The Thresher – sam[ ]zdat
Finale of The Uruk Machine – sam[ ]zdat
Finale.
“We will now discuss in a little more detail the struggle for existence.” –Darwin, On The Origin of Species
I
I wrote a brief summary of the books and terms and the way they interlock. I’ll assume you read it or the series itself and ignore recap.
I don’t think this is even close to a description of modernity (much less a full political theory). I’m personally committed to calling this the Uruk Machine inasmuch as some of these issues are just civilization itself. The only book tied to our era is Lasch, because narcissism is tied to nihilism and those are only possible with a certain amount of tech. Still, if what makes “modernity” modernity is partially in technology, then the Uruk Machine will be updated and whirring at unfathomable speeds, the thresher to Gilgamesh’s sacred club. In other words, all of that but more. And I’m pretty sure that that’s exactly what we see.
Still, “modernity” is not exactly the point. When I started this series, I claimed that all of these books were about the same thing. That thing is power, and all of them are about facets that someone else has and you don’t.
II
I’m going to separate “individual power” and “mass power”.
Individual power is self-determination. Power is always over something, and this is “yourself” and also “the outcome of your actions”. It’s incredibly hard to find the right term for it, but everyone knows it when they see it. The best words for it are “agency” and “self-possession”, and those are the ones I’ll use. Of those, “self-possession” might actually come closest, because it implies ability, self-control and political power. It’s the ability to do something on your own, with all the knowledge and confidence that implies. No matter how much external power you have, it’s your foundation. You need to know how to accomplish something to actually accomplish it. On a slightly larger level, it’s the power of a community for self-determination. I still connect this with agency, though, because those smaller communities are self-governing. I associate it with metis, but it’s not limited to that, and episteme provides plenty of agency (depending on context). I think that individual power is pretty obvious up close, but it’s much harder to see from a distance (everyone in a disaster knows who to turn to, but that’s not always the person who actually has a prestigious or political position in the society).
Mass power, on the other hand, is obvious from the outside. I don’t think this is epistemic power (again, there are plenty of people who use episteme for agency), but it tends to rely on it. Mass power is always power over another, the power to make someone do something. I’m going to call it “command”, but bear in mind that that’s imperfect shorthand. Someone with command might be a king, a CEO, an elected official, a [bleh], but they might also be as part of a mass movement. In fact, I’m pretty that command is precisely what mass movements give, and also why most of them fail to cure frustration. (Even moreso if you have some kind of voice over the mass.)
These two things go best together, and when I talk about “real power” I mean both. It doesn’t matter how self-possessed you are, without any mass power a larger entity will prey on you. On the opposite side, being incompetent in a position of command just means that actually-competent people use the slightest weakness to pounce.
There are entire libraries devoted to the observation, “Overpowered people sometimes do bad things.” That doesn’t interest me, and I don’t think it really interests any of these authors. They’re making a different argument: power imbalance isn’t just an issue because the Crown abuses it. It’s an issue because power is a positive good for the populace. The Man could be a lecher or a saint but if he has all the power and the community has none, then it doesn’t matter.
For Scott, power is good because metis is much more adaptive to local conditions and the people who live there. It’s more efficient and generally “pleasant”, while providing people with a more interconnected and “vibrant” world. For Polanyi, power is good because it allows people to maintain communities and enjoy the not-really-priceable goods that that involves. It allows for a kind of certainty, a sense of meaning, and a general traditional safety. For Hoffer, power is good because it allows people to engage in meaningful labor, to avoid frustration and the subsequent madness of the mass movement. For Lasch, power is good because it makes you a full human, and it makes you much less likely to demand the kind of “pleasures” that only entrench you further in the entire epistemic catastrophe. As a bonus, it makes the elites with command more likely to be competent.
The problem here is that “power” has to include both types, and a whole lot of nation building is a trade between agency and command. That’s not bad or good, it just is. I suspect that a lot of political arguments are basically translation issues between these two kinds of power. So Alice says: “The people have no power to do [thing they want to do].” Bob responds: “They live in a democracy! Was it better under kingship?” Both of them agree on centralization being a key feature of modernity (globalization included, inasmuch as it’s one central economy), which is bizarre because that fact alone shows that both of them are right. Even Rome passed out citizenship to save the empire, but that doesn’t mean that the provinces had more autonomy under Rome. Having power over the central authority is different from being your own central authority and really? We’re still arguing about this?
I don’t want to play the “who was happier or freer at [time]” game. I’m not sure it makes sense to compare modern social-contract freedom to whatever liberty meant in 6th century pre-Burma, and I’m skeptical of how we measure “happiness” (Hotel Concierge does part of the groundwork for me; the rest in another post). It should be clear that pre-modern communities were more independent, if not simply because “walking time” was a meaningful measure of distance and it’s difficult to hyper-centralize by foot.
Modernity isn’t bad, no matter how often people want me to be saying [luddite thing], but everything has tradeoffs. Episteme is also not bad, even if I’ve spent way too much time attacking it. Have you noticed how often I rely on epistemic knowledge rather than communal knowledge? As recompense to the gods of book learning: the First Amendment seems obviously epistemic to me, inasmuch as “freedom of belief/speech/thought” isn’t even a coherent thing to discuss in most traditional societies.
I probably don’t need to point this out, but assume that the Uruk Machine basically wants control and knowledge. What limited it before was travel, distance, safety, and wealth. Now add modern tech, a modern economy, the modern-nation state. But if modernity is the Uruk Machine in overdrive, then it makes sense to assume that much more agency is going to get traded for command. The effects of that trade get very weird.
III
One thing that seems notable about the modern political sphere is that everyone is certain that everyone has the power to destroy them, and, weirdly, all of those people are right. The world is flooded with political movements that can do basically anything they want – elect a president, nuke a trade deal, destroy a career, nuke a trading partner – except control their own lives. Not one of them is composed of competent humans who feel in charge of their own fate. You can tell because none of them will stop clamoring that.
Now, I’m going to say that I think what they want is agency. I’m basing that on every one of these books and everything I know about human beings. When someone says: “I feel powerless”, they generally mean “I can’t control my life” not “The various Gregorys of Idaho refuse to kneel.” The problem is that mass power’s use is other people, and all these people are going to get is mass power. This is for one extraordinarily obvious reason: you can’t force someone to have agency. No one can make someone else powerful. That’s a contradiction in terms. If the demand is “[World/government/who cares?], make me powerful!” then they’re already too far gone to save. Don’t let that stop you from trying, of course, I’m just saying it’s going to fail. Feel free to spend however many election cycles America can survive inflicting it on your neighbor.
That’s about as stark of a contrast between individual power and mass power as you’re ever going to see, and almost all of that comes down to modern problems (discussed below).
Modern states, to their credit, actually try and respond to this. But all they can do is either accede to demands for mass power or try and fake agency (mostly; there may be a few exceptions). Of course, powerless people – especially those already in a mass movement – tend not to use mass power well. And to beat a dead horse: if someone powerful spends all their time “empowering” you, it generally means you have none.
The fake agency is mostly included in that. I’m going to be talking about nihilism relatively soon, so I may as well telegraph some here. Nietzsche talks about how with the death of the church, all of those religious instincts will be channeled into mass political movements. Surprise, he was definitely right. But “religious” here shouldn’t be understood as “spiritual energy” or [something]. It means metis, basically, in the sense of “habitual use of the power you have left that can provide you with a sense of meaning.” In a totally confusing and convoluted way, the only “metic practice” left is electing who to best episteme over us. “Thing is broken? Vote for The Unbreaker, the politician who knows everything about unbreaking.” And this makes sense. Almost no one understands what will better their own life, because [everything below]. But Unbreakers aren’t real. Not even the smartest person can understand our world, much less tell you how to live in it, much less make that meaningful.
This is connected to the other weird thing about modern politics: the “powerful” never seem to change no matter how much people hate them. In other words, the Unbreaker keeps on getting elected even when those pesky kids show that she’s just another breaker.
IV
In his review of Seeing Like a State, Scott Alexander says: “I am shocked that anyone with an IQ of less than 180 has ever managed to be a peasant farmer.” He was right.
Take IQ distribution and a community of two or three thousand (likely more) over hundreds of years. Include the direct empirical evidence of everyone, plus all the cultural selection mechanisms of that time, and you wind up with ridiculously intelligent shared knowledge. I think it’s more analogous to crystallized intelligence, but since I can see arguments against that let’s just say “communal intelligence”. Of course, this means that not everyone has to be exceptionally bright. They’re living off the brightness of several dozen generations.
That’s good for the individual, of course, but it’s also good for the community. It’s always better to have people who know what the hell they’re doing. Better: no matter how smart you are, a mass group of experience can outsmart you, so those forms of communal knowledge are actually way, way smarter solutions than any single person in the current community could come up with.
But when metis disappears, so does that balance. Its loss was inevitable, of course. Tech along probably took out 80%. You don’t get to retain metis if your community’s tools are a decade old. There certainly hasn’t been enough time to move from “subsistence farmer” to “Tech Support” while retaining the old ways. The economy that pushes along that technological innovation is going to have even more impact. Polanyi, yeah, and so that’s going to have [Polanyi effects]. Simply moving to industrial centers gets rid of communities, families, and [other nice things]. Which is, you know a lot.
Some people are better than others at incorporating radically new information. Whatever individual is smart enough to understand and adopt episteme, not to mention those who can create it, become vastly more powerful than before. Given that metis is all but totally gone, it doesn’t really shock me that modern society has become heavily weighted towards IQ. Hell, The Atlantic knows it and I’m pretty sure that even mentioning IQ is a mortal sin there.
The problem is that the Atlantic assumes that modern technology (and similar) makes IQ uniquely important. No. However difficult you think coding is, farming with bronze-age tools is just as hard. I admit that technology and the sophisticated miasma of information now is the critical factor, but contra the Atlantic there’s nothing inherent to those. Opposite test: If you plopped a bunch of people with no communal knowledge down to farm, I’d expect social inequalities to be much worse than they actually were/are in communal villages. Disparities in intelligence were mediated by tradition, but there is no tradition for modern society. Obvious, but there’s also little incentive to make one and/or share it.
Why is the gap ever-widening between the poor and the rich, and why is it based on IQ? I don’t think this is the only factor, but I’d hypothesize that communal knowledge is actually way more important than “computers are hard”. Yes, modernity is much more complex, more on that later. But anyone who just says: “Being a codemonkey is obviously harder than [pre-modern activity], because [unintelligible murmur], so the IQ wealth gap is only natural now,” has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. Have you ever read about the insane level of planning and necessary reactions that go into farming?
This is the other side of mass centralization, and this one is centralization of both agency and command. Sure, people can vote them in, but when it comes time to actually do anything it’s only the people at the very top who can. You need episteme to do anything now, it’s the only agency left, and I’m sorry about how fucking hard that sounds. CTRL-F for non-governmental positions, just with some more woo about start-up grit; further, CTRL-F for communities, given migration to seats of power.
I find it horrifying that we’ve condemned a solid two-thirds-plus of humanity to irrelevance[1], but maybe you don’t. Fine. It still screws you. 1) A single individual is flooded with biases and problems that should be mediated by selection and experience. But given how fragile and centralized our society is, all of that selection is now on everyone’s back. 2) There’s no check and no balance outside of other people who aren’t incentivized to care. When something screwed a community, that hurt everyone. But if something only screws the poor, but repudiating it hurts the reputation of the “smart”, then what’s going to happen? Look, I read the academic insights of Real Elite People more, too, but that doesn’t make me trust them more. Their ability to navigate the map better doesn’t mean they actually understand it, and for a variety of reasons many are incentivized not to say what they really thing. 3) Communal knowledge will always outsmart an individual, and I’d guess that we’re currently running way less efficiently than we should be simply do to size of our pool. It just mean that they can show that they know. This, actually, explains how the Unbreaker keeps getting elected. 4) If people demand power, and what they really mean is agency, how do you think they interpret “only the elite have agency”? You get that people revolt, right?
I have no idea how to fix this. I also don’t mean to say that modernity isn’t worth the trade. What interests me is the explanatory power of this, because I think all of that explains nihilism.
V
Everyone knows that along with modernity comes “existential angst” and possibly “spiritual malaise”, etc. A common explanation is knowledge. I accept this, partially. With the golden exception of every single reddit user, I don’t know anyone who understands the “economy”, which is basically the equivalent of violent, bronze-age storms. Minute changes are ground-level, hard to examine if they’re even properly reported, their effects pile up over decades, we may not even know half the effects because they’re confounded by ill-understood other effects, and [other obvious things here]. Yeah. It’s hard.
You’ll note that this parallels the “computers are hard” argument. It’s actually worse, because I think it’s tripping itself. Modern political and economic circumstances are similar to storms. They certainly share certain characteristics: unpredictability, grandiosity, risk of starvation, etc. But no one in the past understood “causes” better than we do now, where “cause” means “physical process behind an event”. Hell, most kings in the past knew less than the poorest American today. Saying “modernity is much more chaotic, therefore of course moderns are confused and insane” privileges a specific sort of knowledge, and it’s not even right about that one. You’re being tricky, because you’re trying to replace “how to respond” with “why it happened”. Those are different things.
I probably overuse metis, and I promise to continue the trend, but I don’t fetishize it in the sense of “let’s go back to communal farming.” That’s a terrible idea. The past was all kinds of bad: there were famines, and locusts, and other such things inflicted on Egypt. What interests me about metis is that it’s about as close as we’re going to get for “autonomy” and self-possession in the past. That’s communal, obviously, but it also means that individuals in that community were self-possessed. They knew what to do in a given situation, how to respond. Its loss is about as close as we’ll get to understanding why everyone seems to feel so totally helpless despite having more power than any group of humans ever.
Metis is not just “efficient way of doing this thing.”. Ask anyone doing a harvest festival, and they’re going to give you the full run down of its religious and cultural significance. Metis interweaves. It may be a festival for some specific plant, but then that upholds certain community standards, which relate back to the other community traditions, and so on and so forth. In that very motion, you have a movement from agricultural to social to political to x practices, and they’re all bound up in the same thing. Now consider that all of those uphold the philosophical parts. All of your “whys” are bound up in there, every single thing that “myth” says that sounds super pretty: gods and humans and fate and life being important and all of that hippie shit. The stuff you want to believe but just can’t. “Life is worth living” says the myth, and also: “here’s how.”
See I need ritual.