Stranger Than We Can Imagine

An interesting synthesis of ideas relating to the twentieth centuries destruction of frames of reference across all of human experience, and proposing that in the twenty first century a new generation is beginnning to adopt the network as a way of resolving this and - ultimately - growing up. Let’s hope he’s right.

But The Waste Land is a better title because that change of viewpoint isn’t what the poem is about. It is about death or, more specifically, the awareness of death in life. The Arthurian reference in The Waste Land alludes to an arid spiritual state that is not quite death but in no way life. By getting away from the expected touchstone of a consistent narrative, Eliot was free to look at his subject from a multitude of different angles. He could jump through a succession of different scenes taken from a range of different cultures and time periods, and focus on moments which thematically echoed each other.

They wanted to build the best nation that humanity could achieve, not the largest. This made the United States something of an anomaly at the start of the twentieth century.

As the anthropologist Jared Diamond has noted, ‘With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.’

Empires were born when population growth caused egalitarian structures to break down. They ended when technology had grown to the point where warfare could no longer be tolerated. The imperial system, it turned out, was not the unarguable, unavoidable system of human organisation that it had been believed to be for most of history. It was a system that only functioned during a certain period of human and technological growth.

As the old Russian joke goes, capitalism was the exploitation of man by man, whereas communism was the reverse.

It was explained that some were killed for being Jewish or Slavic and some were killed for being bourgeoisie, but the ultimate reason for their deaths was that Russia and Germany had been rebuilt as monolithic states that obeyed the absolute will of Stalin or Hitler. When the day came for Stalin and Hitler to attempt to impose their will on each other, the result was as dark as any event in history.

Crowley and Rand assumed that an individual was a self-contained, rational agent with free will. The true definition turned out to be considerably messier.

In 1996 the president of Genocide Watch, Gregory Stanton, identified eight stages that occur in a typical genocide: Classification, Symbolisation, Dehumanisation, Organisation, Polarisation, Preparation, Extermination and Denial.

The problem, now known as Russell’s paradox, involved the set of all sets that did not contain themselves. Did that set contain itself? According to the rules of logic, if it did then it didn’t, but if it didn’t, then it did. It was a similar situation to a famous Greek contradiction, in which Epimenides the Cretan said that all Cretans were liars.

Gödel’s theorem was extremely elegant and utterly infuriating. You can imagine how mathematicians must have wanted to punch him.

If any branch of thought was going to provide an omphalos which could act as an unarguable anchor for certainty, then common sense said that it would have been mathematics. That idea lasted no longer than the early 1930s. Common sense and certainty were not faring well in the twentieth century.

For people with a psychological need for certainty, the twentieth century was about to become a nightmare.

One result of the simultaneous acceptance of both the ‘wave’ and ‘particle’ models was that these objects were considered to be extremely strange. This could not be more wrong. Their behaviour is the

most commonplace and unremarkable thing in the universe. It is occurring, constantly and routinely, everywhere around you, and so is surely the opposite of ‘strange’. The reason why we think subatomic particles are strange is because they are so different to how things appear at a human- scale perspective.

It is once again down to the observer as much as the observed. It is our problem, not the universe’s.

the scientific community is now more in agreement with the English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, who has said that ‘God does play dice with the universe. All the evidence points to him being an inveterate gambler, who throws the dice on every possible occasion.’

But as Korzybski continually stressed, the map is not the territory.

Our world, both mind and matter, was a small bubble of coherence inside something so alien we haven’t even been able to find adequate metaphors to describe it.

It was necessary to fully confront our situation because, as Sartre saw it, ‘Life begins on the other side of despair.’ He believed that we were both blessed with free will yet cursed with the awareness of the pointlessness of it all, which meant that mankind was ‘condemned to be free’.

As a result of this, he too felt that he had seen the true existential nature of things, and it did not produce nausea in him. From Wilson’s perspective, life was wonderful and self- justifying, and the act of living was undeniably of value.

There are distinct differences in the definitions of words like satori, beatitude, enlightenment, grace, rapture, peak experience or flow, but these terms also have much in common. They all refer to a state of mind achievable in the here and now, rather than in a hypothetical future. They are all concerned with a loss of the ego and an awareness of a connection to something larger than the self. They all reveal the act of living to be self- evidently worthwhile. In this they stand in contrast to the current of individualism that coursed through the twentieth century, whose logical outcome was the isolation of the junkies and the nihilism of the existentialists.

The B- 29 was developed when the Americans feared all of Europe was going to fall to the Third Reich, meaning that any air strikes against Germany would have to have been launched from Canada or the US. The B- 29’ s development, with hindsight, can be seen as a significant moment in American history. It has come to symbolise the rejection of the United States’ historic isolationist policies.

Korolev was unknown during his lifetime. His identity was kept secret, for fear of American assassination, and he was known to the public only by the anonymous title ‘Chief Designer’. With death, however, came fame. His ashes were interred with state honours in the Kremlin Wall, and history now recognises him as the architect of mankind’s first steps into the cosmos. In time, if mankind does have a future out among the stars, he may well come to be remembered as one of the most important people of the twentieth century.

But Little Richard also had a spiritual side. He quit secular Rock ’n’ Roll for the life of a pastor after being deeply affected by the sight of a bright red fireball streaking across the sky during a concert in Australia in 1957. That fireball was almost certainly the launch of Sputnik 1.

Any conflict between the counterculture and the establishment occurred on the cultural level only; it did not get in the way of business. The counterculture has always been entrepreneurial. The desire of people to define themselves through newer and cooler cultures, and the fear of being seen as uncool or out of date, helped fuel the growth of disposable consumerism. The counterculture may have claimed that it was a reaction to the evils of a consumerist society, but promoting the importance of defining individual identity through the new and the cool only intensified consumer culture.

Von Neumann died in 1957, so he did not live long enough to understand why he was wrong. Like many of the scientists involved in the development of America’s nuclear weapon, he had been scornful of the idea that radiation exposure might be harmful. And also like many of those scientists, he died prematurely from an obscure form of cancer.

The Gross World Product, the sum of all economic activity in a particular year, was a little over a trillion dollars in 1900 but had grown to 41 trillion by 2000. The energy needed to fuel this growth increased by a factor of 10, with world energy consumption expanding from around 50 exajoules in 1900 to 500 exajoules by the end of the century. An exajoule is a quintillion joules, and a quintillion is even bigger than it sounds.

The individualism that had fuelled the neoliberal triumph was not the end point to humanity that people like Fukuyama or Margaret Thatcher once believed it to be. It was a liminal period. The twentieth century had been the era after one major system had ended but before the next had begun. Like all liminal periods it was a wild time of violence, freedom and confusion, because in the period after the end of the old rules and before the start of the new, anything goes.

Money is, and has always been, important. But the idea that it was the only important thing was an oddity of the twentieth century. There had always been other social systems in place, such as chivalry, duty or honour, which could exert pressures that money alone could not. That has become the case again. Money is now just one factor that our skills and actions generate, along with connections, affection, influence and reputation.

The uncomfortable fact is that, if we take an honest look at what we know about climate science, the twenty- first century appears to be the penultimate century in terms of Western civilisation. That’s certainly the position if we look at current trends and project forward. We can be sure, though, that there will be unpredictable events and discoveries ahead, and that might give us hope. And there is the nature of the citizens of the twenty- first century to consider. If they were the same as the individuals of the twentieth century, then there would be little reason for hope. But they are not. As we can see from the bewildered way in which they shrug off the older generation’s horror at the loss of privacy, the digital native generation do not see themselves using just the straitjacket of individualism. They know that model is too limited. They are more than isolated selves. Seeing themselves differently will cause them to act differently. Those of us born before the 1990s should, perhaps, get out of their way and wish them luck. The network is a beheaded deity. It is a communion. There is no need for an omphalos any more. Hold tight.