Scenery / setup for the movie about urban decay, dystopia, standby. Just this limited area. Kota Kinabalu is actually a vibrant, vivacious, clean and highly organized city with modern architecture. Kota Kinabalu Malaysia Sabah Borneo.
(Image by Artist in doing nothing.) Details DMCA
Just this morning the New York Review of Books newsletter arrived at my Inbox, and in it is a blog piece called "Portable Hell," by my favourite poet, Charles Simic, who writes about the effects of our infernal current events and sums up my outlook succinctly with, "The world is going to hell in a hurry. At my age, I ought to be used to it, but I'm not."
Because no matter whether you were raised reading the People's History of the world or the Conqueror's, the distilled point of their synthesis drips bleak, bleak, bleak like the slow water torture of historical consciousness applied ever-so-subtly to human memory.
But the subject at hand is dystopia. To dystope or not to dystope. To diss hope or not to diss hope. I ought to be used to it.
When I was in my late teens, ever hung over from the frightful social turmoils of the late '60s and early '70s, like many young geeklings I escaped into literature, hoping to read my way out of impending disaster. I started out by reading the usual suspects -- Steinbeck, Hemingway, Roth and Flannery O'Connor -- but they quickly reminded me of the colossal wreck of Pax Americana, and deepened my worries about the human condition. So I moved on to other lits -- European poetry and novels, biographies of composers, scientific works, art and astrology, before finally tripping over C.S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet) and discovering with great astonishment the worlds of endless possibilities that speculative and science fiction posed. I read a lot of sci-fi; I liked imagining how new technologies and humanity could evolve together; or I simply mooned over the far future of our species, as you do with, say, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. But most of all I was attracted to dystopic fiction from the start, maybe because the world seemed like such a disaster, while at the same time I was young and needed to understand what had gone wrong and envision how it could be fixed. And for whatever reason, the dystopia that captured my imagination then, and remains a favourite to this day, was George R. Stewart's Earth Abides.
I'm not sure what attracted me specifically to that book, although I suspect it was the title, which reminded me of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and, in fact, both titles are derived from the same line in the Book of Ecclesiastes: "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose." Over the years this line from the Bible has affected me more than any other, as it so straightforwardly implies that humans are not the be-all, end-all of Creation, and that Being goes on without us. Considering the source, this deeply resonating chord struck me as subversive, and I'm sure influenced my later decision to major in philosophy at university. Strictly speaking, Earth Abides is not simply dystopic but, more, post-apocalyptic. Often dystopias present systems turned into nightmares but still functioning on some level. But with post-apocalyptic lit, all systems are down, and even the assumptions left over in the heads of survivors are smoky rhetorical question marks. Human certainty ceases, although the sun continues to rise and set regardless.
I also tinkered with dystopic fictional ideas, too. I'm sure, in my mind, that I was one of the first to invent a machine that allowed a psychiatrist to enter, like a knight, a patient's dreams and literally battle the patient's fears; or allow an agent to enter a sleeping person's mind and seed designs and motives that would influence their waking behaviour. But that machine is now real; and the film Inception stole my dreams and erased any desire to sue them for copyright molestations. I was sure that I was the first to see domed cities in space comprised of solar panelling, providing endless energy to mad hippies cultivating massive jungles of seriously potent mayjay, which sounds good, until the ventilation system breaks down, and recycled smoke kicks in, and mates start looking like good little munchies to each other, and all that's left when the smoke finally clears is happy leafery, rather greener now for all the extra human fertilizer plumping up their cell walls. Yes, invariably, I'd discover that one of the hundreds of sci-fi writers out there had, in one of the dozens of books each had written, already covered the idea and there wasn't much point in continuing to develop it. (Although I'm reasonably certain that no one else has thought of those spliff trees and cannabis clouds yet.)
Lots of people were reading and writing sci-fi and dystopias from the moment the Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, through to the moment of Star Wars in 1984 (natch), when US President Ronald Reagan forgot to turn his mike off after a speech and drolly uttered, "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." (My, how times have changed.) Remarks made so much more comical by the fact that the world was gripped then by the absolute terror of an impending nuclear war, as evidenced by the US broadcast of the nuclear war film The Day After just 6 months prior and BBC's Threads, perhaps the darkest film on the subject ever made, about to be broadcast in Britain.
But that's the thing about these dystopias: At some point, perhaps when Reagan gaffed, people seemed to realize that a world that could spend billions of dollars on a Star Wars system was explicitly preparing for a nuclear exchange of fire, and that whatever didactic power dystopias might have had --admonishing, pleading, painting the world black as visceral symbolism -- they'd lost whatever momentum they might have had in preventing the world from going mad. Like the more recent happy tittering of the White House press corps after Barack Obama made a joke about killing with his favourite weapon of war, the remote-controlled drone, there was no shock and horror, no jaws dropped to the plush-carpeted floor, instead the amused ears lifted champagne glasses and saluted His Majesty's murderous mirth.
The fact of the matter is we live in world that is substantially over-populated, with longer life expectancies (even in the Third World), requiring ever more resources, leading to ever more drilling, mining and consumption, which results in ever more toxic pollution, and has led humans to the very edge of cataclysmic climate change, bringing with it melting polar ice caps, tsunamis, earthquakes, monster storms, and the catastrophic decline of the bee populations, rain forests and coral reefs. Instead of reading dystopias now, there are ample samples of our living nightmare -- described in the pages of such contemporary sober and rational non-fiction works as The World Without Us, The Sixth Extinction, and the resurgence of Rachel Carson's prophetic classic, Silent Spring.
Looking for the cause of this historical lightning crack in the ceiling of sanity is difficult, not least of all because we are still in the moment, "the wheel's still in spin," as the Dylan lyric goes. But the crack is there. Another book I've come across lately is one by two psychiatrist brothers, Daniel and Jason Freeman, titled Paranoia: The 21st Century Fear, which argues that paranoia is widespread now, affecting as many as a quarter of the population, and "the days when paranoia could be written off as a meaningless sign of insanity are long gone...because paranoia is centre stage in our culture and in our individual lives." Big Brother is, by definition, out to get us.
The ruminating philosopher in me is tempted to locate the decisive crack of lightning and peal of madhouse thunder at that historical point when the western world's evolution from tenets of the Enlightenment led to structuralism and a sense of scientific certainty and its attendant idealism for human futures -- only to be jig-sawed and relativized by the powerful deconstructive tools of post-modernist thinking. In science, Thomas Kuhn argued that the truths of scientific outcomes was partially related to the working paradigm of the day; what you observed was changed by the observation itself. The value of the Canon and of Grand Narratives in literature was a value controlled by an academic elite with their own vested interests and agendas to protect. The great motifs of the First World's enlightened political philosophy -- liberty, democracy, equal opportunity, assorted bills of rights -- were largely fantasies of assumed power, which, when examined more closely, dissolved from a peaceable kingdom into a frame filled with raw jungle hungers. This is not a knock on post-modernism, which has made so much social and aesthetic progress possible in the last half-century, but it does point to a naive set of assumptions that neglected to account for the sure surfeit of sociopaths who lay in wait for soft, succulent humanists everywhere. No, post-mod's promised landscapes of freedom, its liberating relativism that says there are no grand narratives, no essential humanity really, no transcendent function toward which we must strive into the future as One People, is also the same liberating process unleashed for warriors with their 'humanitarian' interventions with cluster bombs, for politicians to shed what little shame and fear they had about their lies, for Wall Street brokers to party hearty in the snorkle trough.
You can see this wild maelstrom quietly at work in Thomas Keenan's Technocreep: The Surrender of Privacy and the Capitalization of Intimacy. In this relatively short book, the long-time technologist Keenan doesn't so much argue as demonstrate how we have practically reached the point of the so-called Singularity, that evolutionary stage at which machines and humans begin to merge, synthesize, if you will, with the ramifications impossible to predict. In one area of human activity after another, with example after example, Keenan lays out a future that is now, even if it will be too late to avoid its consequences once we come to full consciousness of this new paradigm shift. As President Obama might have said, with a smile, were he a technologist: We are the dystopia we've been waiting for.
Keenan especially focusses on the role of the US Defence Department's research and development arm, DARPA, and their seemingly unlimited budget to bring into the world all manner of deviant technologies, from halitosis and gay bombs, tractor beams and invisibility blankets, eugenics, and an assorted sordid toolkit of subterfuge, always with a Caligula-esque mirth for the destruction to be wrought. In one section he calls Robot Creep, Keenan demonstrates DARPA's key role in future robotics, which DARPA plans not for the betterment of civilization but as proxy battlefield soldiers who can endure more than humans and don't break down as much. Keenan describes how the military sees the use of autonomous robots:
We might even get to the stage anticipated by science fiction
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