modes of production

Artificial Stupidity (Forget about AI; this is the real danger)

Perhaps one of the oddest contradictions of human history is the dual character of that very history. This is so due to the fact that the major source of cultural incompetence is that same heritage through which we have become competent. The past of our world culture, all that we have known as a species and all we have experienced as individuals, is contained in this history. Some of it has been lost forever due to the vicissitudes of a history ongoing and ever-changing, and some further still a secret, yet to be rediscovered. Weekly, we read of startling archaeological finds, many due to the improved technology of location and geophysics. Entire large cities which have escaped our ken for perhaps millennia, emerge with all of their romance intact but with only a partial ability to communicate their knowledge to us. Shipwrecks laden with untold riches, tombs divulging their latent treasures, and all of it speaking the uncanny Ursprach of the dead up against whom we have abruptly brushed. The past does not share a precise language with the present. It tells us of its own experiences only indirectly. We understand what we can, acknowledging that there will always be something or other lost in proverbial translation.

Because we cannot choose what has been preserved and what has been lost, we must take these finds as they are and thus hopefully as well for what they are: the slippage between the cultural competencies of the past and the needs of the present waxes and wanes pending temporal provenience and just how much sheer ‘stuff’ has survived. Mitigating the rapidly receding horizon whereupon remote antiquity calls across an ever-increasing chasm of incomprehension is the historical fact that the farther back one travels in the human career, the simpler things get. Cultural complexity, in its vast majority, is a product of our own era, a well-documented affair which, though subject to ideological suasion and attendant ‘rewriting’, is nevertheless almost fully present to us. From the Internet Archive to the Library of Congress and every modernist reliquary in between, the records remain. Do we have as fair a sample of the earliest of writings? Records of warehouse holdings, which spoke of the agrarian advent, a novel way of life, mingle with narratives of once only oral myths and epics, which spoke of that previous. The symbolic order of subsistence societies, nomadic, horticultural at most, tiny in their population load, relatively intimate with the doings of relevant animals and an always enveloping wider nature, are the murky and indirect sources of what are yet world institutions. And it is one of the most extraordinary facts of history that most of the beliefs of the present have their roots in a stage of cultural development following hard upon the social contract.

Religions with gods, the evaluated afterlife, gendered divisions of labor, domestication of animals, semi-sedentary communities, none of these was the least bit present in humanity’s earliest attempts at culture. Indeed, it is only very recently that we have begun to question them, ten to twenty millennia after their original appearance. The chief factor which disallows their critical interrogation is not that they are stupid in themselves. For a great length of time they served their diverse purposes, dexterous and generalizable, adept at adapting to other societal changes; the most profound of which coming with the advent of agriculture. The symbolic literacy of antiquity contained the competence proper to those periods. For us, the question must be, is much of that same order able to function in our own society? It is rather the shame we feel, as a culture and perhaps also unconsciously, that we, who would like to identify with our ancestors through our respect for their many achievements – the shibboleth at hand is of course the one about the shoulders of giants, though in fact culture has always been a collective enterprise and the singular revolutionary figure is merely a moment of cultural crystallization; a statement that the culture in question is almost done with itself and needs to move on – feel that we have been failed by our predecessors. In turn, we have failed them, perhaps through our lack of respect and our ignorance about their ways. Even so, this dual sense of being let down is not so much historical as it is personal, and its present-day source lies in the family dynamic and its cross-generational conflict.

The past is the parent of the present. The present presents to the past its future selfhood through the child. At first content to learn by rote the manners and mannerisms of memorial consciousness, the onset of adolescence prepares the child to become a being of the future. One must literally begin to look ahead of oneself and one’s current state and status. That I cannot know the future through my own experience, that no ‘culture’ solely of the future can yet exist, inspires me to take up the ongoing historical task of creating such a thing. The future is the dialectical apex of a triangle whose bases are the past as thesis and the present as antithesis. Futurity, an elemental aspect of Dasein as a being which is always ahead of itself, expresses the Aufheben of time as experienced through culture. History is cultural time.

If we are sometimes dismayed that time does not wait for us, we are comforted overmuch by the converse condition; history waits on us for too long. This is the case due to the perduring presence of antique symbolic items which, in their own time of efflorescence, expressed the order of those days. More than just awaiting us, however, in addition, symbolic history waits upon us, is our servant, and in its savant presence we are carried away by what is in reality a narrow wisdom. With the loss of the visionary by way of the exposition of the real through science, the apparatus which presumed upon the utter and final presence of the vision as the only means by which humanity could not only predict the future but as well actually attain it, the entire architecture of agrarian symbology collapses. Modernity states emphatically that there is no otherworld.

Momentary in the social contract, souls unevaluated and presently returning to animate the newly born, the otherworld then was intimately a part of the this-world. Transformer beings crossed such a threshold, something only mysterious to those who lacked that specific ability. In a word, the limen to the otherworld held no mystery in itself. Here, in the primordial mindset of our human ancestors – how far back we have no way of knowing – the uncanny was merely an augmentation of reality, and not one other to it. In this, we can begin to comprehend that even with the earliest appearance of sedentism and agriculture, this perhaps original human cosmology had run its course. It was not long before it became quite formalized; the evaluations of the living were projected upon the dead. The otherworld was divorced from what was considered to be real in itself, and placed at a distance therefrom. Hierarchies in the social order, jarringly novel and also often harsh, enabled a process of judgment that no longer contained within it the will of the community as a culture entire. The ‘sentencing circles’ of the social contract became themselves null and void. Instead of the scapegoat, the law; instead of the wilderness, the prison. City replaced village, herding and thence harvesting replaced hunting, processing replaced gathering. None of this is an effort at nostalgia, quite the opposite, but can we bring the same objectivity to bear upon the ongoing presence of agrarian worldviews in our own times, while acknowledging the total loss of that which preceded them?

If mathematics is the unknowing language of nature, self-consciously, if haltingly, understood by human beings, there is no ‘mind of God’. If the cosmos is a repetitive affair, indefinite in size and yet finite in its own history, as well unknowing, there is no ‘purpose’ to existence. It is arguably the most radical cultural item of modernity that we have granted ourselves the ability to make our own meaningfulness, bereft of either judge or judgment. For some, the otherworld as a personal hallucination conjures a remanant, a vestige of the experience of the hunter and the gatherer, alone in a forest now otherwise metaphysically forbidding, as well as physically fading fast. Though the collective unconscious may well have preserved culture memory from these earliest periods of human consciousness, even here, in dream and waking dream alike, in the reveries of the writer and the revelations of the thinker, we remain children of our own time and no other; beings of our own world and none other. Yet given that this world, in its rather self-conscious appraisal as both the ‘this-world’ and the only world, is shot through with reminders that our present-day cultural self-understanding includes everything from the past which both burdens our endeavors while at the same time urging them onward, it is arguably the greatest challenge of our age to sort through all that may still serve us as a function without form. For the latter is gone. That agrarian framework which itself was built upon the formalization of yet earlier cosmological rubrics was lost in the shift to capital and its industrial-technical means of production. The Zeitgeist of the society it birthed, ‘bourgeois’ and individuated, places me in an ‘iron cage’ not so much of economics, but rather of symbolics and of the symbolic life. Insanity and ‘magical thinking’ are the only spaces of the visionary, but such a culture as has sequestered the human imagination to an ideal arithmetic fosters its own idiot-savant quality. And we are as impressed with it as we in turn imagine our ancestors were of their own.

The incompetencies of the past were often of a logistical and technical matter. That our predecessors could not observe what we now take for granted, the cosmos included, does not necessarily mean that they envisioned less than we. But we are not going to find more than the decayed and perhaps also decadent pith of those visions in the myths and mantras of ages lost. Our entire conception of essence may itself be the vestigial bigotry of bygone ballads. But if that is so, as Nietzsche for one suggested, then existence too can be called into question as symbolic of its own absence of a future conscientiousness. The romantics sought to replace it by living, the existentialists, ironically, by being. But present existence, historical in its very character, holds within it both an unquiet mélange of melodies, the sirens of stupidity, as well as a space within which is held all that can ignore and thus avoid the quite artificial rocks to which we are yet being drawn.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over sixty books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Very Late Capitalism?

Late capitalism is the epoch in history of the development of the capitalist mode of production in which the contradiction between the growth of forces of production and the survival of the capitalist relations of production assumes an explosive form. This contradiction leads to a spreading crisis of these relations of production. (Ernst Mandel, 1972:500).

It is a delicate operation to discern what, within any social critique, is itself ideology, is itself millennialism, is itself despair, is itself anxiety. Greta Thunberg’s first book calls for a sea-change in world systems, but specifically in that economic. And while it is certainly the case that humanitarian crises as well as those environmental have been exacerbated by a cut-throat dog-eat-dog system of exchanges and values, it is also equally the case that, as Marx himself suggested much closer to its advent, Bourgeois capitalism has been ‘the best system yet invented’. It has created unprecedented levels of wealth and spread that wealth far wider than any other economic dynamic in human history. It has levelled both systems of caste and class. It has elevated the Bourgeois class to political power. It has made the genders far more equal. It has invented technologies that can aid a radical democracy of the kind Thunberg envisages, and most importantly, in its dogged doggerel of individuated ideology, it has exhibited no respect for either gods or kings alike.

And all of this Marx realized in his own day. For he and Engels, communism would surpass its predecessor in both its humanity and its equalizing force. Thunberg’s too easy dismissal of such an idea that has never been tested at a national level contradicts the entire heritage of her own critique. With some minor local exceptions, the communism authentic to Marx and Engels is as yet an untried device. Given the remainder of her basic suggestions for change, her own view is essentially the same as was theirs.

Now this is not necessarily a terrible thing. ‘Communism’ is, at least in theory, simply a more equitable and humane version of capitalism, for in the transition from one mode of production to the next, in this case, the means of production remain unchanged. Indeed, Marx had himself to understate this issue within his own dialectical modeling due to two problems: One, purely theoretical, which had Engels’ historical evolutionary scale-level model cohere on the basis of a double change; both means and relations of production were altered in each of the world-shifting limens that had preceded the proposed, and still hypothetical, ‘communist revolution’. And two, purely political; Marx and Engels could not afford to extoll overmuch the system they desired to overthrow.

And thus neither can Thunberg. Overcoming capitalism is made possible only by the presence of the dynamic forces within capitalism itself, just as Marx understood the case to be for the potential communist outlook. For him, the nation in which he was eventually exiled was in fact the ‘closest to communism’, that of Victorian England, replete with its world-wide colonial empire so derided by Thunberg. That pseudo-communist revolutions occurred in backward, non-capitalistic nations such as Russia and China were world-historical events, to be sure, but ones doomed to failure on Marx’s rubric alone. The ‘small is beautiful Star Trek technocratic humanism’ which settles down like a light drizzle upon the umbrella of future visions of a better world could only be had with the high technologies that capitalism invented. This is not capital ‘selling the communist the rope’ by which the latter will hang the former, but rather presents a series of opportunities for the more ethical use and deployment of resources unimaginable in any other economic system, in any other mode of production.

And it is not a case of mere technology. The greatest triumph of capital rests not in its products nor its wealth, but in its human liberation, the very human freedom Thunberg so casually denigrates as being delusional within capital. Not quite so. Freedom is a modern construct that is ‘value neutral’, in that it can be manipulated as a sacred ideological cow – and all political parties in the Bourgeois state do this – or it can be realized by the individual in his or her own existential journey, and indeed, only there. The ‘pathless land’ of Krishnamurti is our unwitting and perhaps ironic guide to this kind of authenticity, and the very idea that a human being, fragile, mortal, subject to both ‘the insolence of officials’ and ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’ alike, should even be able to dream of such an existential business is nothing if not astonishing. And this dream, realized in a yet few persons but available in theory to all humanity, is the central dream not of communism, but of capitalism.

Why so? Because along with the idea of freedom comes the conception of the individual. Though its Enlightenment sovereignty and holism is long gone, even in its fragmented and fractured ‘postmodern’ form it is yet more free. Gone are its loyalties to family, to credo, to crowd, even to vocation. The modern self replaces only itself with a further, hopefully wiser, guise of itself. We do ‘die many times to become immortal’, as Nietzsche intoned. That capital places the privileged in a position where they may exercise this basic human freedom on the backs of others makes most attempts at such unfree. Hence the alienation that Marx stated was a hallmark of Bourgeois relations of production. Even in our radical freedom, we are divorced from our shared birthright, our common humanity. So much so, that we do not tend to think of the distant others who are yet enslaved by our very attempts to end the slavery of the modern self.

This much is true of capital. Even so, the idea that it must be overthrown as its own dialectical force is likely overblown and premature. For within it lie the keys to its own evolution, not revolution. An equitable taxation policy, a surcharge on stock trades of the Tobin variety, an emphasis on sharing innovations, especially in the climate and medical fields, an awareness that we are one species and one world, an adherence to Ricoeur’s dictum that ‘the love we have for our own children does not exempt us from loving the children of the world’, none of these need be sought in a system other than the one we have today. In his day, Marx was understandably coy about his discovery that the essential characteristic of communism were already present in capitalism, but we today have no need to be so. For Thunberg and others to be ignoring this historical insight makes it much less likely that their vision of the future will indeed occur at all.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over fifty books in ethics, education, social theory, health and aesthetics, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.