Spring Forward

Part of the climate in the Pacific Northwest - and plenty of other regions as well - involves an oscillation of cold and warm weather throughout spring, an intermediate for winter transitioning into summer. That transition though seems jerkier and jankier every year, like a car's failing transmission steadily getting worse, with the gears grinding ever more tortuously through a shift. 

You have the remnants of your winter storms coming and going throughout the spring, a little warmer and a little more subdued than they were in the winter. But then when the sun comes out, it feels hot and intense like it does in the summer, much more suddenly. The flora and fauna seem to think so too. You get this, "oh shit we gotta get going!" The bugs are out and getting busy and the flower buds are popping, and then, all of a sudden the temperature plummets again and you're back to late winter/early spring, and everything gets the signal that it's not quite time, and to go dormant again, but then not long after that hot sun is back and blazing again.   

What was before a more gradual warming has become an abrupt and almost rude imposition of the summer, earlier and earlier. Evidence of an increasingly imperial summer. 

What to Fear?

For a vivid illustration of the dangers of ill-considered thought and its relation to the real, a brief survey of the operations of political fear could be quite useful. 

Let's start with a more basic conception of fear. You have these fear responses that are evolutionarily hardwired for certain old antagonisms, like for dangerous insects and snakes, apex predators, predatory and/or aggressive human emotions and behaviors, and then scaling up, explosive forces, loud unidentified rumbles and/or noises, earthquakes, approaching fires and floods, and so on. 

These fear responses can differ per individual, but for the most part, there is a universal collection of elemental threats that by exist simply by virtue of the way in which we are all built. 

As social organization becomes progressively more materially and politically complex however, the ques start to change. When you're living among a greater population, there is always going to be some portion of that population that is subjected to certain elemental threats (when they come) first, and so you are also taking cues from others and their reported experiences and information to judge whether you are going to be coming into danger next. That person yelling from the bush over yonder about getting bit by a poisonous snake is a good cue not to go by that bush, which is simplifying things a bit too much I know, but you get the point. And to a certain extent we are also hardwired to pick up on those compounded social cues too, which adds additional considerations, such as the nature and intensity of another's emotions and register, and how convincing it all is, and what it means for us. 

Not only that, but with growing material and political complexity comes an increasing complexity in society's powers of production and destruction, and so the intelligible sequences of motion that result in the more elemental destructive forces become more complex as well, so it takes more thinking and deciphering to make sense of those cues of increasing complexity. As we are gradually socialized into a modern society from a young age, part of that socialization involves modulating and shaping those innate fear responses to encourage appropriate social behavior on the one hand, and then training the executive controls through teaching to properly ascertain and navigate the complex dangers of the modern world on the other hand. 

To be redundant for a minute, this socialization process is quite social though, and at greater scales, it becomes quite political too. The process in which power concentrates is in itself a complex, multifaceted process, but part of that concentration takes place to better manage material complexity - as a side note, I'll have to interrogate our notions of complexity and simplicity at another time. In the same way, we collectivity concentrate particular symbols, narratives, and ideologies to think about that complexity as well, which forged through collective intellectual and cultural labor and repeated usage, are then regularly circulated whole to help guide us in our daily lives.  

These collective symbols and ideologies prescribe certain daily perceptions and actions, and so order large masses of organized labor and institutions to move and function in a certain way and in a certain direction, together. It becomes clear why such concentrated systems of thought would become such hotly contested political sites, which results in all kinds of additional complications in navigating daily modern life. Collective fears can become further entrenched through tribal signaling and alliance, and through the forging of personal and national identity through this process. And to be clear, there can be real advantages and benefits to participate in certain factions and share their preferred fearful fixations, given you are the right demographic to be plugged in with a given faction. 

One good example would be the US' political culture at the height of the War on Terror. The political class - and capital standing behind it - was very interested in directing the popular fear, that Eye of Sauron, towards the Middle East and its peoples, and to a lesser extent, towards other hot spots around the world where military action was desired, which would cultivate a public sensibility that would facilitate that action. Which created some very interesting distortions. 

You had people on the lookout for the much rarer terror attack - and forget the white people with guns; we really had to watch out for the brown people - or anthrax powder in the mail, while industrial agriculture and the fossil fuel industry and mass automobile transportation and financial crisis and abandonment hummed away in the background, chewing through the body politic with regular ambient heart disease and cancer and literal car crashes, or the economically exploited and abandoned committed suicide by firearm or overdosed via opioid, or died via homelessness and exposure, and so on down the list of real modern threats to life. 

All of that directed stress and anxiety and anger is energy intensive in itself. It beats your body up; it exhausts your mind. Arthritis, gut issues, hypertension, depression, etc. It can drive you to drink, which can accelerate all of that other stuff too. 

What's more, the collective contestations of the objects of danger can themselves be sites of danger. Disagreements arise over what to fear, and what to do about those fears with social resources, disagreements that become welded through conflict to one's identity, increasing the propensity and explosiveness of potential conflict. 

And all of these issues remain chronic today, and indeed are growing worse. To listen to the discourse out of Washington, it is China and foreign invasion which is the great threat today. Nevermind that the domestic oligarchs and the domestic political class become ever more bold about exacting blood from the stone, wringing what life is left from the body politic. And forget climate change altogether. That's someone else's problem. 

So, pretty much everyone has the capacity to fear something, and as you can see, in the modern world that something can have its genesis in a dizzying array of sources, which could be sources of real danger or phantoms of the imagination. It bears thinking about and training that capacity to fear, at least to the extent that one can reduce what risks one can in one's own life, as bad thinking and bad consideration can actually be quite dangerous. 

To point to a simpler metaphor, a survival manual will tell you that ankle deep water may not look very frightening, as compared to a swollen river or a mudslide, but if that water is moving swiftly enough, it can trip up and sweep away a grown adult. And what is in that water and where that water is going matters too. 

In regard to risk though, we all die eventually, and one can't anticipate little thing besides. As hopefully I've shown here, there is a lot to take stock of and consider when working through one's thoughts and fears, and the path forward is not always clear. And then part of longevity is finding it in oneself to chill out altogether, when appropriate. Working through the dangers of thought and its relation to action then figures a lifetime of work. More later. 

Crag

       

Oh You Can Do That?

I've seen this one happen enough times that I feel it might just be safe to call it from the hip. But this is assuming that the US political system in its current raggedy-ass form survives another 4 or (lawd help us) 8 year cycle, turning over power in a manner we've deemed recognizable for the last couple of decades. 

What I'm referring to is this: yes, the contradictory pressures that the feckless Democrats produce in their activities does eventually build up enough force to carry those waves of discontent that sweep the Republicans back into power, but then after the GOP is in and smashing everything up, folks eventually get tired of the bull-in-the-china-shop routine and vote the Democrats back in. 

But what often happens is that as that smashing and flailing has gone on, things open up and change enough that the Democrats look at it and realize, "oh wow you can actually do that," and so they timidly try some of that smashing themselves, at least a little more quiet-like and politely, and they might clean up the worst of the mess in the process to maintain some propriety.  

I've experienced this directly in demolition, of all activities. I'm gingerly pulling at a slat of wood with a hammer claw, trying to pry up the nails while trying to keep everything intact, and someone with more experience than me walks up and says, "No no time is money here gimme the hammer, just pull it this way and smash it that way like this, and if that doesn't work take the hatchet and chop it like this, and if that doesn't work saw off the nails with a hacksaw or a grinder wheel like this..." and so on. And then once I saw someone else do the thing, and knew what was possible, and had a clearer idea of what the objective was, I could be a bit more aggressive with the demo and actually get things done. 

The problem with this analogy though is that here we are talking about a circumscribed job site with a clear objective governed by people who know what they are doing and what results they are after. In a certain sense the political class does know what they are doing in order to get ahead in a certain limited environment and paradigm. But then what is the objective? Where is it all going? And what does it mean to be successful when your success is decoupled from any sort of halfway "objective" measure of political and economic health of the political body that you're serving?

In the modern era, what passes for that measure seems to be yoked to the movements and operations and preferences of capital, with global governments attempting to ride that tiger while at the same time making appeals to it and attempting to steer it in each nation's particular interest. 

So in the US, the Democrats proceed to quietly continue a lot of the pioneering Republican policies, shedding the excesses and slapping their trademarked smiley face sticker back on the faceplate. But of course these cycles occur within larger cycles themselves. We've been seeing this dynamic since the Reagan era at least, and then before that we had the thunderclap of the FDR regime and the New Deal, whose own particular decaying echoes graced the land for some time, until subsequently collapsing into the Reagan era. 

In our present cycle, a lot of the effort of the political class consists of getting all of the protestations and creaks and cracks and screeching metal and other grievous noises to shut up as they continue to dismantle what is left of organized labor and the regulatory state set up during and after the World Wars, so that they and their buddies in the oligarchy could get bigger and stronger and loot better and quicker. 

And this is a continuation of the larger neoliberal project, but which is shifting over into something new. It can't all be demolition, as fun and satisfying as that can be. Eventually you have to clear out the wreckage and plant or build something nice. But in this case there is a whole lot of material to demo, and there is still a whole lot that can be taken apart, and that seems to be the only thing any of these people really want (or know how) to do. And you usually have to have something nice or somewhere nice to start from, where the nice stuff comes from to build the nice things somewhere else. What do you get when you trash all of it? And then keep on trashing? Just more trash. And then eventually when it does come time to build - and we are seeing this in an embryonic form now - you just build nice heaps of garbage made out of trash. 

The political class has been getting so high off of their own product for so long, and we've been moving collectively through these gargantuan trauma cycles for so long, which are difficult to comprehend clearly as individuals, that it has become difficult to establish any kind of productive collective goal or direction, beyond what gets articulated with the most force as countless factions struggle to assert their own distorted visions, making their own desperate attempts to make a mark when they have the power. 

And in this self-referential, cyclical churn, you may have various political and economic problems addressed incidentally (while multitudes more are produced) as the various self-interested actors tackle their respective pet projects for prestige, favor, and treasure, and the system continues to evolve in the direction of least resistance, as it were, but without a larger guiding direction, it is difficult to tell where the greater churn will end up, and what sets of consequences result from that. 

I should qualify though: there is a general direction that can still guide national politics in the US, depending on what is still possible, given where the power is flowing and concentrating, and that's down and apart. Sure, we have some great rock-n-roller types coming out of local politics and local activism, which could take quite some time to manifest at larger scales. But national politics? Put a fork in that one, as they say. 

On Friction

I've been expressing this basic idea in several forms every couple of months, so let's hit it from another angle this time. 

Part of the craft I've been developing over the years involves tracing all the processes of destruction - and the motion resulting in that destruction - to express the ongoing state of world affairs. Expressing an image of constant acceleration within a cultivated state of mind creates a sense of urgency and alarm, focusing the attention, and in some cases, prescribing a collection of appropriate actions, or at the very least, anticipations. 

But you do have to work friction in its many forms into this analysis, which affects the velocity of events, whether local or global. It is not all acceleration all the time. To put it another way, as countless mythologies and religions have expressed, creation and destruction are closely related, and oftentimes you find a single deity at the center of both faces. 

To cite one deceptively simple example, take a clearcut (or to recap: the cutting and harvesting of timber on an industrial scale). Personally I don't like clearcuts categorically: they destroy root structures, forest soils and their micro-organisms, habitat, and the stocks of older and larger trees which tend to be better carbon sinks. It heats up and dries out that part of the forest, and the winds can really get going through them with the loss in resistance. And you get erosion when it rains, as the soil has been broken apart and destroyed, and is no longer held together by plant-life. That and they just look awful. Fresh ones that appear where you are used to seeing forest are a bit of a shock. 

But not everyone around here has a problem with them, at least in certain circumstances. They free up views for one thing, and less superficially, they can make for good firebreaks depending on their location and extent. They allow more snowfall to reach the ground, which can percolate into the soil and refill groundwater reservoirs, depending on where the water is going and what the land can hold (to be balanced against a general drying out of the soil). They also clear the ground for other plant species to flourish, which could be good or bad, depending on the observer. 

The same is the case with wildfires. I don't think I have to get into much more detail here about why they are a problem. We've covered good and recent ground on that one. But smaller wildfires are known to be good for various ecosystems, in which built up undergrowth and dead materials are burned up, releasing their constituents into the soil, freeing up space for fresh plant life, resetting the process of succession in the region. A robust forest ecosystem can stagnate, with the fit incumbents strangling out new growth. And an accumulation of drying out and decaying plant matter on the ground can lead to even bigger and more destructive fires in the future. And indeed, countless indigenous cultures have used controlled burns for thousands of years to shape the ecosystems they are a part of in their favor, and in favor of taking care of the land itself as its own interest. 

But there is usually a direction that all of this is going. Part of fleshing out the oppositional forces of motion and friction of a thing is judging just exactly how fast the thing is going, the duration of that speed, and where it is going as well. It is the whole of these considerations that allows one to perceive and judge whether a wildfire or a clearcut for example, is a desirable thing in a certain context to a given observer. And then so on to judging bigger and more complex things.  

A clearcut may have a certain set of interacting costs and benefits local to where it is formed, but then clearcut after clearcut driven by a voracious demand for lumber predicated on exploitation without reciprocity, on a constantly widening and intensifying scale, is a very different subject for analysis. And the same is the case for wildfires. 

To further complicate all of this, we could continue to nitpick the very concepts of acceleration and friction themselves. After all, it is the resistance offered by friction that makes the kind of acceleration and motion we are so fond of possible. It is the meeting of the "rubber on the road" that provides that grip that makes a car go. And though impressive they may be, those successive explosions in a combustion engine wouldn't be doing much if they weren't contained, and coming up against the resistance of the pistons to do the specific desired work, producing the desired motion in the desired direction. 

Part of teasing out the oppositional forces of acceleration and friction involves judging the proportions and ratios of those oppositions, and in turn determining the relative velocity that those ratios and proportions are helping to bring about. 

To cap it all off, pieces like these are meant to add a little friction to the acceleration of my more "expressive" pieces, in the hopes of modulating the results of the analysis. Why "express" these things with such urgency and color? What is it all about? At times it makes sense to make a strong emphasis with some punch, and at other times it makes sense to dial it back, but what is most likely to come out in the wash is this: too much too soon, and in the wrong direction, and here's why. And if there is anything left to be done, what might that be?

Arms Around The Real

There goes another fallow period, fallow for various reasons I don't really want to get into. Let's get back to it. 

In the interest of getting ahead of the heaps of theoretical and speculative material I have coming together in future posts - which I've been repeatedly promising I know - I wanted to do a couple of the usual metacognitive pieces to preemptively pump the brakes a bit. 

Part of this is attributable to my affinity for sweeping narratives and analytical syntheses across many disciplines, all of which I put together in an unprofessional and "homegrown" manner. I intend to get further into this issue in another post. 

For now though, every realm of the intellect (and body and spirit for that matter) has its share of character-specific strengths and pitfalls: philosophy, the sciences, history, myth, the arts, mysticism, occultism, political economy, the material trades and crafts, etc. And I try to synthesize those realms on the cheap, hopefully while making use of their various strengths and insights while avoiding their weaknesses and traps; that is, when the realms aren't bleeding into one another naturally. 

With mixed results I know. And I've talked about homegrown craft before, which can have some interesting products of its own, and from my unique position straddling all of these disparate traditions in a somewhat unique stance, I think it is possible to produce something useful and illuminating in this way, and which accords with certain appropriate practical and material realities. 

If anything, it seems easier than ever to do something like this. Through internet technologies and powerful means of data storage and distribution, generation upon generation of accumulated knowledge and technique and tradition, and an incomprehensible array of historical developments and accumulated strata of tradition and wealth and resources, I personally have access to bottomless stores of data and powerful ideas without too much inconvenience. 

One corollary to this though is the analogous circumstance in which any yahoo with a quantitatively appropriate collection of social wealth can stroll into a hardware store and purchase a chainsaw - an incredible and powerful machine - and take it home, which can result in anything from vastly improved productivity working with timber to complete bodily ruin, depending on how the thing is used, which I've talked about before as well. 

Now, symbolic expressions - which can help shape our thoughts and guide our actions - can be quite dangerous themselves, though maybe not as immediately or materially as a chainsaw can be. But they can do plenty of damage in longer timeframes, and damage like that can really sneak up on you, whereas with the chainsaw that trench you just cut into your leg speaks for itself. Just as certain operational protocols can make a huge difference in how a chainsaw is used - and what results it achieves - I think there are plenty of methods to make use of when it comes to thinking about thinking, and thinking about how those thoughts are used. 

I suppose that for any kind of thinking, one of the more important methods consists of making one's thoughts fit as much to the real as possible. Naturally, what the real really is can be quite difficult if not impossible to describe, and that is part of the point here: part of the process is constantly engaging in the process itself. Once one begins to assume eternal solid ground and a fully intelligible (and capturable) reality, the trouble begins.   

There are so many distorting layers of basic perception and observation, personal and biological interest, historical distance, fragmentation of viewpoints, and the evolution and transformation of ideology, among many other factors, that from the get-go are wont to impose barriers to a seamless apprehension of what is "real," the pure concept of which could be written off as a theoretical placeholder for what really exists outside of our limited experience. 

That being said though, there is a fundamental way in which we emerge as individuals from the cosmos in time and space, and then are steadily transformed by it as we transform it in turn, subsisting in it for a period of time as something distinct from it, and there are certain parameters within which this process must be sustained, as a general necessity for all living things, and I might say that the whole of this could be approximated as reality. 

Since thoughts are part of and interact with the real, one way to do this is to deconstruct them and see where they go and where they are landing, where the anchor points are and what can safely be assumed to be bedrock, and therefore, axiomatic. But then the deconstructed thoughts eventually have to be put back together, at least if you don't want to just be an annoying gadfly, though admittedly there is a time and a place for those too.  

Easier said than done, and always done imperfectly perhaps. But worth keeping in mind certainly. 

I say easier said than done because all of us are regularly talking about reality and the real and etc. while what we are often referring to is a landscape filtered through that thought which is conventionally successful and/or stable. One's stable worldview is usually the real, accurate, objective truth, and while one is successfully living and breathing, everyone else's is potentially misguided. 

This is a common artifact of the way that we think, which is attributable to our nature as warm bodies that think as part of daily subsistence. You "throw" your thoughts back into the world that gave rise to them, as a means to act on that world to shape it ever-so-slightly to become more amenable to yourself, a process that is tethered to your self as successfully subsisting on this earthly realm. And then of course the pressure for this success grows exponentially as others and then wealth get involved, among other things. 

One of the more general pitfalls here is that there is so much knowledge and information out there, that one is constantly coming across ready-made ideas and worldviews, that by virtue of their visibility and durability are ready to be plucked up and made use of, and which ideas are picked up and used can have consequences not only for one's immediate life, but also one's station in the world. 

This offers an easy way out of the deconstruction and reconstruction phase. If you can reject some bit of failing conventional knowledge, and adopt something leaner and meaner, well then it seems you've got it. 

In a certain respect, this is unavoidable though. You can't take apart everything that exists and put everything back together at once because you can't be everywhere and everything at once. We rely on others (both past and present) to do some of this work, and we find people that we like and trust to do the job well, and we borrow what they have built and do something else with it. Indeed, another aspect of fitting one's thoughts to the real is identifying those one feels are also doing the work, and defer to them when appropriate. 

At the moment I'm thinking here of Corey Robin's wonderful writings on political and intellectual history, or Aurelien's excellent pieces on the inner workings of international relations and geopolitics. These writers are deconstructing terms such as "political fear, conservatism, and fascism," and "empire, diplomacy, and national interest," to list (not exhaustively) particular terms the authors explore respectively, and then reconstructing them in efforts to get at what is really going on under the hood, so to speak. 

There are many others that I read who are regularly doing that indispensable work in their own way, and I'll be referencing them in time, partly to show my work and partly to send the proper praise where it is due, among other reasons. Indeed, I find myself most drawn to writers such as these, as this regular bucking of convention, and a striving towards the real, tends to produce a unique and challenging language and signature, which is just so much more interesting and rewarding in the long run. One looks at the language and strains to make the connections and understand. In other words, one thinks and learns, as opposed to having one's prejudices massaged or one's sensibility entertained, though these elements can be present in moderation too; it certainly makes the reading sweeter. 

So, I want to refer to two particular examples to add some specificity to the process that I'm talking about here, and then I'll wrap things up. 

One thing a lot of folks like to do is reference ancient societies - or even a society in recent history, which I'll get to - to cast some light on our own. I do it myself with some regularity here. What is useful about that is that for the ancient societies we have a lot of information on - such as Rome - we can look at their evolution over time and pick up on certain discernable patterns and structures that arise in that given society's lifespan, and then compare those patterns and structures to the patterns and structures we can discern in our own society as itself passes through time, and make some guesses about where we are heading in relation to where we've been, using the full beginning-to-end account of a society like Rome as a measuring stick.     

These comparisons yield a lot of wonderful insights, providing yet another reason for me personally to be so enamored with the study of history. But a couple of goofy things can happen here too. At the risk of vastly oversimplifying the field of historical analysis, we have two major distortions of thought that are easy enough to identify, and which can prove instructive. 

First is taking the temporal distance - not all that vast on a geological timescale we should note - of an ancient society such as Rome to relegate it to a sort of intellectual quarantine, where it stands as a fundamentally alien society which is plenty interesting to study and think about, while remaining cordoned off, like a museum exhibit that one can squint at from behind the velvet rope. Admittedly this approach seems less and less popular as world affairs in our own time become ever more unstable, which encourages a shift into the opposite second distortion: that Rome is exactly like us and we're shuffling through some preconceived sequence of archetypal events which could be identified and analyzed in the Roman case, and then placed as an overlay upon our own trajectory, revealing a hidden cartography of impending ruin. 

And so the second distortion has us craning our necks and shielding our eyes, gazing out over the plains on the lookout for the approaching barbarians, while simultaneously bracing for kinetic civil war, looking for the literal signs of the encroaching End. 

To strike closer to home, these distortions have their analogue in the heated discussions of the US' slide into fascism as well. Not long ago, it was fashionable to cast Hitler's Germany as an anomalous alien growth that had to be excised from the collective Western world, with the heroic victors successfully vanquishing the demon, sealing its remnants in its tomb. Now it seems that Hitler is here and the enemy is us, and soon we'll all be rounded up, and so on. 

This is not to dismiss both distortions categorically and cast them away entirely. If you've read me any, you could probably guess which distortion I tend towards, though I do my best to temper the worst of that distortion's pitfalls. And both distortions contain in them certain instructive elements that can assist in guiding one's thought as they relate to one's actions and experience. But there is a general problem that I am getting at here that is common to both distortions: the tendency to place greater value in the calcified thought itself, without bothering to fit that thought to the real as one finds it. 

Getting at the real involves taking apart a given object of study, ascertaining its relations and how it is actually working, and then abstracting away those relations and functions so that they can be put back together to accord with one's current state of affairs. And just as importantly, one must relate all of this to one's own positionality moving through space and time: why is one thinking this way? What is the thought accomplishing in one's time? How does the thought relate to how one moves through life?

To relate back to our examples, what were the relations and structures operant within Rome - and Nazi Germany - and how did those relations and structures relate to and operate on our own state of affairs? And why spend the time and energy studying these things, and where is it all going? For that matter, these very subjects are constantly being taken apart and put back together again for various reasons and interests, and our understanding of them is constantly changing, simultaneously as our understanding of them as relating to our own time is changing too. 

All well and good, but I've only obliquely addressed the danger that I brought up earlier on in this discussion. As it happens, there is still a lot of ground to cover here; I don't think I've really adequately dealt with the issues brought up in this post, and the discussion has expanded beyond what I originally intended, so I'm going to have to flesh the rest of this out in a several separate subsequent posts in time. But hey, that's part of the point too: the process is never finished.