection that even amazes us today. These could sail around the world, and literally expanded man’s horizons. The New World was discovered – even thought it had been discovered by pre-historic man long before.

Whole industries sprang up to build and service these ships – and even more amazingly, a huge population to furnish the manpower to operate them. We have always flocked (like chickens) to wherever the jobs were, and this was our second population boom (the first was in response to agriculture).

The era of mass man had arrived – and this would have a profound effect – but also, and this was also typical, we would ignore this most important development. The education system, which was designed to educate only the best and the brightest (but also, if truth be known anyone who had the money) could not begin to cope with the vast increase in the population, but instead concentrated on making them part of the System. I must now describe what this System came to be.

The System was caused by the next major development – the Industrial Revolution. This, in turn, was make possible by Science – which in turn made new, modern technologies possible. As I have already said, the first of these, the Printing Press, was also a technology but hardly a science. In the same way succeeding technologies were only indirectly related to Science – but were nevertheless dependent on it.

The next big event was the Steam Engine – but also, even more importantly, the use of fossil fuels – which started us on an energy high, and an energy addiction, which still defines, largely, who we are. To put it bluntly, we are energy hogs – and we have no intention of breaking this habit. However, let me return to my historical review.

The Steam Engine made manufacturing possible. Instead of using human power (and animal power for transportation) and the simple loom to produce cloth – the Steam engine could provide vast amounts of power – and with the complicated machinery being rapidly developed, could produce vast amounts of cheap cloth. This immediately reduced the people involved, who had been independent farmers and craftsmen, to poverty. There were dark, satanic mills instead of England’s green and pleasant lands. But we were just beginning.

The Steam Engine also made the railroads possible. (I am skipping the development of the canals, because in the end they were not so important.) The railroads also provided employment for the growing population – but in inhuman working conditions.

People had become nothing more than machines to be used for industrial purposes. And Industry had made a few extremely rich – a wealth they proceeded to exhibit in every way possible. This would be the pattern of the future – except for the ostentatious display. This would eventually become more subdued, as its owners became content with control instead. And the rest became content with entertainment instead.

Entertainment (the movies, and eventually television) became an industry itself – and eventually, in the form of marketing, advertising, and politics – the dominant industry.

I hope you are asking, as I go through this review: what happened to the people in all this? The answer is simple – but shocking: they ceased to exist as people but became something else – a something we have yet to acknowledge or understand.

And the situation only got worse as the external combustion engine (coal and steam) was replaced by the internal combustion engine (oil, the automobile and the airplane). And then even worse by the latest complex – the computer/software/Internet.

People had not just ceased to exist, they had actively turned against each other and proceeded to destroy the world. The ultimate terror had begun.

2011
11/06
CATEGORY
History
Technology
4 comments

Ortega on Resistance

By Ortega I mean Ortega y Gasset and to by Resistance I refer to the quote below, taken from page 93 of Ortega’s “The Revolt of the Masses” and the Triumph of the New Man, by Pedro Blas Gonzalez. This text has not been proof- read very well, and I have made some minor changes to it – and I have broken the text into shorter paragraphs. Roll up you pants, because we are going to wade right in:

An even greater problem that Ortega points out in the cyclical nature of human history is our our lack of understanding or failure to recognize human existence as always offering resistance to our individual lives. He tells us, “all life is the struggle, the effort to be itself. “

Human life, then, is best understood as resistance. This resistance is present in every one of our endeavors, trivial as they may seem at times. But resistance in itself, Ortega argues, is the manifestation of life in its human form.

This forces us to discover the self and our place in the scheme of things: my destiny or vocation. The struggle to become how my intuition informs me that I am part of the struggle to be. To live, then, is to confront and develop ourselves.

This is very much in keeping with the existential notion of life as project. Hence in Ortega’s view, to posit life as resistance, as other thinkers like Dilthey and Heidegger have also argued, brings about two central realizations: humility and a sense of awe.

These two conditions, when maintained throughout the course of one’s life become the fundamental ingredients in not following the somnambulist sub-existence of the mass man.

I only need add that Ortega, like most original thinkers, has been ignored in our time – a time which has been characterized as the Great Regression.

2011
10/19
CATEGORY
Philosophy
The Self
2 comments

Making Horrible Music Together

As a young man I was a classical music addict. I had a traveling job as a field engineer, and I carried my music system with me everywhere I went. Setting it up was the first thing I did at every job.

Back in the Fifties we had discovered hi-fidelity (Hi-Fi) musical reproduction. The primary recording medium then was the long-play (LP) vinyl record – which played, of all things, stereo music! We discovered that we had two ears after all. And that they were capable of hearing a much wider frequency range than we had imagined.

Electronics had also matured, and amplifiers appeared with huge output transformers to match huge bass speakers in their huge cabinets. Popular musicians were quick to discover this new power: any moron could stuff a microphone in his mouth, and with amplified guitars backing him up, produce a new kind of music more in tone with its times: music that was loud and vulgar.

But I stayed resolutely in the 19th Century, with its classical music and good manners. Listening to it, I was transported to another world – where things made sense. Bear in mind that I was raised in the rural Midwest, far from any symphony orchestra. But we could buy records, as my father did, and read magazines about the latest classical recordings, as I did. Classical music was only as far as the nearest post office.

Magnetic tape also matured, and my father was in avid recorder of anything that would go on them. He always had the latest tape recorder, no matter what his bank balance was. Cassette recordings and recorders became common. But then the CD appeared and blew everything else away. With all this progress, we should have been in heaven – but we ended up in somewhere that resembled the other place. And that is what I want to write about. What the hell happened?

As a naive young man, the symphony orchestra seemed like the perfect model for any organization – whose objective would simply be to produce beautiful music, of various kinds. Beautiful new products and services. And I was continually baffled when this didn’t happen.

In twenty years, from 1980 to 2000, I never worked on a single successful product – and most of the companies I worked for went out of business. I had doctor my resume hide this brutal fact (that I had worked for ten companies that had failed) – and every company that was hiring overlooked this. Everyone was overlooking this: that we were producing a massive failure – the biggest failure in history.

But no one was bothered by this – because what we were really doing was destroying the modern world that we hated. This was progress – but progress in a negative direction. We never noticed, we just knew things were changing – and changing fast!

I want to emphasize this: that progress can be either constructive or destructive. And the 20th Century was destructive – in spite of its vast technological progress. It destroyed people and their society. People were no longer important. Machines were – and technology is all about machines, and nothing else.

A few saw this problem coming. Emerson, for example wrote “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind.” But no one imagined it could be so overwhelming – after all, nothing like this had ever happened before. It just happened, and no one noticed. The reason for this is simple: because people had been eliminated, as an automatic part of the process. And with no people there could be no awareness.

And no beautiful music – only chaos. The world became a huge battleground – where we were the losers.

2011
07/04
CATEGORY
Business
Economy
Psychology
Sociology
Technology
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Our Parent’s World did not Work

And not only that, but their parent’s world did not work either. One has to go back in American history to the end of the 18th Century, when America was founded, to find an America that worked. It almost didn’t pass its first big test, the Constitutional Convention – which only put off the problem of slavery until later.

The contrast between Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson was so amazing I cannot understand why is it noticed more often. With Jackson, Americans turned their back on the Enlightenment – and concentrated on destroying the Indians, and one of the finest wildernesses in the world. Americans became destructive, and they haven’t stopped being that.

My source for understanding America in the 19th Century is Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers. I also have Golden Dreams, about California’s golden years in the 20th Century. In either case, I am astonished by how much has been lost.

Equally astonishing, however, is our denial of all this. My father used to brag about how much his generation had done for future generations – he probably got this from reading the Reader’s Digest, which is about all he ever read. My siblings absolutely refuse to admit their parent’s generation was a failure. To me, nothing could be more obvious – and this knowledge is where we should be starting from.

2011
05/09
CATEGORY
History
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