Biased Communications

When a corporation wants my money, I’m likely to receive a phone call with a live person on the other end of the line. But when I want to have some satisfaction from a corporation, it is almost impossible to reach a human being just by making a telephone call. I could expand this to include all reasonably large institutions, including government. Is this a peculiarly modern phenomenon? No. It was already present in my youth in Europe when not every household had a telephone yet. The difference is that in the old days the systems protecting the powerful were made up of human beings. They stopped you at the door. You couldn’t see the big man much less the king. These systems to ward off the unpleasant communication have become more efficient, that is all. But what has stayed the same is the reaction of those who seek help or redress. Their irritation has not diminished just because they are repelled by algorithms rather than by people.

Collective Wealth

Still reading Toynbee’s monumental work on history, it strikes me—as I see him assessing ancient cultures’ decline and occasionally touching on our own—that humanity has never experienced a situation like our current one (viewed some 80 years after Toynbee wrote his first five volumes). It is a situation in which extraordinary wealth touches a huge population—but it’s  not wealth as once understood, namely personal control of physical resources and money; it is wealth in the form of collective systems, structures, technologies, and organized knowledge.

Two examples may be Communications and Health Care. Communications anciently demanded personal wealth in that, to deliver a message, one had to send a courrier to distant places; no such media as telegraphy, telephony, radio, or television existed—and general circulation news papers were also absent. Health Care then was centered on the person of a doctor, midwife, or a surgeon—and what small bag he or she carried. The hospital, with its emergency room—accessible even to the poor—did not exist; nor did colossal testing technologies, clean-rooms, remote and robotic surgery, or the pharmaceutical industries.

Behind communications today are submarine cables and space satellites; behind the satellites stands an aerospace industry. Behind medicine are mountains of extraordinarily sophisticated institutions, technical developers very much cut of the same cloth as aerospace, computer technology, and world-wide supervisory organizations communicating, by means of the never-before-seen communications sector, to inhibit the spread of plagues; among them is our own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

These two sectors—and they are just two of many others that operate in the same way, for the collective—represent a form of wealth one cannot discover in ancient times except in the most rudimentary forms: state-built roads with their bridges and water control on a large scale for river management and for delivering water via aqueducts.

Can our collective wealth, which makes even the poor a little “wealthy,” be traced to a single discovery? Yes. It is the “discovery” of fossil fuels. I put that word in quotes because, of course, coal and oil were known before the age of fossil fuels dawned. They were also used, principally for making weapons-grade metals, usually employing human-made and therefore manufactured charcoal. The discovery, however, was triggered by a technological innovation, the steam engine. That device—the Luddites’ first nightmare—then led, step-by-step, to an extraordinarily massive geological raid of dormant energy hidden beneath the earth probably by cataclysmic global changes literally eons ago.

The quite foreseeable exhaustion of this incredible and non-replaceable deposit of wealth will have consequences we can logically project forward. The extent to which essentially “free” energy underlies virtually everything we do and touch—not least how we communicate and heal—is effectively invisible to the public—except its members visit filling stations. The sooner it becomes the daily conscious worry of the average citizen, the sooner can creative responses to future troubles begin. The most important job now is to slow our current energy consumption drastically—to give humanity more time to adapt to conditions where effective “wealth” will once more become personal and nothing much beyond—except roads, bridges, aqueducts, and (I hope) sewage systems that will still, collectively, support us all.

Noted...

Herewith some things I’ve noted as McChrystal’s dismissal unfolded in slow motion over the last two days. I noted with a certain bemusement that two retired general, selected by PBS’ NewsHour as commentators, on Tuesday night, praised the general effusively. One called McChrystal “a warrior,” with emphasis, and several times. I wondered what he meant by this word. Did he mean that in the conduct of war grandstanding before a reporter—in fact apparently trying to impress the reporter by saying naughty things about a number of different leading figures, not least Vice President Biden—is the quality of a warrior? Is that what he meant? Did he mean that a warrior is a person out of control? That to lead American troops we should select berserkers? Is “warrior” in military circles equivalent to “hard-drinking womanizer” in literary circles? — a phrase sure to sanctify the “genuine artist,” or the “deep thinker”? I see the phrase all the time, most recently self-applied to himself by that notable God-debunker, Christopher Hitchens.

I noted my own anxiety that McChrystal might be retained in command, something that, these days, is actually thinkable. And noted next my satisfaction that he was not. And noted the paradoxical aspects of that. Yes, appropriate forms should be maintained, but the war in Afghanistan is still a kind of madness without rational grounding, so my satisfaction had a kind of empty feel.

I noted the pretense, at least I hope it was pretense, that a “decision process” was unfolding. These matters are straight-forward and need no discussion at all. The generals in the media were all wringing their hands—although I did note one lonely retired colonel on CNN who had the right view and bravely stuck to it. A genuine warrior, perhaps.

Last I noted that McChrystal got appointed to his command by people who must have known the pattern of his entire career—which was pockmarked, as it were, by inappropriate behavior. It looks like Petraeus (whose protégé McChrystal was, and whom he is replacing), Gates, McChrystal’s strong supporter, and others on Obama’s staff were touched and charmed by the “bad boy” image all along but thought themselves magically immune to its reckless consequences.

I discern beneath this that if reason fails and flailing takes over as the chief strategy, choosing a bad boy is the appropriate profile for the man in charge. The thought might be that in a crazy world perhaps the mad commander will succeed by sheer accident. In an insurgency, use an insurgent?

The Good and Bad of Bad News

It benefits creatures to become aware of dangers as these arise. The presumption is that they will flee or shelter themselves in ways proper to each. But animals have no access to media of mass communications. They will perceive dangers that genuinely threaten them, but they don’t have to agonize over disasters even a hundred miles away, never mind those taking place on other continents. It was during the Crimean War, midway through the nineteenth century, fought by Russia on one side and assorted other powers (France, Britain, Ottomans) on the other that the telegraph brought instant news of the dreadful slaughter to London and Paris—and hence gave rise to the profession of nursing when Florence Nightingale and others were horrified by reading current, almost instant news. Now, of course, that was a good thing. Not much later (1859) another dreadful butchery, the Battle of Soliferno in Lombardy, gave rise to the Red Cross. Another good thing. Institutional reactions to human-caused disasters continued at a grander scale yet; there is the formation of the League of Nations which the Great War stimulated, and the UN, its successor, arising from World War II.

In the Civil War, the telegraph had the same aura and importance as the Internet still has. Soldiers took every opportunity to communicate home using it. Since then communications have surpassed anything known before: TV, satellites—I wave a hand. It is now possible to warn us of dangers arising in places we shall never see (except on television) and never visit (unless we happen to be soldiers). A veritable downpour of bad news greets us at any time we choose to turn the faucet. The very density of this messaging—and the frequency of our realization that we can’t do a damn thing about this mayhem, except, perhaps send money—leads to a numbing. The scale is too vast, the actors are beyond the human scale. Media-based all-purpose soothing issues as promptly as each upheaval of danger—from the Oval Office, from learned professors speaking of Nigeria, but from Harvard, of Kurdistan, but from California. The rising impulses of today’s Florence Nightingales flicker and then die as fast—unless they morph into an urge to join some meaningless protest or other sure to have absolutely no effect at all.

In Kyrgyzstan the Kyrgyz Turkic majority is killing Uzbeks. Lordy, lord. We can’t even spell these words. And that’s just one story of some evil boil erupting thousands of miles from us...while hundreds of miles away the Supreme Court contemplates whether to review the case of a man from Canada we sent to Syria to be tortured...

If my trees had communications of this sort—never mind my squirrels or my flocks of sparrows—would we be safe in our homes? Or would the whole environment begin to writhe in horrid agonies and the sidewalks buckle as the roots revolt?

Farewell World Focus

Tonight is the last broadcast of World Focus on Public Television. The program ran for only eighteen months, from October 6, 2008 through today. In that time it acquired an audience of 300,000 according to the program. We liked the program a great deal. It was a welcome change from the often technically flawed BBC International program that used to follow the McNeil Lehrer Report and Nightly Business Report. We were especially pleased by seeing Daljit Dhaliwal as one of its two anchors, the equally gifted Martin Savidge as the other. We got to know Daljit on BBC. World Focus, which we affectionately called World Crocus around here, provided that missing dimension in U.S. news coverage on television—international news without the peculiar slant of American Capitalism. The program’s excellent website, which will continue to operate until April 9, is reachable here. World Focus couldn’t find the foundation or public funding it needed to continue. Farewell. If you surface somewhere else, we shall watch you again…