Mr. Kain has graciously invited me to start posting on the main page here at the League, so a more official introduction is probably in order.
Instead of writing about where I live and what I do, I thought a kind of genealogy of my political attitudes might be more helpful, and go a long way toward explaining my deeply conflicted outlook. For this there are really only two things you need to know about me: I was homeschooled for most of my childhood and I love Star Trek.
I’ll start with being homeschooled. Despite sending my older brother to public school from Kindergarten on, a place that he intuitively understood and where he excelled, my parents made me a test case for their anti-establishment philosophy on education. Despite the usual grammar lessons and math drills, I had a lot of time to draw, build with Legos, fumble around with Erector Sets, and indulge in a multitude of other creative pursuits. Hours spent reading had to be enforced, until one extended electrical outage found me sitting around the house all week with of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia; I’ve been devouring typeface ever since.
When 4th Grade arrived, I, fully believing in the value of yellow buses, afternoon recess, and brown-bagged lunches, convinced my parents to send me to school “like all the normal kids.” The first marking period was new and shy, the second was comfortably exotic, but by the fourth I dropped out. I can remember the “quiet desperation” with which I went to sleep each school night after sobbing to my parents to let me stay home the next day. I loved chicken nugget Mondays, had made plenty of friends, and learned that there are sports for everyone, and mine was soccer. But I abhorred the rigid routines that contained so much nothingness. Bells, whistles, and raised hands were a mysterious ritual. Public school, then and there, just wasn’t for me. By April of that year I was released.
During the next three or so years I read a lot of nonfiction and had my first formative intellectual awakening (of sorts) as I explored the bibliographies of Neil Postman and Ray Bradbury. Celebrating humanity, skeptical of technology, and concerned about the alienating and destructive power of large impersonal forces, they instilled in me a disdain for programs perpetrated and implemented by outsiders. Through their subversive influence, I developed my hatred for the regimented bureaucracies of school developed into a larger rebuke of all imposed routines. So when I returned to public school in 8th grade, I was completely cynical about the whole project.
So from that whole experience I came to associate imposed routine with automation, the cold machinations of both bureaucratic processing and market capitalism. My aversion to authoritarian, centrally planned, top-down public schooling helped cultivate my present loathing for all forms of distant authoritarian compulsion. Channeling Postman’s critique of modern culture and Bradbury’s luddite humanism, mine was a reactionary politics aimed at opposing the “assembly line” mentality where ever I encountered it. Now, done with school and graduated from college, I still encounter that mentality in the free market and at work. This is why my response to overwhelming market forces has usually been to support greater decentralization: break up the big banks, support small and local business, and seek ways to help slow down and balance international capital flows.
There’s this other side of me that’s always been impressed and inspired by what large groups can do together. Even if I didn’t get this liberal idealism from Star Trek (or to be more precise, Star Trek: The Next Generation), the series certainly helped reinforce this disposition. And in some ways, Gene Roddenberry’s techno-optimism actually complimented the Sci-fi of Bradbury, showing how a deeply humanistic and diverse community could breathe unique life into the titanium hull of the enterprise rather than have their own individuality snuffed out by it. The libertarian “Prime Directive” of non-interference and the neo-Wilsonian policy of interplanetary self-determination appealed to me. Here, in the 24th century, technology hadn’t enslaved humanity to the assembly line of industrial progress, but had actually liberated people from the undemocratic constraints of capitalism and allowed them to go around exploring the galaxy with limited militaristic outcomes or imperial arrogance. The search for knowledge, understanding, and self-realization was the new raison d’être. Sure, there were still problems. Not everyone in Starfleet was as self-reflective and strong-willed as Jean-Luc Picard. But with each new challenge, a clearly articulated vision for mutual cooperation and individual dignity was present. Even Data, the Federation’s one and only sentient android, was defined by his potential for compassion and free choice rather than cold logic.
And then there was the Borg, cosmic life’s greatest threat and the physical manifestation of every automated industrial impulse for the individual’s subordination to the collective. If any fiction could embody the future I wanted to live in and the principles it would be based on, Star Trek was and remains its closest approximation.
The end result is a politics full of idealistic and progressive liberal impulses tempered by the dread of Borg-like possibilities. I say possibilities because it’s become clear to me that “government” is only one of the many places that dehumanizing bureaucracies inhabit. Thanks to Rod Serling, I find unstructured communities as potentially perverse as their institutionalized counterparts. And for more reasons than can be listed here, consumer culture and the economy that shapes it have long since surpassed government as the most consequential forces in our (American) lives. That’s why a Brave New World is more troubling to me than 1984. And why, despite my libertarian skepticism, most purists wouldn’t regard me as one. In the end, what I fear most isn’t forced assimilation into inorganic collectives, but humanity voluntarily racing en masse to see how fast we can “Amuse Ourselves to Death“, and become enlistees in the ongoing iBorg revolution. Individuality and freedom face threats from many directions. But sometimes the mechanisms we use to protect these values can undermine them just as much, by prohibiting decisive social cooperation and strong community building. At least that’s how it often seems to me.
While by no means a thorough account of my political identity, hopefully this sheds some light on where I’m coming from in future posts. So without further ado, hello!
Welcome and congrats!Report
Excellent! Welcome aboard!Report
Really happy to have you on board, Ethan. (Side note: I think I’m the only Leaguer who doesn’t love sci-fi.)Report
Shun the outsider! Computer, play banjo chase track North-alpha-1! *lights a torch*Report
Arf wid’ ‘is ‘ead!Report
Shawn – maybe you haven’t read the right sci-fi…?Report
Doubt it. I’d rather read a straightforward political novel/ nonfiction than a sci-fi novel with political undertones.Report
Now we have a challenge, what sci-fi novels would we recommend for someone who makes that statement?
Working off of Ethan’s post, 1984 and Brave New World are good examples of important sci-fi that really can’t work as ‘straightforward’ non/fiction.Report
Me, I’d recommend ghost in the shell standalone complex. But call me subversive.Report
I do like Brave New World, 1984. and Fahrenheit 451. Maybe I just favor dystopian sci-fi novels with underlying sociopolitical commentary.Report
Try this one, it’s free. Has all the above and you’ll probably like Stross’ political slant.Report
bloody hell. There’s a webnovel out there for you. Written in about 2008-2009, about what would happen if we did get to cigarettes and stuff. Quite fun, dystopian stuff.
Dammit, I don’t remember the name (you can ask on calculated risk, if you want to bother.)Report
fwiw, as per mr. gude, i’m also mostly allergic to “speculative fiction”. a coworker loaned me that stross book last year. i think it’s charitable to describe it as “descending into complete gibberish”.Report
Greetings and salutations, by the way!
Will you be subblogging?Report
Welcome, I look forward to seeing your posts, I always liked your comments!Report
Welcome to the League.Report
Great…welcome.Report
In a real sense, Farenheit 451 is a precursor to Brave New World. Remember Beatty’s speech to Montag about why the firemen exist: books made people sad, so they had to go. In both cases, society chooses ignorance, distraction, and pleasures over the ambiguities of humanism.Report
Exactly. The thimble, parlor walls, and implicit abuse of pharmaceutical cocktails have always unnerved me, and F-451 shows a world that bridged the gap between the familiar present and exotic future.Report
Great! Welcome!Report
Welcome, welcome!
If you haven’t read Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, you really need to. I was a big ST:TNG fan for much the same reasons as yourself, and I bet the Culture will give Star Trek a run for its money in your opinion of the best future to live in. The first book in the series is Consider Phlebas, but the series is mostly disjoint, so you don’t absolutely have to read them in order.Report
Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll definitely check it out.Report
I keep hoping E.D. will go back and blog more about these. It’s a really fantastic series.Report
Good deal!
” In the end, what I fear most isn’t forced assimilation into inorganic collectives, but humanity voluntarily racing en masse to see how fast we can “Amuse Ourselves to Death“, and become enlistees in the ongoing iBorg revolution.”
Can you explain this a little better? Are you saying you don’t fear forced assimilation because you don’t think it will happen, but rather the latter will happen, or because you’d prefer the forced assimilation to the voluntary race to “Amuse Ourselves to Death”?Report
On both counts really. I think forced assimilation is less likely, AND much easier to spot/be vigilant against.
That’s not to say that it’s easily fought in all circumstances to fight totalitarianism. In addition, the revolution won’t be televised as they say, either for better or for worse, so the more people have been lured into Soma-like existences, the more easily they (we) succumb to totalitarianism (in any form and to any degree).Report
I actually just read that book. Have you read it? How much of what he’s saying about TV do you think applies to the Internet? It occurred to me today that the net is closer to television broadcasting than publishing. Everyone’s doing their own little episodic show now.Report
I read it several years ago and just picked it up again recently after I realized how much TV (or TV-like media) I’ve been consuming.
I think in some ways it applies and others not as much. Certainly, a lot of the web, and the blogosphere in particular seems awash in typography to me, but could just be the little segment of the web that I happen to engage with.
On the whole, I think a lot of the web functions much more like “channels,” than discrete books or newspapers/magazines. For the very reason of how easy it is to “surf” the web, I think it lends itself to a lot of the same critiques.
At the very least, the whole thing is fragmentation, or “Now…this” on steroids. One thing I wish the blogosphere was better at was was spending longer periods of time, say a month, on really delving into a particular topic. As much as I love the Dish, I think it’s a perfect example of blogo-tainment created in the image of television.
As it is, web discourse is still strongly driven by the cable news cycle, or at least what the cable news cycle and TV-ified print publications reinforce and define together as important.Report
I always on the lookout for the deployment water/liquid metaphors. Have you ever made note of the use of baffles in the tankage on boats and aircraft?Report
I’m not familiar, but I’d love a quick explanation.Report
http://www.flickriver.com/photos/barnesmetal/sets/72157623416609863/Report
Baffles, like the ones pictured in David’s link, prevent liquid such as fuel from sloshing back and forth too much by preventing high flow rates from one part of a tank to another. So it sort of relates to the quote from your post.
My apologies if all of the above was perfectly obvious from David’s link, but spacecraft propellant slosh is actually one of my areas of expertise, so it’s hard not to start ‘splaining when I get a chance.Report
‘Zactly.
Imagine if you banked an airplane to turn to port and all the fuel flowed to the tankage on the left side of the aircraft (or visa versa.) It would be very hard to get the aircraft flying straight and level again.
These effects are also important in boat and cars, just less pronounced under typical conditions. But if you put to sea enough times, the Gales of November will come early
You can bank on it.Report
By the way, no takers on the Game of Thrones (television series) reference?Report
Game of Thrones? What’s that?Report
Damn. I really enjoyed that post. Welcome.Report
Welcome!Report