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Adam Curtis’ recent documentary is a headfuck. Its opening claim is bold: ’the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.’ But does it deliver? Read on to find out.
Schumacher’s Guide for the Perplexed (1977) diagnoses, and offers a solution to, the age old question: ‘What am I supposed to do with my life?’ Schumacher offers a novel and complex worldview that has been influential in the formation of ‘systems thinking’. In this book, he attempts to carve out a place for the wisdom of faith in our ‘philosophical map’ of the world. Whilst the question of how to live a good life goes back at least to Aristotle, Schumacher, writing in 1977, felt that cultural developments peculiar to the modern age threatened to render it unsolvable. Schumacher believed that the industrial revolution, and the consequent march of modernity, had lent almost unilateral authority to the institution of science. He also believed that the methodology of science, with its insistence on counting only the clearly visible, measurable things in its ‘maps of meaning’, was threatening to destroy the wisdom of faith by gaining a monopoly on credible paths to knowledge. Wisdom - the ability to use one’s faculties to judiciously weigh values against one another - has long been thought to play a role in answering the question of the good life, but that the totalising impulse of the scientific method threatened to push it out. Schumacher felt that this was problematic because it made humans blind to key elements of their experience. Humans, unable to properly cultivate all of their faculties, would find certain elements of their experience ‘invisible’ and thus unintelligible. This would stop us from bringing all our faculties into ratio, and thus prevent us from realising the ‘higher mind’ supposed to facilitate ‘true’ humanity. If those last two paragraphs made your head spin, you’re not alone. Schumacher’s goal in this book is to argue for the necessity of faith within a science-dominated worldview, and without a proper understanding of the principles his argument is based on, this easily threatens to collapse back into mysticism. So, if you’re interested in knowing how to live, and want to know why Schumacher thought science was such a barrier to solving this question, then read on. In what follows, I attempt to explain as simply as possible (and as far as I understand it) Schumacher’s diagnosis of, and solution to, the problem of how to live, and then to lay out the system of thinking supporting it. Some time in the future, we’ll do a critical analysis, but for now, let’s begin.
In what follows, I intend to summarise, as briefly as possible, the argument of Peter Oborne’s new book, ‘The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism’.
I have finished The Dispossessed. Here are some thoughts.
Today I’ve been watching the Jade Goody documentary on Channel 4. It’s a fascinating insight into a relatively novel social phenomenon. Jade, like Paris Hilton, Rylan Clarke-Neal, or a large number of surveyed school-age children, wanted to be famous not for anything, but simply to be famous. Why has this new social arrangement popped up, and what can it tell us about contemporary culture? Jade Goody did not have an easy life. Her father was a drug dealer, pimp and smackhead, her mother a crackhead. One of Jade’s earliest memories was seeing her dad pinning in front of her - she recounts shutting her eyes in terror, because she didn’t want him to know she’d seen him, didn’t want to be touched by him. By five, she was rolling spliffs for her mum. From those dubious beginnings, it is easy to see where a void of love and attention might’ve emerged, why Jade might’ve grown up wanting, for reasons she didn’t quite understand, to be seen.
Hello and welcome to trap philosophy, a semi-regular series I will now be doing on my blog. The basic vibe is this: we talk about an album that’s meant a lot to me, then I explain how it’s not, in fact, ignorant as shit, but actually carries a strong political message with liberatory overtones. This week we’re going back to roots, to Future’s fourth mixtape, Streetz Calling. This mixtape came out in 2011 at the height of mixtape culture. All the telltale signs of that era are here: the offensively cheap cover art, the kitchen-sink compilation mentality, the dark, cartoony production. The main theme of Future’s music, which echoes the very form of mixtape culture, is disposability. For Future, it is all about getting stuff in order to consume it ostentatiously. With this theme, he embodies the non-respectful attitude rappers typically hold towards traditional objects of consumption: food, clothes, cars, drugs, hoes. My opinion is this: there’s nothing wrong wrong with Future’s attitude to life, but it’s not sustainable. Its similarities with mainstream capitalist ideology suggest that, like Future, we all have some work to do.
People have been worried about a thing called capitalist realism. Capitalist realism is the idea that there is no alternative: that capitalism is the only game in town. However, capitalist realism cannot be seriously maintained. A brief analysis of the past, and a cursory look at the present, reveals this. Capitalist realism is prevalent today simply because the current economic paradigm - ‘neoliberalism’ - needs it to be. But technology marches on, and looks set to leave neoliberalism in the dust. Capitalist realism is finished; but what about capitalism itself?
I just watched the vid for Gunna - Skybox, and it reaffirmed my faith in trap.
According to Byung-Chul Han, we (in the West) have moved from a ‘control society’ to an ‘achievement society’. We have switched out the imperative ‘you should’ with the much more encouraging ‘you can’. However, whilst this might look like it frees us, it actually doesn’t, because by telling us ‘you can’ and then telling us the range of things we ‘can’ do, ‘achievement society’ creates even more pressure to conform. The price of failure? ‘Burnout’.
Mark Fisher talks about the privatisation of stress. Stress has become an individual phenomenon, not a social one: people are encouraged to look first at themselves, at their pasts and their chemical balances, before mounting anything like a critique on the social causes of such mental illnesses as anxiety and depression and ‘lesser’ mental maladies like stress. However, there are clearly good grounds for such a critique, for two reasons.
‘The Establishment’ is an abstract institution. Its purpose is to organise a population into a coherent whole. The way it does this is by shaping their minds, disseminating ideas which make them think and act in reliable ways. Owen Jones’ book, The Establishment, shows how the ideological bent of the UK establishment has shifted away from statism and towards ‘free market absolutism’. The effect of this has been to alter the ideology of the populace. I sketch his account very briefly, in order to sum up the ways the establishment operates to control the minds of its subjects (and why it does it). Then I look at the odd effect that the current Establishment ideology has on our minds, and think about how to change it.
So here’s the thing about Shrek. Shrek pretends to deconstruct myth by poking fun at it, showing that it can be remoulded to fit ‘The Ogre Within’ - the image of man as beast. However, by reaffirming the knight-myth of old, Shrek argues that the myths embody something essential and eternal, such that the ogre has to fit himself into their image. It is the motivational power of true love that forces Shrek to engage with the knight-myth and to reproduce it, establishing through true love’s kiss an eternal form of Order. This is problematic because it confines ‘The Ogre Within’ to the realm of the personal, treating our social norms and the myths which propagate them as instantiations of an eternal form of Reason. It tells us that the only way to find meaning in the world is through love, and that the only way to find love is to reenact the myths of old, which uphold the established order. This, for me, is problematic, if only because all the time kids are watching Shrek, they’re not watching other films that encourage them to think in new, more ogre-appropriate ways, which would almost necessarily involve a critique of the current social institutions which organise them.
‘I’m tired of getting high its exhausting, I heard it gets better with time.’ - Juice WRLD, Ring Ring
Erewhon demonstrates the absurdity of identifying biological fitness with moral goodness. This, in turn, reveals an essential fiction at the heart of our social organisation. Darwin offers a framework for understanding the function of this.
It can be argued that humans stand in a roughly similar relation to machines as bees do to plants. One of the functions of humans is to build technologies which extend their basic sensorimotor functions into the environment, in order to make them work more efficiently. As we build these machines, they begin to replace us, in that they begin to be the mode through which we perform our functions, and so we become their servomechanisms. We exist to reproduce machines which perform our functions more efficiently, and our continued survival depends on our ability to continue to perform this function efficiently. So the more intimate relation we stand in to machines puts us in an awkward situation: if we can build machines to take over all of our other functions, could we build a machine that could take over our machine-building ( i.e., our reproductive) function? Because if we could, we could effectively replace ourselves entirely, allowing machines to build and implement their own technologies to interact with the environment to make the most efficient use of it. So if machines can do all of our world-relevant functions without us, then a) can we build them and b) what happens to us if we do? I argue that the relation of our ‘tribal intuitions’ to our machine-use suggests that machines which can perform our intuitive functions more efficiently than us without feeling are either a long way off or a worthy successor.