The Meaning of "Life"

I'm the compiler of  <www.Clockworks2.org>, a wiki on "The Human/Machine Interface in SF," which is based on Clockworks: A Multimedia Bibliography of Works Useful for the Study of the Human/Machine Interface in SF — that "Multimedia Bibliography" phrase is the publisher's; we called it a "List" (Greenwood Press, 1993). 

The end of the 20th century was a time when literary studies were getting a heavy dose of Philosophy, and respectable scholars by God were to Define your terms! My writing partner, Thom Dunn, and I hadn't always done so and had taken a little guff for the failure. So in the Introduction to Clockworks, toward the end of our Introduction, pretty safe from the eyes of most readers and, we figured, all those unpaid academic reviewers, we wrote this, defining the last part of our subtitle:

In SF. In our Abbreviations, we differentiate between "SF" and "S.F." "S.F." is "science fiction," and SF is "science fiction" plus related genres such as eutopias, dystopias, some fantasy, and some horror. In our earlier volumes The Mechanical God [Greenwood 1982] and Clockwork Worlds [GP 1983], we declined to define "science fiction" and noted the comparable inability of biologists to define "life," of attorneys to define "tort" let alone Justice, of mathematicians to define "point" — and we noted the generations of literary critics who have discussed comedy and tragedy without ever coming up with standard definitions of those terms. Here, we recommend a definition of "life" Erlich heard somewhere and liked: "The process by which entropy is reversed, locally and temporarily, in a volume both in contact with and set off from surrounding space-time"; but we still decline to define "science fiction."

Although we did give some indications of where we set the SF borders.

It was a joke, with a bit of a "Screw you" to the pedants: we won't define "science fiction," but we will tell you The Meaning of Life.

Over the years, a close friend or two with strong backgrounds in the relevant sciences, and strong tendencies toward the wise-ass, has or have suggested an example or two that fit the definition but are obviously inorganic (crystals forming in a sack or "sac" that's a semi-permeable membrane ... and such). 

Okay, but this much in my defense, sort of, and to complete the story with the probable source of the biology-lore I passed along. From Jessica Riskin's The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick, a work I'm annotating for the wiki: "'When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on 'doing something,'" and that "the most salient 'something' that organisms characteristically did was to resist entropy, to avoid decay into equilibrium" (Restless Clock, p. 369; ch. 10). And the source of the quote? Edwin Schrödinger's What Is Life? (Cambridge U Press, 1944).

Ah ha! Sort of. At least the lore I passed on — and I got it as academic folklore, word-of-mouth, a kind of rumor — at least the lore I passed on had a respectable genealogy.

Now Let Us Praise Some SF Prediction: Privacy and Philosophy (9 June 2013)

      In her introduction to the 1976 reissue of her book, The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin denies that she, or most SF authors, are into prediction: "Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying." Le Guin, though, thinks novels particularly and fiction generally can earn their keep because, paradoxically, fictions are not just complex and convoluted lies but also thought experiments that can tell us important truths about current society and may be useful, on occasion, in thinking about truths for the future.

      Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., approached the issue with the metaphor and image of artists as canaries: "I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coalmine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever."

     Science fiction isn't very good at prediction because, as Le Guin notes, it's into extrapolating current trends — and history indeed consists of the continuation of most current trends, but also the occasional weirdo change, frequently (and ironically here), a scientific and/or technological change that changes a lot.

     So every now and then I praise some SF that has been kind of good at predicting and very good at the canary-in-the-coal-mine job and warning of increasing dangers. The occasion for beginning to write this essay was my listening to Kim Stanley Robinson's Forty Signs of Rain (2004), which kills off a flock of canaries warning about global climate change. Still, this time around I want to return to four classic dystopias — and I'll allude to a couple more works — and an anti-utopia; two of these stories you've probably heard of, the rest maybe not.

     Okay, for the more pedantically inclined, a brief justification of differentiating "dystopia" and "anti-utopia": If a eutopia is a story about a Good Place (eu-topia), a dystopia is a story about a Bad Place (dys-topia). Some dystopias may have started out as eutopian projects, but if so that point isn't stressed, and dystopias are mostly agnostic about the possibility of eutopia. An anti-utopia is an attack on trying to set up at least one kind of eutopia and, at an extreme, an attack on utopianism root and branch (and leaves and stems and seeds). George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is a dystopia, with no patience with the idea that Nazi and (more to Orwell's point in the late 1940s) Stalinist thugs are spoiled eutopians: when the novel's severely-limited protagonist, Winston Smith suggests that the totalitarian Party of Oceania works for the common good, the Party official O'Brien cruelly corrects him: "The Party," O'Brien says, after blasting Smith with excruciating pain, "seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others […]. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end" (Part Three, section 3).

     In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), however, the Powers that Be emphatically intend remaining in power, but they know enough to do that by creating a society where people are thoroughly unfree and controlled and set in a class and individual place in a rigid hierarchy — and therefore are happy: innocents, of a sort, in paradise, this Brave New World ("that hath such people in it"). Huxley was to go on to write the eutopia Island (1962), and Island and Brave New World should probably be read together as a complementary pair, but Brave New World is an anti-utopia.
     Anyway, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World are two of the works I want to talk about, and I assume you know them. (If you do not, stop wasting your time reading my schlock and read them now; they're in most libraries and on the web.) The others you may not have heard of: Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1920), E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," and Cyril M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl's Space Merchants (1952/53).

     What We, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and Space Merchants all get right and what interests me in this part of my essay — who stole what from whom does not interest me — is privacy in two senses.

     First, all these worlds except the Brave New one are worlds of total (We and Nineteen Eighty-Four) or large-scale surveillance. In We, people live in apartment buildings, and the buildings are made of transparent glass; spies are common, and, of course, one's friends and colleagues will be honored if they betray you to the One State. Even more of course, in Oceania in 1984, "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU." In Space Merchants, there are just microphones and taps on rooms and such.

     I have dealt with surveillance fairly frequently, and at the moment of writing this piece (June of 2013), I needn't add my voice; people have been talking a lot about surveillance. And, frankly, right about now what I'd have to say is mostly (pause here for dramatic effect): You know, the three most beautiful words to hear may be "I Love You"; but among the most enjoyable to say are "Told You So." All sorts of people have told you so. Orwell's London of 1984 explicitly prefigures in terms of surveillance London of the early 21^st century, one of the most "surveilled" places on Earth outside of a penitentiary or Las Vegas casino. Certainly, Americans who are shocked — Shocked! — at government surveillance in 2012-13 just haven't been paying attention: the National Security Agency has been gearing up for widespread, computerized-assisted surveillance since at least 1978. And cheek swabs for DNA testing have been an issue for nearly a decade, and were central — in decorous satiric exaggeration — to the 1997 film GATTACA.

     But surveillance is just one way to invade privacy, and the great 20^th-century dystopias showed The Powers That Be invading personal space not just to get information out but also to get indoctrination in.

     Big Brother is not only watching you, he is also drumming in slogans and boring you to unconsciousness: "Orthodoxy," after all, "means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness"(1984 1.5), and there ain't nuthin' BB loves more than that orthodoxy! And, of course, in the Brave New World conditioning starts in the womb-bottle and continues life-long, though growing more subtle in bodily adulthood. (The goals of the State include keeping people emotionally juvenilized.)

     We missed the bullet of fanatical totalitarian indoctrination, but Pohl and Kornbluth extrapolated from the capitalism and crazes for psychology, marketing, and advertising in the mid-20^th-century and presented a future world where personal-space is constantly violated by long TV commercials, intrusive advertising, and, well, other people. The near-future society of The Space Merchants is ruled by ad agencies and others — but especially ad agencies — who worship The God of Sales. And Sales wants worshippers: the more the better, the dumber the better, the more passionately consumed by their role of consumers … the better.

     Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., started out his writing/canary-bird career with Player Piano (1952), warning against structural unemployment due to automation of industry and reminding us that private-enterprise, industrial bureaucracies are, by God, bureaucracies; Pohl and Kornbluth help teach that pervasive advertising and marketing is a form of propaganda: «Capitalism is good; consumption is good; my general identity is consumer; my more specific identity is a consumer of __________ products [fill in name of Agency]. Buy! Buy! Buy! __________ [fill in names of some specific products, but the controlling idea — and I do mean controlling — is Buy].»

     In the near-future world of Space Merchants, the Agencies, Chamber of Commerce, and big firms generally pretty directly control the government of the United States, and most of the rest of the world. In our present, power is more diffuse, which is good — but a bunch of Little Brothers and Medium-Size Brothers are also a threat; and minimally regulated markets impinge on us in ways undreamed of in Orwell's Oceania or even Pohl and Kornbluth's hucksters' utopia in Space Merchants.

     E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) is set in a far-future that seems extremely implausible. The opening sentence of instructs us to "Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee." The room is underground, inside a world-machine; and at the center of the room "there sits a swaddled lump of flesh — a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus." In a very short space in this sentence, Forster brings together some of the major motifs of 20th-century SF. He gives us a degenerate future humanity, but more important he places our species underground, inside a machine, and in an environment explicitly likened to a hive.

      Mechanizing the underworld had been done before, by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine (1895), and Wells has a sublunar world of rather degenerate Selenites (Moon people) in The First Men in the Moon (1901); still, to put a whole human civilization underground was something new and important. Back to the time of myth-making, the underworld was the realm of "Chaos and Old Night," the womb of the Earth Mother. It's no less than the complete reversal of an archetype to mechanize Mamma, and the motif will be familiar to anyone who knows such SF films as Metropolis, THX-1138, or A Boy and His Dog.

     We don't live in a literal machine underground, and we are not bloody likely to. Forster, though, is known for the brief epigraph, "Only connect…," and what Foster gets very right is showing us a world of connection and radical lack of connection.

     The world of the Machine is highly connected: air and food and data and ideas are conveyed in to each of the cells and excrement and data and ideas and scholarship go out. And every now and then one can get new clothes and stuff, and I'm sure there are entertainment channels we don't learn about (the point-of-view character consumes and produces lectures and Ideas). The Machine connects people, but only mentally, so to speak — and connects them within the limitations of high-volume machine-mediated connection. The visuals are a little degraded, and other communication subtleties are lost.

     Nowadays, this may sound like a cliché of a nerd's life in his parent's basement working the Internet, using his iPhone, and waiting for new shorts and sandals from Amazon.com. Foster was writing at the beginning of the 20^th century, and he seems prescient.

     Well … maybe.

     Le Guin and most SF critics would say what he was doing was telling lies in the form of an insightful fable, a fable for his time that turns out highly relevant to ours. The Machine can stand for advanced human culture, for technology and techniques of social organization: all useful things but which, taken too far, no longer connect people but alienate us. The world of the Machine is a world of humans tenuously connected to one another and radically disconnected from the physical world and direct experience, disconnected from nature, history, and, ultimately, disconnected from each other.

     Out of touch.

     This much is very clear in the story: subtlety is not totally a virtue in the popular arts. Nuance is, though, and there is one nuanced bit relevant for Nineteen Eighty-Four, the late 20^th century, and maybe nowadays, as products of US and Western European higher ed. in the late 20^th century move into positions of authority.

     The bit of nuance I'm talking about comes in a paragraph many readers may skip through quickly because it appears between two major plot developments. The second is "the reestablishment of religion" as many people come to worship the Machine (beginning of part III, "The Homeless"). The first change in the culture is "the abolition of respirators" so that the people of the Machine, who can no longer breathe easily the air on the Earth's surface, are now prevented from leaving the Machine. This was a problem for students of surface things — the sea, for example — but such scholar/scientists were few and their activity mildly vulgar. More important, advanced intellectuals of the time theorize the rightness of restriction to the Machine.

     A lecturer on what we'd call the web, "one of the most advanced of them" in his thinking, enjoined his audience — we're told he "exclaimed" the line, "Beware of first-hand ideas! […] First hand ideas do not really exist. They are but the physical impressions produced by love and fear, and on this gross foundation who could erect a philosophy? Let your ideas be second-hand, and if possible tenth-hand, for then they will be far removed from that disturbing element — direct observation." The lecturer uses for an example his own field. "Do not learn anything about this subject of mine — the French Revolution. Learn instead what I think that Enicharmon thought Urizen thought" — significant name there, Urizen, unimaginative reason and law in William Blake's mythology — learn instead what "Gutch thought Hu-Yung thought […] Carlyle thought Mirabeau said about the French Revolution. Through the medium of these eight great minds, the blood that was shed at Paris and the windows that were broken at Versailles will be clarified to an idea which you may employ most profitably in your daily lives," although he never says how this idea might be employed. What is important is to this advanced intellectual and to the story is abstraction away from the physical, the material. "'And in time' — his voice rose — 'there will come a generation absolutely colourless, a generation "seraphically free / From taint of personality," which will see the French Revolution not as it happened, nor as they would like it to have happened, but as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine.'" His conclusion is greeted with "Tremendous applause," less because of the genius of the speaker and more that that lecture "did but voice a feeling already latent in the minds of men — a feeling that terrestrial facts must be ignored," so abolition of the respirators and confinement to the Machine "was a positive gain."

     Making fun of cranks is one of the oldest shticks in satire, but what is mocked here is significant. Parallel to people's physical alienation from the world and the human body is the psychological and philosophical alienation of literal Idealism, capital "I" Idealism of the Platonic/neoPlatonic, religious-fanatic extreme sort.

     Idealism is a perennial philosophy and always out there, going in and out of fashion. Forster earned his keep as canary in the coal mine if for nothing else attacking this trend in a popular and understandable medium — as opposed to, say, most academic philosophy — in 1908.

     Re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four in an English department in 1984 and following, what struck me most forcefully was the part of "The Grand Inquisitor Scene" — Winston Smith's interviews with the Party official O'Brien — where O'Brien corrects Smith's naïve, old-fashioned, empiricist view of the world. Today we might say that O'Brien makes Smith sane again by getting him again in love with Big Brother, gradually talking and torturing Smith away from membership in "the reality-based community."

     Totally cut off from the world, in a torture room in the Ministry of Love — for all practical purposes, as much a man-made total environment as Foster's Machine — Smith is taught "that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else." And if this is the case — if reality is what came to be called socially constructed, literally, ontologically socially constructed, what then?

     I've put it, If reality is created between our ears, it will be determined by the guy with a gun in our ear. O'Brien more elegantly clarifies that reality exists "Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party" (1984 3.2).

     Well, maybe Foster's warning and Orwell's did some good, not predicting the future but, in Ray Bradbury's formulation trying "to prevent it," or prevent things from being worse. Hitler and Stalin are dead; the Third Reich and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics — "four lies in one phrase" — are gone; and I can hope that those in power sympathize strongly with "The Social Construction of Reality" in terms of world-views, of epistemology, but otherwise are dues-paying members of the reality-based community.

     Whatever: if we acted only if certain of the results of our actions, we wouldn't do much of importance. Speaking out against vice and stupidity was much of the job of Foster, Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, Vonnegut, and their generations. As I write, Fred Pohl is still alive — and we'd now better start working on the warnings of Pohl, and of the team of Pohl and Kornbluth. 

Poetry and Push-pin, Satire and Sailing (14 March 2014)

[Q]uantities of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry.
—Attributed by John Stuart Mill to Jeremy Bentham 

                                                                                                                               Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with […] 

                                                                                                                            music and poetry. If the game of push-pin furnish more pleasure, 

                                                                                                                                it is more valuable than either. Everybody can play at push-pin; 

                                                                                                                                                                 poetry and music are relished only by a few. — 

                                                                                                                                       Jeremy Bentham, The Rationale of Reward (1825) [III.i]  

            
            Push-pin is apparently some sort of kids' game noted for being particularly mindless, perhaps comparable to "Marco Polo" as played by Stewie Griffin on Family Guy; or, to keep John Stuart Mill's brevity and alliteration — although losing his gender-neutrality — we might say, "poetry is no better than pud-pulling."

            "Different strokes / For different folks" ….

            I've been thinking of such matters since retiring from having taught for forty years the largely poetic scripts of William Shakespeare, and such other works as Shakespeare film, the original Buck Rogers stories, Animal House, Blazing Saddles, and South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

            And, having a retirement income to live on — younger readers should study up on the concept of "pensions," out of which you have been screwed — having a retirement income to live on, I have entered the film biz and have, among other things, provided fairly extensive Notes to improve a brief scene of a nice young Canadian having his stomach punctured repeatedly by a pick axe. Not coming soon to your local theaters but available on Amazon.com: PSYCHOTICA! (2010), and if the bit about a pick axe would be a spoiler for you for the movie, you really don't watch many slicer-dicers and probably shouldn't watch this one.

            Since retiring I've also had to put up with my annoying best friend Dan's habit of periodically asking me why anyone nowadays should study Shakespeare. Dan, of course, is a serious reader of serious fiction, and, as Captain Dan, teaches the problematically practical art of sailing. If the south-central coast of California is ever attacked by poorly-equipped 17^th-century pirates, Dan can be out there leading the naval attack on them; or, in a somewhat more likely scenario, after a secular Apocalypse, Dan could be running supplies out to the wretched survivors on the Channel Islands, depending only on the winds for power, and the aversion to water of both robots and zombies.

            "Quantities of pleasure being equal," poetry is indeed no better than push-pin or Marco Polo or masturbation or sailing — if, but only if, all we're concerned about is quantity of pleasure.

            That's one standard response to Jeremy Bentham's bit of philistinism, but note that the formulation is "if all one is concerned about" is pleasure. Pleasure counts. Utile et dulce and all that: good art is supposed "to please and instruct," to have some utility — a good word for a Utilitarian like Jeremy Bentham — and give pleasure. If pleasure didn't count, people would do better to just read history or philosophy or self-help books or instruction manuals or, God help us, theology or law books.

            But why give university course credit for studying Shakespeare or Blazing Saddles, usually even more credit than for studying sailing?

            The answer I gave Dan: 'cause it kept me working and getting paid, (schmuck!). The more interesting question, that one out of the way — it costs money to sail with Captain Dan, and he wasn't about to push me on that argument — the more interesting question is what literature and drama and film might be good for, period. Granting that harmless fun needs no excuse, what's useful about plays or movies, or — for most of what I taught — non-technical reading?

            In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker has recycled an old and unfashionable argument defending literature, but, if it holds up, a very powerful argument. A major part of Pinker's analysis concerns "The Rise of Empathy and the Regard for Human Rights" from the 18^th century on in the West, a crucial phenomenon for what he calls "The Humanitarian Revolution" (ch. 4). And Pinker holds that this phenomenon didn't just follow substantial increases in literacy and the reading of fiction, but to a significant degree was caused by that reading — and, I will add to Pinker's list, by watching and listening to some drama and later film.

            "Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head" — especially when reading a novel — "you are observing the world from that person's point of view. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person's mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions" (Penguin pb, 2011: 175). That is, while reading many novels, you are automatically engaging in a kind of empathy; and Pinker argues cogently that a rise of empathy was significant for the elimination or radical reduction — usually and so far! — of most of the casual brutality woven into the fabric of everyday life for almost all of recorded human history.

            And there's more involved than just empathy.

            As an admirer of satirists like Jonathan Swift, Pinker also recognizes that "Exposure to worlds that can be seen only through the eyes of a foreigner, an explorer, or a historian can turn an unquestioned norm ('That's the way it's done') into an explicit observation ('That's what our tribe happens to do now'). This self-consciousness is the first step toward asking whether the practice could be done in some other way" (175).

            As a student of satire and science fiction, I'll add that such "S&SF" works, when they're earning their keep, can be highly effective in an audience's world expansion. As Pinker says, most of us, most of the time accept the world we live in as the world, the only possible world. A study of history or anthropology would disabuse us of that delusion quickly: our ways are far from the only way. History however, often comes with quizzes where the proper little "bubble" to fill in gives "1492" for the Fall of Granada or Christopher Columbus's sailing off and doesn't get you picturing life in a besieged city or what was going through the head of a complex world-changer, and major criminal like Admiral-Governor Columbus. And you may remember from your anthro courses mostly factoids on kinship relations among the clans, phratries, moieties, demes, and what-all of the Tlingit peoples of wherever.

            Good satires and science fictions are fun, and they sucker us into seeing our world from alien points of view and seeing the weirdness of everyday life — or seeing worlds radically different from our own. How would Early Modern European history look to a humane, civilized giant of high intelligence, or to a horse-like creature who was truly a rational animal, a rational animal who had never seen an ill-natured quarrel, much less a war? How would we view human relations after several chapters inside the mind of a highly intelligent creature whose species has always come in three sexes?

            Admittedly, a bad teacher can make Swift's Gulliver's Travel's or Isaac Asimov's The God's Themselves every bit as boring, tedious, and unpleasant as bad teachers can make history or anthropology; but for their original audiences, Gulliver and Asimov were somewhat guilty pleasures, and still can be discovered with delight by curious young readers. Or some young nerds can discover to another kind of delight that there are adults willing to take Asimov and Swift and Animal House and South Park seriously.

            Pinker may be more wrong than right, of course, and the esthetes' and puritans' doctrine may be correct that poetry — and art more generally — accomplishes nothing and/or wastes time better devoted to useful things.

            I don't think so.

            Robert Browning's disreputable monk and great painter Fra Lippo Lippi gives us a look into his world in a dramatic monolog justifying himself and his painting to the Italian Renaissance equivalent of a cop on a late-night beat.

                                  we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted — better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out. (lines 300-06)

Art, when it's working, "defamiliarizes" our world and opens up other worlds: "making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar" to paraphrase several lines in S. T. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria (1817: ch. 14). If Pinker and an old tradition are right; if Browning's Lippo is right, and Browning as well, as an author of dramatic monologs — then some forms of art can get us to see the world through other's eyes. That's empathy by definition, which can lead to sympathy; and it offers visions of alternatives.

            So it might be useful to watch and listen to Shakespeare, and perhaps study his scripts, and study and enjoy satire and SF and other arts.

            And, if you're into it, go sailing: quantities of pleasure being equal, sailing is as good as satire reading, plus it's a good way to learn some math and meteorology and the somewhat foreign language of utterly pedantic ways to talk about parts of a boat.