Cultural Evolution

“It’ll get easier. Someday it’ll all be done by machine. Information machines.”

Gravity’s Rainbow

I’m stranded in this Sargasso moment, awash above the blank pages in a sea of bewilderment, bordering too often on despair or at least demoralization, questioning who we are and what we are to do, placing words on screen or paper, appearing too often useless. How can I meet the YouTube moment, while whole contraptions made out of outmoded words float like garish headlines against images appearing for short moments and then gone, while the world arranges itself around another passing crisis. What is it that endures against the nihilistic forces one might call evil, that stalk across the earth like a million metaphorical monsters, puncturing every dream and aspiration for no apparent purpose outside of the blind and momentary pleasure of watching things explode.

In my local community I’m like a ghost. What do I have to communicate besides brittle hope or the pain of loss? So much is lost, to stupidity and greed. The question is, what remains.

I find some escape in the oceanic and ancient desert landscapes of this beautiful state as it flows past my car windows. I indulge in the exquisite paragraphs of my favorite writers, the best of them having been with me almost as long as I can remember.

I grew up in a post-war world of weekly air raid sirens and useless nuclear drills. I’d seen pictures of the bombs going off above Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and watched as ex Nazi Werner von Braun, on Disney, explained the nuclear reaction using ping pong balls and mousetraps. I endlessly fantasized about fallout shelters. My family drove past fields full of surplus tanks and obsolete aircraft on our way to church, all of this hardware useless in a war of total obliteration. I watched movies at Saturday matinees that featured mutant monsters wandering through the wreckage of civilizations. Most of my nightmares were of inescapable destruction.

The fathers of my generation gathered in VFW halls. They shared the fellowship of men and women who’d survived through a holocaust. They were often reluctant to reveal to their children any details of the horrors they’d encountered and survived. With fascination, we gleaned fragments and artifacts of memory from books and photographs. We watched television documentaries, roughly cut in black and white, narrated by Walter Cronkite or Edward Murrow, of battles and bombardments. There were the romanticized exploits in popular movies staring our favorite movie stars, portraying sacrifice, heroism and always victory. There were the morality plays of the westerns that dominated the evenings. As boys our favorite backyard fantasies featured plastic guns and makeshift arsenals. We retreated from history into our imaginations, and I guess it served as our defense against a backdrop of terror.

Amidst the doom and gloom and people taking themselves too seriously, there were other things to think about. Our childhoods, like every childhood, were filled with discovery and wonder. A fresh world of technological possibilities was opening all around us. Television itself was new. We launched ourselves into space, and the pace of ambition and invention was rapidly altering the landscape.

We thought about careers and success, and believed in times of growing tolerance and opportunities. Still, many of us found ourselves stranded in a marsh of questions and indecision. As the decades passed, we entered an extended interval of useless and dangerous conflict, of burning cities, assassination of our heroes, and a rising sense that civilization itself had an uncertain future. For those who stepped off the shores of safe and sound behavior, the plunge into unknown waters took a healthy dose of humor and a strong sense of aspiration, or at least enough momentum to move forward.

When I was 17 years old, I often wandered through the fiction racks in the downtown branch of the Carnegie library in my hometown, Cleveland. One day amid a display of the latest contemporary novels, I looked upon a thick and serious hardcover volume, with a single letter, V. , as its title. The letter stood monumental, upon a surrealistic plane of parallel lines converging toward a vanishing point, beneath an empty blue sky. In the foreground, in smaller letters below, the words proclaimed, A NOVEL BY THOMAS PYNCHON. Something about that image and title suited the world as I’d begun to see it, a mysterious and isolating landscape of endless searching and uncertainty. Like Pynchon’s characters in this, his first novel, my friends and I moved among bewildering scenarios with sensibilities that blended both hopefulness and paranoia. Like Pynchon’s Whole Sick Crew , we wandered amid the moral confusion that followed the chaos and tragedy of a World War. Underneath it all there lingered the frightening suspicion that everything that might have made sense to our parents was on the edge of coming apart.

Thomas Pynchon writes in the words of a prophet, a comedian, a poet of times of transition, when one world collapses into another, and people find themselves somewhat lost and seeking some kind of anchor in the tempest. His novels are mysteries. They take us, along with their sketchily drawn protagonists, into worlds both bizarre and familiar and packed with lush detail, profoundly beautiful and monstrously grotesque, full of both darkness and hilarity. His characters, as they search for patterns that might reveal some sense of ultimate purpose, skirt the edges of discovery, driven forward by circumstance, picking up messages and signs that hopefully provide a clue, or at least an indication of direction. Each of his novels takes us through the beauty and violence of landscapes in a different period of history. We hang out with Benny Profane and Herbert Stencil in the 1950’s, with Oedipa Maas through the Los Angeles real estate boom of the 70’s, Tyrone Slothrop in the zones of Europe at the end of World War Two, Zoyd Wheeler navigating Reagan’s War On Drugs, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon measuring the border that would split America against itself, and the world between spirit and reason in the 1700’s, the Chums Of Chance exploring the realms of fantasy and possibility at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition, and flying ever forward toward the ‘War To End All Wars’. Thousands of characters make their appearances, however brief. The style is said to be encyclopedic, and it is, dealing not merely with characters and events, but with the sensibilities of every moment, where the mythical blends into the factual, the imaginative informs the real. He surveys the fleeting joys, horrors, and absurdities of all times. We shift among as many points of view as there are situations, and at times his people might even break into songs and poetry, even limericks, to illuminate the mood. Pynchon’s writing challenges and even breaks many of the conventions of prose, as if he’s challenging us to trade in our box of expectations for a new sense of freedom.

There are dozens of essays and books written about and/or inspired by Pynchon, and as many interpretations of his work. I can offer my own, although it’s continually under revision. Like a trickster he challenges us to see through the patterns of history into worlds always in flux, driven as much by imagination as intent, old orders always collapsing while new ones arrive, never quite reaching a conclusion. We see humanity in a constant struggle between the opposing urges of freedom and control, and underneath all the hopes, the curiosity and the paranoia, finding no final answer beyond the absolute mystery of beginnings and endings, and everything inbetween.

Many consider Pynchon to be one of the most influential of his generation. He certainly influenced me. Through the years every one of his reviewers and readers attempts to plumb the mysteries and meanings that thread through his voluminous work. The worlds he creates are both beautiful and monstrous, and each is a maze littered with absurdity and meaning. Pynchon himself is a cipher, almost never photographed or interviewed, and as far as I know he’s never offered explanations outside of his work, thus leaving any conclusions largely to the reader.

My main enjoyment is in his magnificent sentences. Lush and long, often the length of a whole page or paragraph, exquisite and wanting to roll off the tongue, more like poetry than prose, or maybe something in between. They are filled with the beautiful, the mundane, the grotesque, the enigmatic and the profound, and the sheer adventure in reading them has gotten me through very difficult times.

An example from ‘Against The Day’:

Yashmeen’s white tall figure, parasol over her shoulder, already a ghost in full sunlight, went fading into the crowds flowing in and out through the trees between the quay and the Piazza Grande…

…Plum and pomegranate trees were coming into flower, incandescently white and red. The last patches of snow had nearly departed the indigo shadows of south-facing stone walls, and sows and piglets ran oinking cheerfully in the muddy streets. Newly parental swallows were assaulting humans they considered intrusive. At a cafe off Katunska Ulica near the marketplace, Cyprian, sitting across a table from the cooing couple (whose chief distinction from pigeons, he reflected, must be that pigeons were more direct about shitting on one), at great personal effort keeping his expression free of annoyance, was visited by a Cosmic Revelation, dropping from the sky like pigeon shit, namely that Love, which people like Bevis and Jacintha no doubt imagined as a single Force at large in the world, was in fact more like the 333,000 or however many different forms of Brahma worshipped by the Hindus—the summation, at any given moment, of all the varied subgods of love that mortal millions of lovers, in limitless dance, happened to be devoting themselves to. Yes, and ever so much luck to them all.

Guns versus smartphones

I’m just turning 75. My life has been formed, and is almost completed, throughout a breathtakingly brief and cataclysmic era in global history. In future accounts it may be referred to as ‘The Neoliberal Era’, ‘The Era Of American Hegemony’, ‘The Age Of Economic Globalization’, or perhaps, as the cataclysm intensifies toward its resolution, ‘Capitalism’s Final Crisis’. There will be a few references to something called ‘The American Empire’. It will appear as a flicker between the centuries, and one of the shortest lived empires that ever endured.

We are at the beginning of a 2nd American Revolution, one that is long due. Whatever the outcome, it will radically reshape the outcomes for global civilization. The age of the nation state is gradually going out of phase with the needs of the physical world. There will be times of breakdown and struggle. We must reintegrate with the workd. This will take some time and will never be at an end. I believe that in the next phase there will still be nations, and languages and cultural boundaries. The dimensions of power will be altered in structure and better managed, through education and the cultivation of respect. The flows of the twin rivers will be, at least until the next glacial scale disruption, in better harmony, as each distinctive part realizes its necessity to the whole.

Technology presents new perceptual models of the world much faster than anything we can control or even keep up with. We are continually confused. The time has arrived for us all to take a deep dive into questioning who we are and who we want to be, and what are the ultimate stakes. Complacency is deadly. We’d been so long buried in our own work, forgetting our reasons for working, or what makes up the whole mechanism of our survival.

We generally see and enterpret the word ’revolution’ to refer to specific cataclysmic changes in the procession of historical events. To understand what moves these events it’s necessary to go beyond specific dates and times and logistical patterns, and embrace the flowing evolutionary trends, ever constant, ever shifting, beneath the surface of what we see.

There are two constant revolutions/evolutions going on at any given historical moment. One is economic, and the other is cultural. They are woven together in close procession, at times in harmony, and at other times they appear to flow in opposing directions. The economic evolution is by nature conservative, its primary focus to preserve stability. Economics is a measure of the river of things, the movement of necessities and the produce of our desires.

Cultural evolution is something broader and more ephemeral, and yet central to our sense of well being. Something within us is driven by an impulse to break the rules, to advance, and to enter new territories. We are curious and inspired. Culture is the river of our perceptions. They are sometimes clear and accurate, and at other times only marginally connected to the world beneath the fog.

These twin streams never stop moving, never stop changing. They are inseparably linked, either energizing or obstructing each other, acting over and through us like the ancient gods in Greek tales about siblings and rivals.

It’s becoming abundantly and existentially clear to much of humanity that survival depends on a true understanding of the role we play as part of a bigger organism. Globalization is the political term for an economic transition. We go from centralized industrial production to widely distributed supply chains stretching across oceans and continents. At its essence, this is like the early evolution of the cell. A number of independent organisms come together as a cooperative community and eventually merge into a single complex organism. A process called symbioses.

Along with economic revolutions, cultural revolutions advance at an unprecedented rate, driven by the tides of information that flow through the system, reshaping at every instance our perception of the world.

We are currently engaged in a third world war, which is a new kind of war, fought with numbers and ideas and conceptual systems playing across screens. The handheld weapon in this war is the smartphone in our pockets.

Things are moving very fast, worldwide…one event or action leads to others. People find out who their allies are. They’re encouraged to become more boldly resistant. A major university resists a government takeover. Prominent financial managers begin speaking out. Republican Town Meetings get rowdy. People, in general, are educating themselves. All of this builds toward an ultimate breakdown of life as usual.

Kilmer Abrego Garcia, like George Floyd before him, like Alfred Dreyfus long before all of this (see ‘Dreyfus Affair), is an unfortunate victim of history. On April 19th, demonstrations, even more enormous than on the 5th, will expand the focus beyond Musk and Trump to embrace and defend Garcia, and his young family, and ourselves, against the fascist brutality that landed him in a living hell.

Trump and company are waiting for an opportunity to gin up excuses to go after dissenters, with fierce repression, just as they did during the George Floyd era. Just like then, only more so, there’s an international reaction to their policies and cruelties, and they now feel cornered.

The American economy is now riding in the back of a cybertruck, under the control of the madman we gave the wheel, heading toward a Thelma and Louise denouement. I fully expect that we will go over that cliff, taking a good chunk of the world with us.

There is, at present, a very thin line standing between democracy and fascism in America, and the next few weeks will determine whether that line is holding. I’m talking about the Law, the Courts and the the Universities.

The 5th Estate, the Press and the Media are barely functional, not even willing, for the most part (except comedians), to call out fascism by its real name (they use the academic term, ‘authoritarianism’ – it’s elite and vague and sounds less threatening).

Social Media has taken up the slack of what remains of democracy and free speech, performing the role that pamphleteering did between the first American Revolution and the Civil War. I find myself no longer getting my news and analysis directly from newspapers or television, and the marketplace of ideas is boundless and international. This is a completely different realm of media, with a whole new set of rules, evolving constantly, that govern behavior and trust.

The vessel of our freedom is still encapsulated in words and institutions inspired and put into action more than two centuries past. If these barriers are breached, we will be in a new state of civil war. At that point another line of defense comes into play. There’s the police, the national guard, the military, led by educated commanders who’ve taken pledges to defend the Constitution and the law. These are forces composed of people from communities most affected by the actions of this administration. We will be in unknown territory.

We are in a Squeeze.

America will survive. The world will survive. The relationships between us all will be radically altered. We will have been through a deep process of self examination. Perhaps for the first time since the last World War, since FDR and long after, we will be forced into revisioning our entire political and economic culture.

My generation won’t be around to witness the conclusion of that process. But we will have been privileged to see its beginning, and to have learned much on the ride along the way.