Rad Geek People's Daily

I’ve Been Reading: Steven Levy, A 25-Year-Old Bet Comes Due: Has Tech Destroyed Society? in WIRED (01.05.2021)

From the article, and by far the best pay-off of reading through the whole thing (emphasis added):

• Kirkpatrick Sale: I cannot accept that I lost . . . . The clear trajectory of disasters shows that the world is much closer to my prediction. So clearly it cannot be said that Kevin won.

• Kevin Kelly: This was a gentleman's bet, and he can only be classified as a cad.

If you want to read the original interview from 1995, that’s also online.

In a lot of ways I am actually quite fond of Kirkpatrick Sale, as an intellectual figure. But Kevin Kelly is clearly right here and Sale is clearly acting the cad. The last year has been really rough for a whole lot of people, to be sure. But there is absolutely no way that a serious answer to the question, Has tech destroyed society? — if destroyed actually means anything remotely like the specific standards for endurance or failure that Sale and Kelly agreed on in 1995 — other than a flat No, it clearly hasn’t. Hyper-industrial civilization is still a going concern in 2021.^[1] There is no forthright, literal, and intellectually serious assessment for the first concrete criterion they agreed to — (1) Has there been multinational global currency collapse that brought standards of living in 2020 below those of 1930?^[2] — except for No, that didn’t happen. (At all.)

And despite Bill Patrick’s really kind of silly efforts to fudge his way into something like a diplomatic split decision between Sale and Kelly, there’s also no forthright, literal, and intellectually serious assessment of the second concrete criterion they agreed to — (2) Have there been social friction and warfare both between the rich and the poor and within nations, to such a massive scale that industrial civilization has crumbled or is even anywhere near crumbling from civil and military strife?^[3] — except for No, that didn’t really happen either. (There’s still a lot of global poverty and inequality, and there have been lots of social and political conflict. Those are really bad, but global poverty and inequality are flatly better not worse since 1995, and absolutely nothing that’s happened in the period between 1995 and 2020, even at its very worst, comes anywhere near the sort of thing that would involve destruction or peril to industrial civilization in even one country, let alone in the world as a whole.)^[4]

And, again, despite Patrick’s silly attempt at a diplomatic splitting of the decision, there’s also no forthright, literal, and intellectually assessment of the third criterion they agreed to — (3) Have there been accumulating environmental problems, such that Australia, for example, becomes unlivable because of the ozone hole there, and Africa, from the Sahara to South Africa, becomes unlivable because of new diseases that have been uncovered through deforestation, to such a scale that industrial civilization has crumbled or is even anywhere near crumbling in the next several years? — except for No, that didn’t really happen either, at least not yet. There’s lots of environmental stuff that’s bad, quite possibly getting worse, but nothing environmental in the period between 1995 and 2020 has made continents unlivable or destroyed industrial civilization, or is even remotely likely to within the next decade.^[5]

None of this, of course, is to say that there’s nothing to worry about, or that real suffering, or the economic, sociopolitical and environmental dangers and crises that so many of us face^[6] are anything less than real, grave, and urgently calling for thought and action. Hell, it’s not even to say anything about whether it’s certain or not whether global industrial civilization survives to 2050, or 2100, or into the gleaming Star Trek future.^[7] The bet was about what the world would be like now in 2020 — that was still 25 years in the future when they made the bet, and the bet they agreed to was about how people would be living (or not) in 2020 — not about how anxious or afraid they (we) might be in 2020 about how the world might turn out another 30 or 50 or 80 years further into the world of tomorrow.

1. ^[1]You might think that it might not be a going concern for much longer. If you think that, I reckon you’re wrong, but I’d be glad to hear what sort of evidence and reasoning you have in mind, and about how long you think it will be until things do fall apart. But Sale and Kelly didn’t bet on whether or not technological civilization would be existing precariously or in decadence or long-term unsustainable in 2020. They bet on whether or not it would still exist and function. If all the present uncertainty leads you to doubt that, I’d call your attention to about 7.8 billion people who aren’t living in nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers, with technics that aren’t limited to wood and stone and skin and bones, who might be able to offer evidence.↩
2. ^[2]Sale, 1995: The dollar would be worthless, the yen would be worthless, the mark would be worthless—the dislocation we saw in the Depression of 1930, magnified many times over.↩
3. ^[3]Sale, 1995 (emphasis added): A second would be the distention within various societies of the rich and the poor, in which the poor, who comprise, let’s say, a fifth of society, are no longer content to be bought off with alcohol and television and drugs, and rises up in rebellion. And at the same time, there would be the same kind of distention within nations, in which the poor nations are no longer content to take the crumbs from our table, and rise up in either a military or some other form against the richer societies.↩
4. ^[4]There’s lots of global inequality, and there’s lots of resentment and conflict because of it. And there’s lots of violent social and international conflict which is really bad. Maybe some of it has gotten worse in the last decade or the last year alone. But there was more extreme poverty and more global inequality in 1995 than there is in 2020, there’s far less political violence and far less violence tout court in most industrialized countries than there was in 1995 or 1969, and absolutely nothing that’s happened economically, socially, politically or militarily since 1995 has come anywhere near the levels predicted or the levels that you’d need to say that industrial civilization was seriously imperiled, let alone that it had crumbled. Global poverty and global inequality have gone down, not up: see for example Our World In Data on Global Economic Inequality. Political violence is lower: see for example the New York Times on political bombings in New York City and the U.S. as a whole in 1969-1970, two years in which global industrial civilization did not collapse. Violence in general is lower: see for example Pew Research on the immense decline in violent crime rates in the U.S. from the 1990s to the 2020s. Of course there are places that have had things much worse — violent crime and (I’d argue) political violence have risen dramatically in Venezuela (Our World In Data) since 1995, there’s a war in Yemen that has created one of the worst social and humanitarian crises in the world, and so on. Those things are terrible, but it is irrelevant, if not simply mendacious, to put forward an awful decade in one or two or a dozen countries as evidence that global industrial civilization has collapsed, or is on the brink of collapse. The claim that intense subcultural-partisan polarization, or idiotic Right-wing political theater, political shit-shows, sorry displays, protests spiraling into out of control or dangerous riots, or menacing, possibly dangerous domestic terrorism, Republican presidential administrations, contested elections, or anything else that has happened in the United States of America in 2020, even comes close to swaying the issue towards Sale’s prediction about the already-imminent fate of global industrial civilization in 2020 is a really absurd, Daffy Duck tap-dance of melodramatic hyperbole, desperate goal-moving and brazen obfuscation of the issue.↩
5. ^[5]Of course, you ought to be worried about environmental problems, — for example, the one you’re probably thinking of right now, i.e. global climate change. And if you’re worried about global climate change, you might want to say that it is already having terrible effects that are hurting people and degrading the livability of many parts of the world. And you’d be right. But there is no way other than either the wildest sort of melodramatic hyperbole, or the most ridiculously brazen moving of the goalposts, to claim that Australia or Africa from the Sahara to South Africa is unlivable, either for the reasons Sale mention in 1995, or for any other revised environmental reason that you might want to substitute now. If you want to try to insist that Africa is unlivable, then I would point out that over 1.3 billion Africans live there now, and the same goes for Australia and the over 25 million Australians who find it, literally, livable, and there is no forecast even tangentially connected to reality that would suggest that either is on the brink of falling off by an order of magnitude. The most alarmist, activist-produced Existential Risk assessments on climate change now forecast that on a path of unchecked emissions, *low-probability, high-impact warming could be catastrophic by 2050. Catastrophic warming in this case is assessed as 3°C global warming, and claimed to be a severe but unlikely tail risk for outcomes 30 years in the future, if nothing is done to avert them, and it is roughly the level of warming that would be likely to lead to the destruction of current large coastal cities, to cause shocks to global food production, etc. Mainstream climate scientists’ assessments, like the IPCC Assessment Report (see for example the summary table in 1, p. 22), make forecasts to the effect that unrestrained, open-all-the-smokestacks emissions would mean that it is (highly) Unlikely for warming to stay below 3°C by 2100, whereas intermediate or stringently reduced levels of emissions are more unlikely than likely, or (highly) unlikely, to produce global warming above 2°C by the end of 2100. Again, that’d be bad, but it’s hyperbolic to equate it to the likely collapse of industrial civilization. And in any case, only a cad would renege on a bet about the effects of environmental crises in 2020 CE by picking up the goalposts, running three to eight decades down the field, and calling down judgment on how clear it has become that we need to worry about things getting really bad in 2050-2100 CE.↩
6. ^[6]And that some people face in a much more severe form than the rest of us.↩
7. ^[7]I have my own views, and I think the chances of survival and flourishing are a lot better than the chances against, but that’s a whole other bet, maybe an interesting one to make now, but different from the bet they made in 1995.↩

I’ve been reading: “How We Heard The Name,” Alan Dugan (1960).

How We Heard The Name

The river brought down
dead horses, dead men
and military debris,
indicative of war
or official acts upstream,
but it went by, it all
goes by, that is the thing
about the river. Then
a soldier on a log
went by. He seemed drunk
and we asked him Why
had he and this junk
come down to us so
from the past upstream.

Friends, he said, the great
Battle of Granicus
has just been won
by all of the Greeks except
the Lacedaemonians and
myself: this is a joke
between me and a man
named Alexander, whom
all of you ba-bas
will hear of as a god.

— Alan Dugan (1960).
From POETRY (February 1960): 270.

I first heard the poem read on POETRY‘s Audio Poem of the Day podcast (23-Sep-2020). The Granicus River (now called the Biga) is a river in northwestern Anatolia, modern-day Turkey, near the ancient site of the city of Troy.

The river banks, and the road crossing the river into the interior of Asia, were the site of the first pitched battle between Alexander’s invading army and the armies of the Shah Darius^[1], during Alexander’s conquest of the Achaemenid Persian Empire.^[2] Alexander’s army forced the crossing of the river and defeated provincial armies commanded by two Persian satraps — and also nearly two myriads of Greek mercenaries under the command of the Greco-Persian warlord Memnon of Rhodes.^[3] According to Arrian, Alexander’s army massacred all but about 2,000 of the Greek soldiers who fought on the side of the Persians;^[4] after the battle, the basileus Alexander ordered honorable burials for the Greek soldiers they killed, but he sent the surviving captives into slavery in Macedonia.^[5]

Arrian says that basileus Alexander memorialized this victory by stripping 300 suits of armor from dead Persians and sending them to Athens, to hang them up in the temple of Athena in honor of the goddess. He requsted an inscription hang above them, reading: Alexander son of Philip, and (all) the Greeks except for the Lacedemonians, (taken) from the barbaroi colonizing Asia.^[6] Lots of people think that barbaroi (barbarians, not-Greeks) comes from Greeks imitating meaningless or incomprehensible speech as bar-bar, much like English blah-blah.^[7] The thing about the Lacedemonians is the basileus’s propagandistic jab at Sparta for refusing to join his Hellenic League or to participate in the invasion of the Persian Empire.

Memnon escaped alive and continued to lead Persian resistance against the invaders until he later died of an illness while fighting in the Ionian islands. As far as I can tell, the poem never says whether the drunk Greek soldier was lost from the Greek army that fought on the side of Alexander’s Hellenic League, or whether he was one of the survivors of the Greek soldiers who fought with Memnon against the invaders.

1. ^[1]Darius III↩
2. ^[2]The battle at the river crossing was the first of three famous pitched battles that form the tentpoles of ancient narratives of the conquest — the (1) Battle of the Granicus, (2) of Issus, and (3) of Gaugamela — respectively, where Alexander’s army first decisively defeated Achaemenid armies and forced the crossing into the Asian interior (1), where Alexander first directly faced and defeated Shah Darius in battle (2), and the final battle before Alexander’s army captured Babylon and forced the effective downfall of the Achaemenid Empire (3).↩
3. ^[3]Memnon came from an ethnically Doric Greek family on the island of Rhodes, just off the coast of Asia Minor. Like many Greeks in and near Asia Minor, Rhodians were politically subjects of the Persian Shah at the time of Alexander’s invasion; Rhodes was invaded and occupied several times between the Greco-Persian Wars and the invasion, but it had been under the control of the Carians, and then directly ruled by the Persians, since Memnon’s adolescence. Memnon married into an aristocratic Persian family; after the Persian satraps were defeated and killed in the battle at the Granicus, Shah Darius appointed him commander over the western satrapies in Asia Minor.↩
4. ^[4]Arrian, Anabasis (The Invasion), 1.16.2 (English translation); Arrian adds the gruesome detail that the 2,000 captives were those who lay hidden among the dead bodies.↩
5. ^[5]Arrian, Anabasis, 1.16.6 (English translation), those Hellenes who, in violation of the things resolved in common by the Hellenic League, fought opposed to Hellas for the sake of the barbaroi.↩
6. ^[6]Arrian, Anabasis, 1.16.7 (alternate English translation). Greek: Alexandros Philippou kai hoi Hellēnes plēn Lakedaimoniōn apo tōn barbarōn tōn tēn Asian katoikountōn.↩
7. ^[7]See for example Wiktionary: βάρβαρος. In classical Greek, barbaroi does not imply the later senses of barbarian or barbarous as uncivilized, technologically primitive, economically undeveloped, or socially and culturally unsophisticated. The ancient Persian Empire was none of these things and ancient Greeks and Macedonians did not think they were any of these things; if anything, they tended to stereotype imperial Persia as over-civilized, overly rich and overly mannered. Greek and Macedonian men typically denigrated Persian men as luxurious and (therefore, they thought) pampered, weak, or effeminate, — not as bestial, wild, rustic, hardscrabble or simple.↩

Well, good.

The story, which comes from a draft order circulating at the Pentagon, is that the man in the White House wants (1) to withdraw about 2,000 of the remaining U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan (leaving about 2,500 U.S. soldiers in the country), (2) to withdraw some additional soldiers from Iraq on top of the force reductions that were already planned (leaving a bit under 3,000 U.S. soldiers in the country), and (3) to withdraw nearly all of the 700 plus U.S. soldiers currently in Somalia. (The headline might be read to suggest that the proposal was to get all U.S. soldiers out of the three countries; if it were, that would be better, but, alas, the occupations will continued their scheduled progress towards ending with a whimper.)

I can only hope the government follows through with its draft order; if anything even remotely good comes out of the dead-end of this ridiculous clusterfuck of a presidency, that will be some sort of progress.

Meanwhile, consider the pairing of that story with this one — with, that is, this (hopefully now) narrowly-averted toying with the idea of an insanely dangerous military escalation, in the interest of some kind of idiotic Parthian-shot show-off of warmongering bravado. That pairing is, I think, just about an apt one-day’s news demonstration of the record of this ridiculous clusterfuck of a presidency’s whole attitude towards and practice of foreign policy.

From The Best American Poetry: 2004, eds. Lyn Hejinian and David Lehman, pp. 233ff. Just act like nothing’s going on.

Bounden Duty

I got a call from the White House, from the
President himself, asking me if I’d do him a personal
favor. I like the President, so I said, “Sure, Mr.
President, anything you like.” He said, “Just act
like nothing’s going on. Act normal. That would
mean the world to me. Can you do that, Leon?” “Why,
sure, Mr. President, you’ve got it. Normal, that’s
how I’m going to act. I won’t let on, even if I’m
tortured,” I said, immediately regretting that “tortured”
bit.^[1] He thanked me several times and hung up. I was
dying to tell someone that the President himself called
me, but I knew I couldn’t. The sudden pressure to
act normal was killing me. And what was going on
anyway. I didn’t know anything was going on. I
saw the President on TV yesterday. He was shaking
hands with a farmer. What if it wasn’t really a
farmer? I needed to buy some milk, but suddenly
I was afraid to go out. I checked what I had on.
I looked “normal” to me, but maybe I looked more
like I was trying to be normal. That’s pretty
suspicious. I opened the door and looked around.
What was going on? There was a car parked in front
of my car that I had never seen before, a car that
was trying to look normal, but I wasn’t fooled.
If you need milk, you have to get milk, otherwise
people will think something’s going on. I got into
my car and sped down the road. I could feel those
little radar guns popping behind every tree and bush,
but, apparently, they were under orders not to stop
me. I ran into Kirsten in the store. “Hey, what’s
going on, Leon?” she said. She had a very nice smile.
I hated to lie to her. “Nothing’s going on. Just
getting milk for my cat,” I said. “I didn’t know
you had a cat,” she said. “I meant to say coffee.
You’re right, I don’t have a cat. Sometimes I
refer to my coffee as my cat. It’s just a private
joke. Sorry,” I said. “Are you all right?” she
asked. “Nothing’s going on, Kirsten. I promise
you. Everything is normal. The President shook
hands with a farmer, a real farmer. Is that such
a big deal?” I said. “I saw that,” she said, “and
that man was definitely not a farmer.” “Yeah, I
know,” I said, feeling better.

— James Tate (2004).
From American Poetry Review.
The Best American Poetry: 2004, 233-234.

1. ^[1](At the time this poem was published (2004), George W. Bush was President of the United States. –R.G.)↩