Should I Just Do It?

 Ah, a quick corollary to the doing post. I hope it doesn't need to be said that just doing something is not necessarily a good in its own right, but I'm going to say it anyway. The complex of doing that is our industrial civilization has placed us at the brink of self-extinction, or at least self-destruction. Extinction is a strong word, yes, but the radical changes wrought by climate change in general are enough to at least inch us up to the possibility of extinction in particular, eventually, even if such a thing doesn't happen completely. 

The initial point - perhaps being made implicitly - was that even by the own stated internal requirements of this particular civilization's flourishing, failure is well at hand; this process of doing appears to be reversing itself. The message is this: hey, look, by the lights of your own stated program, this shit ain't workin', so can't we just do something else? Can we do something different? 

There's nothing wrong with getting organized and doing stuff more efficiently and powerfully to live well. But ah, I'm speaking for myself here but I think there will be others out there who will agree: getting a little tired of lighting myself on fire for a living. 

I Get It

Upon understanding something, an abstraction of that thing is instantiated, and the perception of that abstraction produces something like a surge of euphoria or even a sense of awe and wonder. "Oh I see!" That sort of thing. 

People can then really latch onto these experiences and attach to them, defending them from encroachment even after it becomes apparent that the abstractions need to be modified or even dispensed with. It becomes a part of someone's identity. 

Before this starts sounding too much like a moralization, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with phenomena like this. 

Like a runner's high or that sense of satisfaction from the completion of a given project, these feelings make up part of the motivation for doing such things. 

But for me it is never over. Those abstractions look good and feel good, but then I keep poking at them and am reminded that they are instantiated, and that they aren't quite it. They start to go away too. You have to keep thinking about them to keep them coherent, and oftentimes when you do that you are also taking in new information and experiences and then things start to look different again. 

It's good to "get it," but you gotta keep "getting it." The work is never done.

Doing

Just a brief warning: this is going to be one of those vaguely curmudgeonly posts. Kind of silly, obvious, and complaining, but I can't do much more about the tone and the content: it just needs to be expressed at the moment. 

Anyway, it is comforting to turn away from current affairs and survey the turbulent movements of history, coming to terms with the longer arc of our species' troubled existence: yes we've crashed and burned many times in many lands, and yes we've survived and picked ourselves up to march on.  

But it isn't long before one's attention is grabbed again by the increasingly loud cracks and sparks coming from this giant garbage fire of world affairs. For now my attention will be focused on the Western industrialized world, and in particular, you guessed it, the US, though the whole thing is looking pretty rough. 

You could take your pick of a given grinding and recurring crisis: the pandemic, the mass shootings, the increasingly unstable relationship between ecological ruin and climate change and the fraying national infrastructure, the global brushfire wars, culminating now in the Ukraine crisis, and so on, and observe a painful grinding stasis which typifies it on a systemic level. 

It is the stasis which is particularly striking to me at the moment, and what I'd like to focus on. At least, let's be clear that this stasis appears most forcefully in the West, and in the United States in particular, from my vantage point anyway, and its effects are most apparent in the regular operation of the established elite, affecting world affairs at a larger scale due to their unique hegemonic position. It is a stasis that grows ever more pointed as world affairs themselves undergo transformations ever more dramatic and dynamic. 

To step back for a moment, you can look at the general project of civilization as a general complex of doing, and the reigning empires embedded in such a project are the complexes of doing that have settled into coherent and stable masses which have effectively leveraged their relationships with their environments and their global political communities, so that they can become fully themselves and export that particular form of doing throughout the land. 

Throughout the tumultuous formative and then articulating phases of a civilization's lifespan, great wars - both global and domestic - are fought over who gets to do exactly what and how. The dominant hegemon that arises out of this mess must necessarily subordinate all of its rivals to a certain way of doing in order to solve that contradictory locality of its global character: the hegemon developed as a complex of doing in a certain time and place, and in situation to its particular context, and upon finding its methods favorable, enjoys the privilege of ceaselessly expanding beyond previous obstacles, dominating its rivals and forcing them to adopt its own methods and character, preferably so as to enrich itself . The wise hegemons allow their rivals to assimilate and enjoy their own local privileges, and perhaps some vestiges of their local character and method, but there is necessarily an overarching and shared "system," with the hegemon necessarily presiding at the top and ultimately determining those resource flows and the general direction of the overarching culture. 

Even within the hegemon itself, the history of that entity is composed of a never-ending procession of vying individuals and organizations and dynasties looking to impose their own idiosyncratic modes of doing so as to make the greater society better at its own doing, gaining the universal acclaim and respect of having delivered value. We'll have to discuss value at length sometime, but now is not the time. 

Surveying the historical struggles of ideological and active ambitious individuals, it is striking to see the thread that emerges over and over again: the intense need to advance the new and current and idiosyncratic way of doing things particular to a given individual or organization. The tumultuous processes of industrialization, the crisscrossing of the continent with vast transportation and communication networks, the military encirclement of the globe, the relentless hunting down and stamping out of diseases like small pox, tuberculosis, and polio, the vicious fighting over the primacy of economic systems, the voracious accumulation of research talent and technological capability, I could go on. 

Yes, money and power are important ends, but those things are also means to affect the transformation of the world in the images of their wielders, and as a part of that process, elevate the wielders into a state of collective and historic deification. 

What is so striking now in the West is to witness that process rapidly and dramatically diminishing and then beginning to shut down completely in real time. We see "everything should go back to the way it was," and "no it cannot be done," and "no such and such is impossible." We see cascading failure after failure and the complete inability to do anything about it, or the desire to do anything about it for that matter, beyond putting out the appropriate press releases and patting oneself and one's peers on the back for a job well done. 

A job of course that shrinks back from the imagination and represents itself as the only way, but which itself is merely a decaying composite of past and dying ways of doing. 

There is nevertheless a relentless striving in all directions, but which has cycled into repeat: stuck, broken, as it atomizes to the individual and within the individual, and which as a result, upon losing its coherent mass, has become impotent as a transformative force.   

There is a striking advancing collective failure of will that can be directly witnessed and experienced, and even the images themselves are shattering at a more rapid and obvious pace; the propaganda can't keep up. 

Us enthusiasts of history know all about that gradual shutting down of evolving artistic forms in pottery and architecture in the ancient world and elsewhere at other times, and the historical observations of the dying back of artistic and creative vigor in a given society. It is just so much more stranger to witness it unfold in real time, especially over questions of life and death that aren't even that long term anymore, or for that matter, too difficult to suss out in a rudimentary analysis. 

Diminishing Reproduction

In the multitude of those daily and monthly and yearly cycles of reproduction in which an empire regenerates itself, there is a sort of principle of diminishing net energy return that could be generalized and scaled out. 

An empire is constantly simultaneously damaging itself as it shores itself up and takes energy into itself. The instruments of violence it unleashes to shape its world and the Others in its world are not easily contained, and are perpetually turned back on itself as it operates. 

When one sets upon the land and terrorizes it to mass produce a monocultured crop for instance, one is also extinguishing the dynamic life in the soil, and the soil yields less and less over time, and the problem is moved spatially or technologically for the time being, whether by seeking more soil or artificially shoring up the soil with fertilizer say. 

And one may vanquish an enemy and rival, but the memory of that violence never quite goes away, whether that memory is in the crushed rival or in the victor itself. Just because the destruction moves does not mean it goes away. 

Soon enough that destruction - like the concentrated energy on the other side of that coin - pools and concentrates, and so moves things in accordance with its own logic. 

Rome continued to weaken in part because its enemies learned and grew stronger at the same time that Rome forgot and grew weaker, and those trajectories would pass each other and eventually reach a tipping point: one could see in the history that just as late imperial Rome was achieving stability again after a time of trouble, and beginning to heal itself and regenerate itself, there would be some new invasion, or another flaring civil war, a delayed effect from its previous troubles, and it would be thrown back into the dynamics of its downward spiral. 

At some point, all of the many cycles of reproduction required to sustain such a continuity begin to lose their buoyancy and vitality, as the energy produced from them is not to operate the cycles themselves, much less encourage any more expansion or to break even for that matter. 

Revisiting Oscillation

There was a fascinating dynamic involved in the eventual decline and collapse of the reconstituted Roman Empire that I wanted to touch on, which has pretty apparent parallels to current dynamics playing out in the modern industrial world. I do want to clarify that I'm not trying to locate some sort of precise temporal parallel, where Rome was in this stage in relation to some sort of lifespan, in relation to our civilization's stage in turn, and thus attempt some sort of prediction in terms of timeframes. No, this is mainly to illustrate general principles of connected systems. In so many words, this collapse took quite a while, after some really death-defying reconstitutions no less; this stuff is difficult to suss out. 

We've touched on the nature of oscillating forces before in the context of increasingly unstable systems: the short of it in this context is that as things get to moving and moving faster, and that movement has a large enough mass, it becomes an overwhelming force of thermodynamic redistribution in its own right, overpowering the prevailing forces of thermodynamic organization as embodied in the association of individual humans navigating a specifically constituted society, itself navigating the environment it is ensconced in. 

Those overwhelming forces could very well be made up of other human beings themselves, though the force and velocity of those forces leads to the experience of a sort of desperation and loss of control, and is experienced as an external and determining influence outside of any individual or group's machinations. 

In the Roman case, the dynamic I had in mind was the oscillating arising out of both a weakening and contracting imperial system and its relation to the turbulent forces set in motion by the advancing of its weakening and its concurrent turbulence inflicted on its environment, as well as the concomitant strengthening of its rivals. Comparing now the dim memory of the faltering Republic, a sort of centrifuge got going in which the Empire started to tear itself apart with each rotation of its daily cycle of reproduction. 

What did this actually look like? In the the course of the third century CE, a weakening Roman empire got into deeper and deeper trouble as it became trapped within the contracting structure of its commitments. The now highly centralized military dictatorship it had become had entered into its own cycle of decay and civil war, as various aspiring military talents rose and fell in civil wars, often carried along the whims of Praetorian machinations and other military organizations along the lines of pay and associated loyalty. The crass cynicism of the mass of legionaries and the Praetorian Guard, willing to concentrate their efforts on purely monetary matters, and their capriciousness in backing the highest paying parties, was reflective of serious social, cultural, and economic problems itself, but I'll leave that for now. 

Additionally, legionary forces and farm labor were thoroughly chewed up by the Antonine (possibly smallpox or measles) and the Cyprian (several possibilities) plagues, themselves circulated by the cycles of military expansion and social reproduction, putting a sizable dent in the functionality of military administration and economic functions.  

The actual timeline and corresponding chains of causation are difficult to pin down, due in part to the chaos of the third century and then in part to conflicting and unreliable historical sources due to said chaos, but a general oscillating dynamic arose that can be described as follows (as described by Mike Duncan in his excellent History of Rome podcast): 

Civil wars, plague, and economic and social/political dysfunction interacted at a time when Rome's boundaries were near their peak - waxing under Trajan and then waning under Hadrian and then waxing again during the Severan Dynasty - and there were growing pressures on the frontiers from the growing and unifying German confederations (like the Franks) in the West and the Sassanian Persians in the East, who were emerging newly confident from the collapsed Parthian empire, pressures which were encouraged by previous Roman military conquests. 

You had a centralized power that was called into motion by these disturbances: an emperor and the strongest imperial army - kept closest to the emperor out of distrust of rivals - moving to and fro across the empire to put out the various fires set by a given invasion or uprising. Some regional general may score a victory with his army against an invading force, and they'd declare him Emperor because no one else was dealing with the issue at the moment, and short term thinking and action prevailed, and then the reigning incumbent Emperor would have to proceed to take out that rival, and so on. 

This dynamic encouraged subsequent invasions: word would spread that the Romans were weak and infighting and foreign powers would strike to exploit some weak and undefended point, prompting movement of imperial forces and the opening of a vacuum and a weak point at some other location. The subsequent invasions then further strained economic, social, and political conditions, manpower was drained, discontent would spread, and further uprisings would spring up as short term problems were solved and another localized power claimed the throne, begetting further invasions, and so on. 

The emperor would then speed up this motion by developing a mobile cavalry force, but eventually the empire would break into three autonomous regions, temporarily stabilizing those oscillating forces. Amazingly, Aurelian would reach back out and reunite and stabilize the empire militarily, with Diocletian eventually coming along to completely restructure the empire and further stabilize the system with the Tetrarchy, following formally the informal principle of the empire temporarily breaking into three pieces, this time with the coordinated rule of four emperors. Though this recovery was quite a remarkable event, the empire's continuity was to remain strained and that temporary stability would begin to unwind again. 

So let's take a minute to attempt to abstract some system behaviors from this mess. What we see here is an increasingly kinetic expression of moving energy, that picks up steam and gains velocity and augments as it sets stored and potential energy free as it moves through and antagonizes its containing system. And this moving energy places ever more strain on the bounded environment it circulates in, a bounded environment meant to keep it contained in the first place, which eventually, has its continuity shattered, and having so much of that energy freed up, is able to be unified and stabilized again, a stabilization that was nevertheless tenuous and would soon unwind again in its weakened state.  

That bounded environment, at the peak of its strength, was able to concentrate energy and then direct it in service of the greater bounded system itself, but as it weakened, it was still concentrating energy but in a chaotic and runaway fashion which tore apart the system itself: at this point the system had to be broken to be fixed again, and then in its globally weakened state, would proceed in a downward spiral to more complete collapse. 

A heaving bridge comes to mind: a bridge connecting several disparate pieces of land may begin to flex and warp as it is put under pressure, whether by wind or water or too much weight set upon it, or a combination of these things. What is left is to stabilize the bridge by adding resources to it - when it is not moving of course - or to have the bridge break down altogether into smaller pieces, so that the energy can dissipate more locally, and then the bridge is reconstituted after the ensuing calm. 

Either way, it is difficult to do too much work on a moving bridge, as muscle power and brain power is put into navigating its changing forms, all the more so the more the bridge is heaving, until no amount of energy can be put into navigating the violence of its chaotic movement. Indeed, depending on the mass doing work on the bridge, such activity could add positive feedback to the movement and make the movement itself worse. 

Anyway, I'm not doing anyone any favors by delving deeper into convoluted metaphors. I just want to keep general dynamics like these in mind as we continue to proceed. Conceptually I've made a bit of a mess here, I know, but for a minute we could tease out what this means in terms of contemporary global economic dynamics. 

If you squint into the growing global chaos, you can see this dynamic at work underneath everything: the hegemonic and bounded global economic system, attempting to contain and concentrate energy for itself, constantly expanding outward and squeezing inward its rivals, dumping waste and producing agitation and antagonisms that are growing in breadth and velocity, and we are seeing the cleavages form in real time in which the system will first bifurcate, and then possibly break down further. And then we will see the re-unifiers come out and attempt to put things back together with a religious fervor of their own after things stabilize. But that is in the face of an ever-growing ecological turbulence, so long as the smoke stacks continue to run. 

Simple Wealth

Here we know better: wealth ain't what they say it is or what they try to represent it as. But for the moment I want to illustrate a really simple form of wealth in the hopes of better teasing out what it really is. And we'll soon discover that even the simpler form is not all that simple. 

Let's take dirt, soil, from which living things spring up from. Soil is best free and clear, where it can breathe, and accept new decaying matter so that its multitudes can break it down, freeing up its constitutive elements for other living things. Constant movement and circulation is good, but living things themselves, just as they need the free elements of nutrients to take up to produce themselves with, they also need to slow the movement and passage of these things within themselves. 

A living thing benefits both from circulation and change and the temporary suspension and freezing of that change to momentarily be. In even the most rudimentary of circumstances, human beings themselves require clothing and shelter to arrest the movement of energy out of themselves, or to prevent too much from getting in for that matter. 

For the moment, I'm getting after shelter, so let's keep moving in that direction. A lot of shelters are built from materials that are valued for being able to hold fast and keep shape against the many changing conditions of the outside world: wood and rock and even earth itself, though earth which is typically hardened and treated and shaped so as to stay put. 

These things take lots of energy to produce and then to arrange. A tree has to rise high above the soil to get above the decomposing elements and to capture falling light, and so the wood that is a result of this must have the strength to persist in this state of fighting gravity, and is valued as such, and removed from its context with energy and tool to be repurposed for shelter. 

In building, the cut wood shouldn't necessarily be set right back in the soil, which with moisture and microorganisms and insects would get to decomposing the wood again and changing that desired set-fast form into something else, going back into the dirt in the process.  

The wood would instead be set onto stone, another material in which much energy goes into creating it, in this case, negatively as the pressures of gravity and surrounding material and energy condense it, and then the energy of tectonic forces and moving water set if free from its entombment, where more energy must be put in to moving it and shaping it to be laid as foundation and as barrier against the dirt. 

Once you're up on stone, you can move about without getting dirty, and without having your resources set upon it get dirty as well, and potentially degrade and decompose. This ends up a tremendous asset: the initial stores of energy are invested and now you're up on stone, permanently away from the dirt - at least in a given lifetime - freeing up labor for ever higher pursuits. Needless to say, class arises partially out of this state of being and this privilege. 

This is a form of wealth: this permanent suspension above the decomposing elements and the perpetual structures of permanence that allow various forms of energy to accumulate in usable stores. But like all forms of wealth, this still requires a proximity to and an access to those regions of decomposition and renewal. Indeed, this is an essential condition for wealth to exist. 

Underside

Occasionally here I like to work in a bit self criticism - or self-revealing, which would be a better word for the subgenre - into the routine as part of the work itself. This is in response to a certain tendency we are pressured towards in the sharing of public - and even private - works. 

What we call modernity is characterized by a ceaseless material, technological, and social expansion, so that the way in which we actually interact and relate with each other is informed by vast distances, not only in time and space, but also in the forms of that interaction, which are also constantly changing: a traversal of the various forms opens up a certain distance of its own, as those forms have to be decoded to interface with each other. For example, an 80 year old person scratching their head, asking, "what in the hell is a Tik Tok? and why can't these kids just sit at the table and talk" and so on.  

The result is that the products we share with each other - and the Internet has certainly changed this dynamic quite a bit, but not entirely - tend to have to be shared fully formed and sculpted, and in a significant way, manipulated for the best effect. On the Internet you do see more personal and intimate creative exchanges that can be easily scaled out given the medium, but what you also often see is that as soon as these phenomena begin to gain traction and attention, and the money notices and commodification sets in, then this stuff is further spun and refined so as to achieve that coveted escape velocity. 

Part of this has to do with the intense competition of the interconnected modern world: if one has ready access to the limelight with a computer, then there will be a whole lot of aspirational activity to sort through and make sense of, so the stuff that rises to the forefront - and bids for more advanced commodification, which in this society, is the most obvious pathway towards economic and social security and stability - does tend to be carefully manipulated to achieve the aims of its interested parties, both by its creators and its beneficiaries in their various forms. One thinks of the smothered understory shooting up tendrils of vine, branch, and leaf as far as the energy allows to capture what light that they can. 

The other part of this dynamic is that the repetition of the dynamic itself eventually carves out certain socially acceptable standards which are internalized, policed by sticks of intense fear of failure and ridicule and carrots of fame and regard and wealth. As beautiful as a great work is, there is a lot of pain built into it; certainly the nature of the beast as they'll say. We could look to the simple illustration of the ambitious perfectionist parents looking upon their child's crude drawing and shaming the child that it is not very good, and the drawing could be much better. 

We have to be careful here of course: there is nothing inherently wrong with quality and standards and criticism and even nice or great things. But how and towards what end and for whom? You may be darting back and forth on airplanes to shout over others into microphones powered by huge amplifiers to be published across the electric web that climate change is coming and we have to do something right away, and good for you, good message, and the delivery itself could be quite impressive and great, but also, ah what the hell is that about? When the means involve burning petroleum, you don't have to issue stern warnings about "ends justify the means" thinking: the means are the ends. 

I myself will readily admit to being both perfectionist and ambitious, and just as equally antagonistic to what that means and entails given our collective context. Enough of this! We've been striving for long enough, and like the Romans, with each new generation there are new borders of striving to topple, collectively defined and standardized borders etched in by the ready availability of energy and resources, which must be pumped and squeezed further from the exhausted ground. Now is the time to harness all of that imaginative energy to strive against the striving itself. 

Here I want to point out that yes, I have in the past struggled with a bipolar affect and creative writing cycles, vagaries of the available energy and resources accompanying relative poverty, depression and aimless wandering, illness and a damaged body, and the turbulence associated with transitioning into a lower energy consumption lifestyle, and it all comes out in the writing, both in quality and frequency. 

Here I like playing with form and putting out something considered and refined and of quality, but I've also intentionally left it a bit messy and intentionally revealed some of this dysfunction to reflect the totality of this project. Here we have some typos and some vague and confused writing and some lapses in post and some meanderings and contradictory intentions, mixed in with some stuff that I really quite like and am proud of. 

I'm sitting here speaking of energy and slowing down, and indeed, I personally am now using much less energy than I used to, and in relation to much of the industrialized world, but by whole world standards, I am still using quite a bit of energy, much of it out of sheer inertia. Shame on me, but then so it goes for us imperials. I am trying. 

This is what the totality of the work looks like anyway, just as a completed building - with its swarming construction workers hidden behind work zones and privacy fences, cussing as they smash their thumbs with hammers and chipping parts of their fingers off with routers and saws, having messy shits in the porta potties after quick and cheap lunches - forms the totality of that work too. 

I'm talking here about this work as making up a constant process of Becoming: there is something high and suspended about the Become and something low and earthy about the Becoming. Becoming is what is constantly happening in the soil, the stuff we've been trying to get away from for so long, suspended high above it, drawing from its energies to maintain suspension and beat back whatever else is coming up from it and vying to challenge us and consume us. Neat trick; cool! But we know from experience that that party eventually comes to an end. 

Part of that process for me means turning away spiritually from the collective and modern industrial conception of the great as a finished and tradeable product, striving ever higher and away, and turning back towards what is perpetually being birthed right here in front of me, for better or for worse. 

This is nothing new, radical or special, and indeed, revealing some vulnerability is something all sorts of people do all the time, and it doesn't move mountains by itself by any means. But it is certainly an important part of the work I see myself as trying to do; it is an important part of the ritual. It is too easy to engage in virtue signaling now to try to walk some kind of earnest "path of virtue," but if one can see with any clarity what is really going on, one should do what one can to become further aware of those dimensions and at least angle in that direction.