W: LP: GRP: BS: Distraction

Distraction by Bruce Sterling

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Published in 1998, the story takes place in the years 2044 to 2045, but it is a thinly veiled commentary on what is going on currently (as of this writing--c.2011AD). Mr. Sterling is a skilled writer, so the story gets a higher rating because he has accomplished the first goal of publishing a book--it needs to entertain. I was entertained and found some of the ideas in the story quite interesting; it's worth your time to read this novel. I liked a number of passages in this book, so I'll quote them here:



[Quote:]

It had never occurred to the lords of the consumer society that consumerism as a political philosophy might one day manifest the grave systemic instabilities that Communism had. But as those instabilities multiplied, the country had cracked. Civil society shriveled in the pitiless reign of cash. As the last public spaces were privatized*, it became harder and harder for American culture to breath. Not only were people broke, but they were driven to madness by commercials, and pitilessly surveilled by privacy-invading hucksters. An ever more aggressive consumer-outreach apparatus caused large numbers of people to simply abandon their official identities.

It was no longer any fun to be an American citizen. Bankruptcies multiplied beyond all reason, becoming a kind of commercial apostasy. Tax dodging became a spectator sport. The American people simply ceased to behave. They gathered publicly to burn their licenses, chop up their charge cards, and hit the road. The proles considered themselves the only free Americans.

[Unquote.]

[Quote:]

She looked at him with sudden pity. "Poor Oscar. You've got it all backward. That's not why I feel guilty. I'm guilty because I know it's going to work. Talking with those Moderators for so long...I really understand it now. Science truly is going to change. It'll still be 'Science.' It'll have the same intellectual structure, but its political structure will be completely different. Instead of being poorly paid government workers, we'll be avant-garde dissident intellectuals for the dispossessed. And that will work for us. Because we can get a better deal from them now than we can from the government. The proles are not so new; they're just like big, hairy, bad-smelling college students. We can deal with people like that. We do it all the time."

He brightened. "Are you sure?"

"It'll be like a new academia, with some krewe feudal elements. It'll be a lot like the Dark Ages, when universities were little legal territories all their own, and scholars carried maces and wore little square hats, and whenever the university was crossed, they sent huge packs of students into the streets to tear everything up, until they got their way. Except it's not the Dark Ages right now. It's the Loud Ages, it's the Age of Noise. We've destroyed our society with how much we know, and how quickly and how randomly we can move it around. We live in the Age of Noise, and this is how we learn to be the scientists of the Age of Noise. We don't get to be government functionaries who can have all the money we want just because we give the government a lot of military-industrial knowledge. That's all over now. From now on we're going to be like other creative intellectuals. We're going to be like artists or violin-makers, with our little krewes of fans who pay attention and support us."

"Wonderful, Greta. It sounds great!"

"We'll do cute, attractive, sexy science, with small amounts of equipment. That's what science has to be in America now. We can't do it the European way, where there's all kinds of moral fretting and worrying about what technology will do to people; there's no fun in that, it's just not American. We'll be like Orville Wright in the bicycle shed from now on. It won't be easier for us. It'll be harder for us. But we'll have our freedom. Our American freedom. It's a vote of confidence in the human imagination."

[Unquote:]







*I don't think Bruce foresaw America's sudden lurch toward statism or the 2008 beginning of our economic collapse.



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W: LP: GRP: AR: We The Living 04

We the Living: 60th Anniversary Edition by Ayn Rand

from page 376 (and I ask this question of the corporatist oligarchy masquerading as a Republic here in the USA):

"But you've tried to tell us what we should want. You came as a solemn army to bring new life to men*. You tore that life you knew nothing about, out of their guts--and you told them what it had to be. You took their every hour, every minute, every nerve, every thought in the farthest corners of their souls--and you told them what it had to be. You came and you forbade life to the living. You've driven us all into an iron cellar and you've closed all doors, and you've locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it's doing to us.

Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left--look!"

[Unquote.]

*In our case it was an army of salesmen followed by a galactic sized force of bureaucrats, do-gooders, utopianist experimenters, and many other cozy country club betrayers and revilers of God.

W: LP: GRP: AR: We The Living 03

We the Living: 60th Anniversary Edition by Ayn Rand

Here is another scene from this novel that captures the betrayal of the revolution by that lowest of human types, "the climber" or "the opportunist", the Grima Wormtongue:

[Quote:]

"Comrade!" Morozov panted. "Let me go!"

"Sit still!" Timoshenko roared. "Pour yourself a glass and drink. Do you hear me? Drink, you bastard! Drink and listen!"

Morozov obeyed; his glass tinkled, shaking, against the bottle.

"You see," said Timoshenko, as if each word were tearing his throat on its way out, "I don't mind that we're beaten. I don't mind that we've taken the greatest of crimes on our shoulders and then let it all slip through our fingers. I wouldn't mind it if we had been beaten by a tall warrior in a steel helmet, a human dragon spitting fire. But we're beaten by a louse. A big, fat, slow, blond louse. Ever seen lice? The blond ones are the fattest...It was our own fault. Once, men were ruled with a god's thunder. Then they were ruled with a sword. Now they're ruled with a Primus.* Once, they were held by reverence. Then they were held by fear. Now they're held by their stomachs. Men have worn chains on their necks, and on their wrists, and on their ankles. Now they're enchained by their rectums. Only you don't hold heroes by their rectums. It was our own fault."

"Comrade, for God's sake, comrade, why tell it all to me?"

"We started building a temple. Do we end with a chapel? No! And we don't even end with an outhouse. We end with a musty kitchen with a second-hand stove! We set fire under a kettle and we brewed and stirred and mixed blood and fire and steel. What are we fishing now out of the brew? A new humanity? Men of granite? Or at least a good and horrible monster? No! Little puny things that wiggle. Little things that can bend both ways, little double-jointed spirits. Little things that don't even bow humbly to be whipped. No! They take the lash obediently and whip themselves! Ever sat at a social-activity club meeting? Should. Do you good. Learn a lot about the human spirit."

"Comrade!" Morozov breathed. "What do you want? Is it money you want? I'll pay. I'll..."

Timoshenko laughed so loudly that heads turned and Morozov cringed, trying not to be noticed. "You louse!" Timoshenko roared laughing. "You fool, near-sighted, demented louse! Who do you think you're talking to? Comrade Victor Dunaev? Comrade Pavel Syerov?
Comrade..."

"Comrade!" Morozov roared, so that heads turned to him, but he did not care any longer. "You...you...you have no right to say that! I have nothing whatever to do with Comrade Syerov! I..."

"Say," Timoshenko remarked slowly, "I only said you should have. You and he and Victor Dunaev. And about one million others--with Party cards and stamps affixed. The winners and the conquerors. Those who crawl. That, pal, is the great slogan of the men of the future: those who crawl. Listen, do you know how many millions of eyes are watching us across land and oceans? They're not very close and they can't see very well. They see a big shadow rising. They think it's a huge beast. They're too far to see that it's soft and brownish and fuzzy. You know, fuzzy, a glistening sort of fuzz. They don't know that it's made of cockroaches. Little, glossy, brown cockroaches, packed tight, one on the other, into a huge wall. Little cockroaches that keep silent and wiggle their whiskers. But the world is too far to see the whiskers. That's what's wrong with the world, Comrade Morozov: they don't see the whiskers!"

"Comrade! Comrade, what are you talking about?"

"They see a black cloud and they hear thunder. They've been told that behind the cloud, blood is running freely, and men fight, and men kill, and men die. Well, what of it? They, those who watch, are not afraid of blood. There's an honor in blood. But do they know that it's not blood we're bathed in, it's puss. Listen, I'll give you advice. If you want to keep this land in your tentacles, tell the world that you're chopping heads off for breakfast and shooting men by the regiment. Let the world think that you're a huge monster to be feared and respected and fought honorably. But don't let them know that yours is not an army of heroes, nor even of fiends, but of shriveled bookkeepers with a rupture who've learned to be arrogant. Don't let them know that you're not to be shot, but to be disinfected. Don't let them know that you're not to be fought with cannons, but with carbolic acid!"

[Unquote, emphasis mine.]

*The Primus was the name of the small cooking/lamps using kerosene and ubiquitous in the common usage by the citizens of Petrograd and represents the meager consumer/comfort device allowed to the proletariat.

W: LP: GRP: PL: Solomon Among the Postmoderns: 03

Here are some closing quotes from PJL's book:

[Quote:]

"Vapor" pictures the world as impossible to control. But vapor is also a veil, a screen. Think of how hard it is to drive through a thick fog. Everything disappears. You know there's still a world and a road out there, but the vapor keeps them hidden away. To say that all is vapor is to say that it's hiding something, and Solomon is suggesting that the vapor of the world screens us from God himself, who for the time being, "under the sun," modestly remains behind the veil of the vaporous world.

We don't yet see God putting everything right. We don't see the sovereign hand of poetic justice. Innocents die, sages are ignored, moral pygmies rule the airwaves and the movie screens and many nations. That's what it's like to live in a world of vapor. And that's just what we should expect once we wake from our modern Promethean nap and realize we are creatures, mad from dust, living in a world made from nothing at all. On what were we drunk when we began to imagine we could figure it all out?

[Unquote.]

W: LP: GRP: PL: Solomon Among the Postmoderns: 02

Here is some more Peter Leithart from his book, “Solomon Among the Postmoderns”; these thoughts are useful to me in constructing the specifics of the aesthetic I will try to apply to a Steampunk story (consider that an alternate history in which the rate of modernization and technological advancement in mechanics, including mechanical computers has advanced to give analogous steam-tech solutions to society’s technology needs would all the more create the social pressure toward a post-modern effect):

[Quote:]

Postmodern skepticism also arises from the intensification of scientific progress: as science becomes more and more specialized, it becomes less and less obvious that it is all one project. The very successes of modern science produce a postmodern ghettoization, an inversion of modernity that produces postmodern tribalism—the tribe of physicists at war with the tribe of biologists, and each tribe plagued by its own subtribes—astrophysicists versus particle physicists, biochemists versus microbiologists.

Alongside these inversions, postmodernism unmasks truths that modern science has tried to hide. The truth, for instance, that scientific experiments require very special conditions and constraints and therefore don’t offer the direct and transparent access to nature that they pretend to. Science has acted as if scientific methods quietly seduce Dame Nature to unveil herself to expert gaze, naked and unashamed; postmodernists often see science as something more like gang rape. To take another instance, postmodernists unmask the truth that scientific theories are never as uncontested as the textbooks make them appear. There are always anomalous facts that stubbornly refuse to fit the elegant lines of the dominant paradigm, and there are always cranks who gleefully point out where the undergarments are showing through the straining seams of theory.

[Unquote, p.80-81]

[Quotes from p.100-101]

Under the sun, during this time, we are surrounded by diffusion, differance, death, and decay. Under the sun, the self is elusive, and we all die. Solomon says there is no profit “under the sun,” that is, there is no apparent accumulation, no guarantee of surplus or progress. Under the sun, our projects slip from our fingers like mist. Under the sun, we cannot get a panoramic view of the times and seasons, cannot tell a master story that organizes and places every event of history. In this time under the sun, all is vapor—our lives, our books, our words, our projects. All is so much futile shepherding wind.

~

How can Solomon, after emphasizing the vaporous character of reality, speak with the confidence he does? The key to understanding Solomon is to recognize that he deliberately limits his observations to what is true “under the sun” or “under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1: cf. 1:3, 9, 14; 2:11, 17-18; etc.)

~

Unlike most postmoderns, however, Solomon does not believe that the world “under the sun” is the only world there is. One of the things Solomon says he knows is that God will bring all wickedness to judgment (3:16-17). He knows this, but he doesn’t know it by observation of the world. Observation of the world would lead him to the somber conclusion that the wicked will triumph. If Solomon knows that God will judge the world, that every wrong will be put right, it is because he trusts that God will not let evil triumph forever. Like Abraham, Solomon knows that the God who is the Judge of all the earth will do right.

In knowing that God will judge, Solomon also knows that Derrida is wrong: waiting for the messianic is not fruitless waiting. There is a final word, a word that closes out the time under the sun and begins the time after the time under the sun, a word that sets the final horizon for all words, all thoughts, all selves. And this omega-word is, Christians confess, also the alpha-word, Word who was from the beginning, the living Word who is with God and who is God, the living Word. The words of the wise who fear him are not vaporous breath but “well-driven nails.” For Solomon and for Christian faith, there is a time after the time under the sun, and scripture teaches that there is treasure, a surplus beyond imagining, waiting for us there (Matt. 6:20; 1 Pet. 1:3-5). In the time after the time under the sun, there is a judgment, a final word. In the time after the time after the sun, death and decay are swallowed up in incorruptible life.

[Unquote:]