Of Back-of-the-Book Indexes and Other Cultural Catastrophes

Dec10

“Writing originated purely for accounting purposes;
all subsequent uses have contributed to writing’s decay.”
Thus Spake Aforista

The postfuturist sage Aforista recently caused quite an uproar with this remark. Yes, I know, it’s a frightful thing to say, but Aforista will speak her mind. And she’s not the first to express such a sentiment. Indeed, she belongs to a long and colorful lineage of cultural naysayers and profits of doom, one of whom recently referred to Wikipedia as the “end of scholarship.”

I can’t remember who said it, and I can’t turn it up on Google or even on Wikipedia itself, which I guess means it might as well never have been said. But I’m sure I read it somewhere. And I’m not surprised at the sentiment. It’s always the “end of” something vital to humanity, and we are always teetering on the edge of a new Dark Ages. (Never mind that there was never really an old Dark Ages.)

We hear about the end of literature and the end of classical music and the end of all manner of things. The modest and self-effacing Harold Bloom even called slam poetry “the death of art.” Of course, Bloom has said that just about everything fundamental to human culture, including Rock and Roll, is also dead. (I, too, am not altogether sure that civilization can survive the recent passing of Levon Helm.)

None of this doomsaying is new to our postmodern, digital age. Everything good has been ending for a long time. It’s worth nothing that reading ended way back in the seventeenth century. To be specific, nobody has actually read books for more than 300 years. Reading was killed off when indexes started appearing in the backs of books.

In The Tale of the Tub (ca. 1694-99), Jonathan Swift attacks the pernicious influence of indexes by satirically assuming the persona of a scholar who approves of them:

[W]e of this age have discovered a shorter and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.… [T]he choicer, the profounder, and politer method, [is] to get a thorough insight into the index by which the whole book is governed and turned, like fishes by the tail. For to enter the palace of learning at the great gate requires an expense of time and forms, therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back-door.

And of course, Swift can’t resist an off-color analogy:

Thus physicians discover the state of the whole body, by consulting only what comes from behind.

So the tradition of the death of, well, tradition is a very old tradition indeed—a lot older than Swift, even.

In a similar spirit, Plato would have regarded Aforista’s observation as much too generous toward writing. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates relates how the god Theuth invented writing, and how he was upbraided by King Thamus for doing so:

[T]his discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

So writing itself meant the end of truth, thought, memory, and—I forget the rest of it. And—oh, the irony!—here I sit at my computer, utilizing the most pernicious technology ever devised, putting down words that are useful for nothing except to turn you, dear reader, into “tiresome company.” Besides, I’ve just used up my allotted number of keystrokes for today, so I’ll get back to all this later.

Of Gadgets and People

Nov27

My car is smarter than I am. Worse still, it has a wicked sense of humor. It knows that I’ve never really learned all of its buttons, commands, signals, gauges, options, and manifold gadgets stacked inside one another like Chinese boxes. So it plays tricks on me constantly. It’s favorite prank is to be utterly unforgiving of my clumsiness, let alone my ignorance. The slightest slip of my finger on the key holder sets off the car alarm. And I still don’t know how to turn it off.

My car continues an ancient tradition of trickster servants who stubbornly insist on carrying out every command literally. Consider the legendary fabulist Aesop. According to tradition, Aesop was a slave to the scholar Xanthus, who admonished him against “doing anything more or less than you are told.” This led to trouble. For example, when given the order, “Pick up the oil flask and the towels, and let’s go to the bath,” Aesop studiedly left behind the oil for the flask, because it was not explicitly asked for.

The long line of trickster servant stories extends beyond Aesop to include Rabbi Loew’s Golem, the Jinn of The One Thousand and One Nights, the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” of both Goethe and Disney, and W. W. Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw.” I might well add Pat’s and my novel Mayan Interface, with its portrayal of a trickster computer named Conti, whose all-too-precise obedience to a human command stirs up considerable trouble. In his 1964 classic God & Golem, Inc., the pioneering cyberneticist Norbert Wiener relates such stories to the escalating “gadget worship” of his own time:

The theme of all these tales is the danger of magic. This seems to lie in the fact that the operation of magic is singularly literal-minded, and that if it grants you anything at all it grants what you ask for, not what you should have asked for or what you intend.… The magic of automation … may be expected to be similarly literal-minded.

Writing as he did at the height of the Cold War, Wiener was especially mistrustful of the trickster servants whose mechanical “wisdom” we counted on to save the world from a nuclear holocaust. Perhaps we’ve lucked out of that threat—or perhaps we haven’t. In any case, the uneasy relationship between human and machine becomes more of a problem every day. Wiener’s aptly titled book The Human Use of Human Beings describes how machines may prove to be either the boon or bane of the human species.

As Isaac Bashevis Singer put it, “We are living in an epoch of golem-making right now. The gap between science and magic, science and art is becoming narrower.” Does this narrowing give carbon-based, wetware creatures like ourselves less thinking to do? “No,” says Wiener,

the future offers very little hope for those who expect that our new mechanical slaves will offer us a world in which we may rest from thinking. Help us they may, but at the cost of supreme demands upon our honest and our intelligence. The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.

Whenever I find myself losing my battle of wits with my car, I can’t help repeating the words of Aesop’s owner, Xanthus: “Well, I didn’t realize I had bought myself a master.”

The “Single Synapse” Theory

Nov10

“The transformation of the personality begins with the deliberate activation of a single synapse.” Thus Spake Aforista.

The Postfuturist Sage Aforista makes it sound so easy! Most of us find it difficult to utterly change our personalities from the bottom up. But maybe, in a world on the brink of fiscal cliffs, climate change, global pandemics, and all manner of other crises, we must learn to do so.

In the November 1987 issue of the newsletter version of the jamais vu papers (which eventually served as the basis of an eponymously titled novel), Pat interviewed the late economist Robert Theobald, who made some striking observations on this very issue:

It is a truism that change happens in crisis. Without a crisis people will go on doing things as they have always done them because change is always time-consuming and usually frustrating.…

Bluntly put, homeostasis is the path of the least resistance, and we are stubbornly inclined to follow it, even when change is needed. Even impending crisis typically doesn’t tend to elicit positive change:

If the scope of the crisis seems too extensive people may well panic and simply deny the possibility of affecting the total situation. I believe that there are reasons to fear that this pattern is developing in the world at the current time. We know that things are getting worse but we are so terrified that we continue to keep things going rather than permit some change to happen by forcing situations to the crisis point. All too often the longer we wait the worse the crisis will become.

It’s sad that Theobald’s observations remain so timely a quarter of a century after he made them. Sadder still, we actually invent end times and eschatological deadlines in order to elicit change from without—by extraterrestrial aid, let us say say. Does anybody happen to remember the Harmonic Convergence of 1987?

In an episode little remembered in New Age annals but recorded in a special issue of the jamais vu papers, Quetzalcoatl and the Goddess returned to earth on August 16 of that year to join in the grand fiesta. They were dismayed to find homo sapiens in an evolutionary rut, and dismayed even further that humanity expected them, ancient archetypes that they were, to completely take over the process of terrestrial transformation. In a seldom quoted outburst, Goddess said,

“The idea that a species like yours would just stay immutable for thousands of years at a crack—well, it seems downright ornery, that’s all. I mean, it’s like a kid holding his breath until his face turns blue.”

Will we once again disappoint our archetypal forces and sentient metaphors when the 13th b’ak’tun of the Mayan calendar comes to an end on December 21, 2012? It’s a question that Lydia Rosenstrom, the protagonist of Pat’s and my novel Mayan Interface, pauses to consider as people all over the world await “a force outside themselves to make things right somehow—either by bringing our world to an end or by transforming the whole of humankind”:

“Well, some folks might experience something. Others might miss their best chance while they’re waiting. Some wouldn’t notice transformation if it up and bites them, because it doesn’t fit the story they’re fixed on. Some just expect transformation to be a one-time thing, so they’ll be stuck wherever they arrive that day.”

As Quetzalcoatl and the Goddess tried to tell us back in 1987, we don’t have to wait, and we don’t need extraterrestrial aid. Human nature itself is mutable, after all. And when you get right down to it, it’s simply a matter of deliberately activating that single synapse.

Bureaucratic Mummies

Oct28

I’m currently reading 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles C. Mann. If you haven’t read it, it’s absolutely breathtaking. It not only shatters the hoary belief in a sparsely populated pre-Columbian America, but also demonstrates that the “New World” stumbled upon by Columbus and subsequent Europeans was anything but “new.” State-of-the art research suggests, as Mann puts it, that “people were thriving from Alaska to Chile while much of northern Europe was still empty of mankind and its works.” Indeed, the Peruvian ruins of Aspero, currently under excavation, may turn out to be the site of “the world’s oldest city—the place where human civilization began.” Think about that for a minute!

One passage from Mann’s book that especially fascinates me has to do with Inka mummies:

When the Inka [ruler] died his panaqa [royal lineage] mummified his body. Because the Inka was believed to be an immortal deity, his mummy was treated, logically enough, as if it were still living. Soon after arriving in Qosqo, Pizarro’s companion Miguel Estete saw a parade of defunct emperors. They were brought out on litters, “seated on their thrones and surrounded by pages and women with flywhisks in their hands, who ministered to them with as much respect as if they had been alive.”

“Logically enough,” indeed. And it seems that these mummified emperors were hardly “defunct”:

… [A]s Pedro Pizarro [cousin of conquistador Francisco Pizarro] realized, “the greater part of the people, treasure, expenses, and vices … were under the control of the dead.” The mummies spoke through female mediums who represented the panaqa’s surviving courtiers or their descendants. With almost a dozen immortal emperors jostling for position.… Inka society had a serious mummy problem.

In today’s parlance, it was government gridlock at its most exasperating. Worst of all, the mummies actually quarreled with one another, promoting different claimants to the Inka throne and provoking actual civil wars. What on earth was going on in such a culture? The possibilities seem stark:

The Inka’s bureaucracy of mummies represented nothing more than superstitious ancestor-worship gotten way out of hand.
“Talking mummies” were simply an elaborate con devised by an arrogant ruling class to lord it over a gullible populace.

Perhaps I’m just not cynical enough to accept these scenarios, which strike me as unworthy of what was then one of the most advanced cultures on the planet. And it doesn’t seem to me that Mann is settling for them either. A third possibility strikes me as more plausible:

The minds of the Inka were different from our own.

What I mean to suggest—“logically enough”—is that the mummies were heard to speak, and that they actually did wield civic authority; superstition, obfuscation, and gullibility had nothing to do with the issue.

I’m sure that the late psychologist Julian Jaynes, author of the extraordinary 1979 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, would have much of interest to say about Inka mummies. I suspect that he would have found in their authority vestiges of the bicameral mind—a mentality that, according to Jaynes, preceded modern consciousness. Because people of ancient civilizations lacked a centralized, self-reflective sense of identity, they relied on auditory hallucinations to direct their decisions. These hallucinations were the original “gods.”

This idea has always been controversial, to say the least—as have Jaynes’s other stunning hypotheses about language, hypnosis, schizophrenia, literature, human history, and cognition in general. But ongoing discoveries in archeology, anthropology, and neuroscience seem to support Jaynesian thinking more and more, as editor Marcel Kuijsten reveals in his invaluable 2006 anthology Reflections on the Dawn of Consciousness: Julian Jaynes’s Bicameral Mind Theory Revisited.

When Pat and I discovered Jaynes’s Origin of Consciousness back in the 1980s, it thoroughly blew our minds. I suspect that every single novel we’ve written together has reflected Jaynes’s ideas in some way. This is especially true of our latest book, Mayan Interface, which is at least partly a rumination on the “collapse” of the Classic Maya, the end of an age of magnificent monuments to gods and father-mothers. Why did it happen? One astute Amazon.com reviewer stated one of our story’s overarching questions quite nicely: “When God or gods fail, is it the fault of the deity or the worshipers?”

The question pertains to the bureaucratic mummies of the Inka, the Mayan collapse, and the precarious state of our own civilization—and it is much more than a question of belief. Mayan Interface opens with a quote from Morris Berman’s book Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the Hidden History of the West:

Certain cognitive shifts can occur in a civilization that are so profound that there seems to be almost no mental continuity between one epoch and the next.… It is not merely a question of conflicting theories that is at issue here; rather, what is actually seen, felt, and experienced in the world is radically different.

What Pat and I seek to explore in Mayan Interface is the ever-evolving, ever-changing quality of being human. We put no stock in the current school of thought that holds human nature to be fixed and unchanging. Oscar Wilde expressed our viewpoint perfectly in his great 1891 essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it. The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not on its growth and development.

Apocalypse and Rumors of Apocalypse

Oct18

RUPERT GILES: It’s the end of the world.
SCOOBY GANG (in unison): Again??!!

Pat and I dearly loved the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For one thing, we could relate to the show’s perpetual threat of apocalypse. Just about every other week, poor Buffy had to wrangle the demon hordes of multiple hell dimensions, keeping them from rising up and overtaking the earth. Typically, her direst obstacle to saving the world was being grounded by her mother.

Pat and I have been married and writing together for a quarter of a century. Like Buffy, we’ve seen lots of apocalypses come and go, although most of them have fizzled out without the Slayer’s heroics. Back in the latter half of the twentieth century, nobody expected civilization to make it through the 90s. At the very least, America’s great coastal cities would be destroyed by earthquakes, and much of the country would be underwater. Then came the millennium itself, with technology promising more trouble than all twenty-two chapters the Book of Revelation put together. Remember that computer glitch that was supposed to plunge humanity back into the stone age?

And now we’ve got the so-called end of the Mayan calendar looming, just a couple of months away. As it happens, Pat and I have done some homework on the subject. We recently published our Living Now Book Award-winning novel Mayan Interface, which meditates on both ancient Mayan traditions and today’s headlong rush into cyberreality. The story is set this very year. And believe me, I’m not spoiling the plot in the least by revealing that it does not feature an apocalypse.

The whole end-of-the-world scenario stems from a widespread misinterpretation of the end of the 13th b’ak’tun of the Mayan calendar—specifically, the date 13.0.0.0.0, better known to most of us as December 21, 2012. It’s really the end of a cycle, not the end of the world. Mayan calendar dates for the future include one that’s still 41 octillion years away—a time that I, for one, have no idea how to even think about. Besides, the ancient Maya considered cyclical completions to be cause for celebration, not dread. A big party might be in order.

So the world is not going to end on December 21, 2012 …
… and people need to get ready for it.

Pat and I are alarmed at how unprepared the world is for this calendrical non-event. Human transformation is an everyday occurrence—or at least it needs to be. If people think they’ll be relieved of all responsibility to grow and learn by some cosmos-obliterating cataclysm, conscious evolution might stop dead in its tracks for a critical mass of human souls by the time the sun unexpectedly rises on December 22. And that’s a catastrophe worth worrying about.

Of course, New-Age-ish spins on this date predict something more benign—a kind of extraterrestrial intervention in human evolution. But as far as we’re concerned, this is scarcely less scary than the end-of-the-world scenario. It proposes that something out there is going to suddenly do our own job of personal and cultural transformation. Our very lethargy becomes a sort of solution to the world’s manifold problems.

Pat and I are not in the business of saving humankind from its own laziness. So what can we neofoxes do to keep this non-event from throwing a massive kink in the realization of human potential?

This may not sound like much, but …

… we can tell Story.

As the protagonist of our novel puts it, stories “re-write the mind.”

And we think that Mayan Interface is a dandy Story to mark the end of the 13th b’ak’tun.

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