Category: Books

Even Less Impressed With Our Technocratic Overlords

Sapiens just gets worse the more I read.

The theme of the most recent section can be summarized as: “Unless you can prove a moral principle or element of civilizational organization is a direct expression of some unquestioned aspect of human biology, it has no basis in reality, and is therefore arbitrary, and therefore cannot be justified.”

Which is a fun bit of nihilism, and further confirms my read that Harari has a fundamental hatred for humanity: everything humanity has done as a species from the point we started to express traits unique (or unique in degree) to humans has been a mistake, and a tragedy – not only for all other species, not only for the planet as a whole, but for humanity itself. Agriculture, industry, complex social organization, property, specialization, technology as a whole, culture as a whole, civilization as a whole: all bad ideas, any cherry-picked “benefits” far overshadowed by their pervasive negative consequences.

I know I’ve criticized Sagan here, but Harari is his philosophical inverse. Sagan may have smugly dismissed what he considered unscientific or irrational views and those who hold them, but he didn’t breezily discredit everything that makes us human and the entire legacy of human history.

Which makes me wonder if “technocratic” is really a suitable adjective for Harari…

Busywork as Social Order Maintenance

 

I found this passage from Two Years Before the Mast interesting for several reasons (emphasis mine):

Before I end my explanations, it may be well to define a day’s work, and to correct a mistake prevalent among landsmen about a sailor’s life. Nothing is more common than to hear people say, “Are not sailors very idle at sea? What can they find to do?” This is a natural mistake, and, being frequently made, is one which every sailor feels interested in having corrected. In the first place, then, the discipline of the ship requires every man to be at work upon something when he is on deck, except at night and on Sundays. At all other times you will never see a man, on board a well-ordered vessel, standing idle on deck, sitting down, or leaning over the side. It is the officers’ duty to keep every one at work, even if there is nothing to be done but to scrape the rust from the chain cables. In no state prison are the convicts more regularly set to work, and more closely watched. No conversation is allowed among the crew at their duty, and though they frequently do talk when aloft, or when near one another, yet they stop when an officer is nigh.

…This is the usual resource upon a rainy day, for then it will not do to work upon rigging; and when it is pouring down in floods, instead of letting the sailors stand about in sheltered places, and talk, and keep themselves comfortable, they are separated to different parts of the ship and kept at work picking oakum. I have seen oakum stuff placed about in different parts of the ship, so that the sailors might not be idle in the snatches between the frequent squalls upon crossing the equator. Some officers have been so driven to find work for the crew in a ship ready for sea, that they have set them to pounding the anchors (often done) and scraping the chain cables.

In the full passage, Dana explains that there is more than enough necessary work aboard ship to keep the crew continually busy. But he implies here and elsewhere (and may at some point come out and say it explicitly) that the continuous employment at all times is a means of maintaining discipline and order among the crew. When every waking moment is taken up with some task (necessary or make-work), there is little opportunity or energy left for the kind of talk or actions that could lead to conflict or disobedience.

Which, when you think about it, is a lot like modern life: work, commuting, childrens’ enrichment activities, the DMV, tax prep, home maintenance, car maintenance, doctor or dentist appointments, walking the dog, bathing the cat, etc. And what time is not consumed in these tasks (some of which are the consequences of personal choices, and some of which seem consciously structured to maximize the waste of your time), omnipresent distractions like sportsball, addictive social media, banal entertainment, controversy-stoking “news”, shifting trends, etc. are there to absorb.

I can easily imagine this shipboard practice being implemented on ships traveling between Earth/Luna and Mars – and at least in the early days, in settlements themselves – for exactly the reasons thus far implied by Dana.

The Moulding of Communists

Frank S. Meyer’s book was a bit of a slog (as noted previously), but it paid off in the end.

In a nutshell, the book describes how Communists are recruited, selected, trained, and ultimately shaped into “cadre men” – true Communists. Unsurprisingly, the process follows how certain cults operate, with the same sorts of isolation from outsiders, brainwashing, jargon, consumption of free time and initiative, self-serving morality and ethics, totalizing worldview, and focus on the promotion of the interests of the organization.

While somewhat dated nowadays (my copy was published in 1961), the book nonetheless offered useful insights as to how we got to where we are today. One can read his description of how real, card-carrying Communists in the 1920s-1950s thought and behaved and find directly analogous thought and behavior patterns among the broader modern left. Modern cancel culture and political correctness are the direct descendants of practices common in Party operations in those years, but one can easily see the roots of wokeism, scienceism, climatism, and other lefty and left-adjacent ideological cults of Current Year in Meyer’s account of how the Party worked.

While they stand on similar foundations of a totalizing worldview, simplistic lenses for interpreting the entirety of reality, moral and ethical flexibility in the promotion of the Cause, rabid intolerance to dissent, etc. (things James Lindsay described in his essay Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism), these modern ideological cults look like cargo cults by comparison to the old Party – trying to apply the recruitment, propagandization, training, etc. of the old Communist movements without understanding how those things work or why the Communists did them.

Still with some degree of success, true, but without the remarkable degree of organization and competence Meyer describes – remarkable in no small part for having evolved in such a short time following the Russian Revolution.

 

 

Not Impressed With Our Technocrat Overlords

I’ve been reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. 

My reaction so far has amounted to, “This is what so much conspiratorial hubbub is about?” I’m about 50 pages or so in, and finding the writing style insufferable – such that every time I put it down, I swear I’m done with it.

The prime offense is that it reads like it was intended for an audience with an eighth-grade reading level – if that. Harari uses short, simple sentences. He waters down complex concepts. He uses some big words, but not too big. And a lot of repetition. Did I mention the simple sentence structure?

Yeah. He’s no Carl Sagan, let alone a Silas Hudson.

What probably ought to be the prime offense, however, is his extensive use of unsupported (because unsupportable) conjecture, presented as fact. Sure, I understand where he’s ultimately going with his assertion that prehistoric foragers led more rewarding or satisfying lives than we moderns (they owned nothing and were happy, you might say), but he can’t possibly know this as fact. It’s not something that can be known as fact when comparing two different extant cultures, where those who make up those cultures can be interrogated extensively about how contented they are – there are simply too many ways to look at the question to establish who is in fact happier.

I’m disappointed. I was expecting a more noodly piece of writing, with much to chew on with regards to technocracy and transhumanism and the like – so much so that I bought Sapiens bundled with Homo Deus and 21 Lessons. Now I’m going to have to decide whether to waste my time reading them or waste my money by not.

 

A Litmus Test of the “Scientifically Minded”

Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind  has been making the rounds over the past year or so (despite originally having been published in 1976 – I blame Westworld.)

I read it last summer, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was wholly skeptical of the premise as I had encountered it prior to reading the book, in particular the shift from bicamerality to unicamerality/consciousness happening in such a brief period over such a wide area. (Spoiler: a good part of it is driven by the advent and diffusion of literacy.)

The book was not at all what I was expecting. It’s a deep dive into the anthropology and history of archaic cultures and early civilizations, particularly those of the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, and what our knowledge (as of the mid-1970s) tells us about their conception of knowledge and its origins, what that reveals about the structure and operation of their minds, and how these things evolved over thousands of years – first glacially and then all at once.

There are plenty of summaries and analyses of the book and Jaynes’ ideas, however, so I’ll focus instead on an aspect that I find particularly interesting: the reaction to it all.

My take is pretty common, and I would say properly scientific: the book is a flood of interesting ideas and conjectures, some of which are argued more convincingly than others, but which overall are very thought-provoking and point in a potentially useful and informative direction. One can and should read it (as all science books) with open-minded skepticism, and tease out the useful threads of inquiry. As I’ve seen it put by several readers, Jaynes may not have hit a home run, but he’s definitely on the field – however flawed or limited, there is a “there” there that merits consideration and further exploration.

And then there are the reactions from the “scientifically-minded”.

Because it’s not wholly-accepted and Expert-Approved Science™, or employs some evidence which has been overturned in subsequent decades, or engages in conjecture which is (of necessity given the antiquity of the examples) unfalsifiable, they write the whole thing off as pseudoscience.

Which is itself an unscientific attitude to take, but one which is all-too-common among those who fucking love Science™ but are utterly bereft of the curiosity and ability to think independently which are essential to true science. If science is supposed to be about the discovery of knowledge and the development of understanding about reality, closing one’s mind to new ideas and dismissing potential insights in this manner is plainly counterproductive.