Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Moral Capacity





I’ve mentioned the Dead Kennedy’s once before on DustyBrine.  And they are well worth mentioning again.  The last mention was merely a parenthetical cliché.  I couldn’t resist drawing a predictable parallel on piece criticizing Jerry Brown’s California.  This time, I hope, will be a bit more thoughtful.  I’ve mentioned Crass before, the British, anarcho-pacifist punk band from the late 70’s early 80’s.  The DK’s were cotemporaneous and to my mind the obvious American counterpoint to Crass’ political profundity.  And they were funny.

I was intrigued and intimidated in equal measure when I first encountered the band as a twelve year-old.  Around 1980 I got to see them at a show in Bonds in Manhattan that absolutely changed my consciousness.  The band was ferociously tight and Jello Biafra, utterly captivating.  Witty, caustic, smart, physical, he seemed absolutely heroic to me at that show.  A few months later I got to meet him after another concert.  In a small room backstage the reporters were all trying to ask him questions.  He was rude and asked them why they didn’t engage the bass player, Klaus Fluoride instead.  Then, he turned and asked me with unimpeachably genuine curiosity about the “band” I was in.  That was about as cool as life got at that age.

Any rate, I was at the gym this morning and the first song from the Dead Kennedy’s third album, ‘Plastic Surgery Disasters’, the last one, incidentally, that I ever bought, “Government Flu” came on.  East Bay Ray’s guitar work, unfathomably fast, Don Peligro’s drumming simply state of the art of hardcore tightness from that time.  I pushed that damn stair thing with all I had.  The song is dystopian prognosis that the U.S. government was actually testing subtle forms of germ warfare the populous.   “The government flu, through, you.” 



As I look back I essentially grew up for a few critical years as they matured as a band.  And then, like all teenage loves, I had to jettison them entirely, so that I might be able to reconnect again, sometime in the future.  The first album is one part political critique and perhaps two-thirds absurd, comical, ironic abuse.  So a song like Police Truck is a straight attack on police violence.  “Funland at the Beach”, “I Kill Children” or “Chemical Warfare”, are “what if’s” where lunatics are loose in placid suburban America.  They take comedic risks and are fundamentally irreverent. 

The second and third albums are perhaps two-thirds political critique and only one third comedic irony.  At the time this seemed utterly appropriate.  Crass, by comparison had almost no real humor.  And to my sixteen year-old mind there were terribly serious problems that all “right thinking” people should be focused on.  There was a battle for consistency, which I’ve talked about before.  If you’re consistent, then you shouldn’t participate in the “system” and should look for any way possible to purify yourself from complicity.  The DK’s were moving in that direction and I liked this.  They became better as a band, and the critique became more poignant. 

And, as happens to many bands and public figures in this dynamic, the subsequent albums felt devoid of irony, and self-examination.  My interests broadened and I had no time for the haranguing that remained and wanted different sounds.

I take the time to explain all this because I read a very interesting, and imperfect article yesterday by someone whose work I greatly admire, Jonathan Franzen.  I noted yesterday on the “Summary 80” that a disproportionate amount of the media I referenced was from Wiki or the New York Times.  Hacker News on Ycombinator is solid alternative source and it was there that I noticed this article by Franzen that was published in the Guardian.  (a source that I also seem to often wind up at.)

I read “The Corrections” a few years back and was floored.  I thought it started slowly and I spent forty pages or so wondering what all the hype was for.  I didn’t like the initial professor character.  But when I moved into the description of the older couple, I was spellbound.  This was an aged couple I regrettably knew and felt trapped with. Like John Updike or indeed, Jello, it was powerful as it managed to render something simple and honest about suburban America that left you terrified. 

This article introduces a fascinating figure that I wasn’t aware of from fin de siècle Vienna, Karl Klaus, a.k.a. “the Great Hater.”  Franzen juxtaposes the “Viennese charm” of that time in Austria when everything seemed possible and everything was about to fall apart with our own “American cool” of today. One of my heroes from that time is Robert Musil and his masterpiece “The Man Without Qualities” is a novel that never needs to end.  Here is what I had to say in my manuscript from the “Seven Deadly Starbucks” (7DS)

Atmospherically speaking:  China is rising.  America is dissipating.  Japan and China are eternal enemies.  South Korea can never trust either neighbor.  Hong Kong’s best days are behind it.  Shanghai is obviously this, and Beijing is certainly that.  So much noise reinforced by cab ride conversations, Herald Tribune editorial articles, and after business dinners, year after year.  Our petty, early century challenges and assumptions will seem naïve and misguided one day.  Look at the complementary period before World War I, a century ago.  See the barometric-low at the beginning of Robert Musil’s 1913 glory, “The Man Without Qualities” and consider that everything was possible and that everything was, shortly about to deteriorate along with Clarisse, into insanity. 

Like Jello, Franzen makes clear that he is angry.  He is fundamentally disposed towards 血沸[1]  He takes time to explain the source of his anger which is a colorful, and interesting segue that, to my reading didn’t really close the circle on precisely what it is at the end of the day, so frustrating for him.  But his angry self is fused, for him, with his engagement with Herr Klaus.  Franzen describes how his anger has shifted over the years.  He used to be angry at newspapers that were flat and unsophisticated.  Now he reluctantly empathizes with their efforts and broadens disdain to all the imaginary individuality that the internet creates for people. 

China is only mentioned once, in a throwaway fashion, to reference a place where things are made cheaply.  Certainly he doesn’t “need” to talk about China.  I rarely write about Germany.  He spends a lot of time talking about the Germany of his youth or the Austria of 110 years ago.  But this piece, although published in a British paper, is written by an American for Americans to critique their own worldview.  America’s coolness is soulless and bankrupt.  What doesn’t seem to concern him though is where the zeitgeist will migrate to, as it once did from Vienna.  Can China drive cool?  Unlikely.  But they may absorb it and articulate something which from this vantage is as ineffable as “cool” was to Klaus and Musil turn of the century Vienna.

To me the most impressive thing about Kraus as a thinker may be how early and clearly he recognised the divergence of technological progress from moral and spiritual progress.

Certainly we can concur that they are different.  Identifying the prior is rather straightforward.  I would be interested to understand from Franzen what, from his vantage, specifically constitutes moral and spiritual progress.  I don’t think humans as a species are any less capable of brutality than they ever were.  As societies, I would imagine pointing to tolerance for example, imperfect for sure, which comparative peace and prosperity have allowed to largely broaden in, say, America.  I'd say that is relative moral progress, for "us" as a collective. Tolerance for people of races, genders, sexual orientations, etc. speaks to something akin to a spiritual evolution.  It is not a birthright, like a thumb or lungs.  If there is no civil society and no electricity there will be no computers.  No peace and prosperity, very little tolerance.  But to read Franzen in this article we only experience stasis or backslide on moral development, in comparison to technological innovation, and I don’t think that’s true.  There is more going on than faster gadgets in a moral quagmire.  

We find ourselves living in a world with hydrogen bombs because uranium bombs just weren't going to get the job done; we find ourselves spending most of our waking hours texting and emailing and Tweeting and posting on colour-screen gadgets because Moore's law said we could.



Yes.  We do more because it can be done. Some of what capacity yields is brainless.  But some of it, like mapping the human genome or growing replacement organs has great potential to ease human suffering.  It could of course be used for nefarious ends as well.  But what was it that our near or further ancestors did with their time, in large part, that was so much more fulfilling?  We could point to the intelligentsia of late nineteenth century Russia and say “wow, by and large they were remarkably well educated.” And of course most people weren’t. Farming?  Building?  Sure.  Wonderful things to do, but wonderful perhaps to not have to do, as well.  Perhaps kids who grew up in my day played outside a bit more, but they also spent untold hours with vapid TV consumption as well.  It may not be an evolutionary breakthrough and certainly not high art, but it is qualitatively different and arguably more spiritually advanced to say, post pictures we shot and garner feedback then it is to watch content all night long that someone else decided would be entertaining.

With technoconsumerism, a humanist rhetoric of "empowerment" and "creativity" and "freedom" and "connection" and "democracy" abets the frank monopolism of the techno-titans; the new infernal machine seems increasingly to obey nothing but its own developmental logic, and it's far more enslavingly addictive, and far more pandering to people's worst impulses, than newspapers ever were.

‘Techno titans’ surly do have great potential to control.  But is it so clear that it is more impactful than Hearst’s “Remember the Maine?”  Could Google send us to war?  I wouldn’t rule it out.  But it also seems to me that ‘techno titans’ positions are also appropriately rather precarious.  Microsoft, the “German” anti-cool that is therefore cool, Nokia, Research in Motion, all seemed invincible not so long ago.  Is the "infernal machine" truly something with its own agency? If so might not the dialogue beckon our moral capacity?

And where as Amazon or Google may or may not be disrupted in another decade, it is unlikely that Uncle Sam will.  Looping back to Jello and the critique of global capitalism, my mind shifts to the question of consistency.  It is OK to be critical of Bezos.  But I got your book on Amazon, Jon.  Your fame as much as anything is contingent of what happens there, even if it chokes off other less fortunate or less talented writers.  You and I Jon are implicated. I think we're both aware and OK with that.  But to my ears, this reduces your potshot critique of techno modernity to something cranky and unclear. 

Technovisionaries of the 1990s promised that the internet would usher in a new world of peace, love, and understanding, and Twitter executives are still banging the utopianist drum, claiming foundational credit for the Arab spring. To listen to them, you'd think it was inconceivable that eastern Europe could liberate itself from the Soviets without the benefit of cellphones, or that a bunch of Americans revolted against the British and produced the US constitution without 4G capability.
                                 

I don’t have the offending quotes that he is referring to.  It is not hard to imagine that some truly insipid things from the 90s or more recently by Twitter execs have been uttered.  But I think it is simplistic to suggest that technology didn’t have an impact the Arab Spring.  From my vantage something occurred that is rather jarring to a Marxist framework.  Insurrections were organized and executed with minimal role of a “vanguard.”  In classic Marxist thinking a vanguard party is essential to drive a revolution.  Technology allowed for something much more ‘viral’ if you will to spread and foment based around general dissatisfaction of a fruit salesman’s death.  I think that is frightening to, for example, the CCP, in a manner much less predictable than what happened in Eastern Europe. 

So, I’m glad and I’m grateful that Franzen and Jello and Kraus and Crass are all angry.  It’s good to be jolted and juxtaposed out of contentment, typing into a commonly cool Mac Book Air.  Technological progression is exciting and terrifying.  And perhaps it is wise to remember that most of what is done with all of our capacity isn’t especially cool.  But it’s not to say that what was done without it was in any way cooler.  Nor is it to equate critical, with cool.  There is nothing especially cool about noticing that technology has evolved but we haven’t, unless you offer some insight into how it is we might.  And America or the West’s moral and material stasis, doesn’t equate a lack of material or moral progress for humanity. 

Well JF, we share the same initials.  In elemental “7DS” fashion, I 'envy' the clarity of your fiction.  And were it not for the global capitalist machinery,  forever waxing as it does, I would never have heard of you.  So I’m thankful to the cancerous system for connecting us, because you write beautifully.  But I think you sounded whiney and entitled in this prose effort. 

I certainly didn’t do any better a job of squaring the circle than you did.  This thing gets published once a day and I took longer today than usual to try to reckon with you, but daily matters got in the way, and its late, and I’m getting tired.  This isn’t edited anywhere near as well as the Boston Globe articles you once delighted in slamming. I do derive some satisfaction from this process, so perhaps I’m the typecast dullard, content to publish unpolished commentary, simple photos and imagine he has a voice.  I would say though that this process is more interesting and more challenging than watching the evening news.  Indeed, it is, to me, on par with reading one of your remarkable novels. 

America may get you down.  And China may look worse from afar.  You and Jello are right to remind me that both governments are likely amassing an enormous data file on me and that this continues whether we have a smiling Obama or a snarling Bush at the helm.  Technology development without moral development is a poverty, certainly.  But the progression continues regardless.  I’m not sure that it’s enough, with all your talents, to be so content with your anger, and equate it with a genuine cool, when you’ve offered so little as a critic to suggest what moral and or spiritual development might actually look like.  I’ll keep my eyes out for your next posting.  Do the same for mine.



[1] rèxuèfèiténg:  to be burning with anger (idiom)

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