(Not the movie.)
People don’t have ideas; ideas have people. (Carl Jung)
We don’t live in a rational world. We simply don’t. Oh, but we wish we did, and the yearning to find Order and Reason all around us -and especially above us — exerts an irresistible, seductive, tidal undertow on our minds. We anticipate, even imagine we can see, in the space around us unmistakable and unerring regularity, linearity. Our certainty regarding this mysterious unseen “reality”, its authority and efficacy has long been a besetting sin. For it is true that we see what we believe, and not that we believe what we see. Heaven help us, it’s true.
Tell me what Truth is, and I will believe it. So the flock bleats to this day.
For example, there is the Scala Naturae, the Great Chain of Being, brainchild our intellectual uncles Plato and Aristotle, which was also much loved and revered (and unquestioned) by the medieval Church. The Scala, a pyramid — the pyramid of everything, was a shining tribute to rationality and permanence, a framework that safely contained all reality. It was deeply satisfying. And wrong. Given its absolute justification of human inequality, (Divine Right of Kings, wealth means virtue, class equals value, etc.) it was frankly evil, and trapped us in a prison of our own making. Yet we loved it, needed it, and hated it.
As it always has, the world we find ourselves in oppresses us with its complexity, randomness and turbulence. We want simple,and by heaven, we’re bound and determined to have it one way or another. Even more, we want to relinquish ownership andresponsibility. Hey, I’m three feet tall. Someone taller must be around somewhere.
Auguste Comte, an early modern French thinker, thought to be the first philosopher of science, attempted to “solve” the disorder and malaise swirling crazily about in his day in the aftermath of the French Revolution through the application of strict reason, logic, and a rigorous dollop of empirical science. He is perhaps best remembered for his optimistic dictum, “To know is to predict; to predict is to control.”
Bravo. At last. Bravely done, Monsieur Comte. H-m-m-m.
Comte and others like him before and since, seized the bright blade of Reason and Science, and attacked the murky disorder of the human world around them, parts large and small, material and immaterial, with great zeal. And like the single-minded demigod Procrustes of Greek lore, set out to fit all human questions to the Bed of Uniformity. Lopping off ill-fitting parts, stretching, hammering, all in the name of glorious simplification. What could possibly go wrong?
RECENTLY I found myself on a long flight, second in a tiresome series, from the Persian Gulf headed toward Southeast Asia. A thoughtful, older man came on late to occupy the aisle seat next to me, and we quickly struck up a conversation. He had grown up in Singapore as I recall, and was now settled in the U.S. Being of Chinese descent and both of us heading into the deepening shadow cast by rising China, we each enthusiastically shared what we knew and surmised about what was and what was to come in this part of the world.
Right off we both agreed that China’s practical response to the Great Recession had been efficient and brilliant, creating virtually from scratch a high-speed rail industry, laying down thousands of kilometers of dedicated passenger and freight lines all across the vast, rugged Chinese landscape, a gift to its present and future self. But why hadn’t other richer nations reacted so astutely and swiftly in this crisis to put in place a hyper-efficient system of transport?
Well, too many social constraints, a decision-making process that could not function without multiple feedback loops being satisfied. A Congressional committee to investigate, environmental impact studies. Re-zoning and consultations, financing, bonds to issue. Tick tock. Time passed and so in the West this tide in the affairs of men slid silently back out into the deeps.
So my new friend argued, this was all a sterling illustration, even proof positive that the very short and ruthless decision-making chains of China’s hierarchical power pattern, a thoroughly new yet ancient and traditional society, must therefore be superior.
Wait. Hold steady. I recalled other episodes in this long-running series that were far less laudable. What about those, I asked?
In 1958 Mao’s leadership brain trust launched the GTP and the GLF (Great Turning Point and Great Leap Forward) with a white-hot evangelical fervor, coupled with a predictable and (as it turned out) catastrophic ignorance of how economics worked, and a total absence of doubt. Religious institutions and indoctrination might have been purged in post-revolutionary China, but the all-too-human capacity for herd-mind, and collective Will to Believe and (for the top) to Be Believed had not. A cult-like faith in the infallibility of the Leader coupled with the effective erasure of individual free thought and action into the Collective did its work thoroughly.
Instead of the GTP and the GLF, the next four years turned into the GCF (Great Chinese Famine). As many as 55 million Chinese citizens died as The Plan was faithfully executed. At around this same time similar “improvements” were taking place in the USSR under the direction of Molotov, chairman of the Council of Commissars with similar results. Self-inflicted mass death.
“How can we square the circle here,” I asked him earnestly?
Although he appeared to be tempted to react defensively, he didn’t, but chewed on this bitter nut for some time. Such an epic disaster was at least as weighty a data point as 2000 miles of high-speed rail. Where could the truth be hiding?
As we poked and prodded at this conundrum I pointed out the universality of such human folly, and right up to the present too: persistent claims in the West by so-called Free Market Fundamentalists of utopian runaway economic growth as taxes and regulation fell, all in defiance of evidence, the unrelenting death grip of unscientific beliefs about Race being true and determinative on large numbers of “modern” individuals. For me personally it was the embarrassing prostration of the modern educational establishment before the altar of Big Tech as the end-all and be-all.
The problem I argued was nothing inherent in Chinese minds, character, or even culture. What then? How could such a system function heroically in some instances and so abysmally in others? How could this be understood, prevented?
After a pause, I asked my new friend to imagine a room . . . somewhere in China, locked doors, a large table filled with Those Who Think. In any social group a few are designated as such; they Think, and It Is Decided. But these chosen ones in the room almost certainly share common features of past experience and education, and swim in the same particular culture, an invisible everything which defines what is real and what has value for them.
Those Who Think look ahead, they look back, they weigh up what they are quite certain are a reasonable array of options for the future, perform a cost-benefit analysis that naturally serves to protect those persons who are real for them, and in short order, The Future is born inside that room.
Now then, I continued, whenever unruly and unpredictable and complex Reality happens to correspond sufficiently to the version shared by the minds of Those Who Think, voila, success, as in the example of the high-speed rail decision. Yes, yes, all good so far.
But . . . what if the insights or ideas, the lived experiences needed at just this moment aren’t present in that room, or perhaps some unique development has occurred that they simply could not have predicted? Such short, clean, tidy systems are not and cannot be self-correcting. Where would the missing divergent input come from? Who would say no, or even just laugh out loud?
H-m-m-m, my friend looked genuinely puzzled, as though such a possibility had never occurred to him. Could something like this even happen?
If the world were rational, as we nearly always pretend that it is, then all that must be known in order to create the correct and optimal way forward for us all would, must be found inside that room. Causality must have arranged it; for anything else to occur would represent the cruelest kind of joke. Because, let’s be absolutely clear here, in the China of 1958, the USSR of the 30s and 40s, and in 2018 for the vast, compliant herd of tech believers and consumers, our job is not to think big or improperly, but to believe and do. To imagine ourselves as free when we are in fact not.
Ultimately, what if Those Who Think get it wrong (and absent some overt magical cosmic intervention and close management, how could they not)? Abraham Lincoln observed, “Everyone is ignorant, only about different things.” In that proverbial room there is w-a-a-y too much certainty and overlapping experience. And the longer that room of TWTh remains in the hands of similar people the greater the divergence between restless reality and the understanding and solutions on offer in there to confront it.
Privilege swaddles people, sheltering them from unpredictability and the consequences of wrong-headed, inadequate thinking and living. Existing for any length of time inside a cotton-wrapped universe makes a person weak, risk-averse, and selectively ignorant of just those troublesome details they most need to see. In other words that room becomes more orthodox over time. That’s bad.
The authoritarian model of a fixed, pure, rational hierarchical order, one that cries out to be protected, assumes of course that all minions “below” will be, must be made to be, orthodox and loyal. Such is their task in the cosmic order. The orthodox mind doesn’t think — it recites. As constituted it can’t think.
And again, as I told my increasingly troubled new friend, how can any of us be certain that The Plan should be followed? I’m not necessarily imputing stupidity or bad motives to TWTh, although if such a thing turned out to be true how would we know? But hierarchies are not self-correcting. (Just about now I mentioned the ongoing self-immolation of the Roman Catholic hierarchy over its embarrassing inability to come to terms with generations of child rape and cover up.)
Talent, creativity, drive — these rare and essential gifts simply refuse to go where they are supposed to. They arrive on their own schedule and hit randomly like lightning strikes. No society, neither the West nor 21st century China, can afford to waste them. What about the Made in China 2015 initiative, to supercharge the nation into a cutting-edge technology leader, I asked? If divergent impulses and wandering thoughts, are relentlessly pruned from the earliest ages, where will the innovative ideas even come from?
A long silence fell between us as our wide-bodied jet hummed on (flawlessly we hoped) through the upper air over Asia. If my argument was true, this was no small problem. What would a solution look like? Finally he asked me directly what I proposed.
My answer was simple. Make every social, cultural, and political system as flat and transparent as possible, as fluid as possible. Roll the dice. Yes, I nodded, that means that the sacrosanct room containing Those Who Think, those who bear the responsibility for becoming ruthlessly well informed, wise, and self-effacing, radically changes. No more allowing staggering disasters like the GCF, and covering them up later. No, we must all rise resolutely to the burden of collective ownership, each of us ultimately holding the bag if it all goes sideways. That room must make space for every last man, woman, and child of us.
Can we do it? What would it look like? It would be messy in the extreme, and would require more than a few changes to our schools, our families, our politics, and our economics. Certainly more would be needed than some new tech trinkets, which have so far mostly served to bring us kitten videos or worse, and grossly amplified our weaknesses.
We humans will either rise to our potential and save ourselves and our fragile home or we won’t, but it will not be possible to avoid such a risky bet. When we search the space above us for answers or comfort, all we see is blue sky. The potential resources, energy, and insights needed to survive and thrive are hidden everywhere in plain sight. We have met the solutions, and they are us.
It’s time to finish the flattening out of the modern age. Even in China.