Via Ran Prieur (apologies, I don’t know how to link to specific posts on his site), this is a great story about how a particular kind of 3D printing technology using metals recently died and disappeared. There’s no mystery involved- it’s just that it’s a technical and specialized process and private companies threw the technology away so they wouldn’t be bogged down in their race for profits.
I find this a much more likely explanation for the observations underlying the Tartarian Empire conspiracy. That conspiracy, if you’re unfamiliar, says that roughly 150 years ago all the people who knew how to make ornate and decorative architecture died in some sort of secret apocalypse that was hidden from everyday people by governmental elites; now buildings are all flat and boring because we don’t have anyone left who knows how to do anything else.
The conspiracy is obviously false, and so vague that Hitchens’s razor probably says we don’t need to spend any effort debunking it. But luckily people have spent that effort anyway. Turns out architects and historians have been observing the causes behind changing aesthetic tastes for years. And we actually do have ornamented houses, it’s just that they’re less popular among the super wealthy.
So it certainly isn’t the case the a bunch of craftspeople disappeared off the face of the earth. But it’s still possible for hands-on experience to be lost. This sucks if you want want a particular kind of archway or glazed tile for your house, but it’s a much bigger issue when somebody needs to repair a bridge or even make sustainable building materials.
Where do we get the capacity to imagine eternal paradise and eternal damnation, and why do these ideas have such resonance? For this post, I’m less interested in the cultural history of these ideas (which is certainly important if we want to develop a full understanding) and more interested in cognitive architecture.
Hell is easier for me to conceptualize. When I’m in pain, it’s all I can focus on. It’s very hard for me to step outside that pain and think “Next week I will feel better.” This is especially true of the “positive and active anguish” (to borrow William James’s term) of depression. Aaron Beck’s cognitive triad of depression says, in part, that when we’re depressed we feel like the future is hopeless and the bad times will last forever. Maybe the concept of the eternal suffering of hell resonates with people because we already have experience imaging that our suffering will go on forever1. I wonder if some of the theologians who helped shape our modern concept of hell struggled with depression.
On the other hand, happiness, pleasure, and joy all feel more fragile to me. I recently read Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and this quote captures the notion very well:
Often in my life, in the throes of despair, of my husband’s abuse, I have held the certainty of the damned, that sense of “everything is going to be just this, this misery forever, till I die.” An irrepressible inescapable horror stretching out infinitely in every direction. Tragic, that only terror feels that way. That even in Roya’s and my impossibly good moments, I instinctively knew to hold them, to store them inside myself like pockets of fat for the lean seasons ahead.
Maybe we can reach into a moment of supreme contentment, seize it, and imagine stretching that moment into infinity. But something about my lived experience keeps such an image from resonating very much. Instead, I think it’s a different kind of imagination that gives the idea of heaven its power.
Over at Experimental History, Adam Mastroianni did some cool research that found that human beings might have a fundamental predisposition to imagining how things could be better. It seems we do this in all sorts of contexts, and we imagine things being better much more often than we imagine things being worse. Maybe heaven, then, is a place to put all of our imagined improvements. Or to put it another way, maybe ideas of a perfect paradise resonate with us because we’re fundamentally wired to imagine how things could be better- and what’s better than perfection?
I think there might actually be instances in which we trigger thoughts akin to heaven and hell at the same time. Imagine having a pity party for yourself where you dwell on all the things you wish were better about your life. The more you think about it, the more perfect this alternate life seems, but also the more out of reach. Things will never improve, because while you can see the alternative clearly in your head, you’ll never be able to get there. You’re doomed to continue your suffering for the rest of your days.
I don’t know the best way to wrap up this post, so let me direct you to the excellent but only tangentially related short story by Ted Chiang, Hell is the Absence of God.
It helps to drive home how strong this cognitive tendency is when you consider that many people overcome pain and difficulty with a success rate approaching 100%. I’m currently not in any physical or emotional distress, which means that every single time I’ve imagined my suffering would go on forever, I was wrong. Despite that, I can basically guarantee I will despair about the future many more times in my life. ↩︎
One of my least favorite philosophical tropes, one which most people seem to take for granted, is the notion that we can’t have or appreciate one state of being without also experiencing its opposite.
For example:
Another example:
There is no positive without negative, and there is no negative without positive… You see, they’re explicitly different but implicitly the same, because they always go around together. And that reveals a hidden, implicit conspiracy between black and white, and the truth is you can’t have one without the other.
I’ll concede that there are some theoretical situations where we need both ends of an opposite relationship to make sense of something. “Up” only makes sense if there is some comparable concept of “down”; floating in the void of space, up could be in any direct until you define it against something. But as is often the case, these sorts of purely analytical definitions don’t work well when you map them onto the real world.
When I’m happy, my experience contains all sorts of elements that aren’t strictly related to mood. I can concentrate better. I have more endurance for mental work. I’m more talkative and better at coming up with jokes. I fall asleep more easily. I don’t need to experience sadness to be able to reflect on these elements and decide that I like them. In fact, I don’t even need to experience the opposites of those elements (e.g. distractability, fatigue, social withdrawal, etc.). I have never experienced being dead, but it would be silly to suggest that I can’t appreciate life until after I die.
I suppose someone could say that I can imagine distractability, or death, or whatever, and it is that imagining that provides the necessary contrast that allows me to appreciate their opposite. Fine, that seems plausible. But that’s not the only way these ideas get used in everyday conversation. People often talk about the importance of actually experiencing bad things because they allow us to appreciate good things. Whether or not experiencing bad things (pain, embarrassment, discrimination, injury, etc.) is important, it certainly is not a prerequisite for appreciating good things. Suggesting otherwise is wrong, and lends itself to all sorts of disturbing justifications.
Wow, what an ominous title, huh? What’s the alternative? Ending in a dystopia? But no, it doesn’t end there either. Mostly, it just doesn’t end.
The way people talk about utopia often ends up being a sort of thought-stopping device. If we just do my politics hard enough, eventually we will achieve some sort of everlasting paradise. The end. Maybe this is because even secular notions of utopia borrow heavily from Christian thinking and attendant notions of heaven. (Thomas More, who coined the term utopia, was a devout Catholic.) Or maybe it’s because people don’t like to admit that their pet ideologies contain drawbacks that can eventually lead to their downfall.
Anyway, this view of a one-and-done utopia is highly compatible with how liberals stereotypically view changes in society. They imagine a line moving upwards, with the perfect, utopian society somewhere above where we are now. By contrast, conservatives often imagine a line moving downwards, and the perfect society was fumbled at some point back before the decline started.
I generally don’t want the same things that conservatives want, but I find their view to contain a kernel of truth that’s missing from the progressive view. Namely, it is possible for perfect (or at least very good) conditions to exist and then later go away.
Acknowledging this is important! It can expand where we look for inspiration. It shows us that nice societies take continuous work. And it reminds us that even when things change for the worse, we’ve invented utopia before and we can do it again.
Here’s a prolix but interesting post by Kate Wagner about why people love going down Wikipedia rabbit holes about terrible things. Basically she argues it creates an aesthetically sublime experience.
Last week I completed a bucket list item by submitting a ballot in a high-profile movie poll. Here’s what I learned in the process.
Prestige– After completing my list, I felt some anxiety that I was overly concerned with high art darlings and neglectful of more accessible fare. It’s a weird concern to have about a list that features two animated family films, a fantasy movie, and a horror flick. As I examined the feeling further, I realized I was reacting to my own tendency to distinguish between movies I like and movies that are “good” in some other sense.
There are pros and cons to such a distinction. Acknowledging value in movies that confound or infuriate us is important. But identifying value can be difficult, and often devolves into recapitulating received wisdom. I think this is how we get the worse of the film bros, who uncritically gobble the movies others deem “good” and then feel superior because they can parrot back that those are, in fact, good movies.
Anyway, I felt a mild but complex blend of envy, admiration, and self-doubt when I saw my friends submit lists of genre flicks that were (seemingly) unconcerned with received notions of status. I genuinely like all the movies on my list, but I also reached for titles that seemed to do something more than entertain me. I don’t know if that was the best approach.
Popularity– When I was younger, I sometimes felt critical of popular movies that made these lists, assuming people voted for them due to some lack of creativity or knowledge. When making my list, it suddenly became obvious that your voting is limited to what you’ve seen. Popular movies show up more often because, by definition, more people have seen them and more people have the potential to vote for them.
Sincerity– Two days after making my list and sharing it with friends, I suddenly realized how obscure most of the titles were. I worried that others might think I was trying to look cool or smart with my picks. I wasn’t! Most of the obscure stuff is international, and I came across it from doing March Around The World for the past eight years.
For me, this is a lesson in giving list makers the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes people do try to project an air of sophistication, but just as often (or more) they sincerely like things that I don’t like, or haven’t heard of.
Individuality– I wanted a ballot that felt like “me.” I made sure my interest in animation was well represented. (Earlier versions of my list had up to five animated films!) I switched out Mulholland Drive for Pulse at the last minute because the latter felt more idiosyncratic to me. Anecdotally, I saw other people taking a similar approach. I wonder how this might change in more collectivist cultures.
Diversity: I didn’t select my movies based on the demographics of the directors, but I’m pleased with the diversity (of gender, race, and nationality) I ended up with. Since you’re limited to what you’ve seen when making your list, it’s important to do your homework on the front end.
Recency bias– Most of my movies are things I’ve seen in the last five years. Obviously the movies themselves are from a range of different years. I wonder how recency bias might have affected these sorts of polls before the advent of home media.
“That tradition was a subterranean one, largely outside the orbit of mainstream fantasy art. Psychedelic poster designers, Symbolist painters, and zinesters working on the margins of the counterculture all contributed, consciously or not, to the strange visual DNA of early roleplaying games. Before branding demanded consistency and legibility, Dungeons & Dragons was porous enough to absorb all of it.”
It makes wonder what’s on the fringes of modern visual culture. Snapchat filters? Adult Swim cartoons? Anthro furry art? AI slop? It’s hard for things to feel underground now, because as soon as you identify it you can get ten thousand other people who will latch onto your subreddit. Still, not everything has the same cachet.
“However, as D&D became a brand, this strangeness was steadily scrubbed away. Style guides were introduced. Idiosyncratic artists gave way to professionals. The game’s visuals became cleaner, more representational, more standardized. With that polish came a flattening of the imagination. D&D no longer looked like a vision; it looked like product.”
I’d argue DnD is still plenty flexible to accommodate weirdo visions. It’s no longer baked in, so you’d have to do more work on your own. As ever, that comes with pros and cons.
Anyway, check out the full article. It’s fun, and the author even hints that its influences made early DnD a vehicle for altered perception.
Ziz: I was vaguely aware that the term “leviathan” referred to a creature with biblical-ish origins. And while I knew the word “behemoth,” I didn’t know it referred to a specific (fictional) creature, also from Jewish mythology. What I definitely didn’t know is that the leviathan and behemoth have an airborne cousin, the ziz. It is a bird said to be so huge that it can stand on the floor of the ocean with the water only reaching its ankles, and it lays eggs so massive that if they crack open they’ll flood sixty cities.
Three Hares: This is such a neat factoid I’m surprised I’ve never heard about it before. There’s a very specific art motif that features three rabbits arranged in a circle such that their ears are overlapping, and this symbol has popped up through through vast spans of time and space. The earliest examples we know of came from Chinese caves between the years 500 and 700. Later, the symbol appears in Islamic art in the late 1200s to early 1300s. Later still, it appears in western Europe, and even becomes particularly prevalent in the churches of southwestern England. There’s a theory that the symbol gradually diffused out of China along the “silk road” trading route. (For reasons I can’t really explain, this is my favorite hypothesis.) Others guess that the motif rose at least partially independently, and point out a long history of similar symbols in Celtic culture. One of the fun things about the Wikipedia article is reading all the different meanings the symbol had across times and places: everything from water to luck to the holy trinity to the Jewish diaspora.
Peter Lamborn Wilson: I came across Wilson as the person who coined the term “temporary autonomous zone” (TAZ). It’s a kinda useful, kinda fun idea about how we can make spaces that are mostly free of social control and use them to experiment with different ways of being. TAZs still get talked about a fair amount in anarchist circles, from what I can tell, though sometimes with some some caveats about Wilson’s personal life. In reading out his life on Wikipedia, two things jump out at me.
First the big one: apparently he also wrote for NAMBLA? I haven’t tracked down those writings and don’t care to, but they have been characterized by others (including Wilson’s former friends) as promoting sex between adults and children. So that fucking sucks. It’s weird how often this sort of thing crops up. Science fiction grand master Samuel Delany is a queer champion but also a supporter of NAMBLA1. (Both Wilson and Delany have had criticisms and mentions of pedophilia downplayed in their Wikipedia articles in the last year, which is disturbing). As this great thread on /r/AskHistorians points out, philosophers like Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre signed a petition against age of consent laws. I think you find predators in every walk of life, and they often manipulate whatever ideas they have at their disposal to persuade others2.
Second, Wilson was seemingly obsessed with other cultures, particularly Islam. That’s always a phenomenon that interests me. On one end of the respectability spectrum, you have have college professors and anthropologists who specialize in this or that. At the other end, you have folks like Iron Eyes Cody or Rachel Dolezal who engage in 24-7 cosplay as a member of a different group. Wilson didn’t quite go that far, but he did convert his religion and produce a lot of his writing under an ethnic pen name. I want to better understand why people get involved with that sort of cultural adoption. That means I’ll probably mentally bookmark Wilson as a case study but never look much further because focused research isn’t actually fun for me.
Anyway, TAZs are a cool concept. I think it’s important to recognize value in social experiments even if they don’t last for a long time.
Digesting Duck: When I was in middle or high school, I read about an art instillation where some weirdo built a complex machine that mimicked human digestion. Food would be pushed in one end, get processed, and exit the other end as artificially-made shit3. The shits would then be vacuum sealed and sold to art collectors4. Anyway, the artist was (knowingly or not) working in conversation with Jacques de Vaucanson, a 1700s French inventor who created various machines and automata, including a mechanical duck that “ate” food out of the operator’s hand. Then, through some jiggery-pokery, the brass duck would appear to poop out the remains of the food. In reality, the food went into an internal pouch, while the “poop” (small, balled-up pieces of bread that were dyed green) were pre-loaded in a separate pouch. People at the time went gaga for the fake metal poop machine. The duck was lost in a fire, but has a robust afterlife making cameos in literature by everyone from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Frank Herbert.
There’s a complex history between queer folks and organizations like NAMBLA that is beyond the scope of my knowledge but which surely provides important context. ↩︎
According to the scant information on Wikipedia, there’s no evidence that Wilson abused children himself. Whether he was persuaded to his views by an abuser or came to them himself I don’t know. ↩︎
Arguably an early example of machines taking over creative jobs. If you’re anti-AI, you shouldn’t settle for anything less than the real thing (SFW link, except for language). ↩︎
Over at Ancillary Review of Books (which I was previously unfamiliar with, but which I will be checking out more now), Zachary Gillan (ditto previous parenthetical) published a very good essay entitled “Reading Weird Fiction in an Age of Fascism.”
Essays that argue about the political content of various genres (e.g. fairy tales are inherently feminist / antifeminist) can be a little interesting, but they usually read like fan theories for self-important academics. Gillan elides this by instead asking how an antifascist might mine weird fiction for lessons / tools, were she so inclined. I find this approach way more palatable.
It boils down, I think, to two axioms:
To become radical, politically, is to become aware that the dominant ideology shaping the way we view the world is Wrong, and needs revolutionary change from the root.
To be a character in a work of weird fiction is to see that the world is Wrong; whatever direction the author takes this sense of Wrongness, weird fiction hinges on a radical shift in awareness (Some weird fiction channels that sense of unsettlement into the awe-inspiring sublime or fascinating numinous; this is not the kind of weird fiction that I’m considering here.)
He goes on to elaborate on these ideas in clear and persuasive prose. Right near the end things get a little tedious as he quotes people who quote Marx. But overall I really liked this.
