The Middle Mind

So much of what Curtis White says in the final third of this book is brilliant and had me furiously taking notes. He also infuriated me and tried my patience with the first two thirds of his book while he complains about what I have long abandoned as hopeless mediocrity. In his characteristically cranky white boy way (by which I mean he references mostly works by white guys and gives grudging lip service to feminism, queer theory and minorities), he gives the impression that he is struggling in quicksand to free himself from the very culture he is complaining about.

The Middle Mind is what ails us says Curtis White, who characterizes this condition as a lack of imagination and therefore an inability to think and as a result make change happen. He lays out his thesis in a systematic and somewhat exhaustive way to show how the imagination has been co-opted by various sectors of society including the entertainment industry, the academic institutions, the military industrial complex, technological innovation, capitalism, the New Age spiritual movement and the art world. Ultimately he identifies that it is art (both high and low) and philosophy, that will best serve us as the vehicle for cultivating imagination in our culture.

He chooses art for the job by which I gather he means art that has been imbued with meaning and context, but not so controlled that the sublime and unexpected cannot slip in. I was illuminated by his description of how consumerism has robbed us of historical perspective and context. This is why we can't seem to think things through to their logical conclusion. We are made to be satisfied with a surface level of critieria and ethics. We are encouraged to be "stupid/smart" so that we contribute to the market (ie capitalism) through innovation, but don't question the status quo.

He tells us that "art reminds us that change is real and the possible is possible". He specifies that it is the job of art to remind us of justice, freedom and creativity—the promises of the Enlightenment. Art should "critique and imagine alternatives to the social status quo. Art is at work only when it is biting the hand that feeds it."

This last concept was particularly empowering for me because I've always felt that way about art and the market for art. The book was most useful in how it got me thinking about "being the change I want to see" but not that rah rah solution oriented, techno-wonderful, change, more subversive, gritty, badly behaved, unpredictable and revolutionary in meaning. Fodder for my next essay.

The World Is Flat

Reads like an Evangelical preacher explaining, to the already converted, how we will have heaven on Earth if everyone on the planet would just embrace Capitalism and repent from the evil ways of Communism, Marxism and terrorism.

NY Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Freidman, is well known, which is why so many people were reading this pap and mentioning it to me until I felt I had to suffer through it in order to respond intelligently. The first third of the book is about how the internet brought us globalized trade, thus "flattening" the world. All old news if you've kept up with technology or lost money in the dot.com debacle. Some interesting anecdotes of how India ramped up their call centers in Bangalore, that explains a lot about India's current stake in the world's economy, as well as China's, but it's really about Dell Computer's stake in the world and McDonalds.

All his details are a good example of how invested we are in increased complexity, vastly long supply lines, and an exponentially expanding power grid. He does not mention anything about how vulnerable these features make the whole world (except in the event of terrorism).

In the second third of the book he gives his readers a stern talking to about how Americans have to get back to discipline and hard work and figure this whole flat world thing out, in order to keep up with the much cheaper and better educated worker in India who so happily man (and woman) those call centers. At which point I suspect most will put the book down.

Near the end, he becomes so stunningly ill conceived, as to be rendered dangerous, if anyone bothers to read to the end of this tome. He has the audacity to suggest that Capitalism is the ultimate tool of peace because every country that has a McDonald's in it is far less likely to make war on its neighbors (because supply lines have become so important). He does not mention that every country that has a McDonald's in it is far less likely to be bombed by the US, back into the Stone Age, because it has not yet been colonized by corporate interests and needs to be humbled so it can be.

He explains the events of 9/11 as a cautionary tale about how the flattening of the world makes us vulnerable to the suicide bombers of the world (all 200 of them since 9/11) while making no mention of the impact of our sanctified, military terrorism, apart from some references to Bush and Co having behaved badly.

He does attempt to fend off critics of capitalism by offering to tweak the system with his suggestions for a more "compassionate" capitalism. His appeal to industry to take the compassionate route is about as effective a call to arms as a preacher's plea to his flock to abstain from sex (and for himself to abstain from buggering the choir).

His understanding of the world is so simplistic, he reminds me of our Teflon president, Reagan. I can just see him browsing a bookstore and saying to himself, "I don't need to read that, it's written by a Blah, Blah", whenever he comes upon anything that might challenge his viewpoint. I gather that most of the nation sees the world the way he presents it and conduct themselves in a similar fashion.

The Collapse of Complex Societies

Published in 1988, this is the grandaddy of collapse literature. A short, but pithy academic treatment of the subject. Tainter starts by analysing all the past attempts at explaining why societies collapse including: resource depletion, new resources overwhelming old systems, catastrophes, insufficient response to circumstances, other complex societies taking over, intruders, conflict contradictions and mismanagement, social dysfunction, mystical explanations, chance concatenation of events and finally the only one he feels is viable—economics.

Because complex societies excel at handling adversity, he accounts for collapse as the logical fallout from diminishing returns on investment of labor and resources, particularly in agriculture, information processing and education, sociopolitical control and specialization and overall economic productivity.

He examines in detail the collapse of Ancient Rome due to over expansion leading to high operational costs. Leaders tried to compensate by debasing the currency, thus shifting the burden to future taxpayers, but the future also faced equivalent crisis. Eventually overly high taxes drained the agriculture sector and the peasantry upon which Rome relied.

He also details the Mayan collapse. The societies herewith were competing in an art race (to intimidate their enemies). He doesn't mention Easter Island, but sounds similar to those big heads. The Mayan elites further imposed an expanded building program on a weakened and undernourished population that could not support the demands and presumably fled or died.

The third society he examines is the Chacoan of the American southwest. This network of communities was challenged by arid land that eventually was not diverse enough to meet the unpredictable production of the land. Communities left the network, preferring to migrate rather than deal with drought. Major construction of food storage facilities drained resources.

Tainter claims that collapse is not likely today because of 1) absorption by larger state or neighbor, 2) economic support by a dominant power or by an international financing agency, 3) payment by the support population of overhead costs to keep the society going. The situation today is unique because all societies are complex; there needs to be a power vacuum to bring on collapse. What we have today are competitive peer polities. It is an arms race situation. Tainter points out that unilateral economic downsizing is as foolhardy as unilateral disarmament, but doesn't say why.

He feels that we will finance diminishing returns well into the future and that collapse will be global. He points out that reliance on stored energy reserves (oil?) demands that we find a new energy subsidy. Lack of a power vacuum and competitive spiral have given the world a reprieve from collapse. Failure to take advantage of the current reprieve will lead to collapse. Competition may also lead to collapse. The appearance of a disastrous situation that all decry may force us to tolerate a situation of declining marginal returns long enough to achieve a temporary solution to it. He urges that we must proceed rationally and make it our highest priority to find new energy source.

Tainter actually comes across as fairly optimistic especially now that global warming is being seriously discussed since complex societies are supposed to be good at solving complex problems like this. His description of complex societies and how they work projects a solution that is based in technological innovation and bureaucratic management. If a society fails to solve problems of insufficient resources or environmental degradation, then he feels that it is not a dysfunction of the complex society, but of the psychological underpinnings of said society.

His thesis gives the impression of inevitability. We will collapse because increasing complexity will overwhelm the resources needed to manage such complexity. He doesn't really leave room for rethinking how we live or creating a new myth to live by. We are trapped in a prison of our own making. Is this merely a patriarchal way of thinking given all the research on matriarchal societies that lived in harmony with the land?