Month: December 2018

In capturing a source of our existential anxiety, Kierkegaard’s famous quip “life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards” highlights something fundamental about our epistemic situation: we can understand events only in hindsight.

That, in and of itself, is not a problem. What makes it problematic is that we grant unwarranted value to our keen aptitude for making sense of things after the fact. Our ability to build a reverse-engineered causal chain, to construct a coherent narrative in the past tense, to cast a tightly woven retrospective net across experience, engenders a false sense of confidence in our ability to apprehend the world as it truly is.  

In addition, the most potent events in our lives are invariably those which are entirely unpredictable ahead of time, what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “Black Swan events,” events that have an extremely low probability but an extremely high impact, events that are impossible to anticipate or prepare for ahead of time but entirely explainable—understandable—after the fact. Even the most unprecedented events seem somehow mundane in retrospect. Every event of importance, in our personal lives and in the world at large, has a Black Swan quality to it. Every single one.

This should terrify us. But it doesn’t. False confidence gleaned through the lucidity of hindsight prevents us from perceiving the precariousness of our situation. We are walking backwards toward the edge of a cliff, a canyon carved out of otherwise flat terrain. We see the path that we have traveled receding into the past, with all of its previously unforeseen obstacles clearly visible, all once-hidden dangers obvious and discernable, all unexpected twists and turns clearly marked. And when we step off the edge and crash down to the canyon floor, hindsight will be our guide.  

There has been a lot of political teeth-gnashing—amplified and intensified by corporate news media—over building a wall along the southern US border. Reasonable folks on both sides of the issue (pun intended) recognize that a border wall is largely, if not entirely, symbolic. It will make it more difficult for wildlife to traverse their migratory routes, but it will do little or nothing to keep brown people out or dissuade illegal commerce. I suspect, however, that the most virulent supporters of the wall are unable to separate its symbolic role from its efficaciousness. To them, the most important thing is to have some concrete and tangible representation of what is in reality mere idea, a geopolitical invention.

Borders don’t exist, of course, at least not those associated with politically-defined territories. They are abstract entities, and their placement is entirely arbitrary. Many make use of physical boundaries, rivers or mountain ranges that serve as natural barriers to easy travel. But others consist of nothing more than map coordinates. I remember visiting the Four Corners monument as a child, standing on the engraved circle at the precise point where Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Colorado meet, and marveling at how the surrounding land looked exactly the same in every direction. Why exactly here, I thought, why not three feet one way or another? It would have made absolutely no difference.

To say that I am a fan of open borders misses the point. I am a fan of open acknowledgement of the reality that borders do not exist outside of the make-believe worlds of civilization. I am a fan of open awareness that borders and property boundaries of all kinds are weapons of immiseration, technologies of oppression and control, tools the powerful use to keep and enhance their power.  

It’s called transverse orientation, navigation at night by keeping a fixed angle of orientation to a distant light source. In the natural world, salient nighttime light sources are invariably celestial and indeed distant, the moon, Venus or Jupiter, the waxing or waning glow on the horizon that precedes and follows the sun. The trigonometry changes dramatically with luminescence from a nearby terrestrial source, a streetlight, a porchlight, a campfire, and the resulting path of travel becomes an inescapable circular vortex, a nocturnal Charybdis. Moths aren’t attracted to light from the window, they are just unable to fly away from it because all plottable courses lead them right back to where they started.

I was visiting a cousin who lives in a corner apartment on an upper floor of a high-rise condominium in downtown Seattle. The view in both directions was heavy and angular. The iconic space needle, just a few blocks away, loomed from behind a cluster of buildings outside the window on one side, and on the other was the Sound, with docked container ships dwarfed by massive oil tankers resting just offshore. Objects in the distance were attenuated into vague impressions of themselves by the late afternoon fog. People pay a premium for this, for a private voyeuristic viewing platform, for a climate-controlled glass box from which to gaze at leisure upon an aerial pie slice of death and concrete.

Transverse orientation. People aren’t drawn to the city so much as they become trapped by their own navigational trigonometry, caught in a vortex created by the city’s consumptive commotion, failing to recognize its source of luminescence is the spark of life being violently extinguished; its siren’s song, a fading scream; its beguiling pulse, a death rattle. All plottable courses lead them right back to where they started.

According to Jonathan Swift, “You do not reason a man out of something he was not reasoned into.”

But this is only part of the problem, and a small part at that. If the orthodoxies of civilization were like those of religion, it would be a simple matter of injecting tiny corrosive packets of uncertainty here and there, sowing seeds of doubt fertilized with a balanced application of critical thought and skeptical reflection, waiting for the ground to swell with the first signs of ripening disbelief, and then—and this is an extremely important step—demonstrating that there are more satisfying alternatives, alternatives grounded in the reality of our situation as temporary beings immersed in symbolic worlds of our own creation.

A civilization heretic with evangelist leanings, with desire and drive to pull the veil from the eyes of the faithful, faces a double challenge. Unlike the religious situation, where appeals to logic and reason can only be met with avoidance and denial, civilization presents something approaching an epistemologically closed system, where almost every potential threat from reason is met with a rational sounding counterpoint. To mount a successful attack, it is first necessary to undermine deeply embedded presuppositions and assumptions about the nature of human nature itself, starting with Hobbes and his claims that uncivilized life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” And then there are the demonstrable facts of medical technology aimed at treating civilization’s many iatrogenic disorders, and after that, the sheer convenience civilized life affords to its privileged classes.  

And even if this first part of the deconversion process could be successfully employed, the second part is very likely to end in failure. Civilization allows for no alternatives to itself, denying even the possibility of the binary choice: are you in or out?   

What are they called, those brown, curved, cashew-like parts of a pine flower? Strobili? I saw one on the sidewalk today and was suddenly in my maternal grandparent’s front yard, on a warm fall afternoon, sitting on the grass in the shade, with my back against the trunk of a large ponderosa pine, its rough bark of stacked puzzle pieces biting gently through my shirt, a dry strobilus rolled between my thumb and forefinger, quickly denuded of its granular substance, leaving a sharply convoluted stem. I have fragments of recollection, likely netted across a dozen or more years, where I can see small piles of harvested grains on the sidewalk beside me, microscopic corn rubbed from thin, brittle cobs.

There are thousands of these kinds of things littered throughout my earliest memories. Collectively they comprise the overwhelming bulk of my past, features of the world that have been swept into unimportance because of their mundane familiarity, rendered commonplace and banal by their lack of connection to the invented worlds I am expected to inhabit.

And it is not just in the distant past, or those things illuminated within the penumbra of childhood nostalgia. Yesterday harbors uncountable shards of similar momentary awareness, transient instants of wonder and discernment attached to concrete details perceived in passing, details quickly lost or forgotten, dismissed as insignificant, trivial characteristics of everyday life, not relevant to the goal presently being pursued, unrelated to the destination, part of the surrounding topography, minor stones on the pathway.

The pattern of shadow across the dog’s face. The chittering of the tiny bird just outside the window, and the way the twig recoils as it bolts to a different branch. The familiar fragrance of decay folded within the cool moist morning air on the first official day of winter.     

The phrase has a military origin, a reference to a marching column of soldiers in mechanical lock step. Militaries are machines, and, as with all mechanical devices, function only when each part is operating in sync with the others.

Our psychological sensitivities in this area are informed from two directions, internally, from intuition grounded in evolved primate proclivities, from two and a half million years of life in small foraging groups where affiliation and consensus were matters of life and death, and externally, from the forced mechanical roles of civilization, from a lifetime embedded in steeply hierarchical power relations where compliance is nonnegotiable and obedience is ensured through the application of lethal force.

These two, the internal and the external, meet in the middle, in compelling social pressure, in a social-psychological compulsion, impossible to ignore, overwhelming in its insistence that we conform, that we “toe the line”—a quip, incidentally, with its origin in the starting line of a footrace. To be out of step is not merely an uncomfortable state, to remain out of step for any length of time is intolerable. And to be intentionally out of step, to purposefully step out of line, to forcefully extract yourself from the drivetrain, is a clear sign of mental illness.

But what are you to do when you start to see civilization as the death machine that it is? What if standing apart, or stepping out of line becomes a moral imperative? What if you can no longer, with clear conscience, continue to conform to a system that intentionally intensifies suffering, a system that is systematic in the ways it metes out misery and death to everything within its purview, a system that insists that there is nothing in the entire universe outside of its purview?

Layers.

There are layers to this, strata containing hollow permineralized husks, fossilized residue of the past in ribbons.

Some are thin, composed of detritus from a dramatic event, like the charred black clay left behind by a fire, or the powdery silt washed in during a massive flood. Some are thick, and hold scattered bones laid down during periods of climatic stability.

The thin layers tend to run in succession, one after another, several stacking upon each other in tessellated patterns of minor tragedy—fallout from an extended period of change and transition.

Close inspection shows that the thick layers are not as uniform as they first appear, but the colors and textures interdigitate and interpenetrate at the margins so that differences only emerge when comparing the extremes, darker and rockier deeper down, farther back in time, lighter and sandier toward the upper, more recent formations.

And there are recognizable epochs, separated by a thin line sealing the past behind a before-and-after boundary, an asteroid strike, a cataclysmic mass extinction. A single event that changes everything, that rewrites the rules. A child. A divorce. Cancer.

My reverie usually follows a highly stratified epochal frame: a memory emerges, and its extraction unearths others from within its own layer, following a lateral pattern of excavation that rarely scrapes past the borders. In this way I find myself immersed within periods of the past that appear isolated and individuated, as if standing upon too-broad stairs on a poorly designed stairway, impossible to climb with alternating steps, and forced to use the same leg each time—awkward and infantilizing. To travel across layers is to move to entirely different altitudes, qualitatively different realms, to step from the valley floor to the tree line with little or no sense of the interstitial, the complex, temperate, life-abundant areas between.