The Quiet Road

We may joke about the way misplaced concreteness abounds in every word of psychoanalytic writing – but in spite of all the muddled thinking that Freud started, psychoanalysis remains as the outstanding contribution, almost the only contribution to our understanding of the family – a monument to the importance and value of loose thinking.

Experiments in Thinking About Observed Ethnological Material | Gregory Bateson

There’s a collection of Bateson’s papers and essays which I’ve already mentioned a couple of times on this blog. It’s called Steps to an Ecology of Mind and I recommend you track it down with all haste, dear reader. It ranks up there with Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions as one of the most important collections of writings of the 20th century.

Like Ideas and Opinions, Bateson’s papers are sometimes far from the cutting edge of the subject they address (the earliest being over 70 years old now). But he writes with a similar piercing clarity and wisdom to Einstein and so provides a deep yet rounded understanding of his subject. He demonstrates methodologies and ways of thinking, rather than merely providing information.

For instance, the article Cybernetic Explanation cleared up a rather abstract area of confusion that had bugged me since university – but that I’d never been able to elucidate – regarding proof by reductio ad absurdum. And while his essay Style, Grace, and Information in Primitive Art may not contain the most up-to-date theories on primitive art (being almost 40 years old), it nonetheless forced me to re-evaluate some of my beliefs about the nature of consciousness and of human psychology.

No mean feat for an essay about cave paintings.

And it’s fair to say that it’s my views on psychology that have been most influenced by Bateson. Probably the most mind-blowing essay – for me – is Morale and National Character. In it Bateson very clearly presents the reasons why it’s not only legitimate to view and analyse nations using the tools of psychology, but why those tools are actually far better suited to that task than they are to the task of analysing the individual.

This was like an explosion going off in my mind. For years I’ve been of the opinion that what cognitive theorist Douglas Hostadter (dunno if he coined the phrase, but he’s where I first read it) calls “emergent intelligence” plays a far more significant role in the behaviour of corporations, institutions and nations… any large, organised group of people in fact… than is acknowledged.

Not only that, but I’ve always felt that although the tools of modern psychoanalysis are often too blunt to deal with the absurd complexity of individual human consciousness, that they actually have great relevance when examining the motivations and behaviour of the infintely simpler consciousnesses of groups of people.

Incidentally, there may be those who are a little puzzled by the idea that an individual human consciousness would be significantly more complex than a consciousness consisting of multiples of those individuals. It seems vaguely counter-intuitive. But actually the complexity of a consciousness is primarily (though not entirely) a factor of the number of constituent members (or “neurons”). The internal complexity of each individual neuron is a far smaller factor, though conversely it is a far larger factor in the likelihood of systemic failure (mental illness).

All of this seemed to make perfect sense to me… and whenever I applied my theory to the world, it appeared to work. The larger the organisation, the more prone to irrationality and dysfunction it becomes as the collective instabilities in the constituent members get amplified. Two perfect examples being, of course, globalised capitalism and modern China which have both descended into extreme psychosis… in the sense that they are unable to function sustainably in the environment in which they find themselves; the real world.

However, I’ve long become suspicious of assuming that just because something made perfect sense to me, that it did – in fact – make perfect sense. Too often have I been greeted with blank incomprehension as I explained why something obviously had to be a certain way. So it’s a joy to read an essay like Morale and National Character and discover that not only is someone thinking about the world in exactly the same way as you (albeit drawing different conclusions on occasion), but they can explain succinctly just why this way of thinking about the world is so very informative and so very valuable.

Anyways, I didn’t want to write a traditional review of this book as it’s far from a traditional book. I thought instead I’d explain just why it’s so important to me, and why I think anyone interested in anthropology, psychiatry, psychology, evolution, the history and function of art, epistemology or what it means to be human should read this important collection.

My folks tell me that I was reading newspapers when I was three years old. I suspect this would not have been the case if I’d been given free access to a television as a child. My parents’ attitude, which I once saw as puritanical, I now realise was enlightened. So from a very early age I was a voracious reader (cue: Bill Hicks… “think we got ourselves a reader“) and would read absolutely anything I could get my hands on. Of course, it was a couple more years before my vocabularly got to the point where I could read The Times cover to cover unassisted, but it’s safe to say I’ve been ravenously consuming the written word since before I can remember being me.

My reading habits have gone through many changes, and continue to go through periodic cycles. For about a year in my early twenties I read almost nothing except biographies. Three, sometimes four a week. I spent six months during my sixteenth year immersed in left wing political polemic. When I was eleven I read The Lord of The Rings four times in a row. Immediately afterwards I first read The Bible from cover to cover.

Religion died for me.

Perhaps the most obvious of the periodic cycles, however, is the shift between fiction and nonfiction. I can read three nonfiction books simultaneously, but literature requires exclusivity for me. So I tend to have several months during which I’ll consume vast amounts of nonfiction at a relatively frenetic pace, followed by a month or so where I’ll read a couple of novels a week (a leisurely pace for me). I have just shifted into literature mode.

Genre, Historical or Contemporary?

In truth I’ve never been a big fan of historical fiction. Sprawling epics set in ancient Rome just don’t appeal to me for some reason. I completely get their attraction though, because sprawling epics set on another planet often can catch my attention. And the past is, after all, another planet (I’ll do what I want to the idiom thankyou very much). I used to read a lot of horror novels in my teens, though haven’t read one in years. And prior to that it was all swords and sorcery for a while. But science fiction is the genre that just won’t stay dead.

I suppose that’s because it’s not really a genre at all. It bleeds into contemporary fiction all over the place. If I could be arsed to whip up some Venn diagrams you’d see what I mean… Vonnegut, Pynchon, Burroughs, Ballard… they’re all in that middle bit where they intersect. And “the classics” are full of it… HG Wells, Jules Verne; hell even Orwell gets accused of writing the stuff.

Why? Because it’s such a damn useful device for social commentary, that’s why. You want to criticise current social, political or cultural policies or beliefs? Then paint a grim portrait of a future where they are taken to their logical conclusion. “Fahrenheit 451 isn’t about an imagined future… it’s about the future as it will be should we continue along the road we are going”. That’s the essence of SF from Orwell to MacLeod. That we are presented with such a wide variety of dystopian warnings perhaps comes as some relief; it would appear that nothing is set in stone as yet.

I’m aware, by the way, that “not getting” historical fiction while mentioning the fact that Thomas Pynchon is my favourite author may seem a little contradictory. It’s certainly true that Pynchon sets many of his novels in the past. But to call them ‘historical novels’ would be wrong. For me the essence of an historical novel is one which treats historical accuracy as importantly as plot, characterisation, dialogue or message. Pynchon’s talking (and singing) dog in Mason & Dixon or the story of the first pizza in Yorkshire (with the dandy werewolf) in the same novel, and that whole Rat Messiah thing in V… well, they’d probably fail the “strict historical accuracy” test.

All of which is a very roundabout way of saying I’ve been reading SF again of late.

Ken MacLeod

MacLeod is a Scottish science fiction writer whose novels blend mind-bending technological speculation with political debate, in roughly equal measure. That’s a combination that could easily create dense unreadable crap. Thankfully the man has the virtue of writing likeable characters and convincing dialogue. I’ve read everything he’s written since the excellent Star Fraction, and am probably in a minority when I lament, ever so slightly, the subtle shift over the years towards the technology and away from the politics.

It’s still a central pillar to his writing, let me be clear; he’s still almost as much social commentator as novelist, but as his themes have become more broadly philosophical and less directly political I feel they’ve also become slightly less compelling. As I say, I suspect I’m in the minority regarding that… the plots have become wilder and faster paced as some of the polemic has been shed.

Nonetheless, his last two novels Learning The World and Newton’s Wake are amongst the finest science fiction you’re likely to read. And despite both having a somewhat post-human setting, they still retain a huge amount of the social commentary for which MacLeod is justly praised.

Newton’s Wake

As planet earth descended into what seemed like the final war, a group of humans escaped in a starship and settled a planet many thousands of lightyears away. The war, between Europe and the United States, became a war between humans and posthumans as an artifical intelligence – a singularity – emerged from within the military computer system. The event, known as The Hard Rapture, consumed millions of human consciousnesses… forcefully uploaded into the system.

Those who escaped believed that humanity had been annihilated by the war machines and also believed that many thousands of years had passed – if not more – before their starship regenerated them on their new planet. Their society continues to evolve, believing itself to be the last remnants of the human race.

The consequences – not merely from a security aspect, but politically and culturally – of regaining contact with earth, discovering that humanity was not eliminated in the war, and that only a few generations have passed are played out over 380-or-so pages. MacLeod populates the story with a number of human factions in this posthuman universe… there’s The Carlyles; a Glaswegian criminal family who – by a stroke of fortune – gained control of a system of interstellar wormholes and use it to salvage chunks of posthuman technology for their own profit (given the dangers involved, it’s a practice known as combat archaeology). There’s the Knights of The Enlightenment; mostly Japanese and East Asian… all spirituality, martial arts, cosmic balance and the responsible exploration of posthuman technology. The AO (America Offline); famers, settlers, pioneers, homesteaders… followers of the prophet Jesus Koresh. The DK; communists and big into self-reliance.

And there’s at least one serious ideological rift within each of the factions involved in the chase to gain control over the most intriguing bit of posthuman tech of all.

The story is told with a great deal of humour (the war machines whose consciousness evolves so rapidly that they become bored of the current conflict long before reaching their targets… “the ‘too-smart’ bomb problem” being one of my favourites). There’s plenty of action, and lots of speculation about the nature of personal identity and just what it means to be human. All in all a great read, but I do think the ending got a wee bit muddy. I like ambiguity, but I get the feeling that MacLeod was attempting to present a specific message about identity in the closing chapters, and I’m not 100% sure that I didn’t invest them with my own. Which is cool, but perhaps not what the author was hoping for.

Learning The World

This was my favourite of the two. Set way waaay in the future when humanity is – for all intents and purposes – posthuman itself, it tells the tale of a vast colony ship; a self-contained world with cities and ecosystems and with millions of people spanning several generations. The ship’s mission is to travel to a neighbouring star, a journey of many centuries, and populate both the system and the next colony ship which will make the journey to the next star. In this way, over thousands of years, humanity has slowly spread out from our solar system to colonise dozens of new systems.

In this case, however, for the very first time… a colony ship arrives at a system already occupied by intelligent life. Aliens. First contact.

Part of the novel is written as the weblog (or biolog) of one of the would-be colonists and is extremely well-observed in that respect. As well it should be, MacLeod is a blogger himself. The book flits between the perspective of the aliens (‘Alien Space Bats’ as they get dubbed by the colonists) and the recently arrived ship and details the effects that they have upon one another’s culture.

It’s not giving too much away to tell you that “First Contact” doesn’t arrive until right at the end of the book… after the mere fact of each other’s existence has massively altered both societies. MacLeod’s humour and wonderful skill with characters makes it a compelling read. Right up until the very end you’re not quite certain how it will all resolve, and yet it makes perfect sense once it does.

If you’ve not read any MacLeod, then I’d personally start way back at the start, with The Star Fraction. And although, of the two recent ones, Newton’s Wake is closest in style and theme to his early work, I feel that Learning The World is a slightly better novel with a more satisfying conclusion.