Another Veterans day has passed 
. Whenever we wrap ourselves in the flag, I feel slightly uncomfortable. My emotions range from pride to irritation; solemnity to aggravation. I’m practically pro and anti-nationalist. It inevitably ends with genuine (and startlingly sincere) gratitude toward those who serve. They put their money down, unlike we freeloaders.
It’s not enough for me to claim that I’m bi-polar with regard to nationalistic holidays. It’s more a borderline patriotic insanity. Ultimately, it’s another occasion where I marvel at our collectively contradictory nature.
When reflecting on our modern, global position, the faithful and patriotic among us will proclaim it providence. We’re the inheritors of a vast empire, we run the world’s trade system, and we have what may be the most favorable geography of any nation in the world. Providence? There’s another word for this: Luck.
But none of us approach such subject with anything even resembling honest inquiry. We choose the story we like best. I’m no different. My story isn’t very coherent, but there are a few strains that are predictably formed by my geopolitical readings.
Those amazing Romans
Brad DeLong just made me aware of a great Wired piece by Charlie Sorrel.
What have the Romans ever done for us? Well, it turns out that back somewhere between A.D 201 to 300, a clever Roman, probably named MacGyvericus, invented the multitool. And not just some weird, old-fashioned multitool, either. MacGyvericus’ tool is startlingly similar to the modern Swiss Army Knife, now part of the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. (Sorrel)
Look at the thing. It’s unusually modern in appearance. This single artifact (like the Antikythera before it) throws my own cartoonish historical mental pictures into the trash heap. I can’t have an accurate picture of a people when an 1,800 year old multitool looks this contemporary. I have nowhere to file it.
This is relevant because cultures evolve, are multi-faceted, and frequently defy easy description. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that hundreds of years of Roman History has been unfairly squeezed together and essentially amounts to a bunch of pictures of spears, Christian-eating Lions, crosses, and statues. The reality is, by necessity, more nuanced, and far more alien than we realize.
American adolescence revisited
Back in January, I posted my first series exploring the coolest parts of The Next 100 Years, by George Friedman. In my post, America the Moody Adolescent, I noted Friedman’s really great description of the three stages of culture, which I’ve re-quoted.
Cultures live in one of three states. The first state is barbarism. Barbarians believe that the customs of their village are the laws of nature and that anyone who doesn’t live the way they live is beneath contempt and requiring redemption or destruction. The third state is decadence. Decadents cynically believe that nothing is better than anything else. If they hold anyone in contempt, it is those who believe in anything. Nothing is worth fighting for.
Civilization is the second and most rare state. Civilized people are able to balance two contradictory thoughts in their minds. They believe that there are truths and that their cultures approximate those truths. At the same time, they hold open in their mind the possibility that they are in error. The combination of belief and skepticism is inherently unstable. Cultures pass through barbarism to civilization and then to decadence, as skepticism undermines self-certainty. Civilized people fight selectively but effectively. Obviously all cultures contain people who are barbaric, civilized, or decadent, but each culture is dominated at different times by one principle. (The Next 100 Years, page 29, emphasis mine)
Friedman makes the claim that America is a barbaric culture. Whatever our partisan narratives have to say about this statement, it’s no use here. Those narratives ignore a more interesting – and quite provocative – story. But to appreciate this, we have to skip ahead to another chapter of Friedman’s book.
Creative destruction and the computer
Creative Commons image by eurleif (Leif K-Brooks) at Flickr
From demographics to women’s suffrage to urbanization – modern life is turning historical norms on their ear. America is a major force in ushering in those changes. It’s what we don’t mean to say when we say the word globalization. There’s a reason that airplane-wielding fundamentalists have American in their targets. America is the standard bearer for modernity: It’s new, it’s strange, and it’s downright scary.
Let’s look at this from another perspective, that of technology. As the American Age opens, the United States has a vested interest in the destruction of traditional social patterns, which creates a certain amount of instability and gives the United States maximum room to maneuver. American culture is an uneasy melding of the Bible and the computer, of traditional values and radical innovation. But along with demography, it is the computer that is reshaping American culture and is the real foundation of American cultural hegemony. (The Next 100 Years, page 61, emphasis mine)
This part of Friedman’s book gets pretty weird. So much of his geopolitical discourse can seem detached, scholarly, and cold. Then he’ll slap me in the face with something downright philosophical and I’ll lose my bearings. This section of the book felt like a bad Monty Python routine where I’m repeatedly slapped by a fish.
Computers crunch data and this is valuable, but it also causes us to approach the very act of reasoning in a whole new way.
It is a powerful and seductive tool. Yet it operates using a logic that lacks other, more complex, elements of reason. The computer focuses ruthlessly on things that can be represented in numbers. By doing so, it also seduces people into think that other aspects of knowledge are either unreal or unimportant. The computer treats reason as an instrument for achieving things, not for contemplating things. It narrows dramatically what we mean and intend by reason. But within that narrow realm, the computer can do extraordinary things. (The Next 100 Years, page 62, emphasis mine)
Eroding complexity
Obviously, American pragmatism predates the computer, but it seems fitting that what we identify as computer culture started as a mostly American phenomenon. It fits us. This is something that we’re proud of – geeks doubly so. But there’s reason for concern.
If we look for the essence of American culture, it is not only in pragmatism as a philosophy but also in the computer as the embodiment of pragmatism. Nothing exemplifies American culture more than the computer, and nothing has transformed the world faster and more thoroughly than its advent. The computer, far more than Coca-Cola, represents the unique manifestation of the American concept of reason and reality.
Computing culture is also, by definition, barbaric. The essence of barbarism is the reduction of culture to a simple, driving force that will tolerate no diversion or competition. The way the computer is designed, the manner in which it is programmed, and the way it has evolved represents a powerful, reductionist force. It constitutes not reason contemplating its complexity, but reason reducing itself to its simplest expression and justifying itself through practical achievement. (The Next 100 Years, page 63, emphasis mine)
It’s digital, not analog. After reading this stuff, that simple distinction somehow means more than it did before. And at once, I have all these pictures of modern America swimming into focus that seem to make a strange sense.
Think of our government’s binary political system. Think of those people you’ve met who think that if it’s on the ‘net or printed in a book it must be true. Think of traditionalist religious folks employing social networks to achieve specific political ends with a disregard for messy factual details, all using the most advanced technical tools ever devised by specialists. Think of the valuations – currency or otherwise – that we make without regard to that contemplation of complexity.
The computer is the starkest picture of the future that we can imagine. But framed in this way, it’s seems decidedly less futuristic. The on/off states seem to cascade through our culture. None of the preceding is only American, of course. But I wonder how much of it is has more power thanks to our ready embrace of technologies we employ solely on the basis of their reductionist utility.
Getting to the Point
Getting from there to here may be a bit of a stretch. I might be seeing shadows or reinforcing some misconceptions, so forgive – and please correct – me if that’s so. But lots thoughts like these have been nagging at me for years and I’ve had a really hard time making sense of them. The multitool simply pushed a large ball of tangled thoughts down a very steep hill.
I eschew the simple analogy that America is Rome, therefore America is on the brink of collapse. That’s silly. Such a story ignores the mountain of differences, both historical and structural, at work in America. But that’s not to say that there aren’t similarities.
To me, that the Roman multitool represents the same force of creativity and barbarism I see at work in American culture. Around two thousand years ago there lived a culture that was magnificent, horrifying, educated, and savage. With a series of military acts – justified as a defensive necessity – these people conquered or politically dominated most of the known world. They built a vast trade infrastructure and created institutions and tools that have echoed through the ages.
Sound familiar?
EDIT: The holiday is actually November 11. However, my son’s Veteran’s Day performance was yesterday (November 9) and I found incorrect online information that claimed it is always on a Monday (so I thought it was November 8). Please forgive this error.
