communism, Meta Intelligence

Monomania and the West

There have been all kinds of “voices” in the history of Western civilization. Perhaps the loudest voice is that of monomaniacs, who always claim that behind the appearance of the many is the one. If we illustrate the West, and at its roots, the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem, we see the origins of this monomania. Plato’s realm of ideas was supposed to explain everything encountered in our daily lives. His main student and rival, Aristotle, has his own competing explanation, based in biology instead of mathematics.

These monomanias in their modern counterpart in ideologies. In communism, the key to have everything is class and the resulting class struggles. Nazism revolves around race and racial conflict.

In our own era, the era of scientism, we have the idea of god replaced with Stephen Hawking’s “mind of god,” Leon Lederman’s The God Particle and KAKU Michio’s The God Equation. In the 2009 film, Angels & Demons, there’s a senior Vatican official, played by Ewan McGregor, who is absolutely outraged by the blasphemous phrase, “the god particle.”

Currently, the monomania impetus continues full-force. For example, Professor Seth Lloyd of MIT tells us that reality is the cosmos and not chaos, because all of reality together is a computer. His MIT colleague, Max Tegmark, argues in his books that the world is not explained by mathematics, but rather is mathematics. Perhaps the climax of this kind of thinking is given to us by the essay “Everything Is Computation” by Joscha Bach:

These days we see a tremendous number of significant scientific news stories, and it’s hard to say which has the highest significance. Climate models indicate that we are past crucial tipping points and irrevocably headed for a new, difficult age for our civilization. Mark van Raamsdonk expands on the work of Brian Swingle and Juan Maldacena and demonstrates how we can abolish the idea of spacetime in favor of a discrete tensor network, thus opening the way for a unified theory of physics. Bruce Conklin, George Church, and others have given us CRISPR/Cas9, a technology that holds promise for simple and ubiquitous gene editing. “Deep learning” starts to tell us how hierarchies of interconnected feature detectors can autonomously form a model of the world, learn to solve problems, and recognize speech, images, and video.

It is perhaps equally important to notice where we lack progress: Sociology fails to teach us how societies work; philosophy seems to have become infertile; the economic sciences seem ill-equipped to inform our economic and fiscal policies; psychology does not encompass the logic of our psyche; and neuroscience tells us where things happen in the brain but largely not what they are.

In my view, the 20th century’s most important addition to understanding the world is not positivist science, computer technology, spaceflight, or the foundational theories of physics.

It is the notion of computation. Computation, at its core, and as informally described as possible, is simple: Every observation yields a set of discernible differences.

These we call information. If the observation corresponds to a system that can change its state, we can describe those state changes. If we identify regularity in those state changes, we are looking at a computational system. If the regularity is completely described, we call this system an algorithm. Once a system can perform conditional state transitions and revisit earlier states, it becomes almost impossible to stop it from performing arbitrary computation. In the infinite case that is, if we allow it to make an unbounded number of state transitions and use unbounded storage for the states—it becomes a Turing machine, or a Lambda calculus, or a Post machine, or one of the many other mutually equivalent formalisms that capture universal computation.

Computational terms rephrase the idea of “causality,” something that philosophers have struggled with for centuries. Causality is the transition from one state in a computational system to the next. They also replace the concept of “mechanism” in mechanistic, or naturalistic, philosophy. Computationalism is the new mechanism, and unlike its predecessor, it is not fraught with misleading intuitions of moving parts.

Computation is different from mathematics. Mathematics turns out to be the domain of formal languages and is mostly undecidable, which is just another word for saying “uncomputable” (since decision making and proving are alternative words for computation, too). All our explorations into mathematics are computational ones, though. To compute means to actually do all the work, to move from one state to the next.

Computation changes our idea of knowledge: Instead of justified true belief, knowledge describes a local minimum in capturing regularities between observables. Knowledge is almost never static but progresses on a gradient through a state space of possible worldviews. We will no longer aspire to teach our children the truth, because, like us, they will never stop changing their minds. We will teach them how to productively change their minds, how to explore the never-ending land of insight.

A growing number of physicists understands that the universe is not mathematical but computational, and physics is in the business of finding an algorithm that can reproduce our observations. The switch from uncomputable mathematical notions (such as continuous space) makes progress possible. Climate science, molecular genetics, and AI are computational sciences. Sociology, psychology, and neuroscience are not: They still seem confused by the apparent dichotomy between mechanism (rigid moving parts) and the objects of their study. They are looking for social, behavioral, chemical, neural regularities, where they should be looking for computational ones.

Everything is computation.
Know This: Today’s Most Interesting and Important Scientific Ideas, Discoveries, and Developments, John Brockman (editor), Harper Perennial, 2017, pages 228-230.

Friedrich Nietzsche rebelled against this type of thinking the most profoundly. If scientism represents the modern, then Nietzsche was the prophet of postmodernism. Nietzsche’s famous phrase, “God is dead.” is not about a creator or divinity, but rather finality itself. There is no final explanation.

Education and the World’s Confusion

Students need to understand that the world and history and the mood of the moment are always a “confusing swirl,” as experience shows, and that implies the present intersection of world/history/mood is also such a confusing “opaque windshield.”

Take the example of Europe after World War I. Mussolini leaves his position at the left-wing paper Avanti! (English: “Forward”) and founds the bellicose Il Populo d’Italia (English: “The People of Italy”), which is nationalist and warlike.

Avanti! was an Italian daily newspaper, born as the official voice of the Italian Socialist Party, published since 25 December 1896. It took its name from its German counterpart Vorwärts, the party-newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Il Populo d’Italia, was an Italian newspaper which published editions every day with the exception for Mondays founded by Benito Mussolini in 1914, after his split from the Italian Socialist Party.

Mussolini was a complete tactical opportunist and his profound flip-flops indicate that “the winds” of mood and opinion were capricious and somewhat blind to its own twists and turns.

Take the case of the (later) famous anti-fascist Arturo Toscanini, the great music conductor. His trajectory is non-linear and as “jumpy” as Mussolini’s, going the other way:

“From the start Fascism was an eclectic movement and in its early days in 1919 it attracted a number of people who, including some, such as the great conductor Arturo Toscanini, who soon became its most determined opponents.”
(James Joll, Europe since 1870: An International History, Penguin Books, 1976, page 266)

Toscanini ran as a Fascist parliamentary candidate in Milan (1919) and this is a clue as to the tremendous disorientation in the wake of World War I.

In 1983, the outstanding Hebrew University scholar, Professor Sternhell, wrote Ni droite ni gauche. L’idéologie fasciste en France, which was translated to English three years later under the title, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France. The title of this classic by Sternhell—“neither right nor left”—captures via its very title, the indeterminate fusion and hodge-podge quality of modern ideologies. If they’re neither right nor left, where are they?

We could say there’s a deep pattern: World War I (yielding communism and fascism and Nazism) and then World War II (with atomic weapons and Auschwitz) and the Cold War have all left very disorienting legacies and since people in 2022 are legatees of these three wars, outlooks are very foggy. As the world becomes extremely confusing, people react accordingly and veer from mood to mood and opinion to opinion.

Movies as a Parallel University: Cola Wars Movie

The 1961 fast-paced comedy, One, Two, Three starring James Cagney is extremely informative in a certain way if you get beyond the farcical and “manic-jocular” tone and atmosphere.

The story takes place in West Berlin. Communism and Nazism are still “in the air,” although Germany has of course been defeated in 1945.

C.R. “Mac” MacNamara (James Cagney) is a high-ranking executive in the Coca-Cola Company, assigned to West Berlin after a business fiasco a few years earlier in the Middle East (about which he is still bitter). While based in West Germany for now, Mac is angling to become head of Western European Coca-Cola Operations, based in London. After working on an arrangement to introduce Coke into the Soviet Union, Mac receives a call from his boss, W.P. Hazeltine, at the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta. Scarlett Hazeltine, the boss’s hot-blooded but slightly dim 17-year-old socialite daughter, is coming to West Berlin. Mac is assigned the unenviable task of taking care of this young whirlwind.

The undiscussed and “latent content” of this zany comedy is very serious.

There are three fundamental choices for a country:

Class war (Communism, Eastern Bloc, Russia).
Race war (Nazis, Germany, fascism).
Cola war (Coke versus Pepsi, USA, business civilization).

The implicit message of the movie, which constitutes a kind of ultimate political science lesson, is that cola wars (i.e., corporate competition for sales and profits and markets worldwide) is the best choice, no matter that it seems manic and empty, since the alternatives on the list of three options are impractical nightmares which lead to calamities and historical catastrophes.

The basic book describing the cola wars factually is: The Cola Wars: The Story of the Global Battle between the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo, Inc., J.C. Louis & Harvey Z. Yazijian, Everest House, October 1, 1980.

Movies as a Second University

Head in the Clouds is a 2004 Canadian–British war drama film written and directed by John Duigan. The original screenplay focuses on the choices young lovers must make as they find themselves surrounded by increasing political unrest in late-1930s Europe.

There’s a very informative scene in the movie where Penélope Cruz’s (the famous Spanish actress) character in the movie, suddenly says she has to go back to Spain because of the Asturias miners’ ferment which involves her family directly. “The Asturian miners’ strike of 1934 was a major strike action, against the entry of the Spanish Confederation of the Autonomous Right (CEDA) into the Spanish government on October 6, which took place in Asturias in northern Spain, that developed into a revolutionary uprising. It was crushed by the Spanish Navy and the Spanish Republican Army, the latter using mainly Moorish colonial troops from Spanish Morocco.

Francisco Franco controlled the movement of the troops, aircraft, warships and armoured trains used in the crushing of the revolution. While the insurrection was brief, historian Gabriel Jackson observed “In point of fact, every form of fanaticism and cruelty which was to characterise the Civil War occurred during the October revolution and its aftermath: utopian revolution marred by sporadic red terror; systematically bloody repression by the ‘forces of order’; confusion and demoralisation of the moderate left; fanatical vengefulness on the part of the right.”

The revolt has been regarded as “the first battle of” or “the prelude to” the Spanish Civil War.

Notice that miners have often been in the vanguard of radical labor unrest. This includes Thatcher’s England.

Remember the violent strikes in the Thatcher years and the Thatcher/Scargill feud: “Arthur Scargill (born 11 January 1938) is a British trade unionist. He was President of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) from 1982 to 2002. Joining the NUM at the age of nineteen in 1957, he became one of its leading activists in the late 1960s. He led an unofficial strike in 1969, and played a key organizing role during the strikes of 1972 and 1974, the latter of which helped in the downfall of Edward Heath’s Conservative government. His views are described as Marxist.

“A decade later, he led the union through the 1984–85 miners’ strike, a major event in the history of the British labour movement. It turned into a fierce confrontation with the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher in which the miners’ union was defeated. A former Labour Party member, he is now the party leader of the Socialist Labour Party (SLP), which he founded in 1996.” (from Wikipedia)

Remember too, the Ludlow Massacre: “The Ludlow Massacre was a domestic massacre resulting from strike-breaking. The Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel and Iron Company guards attacked a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families in Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914, with the National Guard using machine guns to fire into the colony. Approximately 21 people, including miners’ wives and children, were killed. The chief owner of the mine, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was widely excoriated for having orchestrated the massacre.

“The massacre, the seminal event of the Colorado Coal Wars, resulted in the deaths of an estimated 21 people; accounts vary. Ludlow was the deadliest single incident in the southern Colorado Coal Strike, which lasted from September 1913 to December 1914. The strike was organized by the miners against coal mining companies in Colorado. The three largest companies involved were Colorado Fuel & Iron Company, owned by the powerful Rockefeller family; Rocky Mountain Fuel Company, and Victor-American Fuel Company.” (from Wikipedia)

The movie Matewan gives a glimpse of the Battle of Matewan (also known as the Matewan massacre) which was a shootout in the town of Matewan in Mingo County and the Pocahontas Coalfield mining district, in southern West Virginia. It occurred on May 19, 1920 between local coal miners and the Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency.

Lastly, the movie Confidential Agent, based on Graham Greene’s writings, is a story about various participants in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) trying to convince British coal-miners and coal-mining companies to stop selling coal to the Franco royalists who will use the coal to work metal into gun and planes and steel for the military.

One has in a sense come full circle since 2012 to see a renewed Asturias, Spain, miners revolt and ferment: “The 2012 Asturian miners’ strike was an industrial dispute involving more than 8,000 coal miners in the Spanish autonomous community of Asturias.”

The geographer David Featherstone has described the strike as “one of the most dramatic forms of anti-austerity protest to emerge in the wake of the crisis of 2007–2008.”

The tremendous tensions between haves and have-nots in Europe before WWII, is also alluded to in the movie Julia. “Julia is a 1977 American Holocaust drama film directed by Fred Zinnemann, from a screenplay by Alvin Sargent. It is based on a chapter from Lillian Hellman’s book Pentimento about the author’s relationship with a lifelong friend, ‘Julia,’ who fought against the Nazis in the years prior to World War II.”

In Julia, Vanessa Redgrave’s character tells Jane Fonda’s: “There’s a lot of interesting progressive experimentation going on in Floridsdorf.” This scene goes unnoticed by the average movie viewer but is very informative since Floridsdorf was a section of Vienna that was trying all kinds of progressive communal social forms in the thirties, all of which, like the Asturias miners’ ferment in Spain, was crushed by right wing violence.

In other words, one can get a sense of Europe “seething” with left-right tensions before WWII, with the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939 as a kind of “overture” to all of it.

The current turmoil in Spain over the removal of Franco (died in 1975) remains to a less monumental site is tied up with all these fights of yesteryear and all the violent atrocities that accompanied the suppression of all progressive movements under the all-purpose “rubric” of anti-Communism.

Magic or Sacred Geography as a Kind of Silent Education

Magic and its clone, sacred geography, are all around us and are crucial organizing principles for the way people think. Such emotions are an overlay over all formal education.

For Communists, the grave of Marx in Highgate Cemetery in England is sacred ground. For some German soldiers after WWII who committed suicide on the steps in Feldherrnhalle (“Field Marshall’s Hall”—a display in Munich in Odeonsplatz of large statues of famous military leaders in German history), these statues and their place in Munich “means” something magical or sacred to them. North Koreans have Paektu Mountain which Kim recently ascended in a ritual addressed to the North Koreans. Think of Camelot or Lourdes. Think of sites such as the Lincoln Memorial or Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris or “holy sites” in Jerusalem or Mecca.

Think of magical and sacred things like the three imperial regalia in Japan which Emperor Hirohito fixated on at the end of WWII.

How does this kind of thinking permeate our lives in a way that nobody quite sees clearly:

The left in American politics (Bernie Sanders, Jeffrey Sachs, et al) explicitly or implicitly, think of Scandinavian social and economic systems as a kind of “magic geography” (i.e., defects and problems are not “welcomed” in their idealized visions). On the right, there’s a Singapore paradise of the imagination (what magic geography is) whereas Boris Johnson of England sees a “high wage, low tax” investment utopia which serve as a marvelous locale for the founding of both new businesses and new families. In this vision, men found businesses and women found or establish families, so everybody’s happy.

These competing visions can be traced back as far as you like, but we point to 1974 when Hayek (“the right”) and Myrdal (“the left”) shared the Nobel Prize for Economics.

Professor Niall Ferguson, the conservative Harvard (now Stanford) financial historian (you may have seen his The Ascent of Money PBS mini-series), had a program years ago on educational TV where he walked around places in Chile that he presented as a pension “heaven.” Chile is now kind of falling apart with street riots convulsing Santiago. (Ferguson’s ideal Milton Friedman of Chicago was the main advisor of General Pinochet after the 1973 Chilean coup.

What none of these people see is that social reality is complex and highly changeable and that “magicalizing” one place or system (Sweden, Hong Kong, Singapore, Chile) won’t work because successes that look solid or eternal are often caused by all kinds of “conjunctural” (i.e., of the moment) factors which don’t last “forever.”

Thus, much less “dogmatism” is called for so that one is not “swept along” by “ideological foolishness.” embedded in “magical geography” or its clone “sacred geography.”