 
Date: 20 Nov 1992 19:35 -0500 (EST)
From: BLUECANARYINNAOUTLET 
Subject: Muses of the Apocalypse? Hmm...
To: +dist+/afs/andrew/usr/js9b/Public/camc.dl@ANDREW.CMU.EDU
Message-Id: <01GRDWU1AD8G000YXI@YANG.EARLHAM.EDU>
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT

Hello all--

   Wow, it's been a long time since I've been on this list.  I kind of
assumed it had disintegrated over the summer.  Well, there you go...

   Oh, hell.  Just realized that I have no idea how the list works now.
Hopefully I got the right net address to send my reply to, but I'm not
exactly sure who's writing what to whom.  I'm assuming that the below
stuff is Thomas answering Bill.  If I'm wrong, please tell me!  In the
meantime, I'll lay off any ad hominem attacks... :-)

>>There's still a possibility for a cultural leap, for a move to a more
>>advanced and self-sustaining civilization.
>
>If there's going to be a cultural leap ... we need new myths.

   Yes.
   I've been thinking about that ever since last spring, when I heard a
fascinating lecture by Kavetsa Adagala, a visiting prof from Kenya, on the
African oral traditions.  Every tribe, she pointed out, has a set of myths
explaining how they came to be, and *justifying* their way of life.  I
think it's the Kikuyu, nomadic cattle herders, who have a myth in which a
god blesses the tribe by sending all the world's cattle down to the earth
on a spider's thread, with the injunction that the tribesman receive the
bounty silently-- only for the tribesman to have his clumsy neighbor, a
hunter-gatherer, bumble in to disrupt the process.  As a result, only some
cattle reach earth.  There's a lot of hostility in that one, but the
process of development it hints at tells me that we need a set of myths to
justify the existence of whatever new civilization we want to see arise.

>(Actually, there's more detail available than that -- we need a new
>spatial experience (which we have -- telemedia) out of which come the
>related developments of a new mathematical consciousness, a new monumental
>architecture, and new myths ... Oswald Spengler's _Decline of the West_
>is the relevant reference book here)

   Interesting.  Why "new monumental architecture", particularly? (And why
is Spengler so applicable?)

>So we need people able to hack around with them. The problem that I see
>so far is that most people working with myths are fruitcakes.

   Awfully pointed terminology there-- but I know what you mean.  I think
the thing is to understand how both myths and more objectively grounded
accounts of the world function in a society as *narratives*-- but at the
same time, not to put them all on a level.  Postmodernism, maybe, without
the absolute relativism.

>What we need are talented people who have a *cynical* take on the hippie
>worldview: all religion is metaphor, all magic is either metaphor or
>electromagnetism.

  I don't think that cynicism is called for so much as moderate
skepticism.  As one who is a firm disbeliever in the supernatural, I agree
with you about religion and magic.

>This sort of outlook is the only one that
>will provide real respect for all traditions, necessary before they can
>be understood or used, but at the same time an irreverent ruthlessness
>in working with them (e.g. "I'm not dealing with gods or spirits or some
>bad future karma here, I'm working with the toolbox that exists for
>manipulating consciousness, which is the ultimate indivisible substance that
>we've got to work with, and I want results, and there's nothing to fear").

   More or less exactly. :-)

>Where was I? Oh yes. I got excited about particulars. Cultural leaps
>have happened before, and we can see how they worked -- in addition to
>the modality (the stirrup, capitalism) there was the idea (Hierarchical
>chain of being, protestantism) and while it looks like the modality
>carries the idea, the idea made the invention of the modality possible
>and is closely bound up with its entrenchment in the populations it
>spreads into.

   Hmm.  Have you by any chance read McLuhan?? (I've read a lot of his
stuff; also the work of his old comrade, Walter J. Ong.) My own
understanding is that the modality *does* make the idea possible-- not the
other way around-- and that what creates the new modality is the decay of
the previous idea-- it's self-deconstruction, as it were.  But this all
may be a chicken-and-egg argument, if we agree that the important thing is
to recognize a very close historical conjunction between large changes in
the technological base of a society and similarly large changes in its
culture.

>Nowadays we need to fight with every weapon
>we have, and there's more out there than (the vital weapons of) corporate
>legal organization and biotechnology.

  Whoa.  I don't know about this corporate stuff.  This is one of my major
hedges about Bill's ideas.  I think that the means shape the ends, and
that they have the capacity to become ends in themselves.  I think
capitalist/corporate culture is part of what's wrong with this world, not
part of a solution...
   Biotechnology, sanely and safely applied, could be a wonderful tool,
though.

>>What I expect is what I call periods of patchwork collapse, in which the
>>federal government keeps an iron hand over strategically important
>>resources-- certain cities, power sources, roads, rivers, food-producing
>>regions. The feds will be so busy with these that, except for political
>>threats, large areas of the rest of the country will be left to fend for
>>themselves. As you say, in some areas local government will be strong
>>enough to retain acceptable safety, in some areas the local govs will
>>become thugs, and in other's there will be no local gov at all,
>>sometimes with good results, sometimes with results that will bring
>>somalian misery to american soil.
>>
>>No matter where we are, we're going to have to think about self-defense.
>>I think that self-defense is going to be a huge, huge issue, for
>>everyone in this country, communitarian or not.

   As a pacifist, as some of you already know (by the way-- who all is on
this list now? More people? Less?), I have problems with this.  I think
that going down the path of defending *my* interests above those of people
who are worse off than me is not only elitist, but suicidal.  People in
the poorest countries in the world have access to armaments capable of
mass destruction; how do you propose to hold off the desperate people you
envision encircling your enclave? Why not simply share the most precious
resource you have with them-- information? Teach them how to build their
own technosphere for self-sufficiency, help them to build it, and maybe
they'll build their own stable, perhaps even peaceful settlements around
yours; and if they do the same for whoever confronts them, there will be a
spreading, concentric ripple-zone of peaceful change where your pebble has
been cast.  Sort of the opposite of the destabilizing "tribal zone" that
the European settlers brought to this continent-- but I digress. (Read
about the tribal-zone theory in *Scientific American* a while back,
couldn't resist mentioning it! :-)

>Thoreau has been the only significant "Free Philosopher" of this nation, but
>there have been thousands like him all through history -- consume little, need
>little, have no material roots -- and have great freedom and power, and
>moral and intellectual influence. (Aldous Huxley's excellent monograph
>on mysticism, _The Perennial Philosophy_ talks around this issue, as do
>extended passages in his book on progressive social reform, _Ends and Means_.)
>If you've got nothing but the clothes on your back, a rucksack with notebooks,
>your incoming mail, and the enduring friendships of your scattered
>co-conspirators, "they" can't break you and they won't need to kill you.

   The responder's suggestion "that the easiest and most secure
self-defense will be poverty and mobility" seems ethically sound, but is
it necessary or practicible? How do you plan to be mobile and poor at the
same time? Surely not through animal herding, but that's the only way I
can remember such nomadism working.  If you've already explained your
ideas to the group, could someone e-mail me and fill me in? Thoreau tried
to get away from material constraints through simple living, but if I
remember right he went home every day to eat with his mother, didn't he?

>Obviously this will be an extremely difficult lifestyle for a man in his
>50s, a reasonable estimate of my age when everything hypothetically will
>be going to Hell and necessitating such security measures. But we're
>talking about as much of a frontier as the ocean -- the post-cataclysmic
>social consciousness, to be precise -- and I don't think it'll be nearly as
>hard to live as a Humanist Mendicant, so to speak, as it will be to organize
>sea-stations of the kind Bill has been posting about.

   Hmm.  In any case, something to think about...

>Has anyone else here thought of Humanist monasticism, or an organization
>along the lines of the religious orders? They kept learning alive through
>the Dark Ages and, being as they are based on close working relationships
>among highly disciplined human spirits (rather than being based on
>telecommunications, say, among the overgrown children / puppets-of-the-
>advertising-and-media-industries who run this nation's society) they are
>highly stable in times of chaos. Also, being organizations of generalists
>rather than of specialists, they are highly flexible in times of chaos.

   Depends to what degree you mean to imitate the monastic structure, but
I think that's a good idea.  In my art history reading, I saw a plate from
a text that was circulated widely in the Middle Ages, issued from the
central Church to outlying areas: a set of diagrams and instructions for
building a monastery, complete with gardens and cottage industries.  Maybe
we should try hunting up stuff like that, see what worked...

>>Truly independent colonies will need (a) weapons and (b) something, some
>>product, that's very valuable to trade for protection and patronage. I
>>figure it'll take a few decades minimum to put that package, plus the
>>viable ocean technology, together.

   Ack!  Sounds like mercantilism... oh, you've heard my complaints before.

>I have a new friend who is Swiss and an old friend who is an International
>Relations grad student, and they've explained to me why Switzerland hasn't
>ever been invaded: not because their land is useless (although it is and that
>doesn't hurt), not because their militia is excellent (although it is
>and that doesn't hurt either), but because their banks are vital to the
>economy of the entire region and any civil disturbance like an invasion would
>disrupt the banks and hurt everybody.
>
>Apparently that's how to be safe from governments, if you're a small country
>or colony.

   They also are fortunate not to be next to Somalia.  I don't think that
half-starved Somalians would care particularly whether or not the banks
died.  It wouldn't make any difference to them-- any immediate difference,
in any case, which is all that the truly desperate care about.  If we're
forecasting such a situation on the global scale, why would possession of
such a resource guarantee safety? I don't think Switzerland, in that
sense, is a model for the future.  (I seem to remember them having an
extremely high, rather young suicide rate, too? An issue of *Granta*
talked about that, sometime last year...)

>[...]there's also the dodge :-)
>of having the people who would be poor and desparate (and threatening)
>without you be prosperous and useful *with* you by providing mutually
>beneficial ways for them to become a part of your society.

   This is what I was suggesting, above, when I talked about
information-sharing as a defense.
   This talk of sea colonization is interesting, but... I'm not sure how
universally accessible it would be.  Who would be able to build these
things? Those who really need it? I'd like this list, and any such
discussion anywhere, to keep those questions in mind.
   Anyway, glad this list is still going, still coming up with new
stuff... Keep it up! :-)


   --Jesse.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The double integral stood in Etzel Olsch's subconscious for the method of
finding hidden centers, inertias unknown, as if monoliths had been left
for him in the twilight, left behind by some corrupted idea of
"Civilization," in which eagles cast in concrete stand ten meters high at
the corners of the stadiums where the people, a corrupted idea of "the
People" are gathering, in which birds do not fly, in which imaginary
centers far down inside the solid fatality of stone are thought of not as
"heart," "plexus," "consciousness," (the voice speaking here grows more
ironic, closer to tears which are not all theatre, as the list goes on...)
"Sanctuary," "dream of motion," "cyst of the eternal present," or
"Gravity's gray eminence among the councils of the living stone." No, as
none of these, but instead a point in space, a point hung precise as the
point where burning must end, never launched, never to fall...

                                --Thomas Pynchon
                                  *Gravity's Rainbow*



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