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JERROLD McGRATH: THE RECORD
6. Books
In Praise of Disorder. UKAI Projects, 2023. 247 pages, about 96,000 words. Edited by Richard Martin. ISBN 978-1-7386464-0-1. Also in paperback, ebook and audiobook from Amazon. On disorder not as a problem to be managed but as the condition from which culture and meaning emerge, and on attending to the boundaries we use to divide our experience of the world. Ten chapters: Choking, Ambivalence, Procrustes, Dystopia, Poaching (how the present order was built and what it costs), then Linger, Interrupt, Ritualize and Theorize, Beat the Bounds, Tubu (practices).
In Praise of Disorder, full text
The complete text of the book as published by UKAI Projects (2023), without images, front matter or author biography.
1. Choking
“Two dangers constantly threaten the world: order and disorder”
— Paul Valéry
Story
It’s 2004 and I’m working as a relocation trainer in the Japanese automotive industry. Employees at Toyota and Mitsubishi, in preparation for a term of service in an overseas office, receive English language training and support in managing non-Japanese employees. Many are leaving families and friends behind, and I sometimes wonder how much attention they can offer to our daily exercises. I appreciate the time I have with them.
On a day off, I visit the province of Gifu. Some friends take me to the Nagara River to witness an ancient method of fishing known as ukai. Balls of fire hang over the river. As we move closer, we can see the long wooden boats, the figures standing in them, and the harness, or kagaribi, that suspends the flames over the water. A man is feeding the flame with splits of pine while a young woman holds some ten or twelve strings in her hand. She wears a blue shirt and a matching hat that reminds me of the bishop’s piece on a chess board. Her skirt is made of long straw. Sparks blow past her face.
The young woman twists her wrist and pulls her fist to her abdomen. Her hand then uncurls and lets the strings go slack. She glares at the bobbing forms at the end of each line. I anticipate decorative lures or fish ready to be drawn. I follow her gaze and am surprised to see that each shimmering thread leads to a large black bird, a cormorant, with the string attached to a metal ring that gently chokes its neck.
Both the woman and the cormorants fish by the light of the fire. I learn later that the birds dive for ayu, a sweetfish, and rise again to the surface. Small catch slide easily down the birds’ throats, but the rings prevent them from swallowing the larger fish. All the same, the cormorants persist in their hunt, seemingly indifferent to their inability to enjoy what they have caught. When their throats are fully engorged, the woman hauls them into the boat and turns them upside down. The catch slides out in a torrent into a bamboo bucket. Back on shore, the fish are handed over to the community to eat or to sell to tourists. As the festivities conclude, the birds are given another run, this time without the rings attached, and they are free to eat their fill.
I watch in quiet awe while a voice in my head demands that I make sense of what is happening. I’m ashamed to say that making sense to me, at that time in my life, means passing judgment. I turn to a friend and remark that it is a bit cruel. She shrugs and gives me a look that I fail to interpret.
Ukai has been a part of Japanese culture for at least 1,300 years. While today it is demonstrated primarily for tourists, ukai long played a role in how com- munities fed themselves. In areas where modern commercial approaches came to dominate, inland fish stocks experienced collapses and, in some cases, with strict management, recovery. However, ukai fishing doesn’t appear to have any impact on the sustainability of these stocks.
Animal rights groups, both in Japan and internationally, criticize the practice as being unnecessarily hard on the cormorants.
Matsuo Bashō, a seventeenth-century Japanese poet, describes the discomfort the practice evoked in him:
Delightful, and yet Presently how saddening, The cormorant boats.
Others are more effusive in their support of the practice. According to a 1998 story in The Australian, filmmaker and actor Charlie Chaplin once described ukai as “Japan’s highest art form” after he, too, visited the Nagara River.
The men and women who practice ukai are known as ushou, and they argue there is a close and intimate relationship between the birds and themselves, in much the same way that dogs are leashed and yet remain an important part of a family. “It’s because we live together, the man and the cormorants, that ukai fishing is possible,” says one in an interview with the Agence France-Presse.
The practitioners argue that the ushou, the cormorants, the community, and the ayu are in a harmonious relationship. When enjoying a grilled sweet- fish later in the evening, it is difficult to forget the throat of the bird, the ring around it, a string in a hand, and a fire hovering above it all. The process is well-rehearsed, orderly, yet it draws on ways of understanding the world that trigger an immediate need to respond.
I play with the image in my mind for years. In fact, over a decade later, a non-profit organization that I help found is named after the practice. I start wondering what the strings in my hand are attached to in my work and in my life. Sometimes the thing attached seems so far away I can barely make it out. We tug and pull and are unsure what effect it will have on whatever is tangled up at the other end. Or perhaps I am at the end of the string, and somehow have missed the ring that prevents me from swallowing.
The strings to other aspects of our lives trail off into obscured distance. The effort and connections that provide us with our food, our clothing, and our stories are impossibly hard to see. Traditions like ukai are often sacrificed in service to doing things more efficiently and at enormous scales. The philoso- pher Martin Heidegger lamented the idea of the gigantic, which disembodies things from their relationships in order that they might be studied—all the while annihilating distances. Of course, Heidegger, despite support from notable Jewish thinkers, such as Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida, was strongly anti-Semitic. There are always more strings.
We sacrifice intimacy with landscapes, sustenance, and work in return for affluence and comfort. The land we walk and live on is no longer un- derstood as existing for itself. Terrains are defined by the uses they serve— timber, recreation, a place for our dead, or cover for essential minerals. The food we eat hides from where it grows and those that grow it. Our talent and time become commodities on a shelf, marketed as best we can to those that can provide us with what we need to survive. It would be hard to ignore the fact that the ability of our planet to support human ingenuity in service of growth has been called sharply into question.
For me, the experience of watching ukai is one of profound confusion. It refuses categorization—at least when I try to make sense of it. I recognize that my attempt is partial, incomplete, and unsatisfying. It fits nowhere in the cognitive boundaries that fence my reality. A sense of order lets us deal with the world abstractly, predictably, rigidly. A thing I’m seeing should belong to a group of things I recognize and about which I have certain ideas and opinions.
Ukai wasn’t fishing as I knew it, but it wasn’t anything else I could understand either. The process of removing experience from the realm of the senses would normally allow me to sort, make sense, and store it away.
Waiting for a bus in Canada, I have expectations about how the line should be formed. Someone, perhaps an elderly woman or a young child, deviates from these socially negotiated routines and I start to categorize again. Perhaps the elderly woman is from somewhere else and unfamiliar with how lines are made or I put her in the too old to stand for the bus ride and making sure she gets a seat category. For a child, I may sort them in the not old enough to understand grouping, and then I naturally look for a parent so that the sorting can continue. I have emotional responses to each of these categories. Even the none of my business bucket will make me feel some way about the interaction. There is an expected order, and deviations from that order push me to make sense of it all. Without a framework in place, I would be exhausted and over- whelmed. We develop routines to filter and sort incoming experiences so that we can function despite the constant barrage of stimuli that comes our way.
My hope, though, is that this book encourages you to be more open to disorder.
True disorder must be dealt with concretely. It’s slow and awkward and makes us feel dumb. Not knowing is humbling and a gateway into something incredible. Imagine that the elderly woman in my bus line started singing opera in Italian or the young boy was found to be travelling alone on some grand adventure. Imagine that the fish were being caught by sleek, glossy birds tied to a string and swimming under an open fire of pine. Would you reject what was happening? It would be easy to disregard the old woman as insane, the boy as having irresponsible parents, the people fishing as cruel to their birds. Or we can kneel down and put our faces up close and try to make sense of what is happening without resorting to established categories or boundaries. We can try to make sense of it as it is.
Disorder, by its definition, contains uncertainty and fluidity. Disorder is an awakening to the fact that we are insufficient to an experience. The words of Paul Valéry that open this chapter speak to an ongoing tension between a desire for control and the need for chaos; the need for humanity to step into something new.
Stepping into disorder is a choice. It’s not the same choice for everybody, but it’s a choice all the same. My culture and my upbringing mediate the categories that I use. Experience refines them. The structure of the city I live in affects the types of things I might see. The culture of the city in which I was raised affects how I’m likely to respond. Embracing disorder isn’t an easy thing. Many have no choice and have so little invested in the way things are that it makes little difference. More and more of us are losing our ability to choose.
We will see how tightly our current idea of order is choking us.
Our world is increasingly defined by order, despite claims by many that things are more chaotic than they’ve ever been. Volatility and precarity seem to define existence, but this fragility arises from the escalating power of scale, generally understood as the pursuit of growth and efficiency: the values that underpin our relationships and the structures of modern life. In order to build the sys- tems that we rely upon, we shift vulnerability on to people and communities that are far away. To meet our needs, predictability becomes essential. The intricate machine that brings a banana, for example, from the tropics to my table allows for little variation. The people tasked with serving these machines are flung about so that my needs are met.
As the title suggests, this book is an argument in favor of disorder. Of course, we will need to be clear on exactly what we mean by the term, and how it relates to the world around us. I am wary of the language of “we” and the voice of this work will jump from the collective to the personal when my discomfort demands it. My experience of the world is specific and privi- leged. The strings attached to me and the strings I hold differ greatly from those of others, and particularly those from elsewhere.
My embrace of disorder is not purely ethical. My practice has centered disorder in culture to bring about changes in systems in both local and global contexts. I have seen firsthand how disorder serves highly practical purposes for individuals, communities, and society at large.
In writing this, I hope to show that:
Awe
Awe makes uncertainty fun. If disorder is a denial of what we expect to see, then awe is the capacity to step into it anyway. My experience of ukai was disorienting but in a way that invited me to explore. I too quickly fell back on a desire to categorize and abstract, but the experience of awe is a necessary condition for human beings to step into the unknown. Researchers at the Lab of Misfits, curious about the phenomenon, studied Cirque du Soleil audience members to try to better understand the experience. Over five nights, 282 audience members were invited to participate. Sixty of them were fitted with EEG caps to measure neurological responses. Those that reported an experi- ence of awe saw a marked decrease in brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, an area associated with decision making and intention.
Neuroscientist and Lab of Misfits director Beau Lotto observed, “They weren’t focused on looking at things. They were just taking it in.” The researchers also noted a concurrent increase in activity in the default mode neural network, associated with imaginative thought. This asymmetry of activity correlates to “the desire to step forward,” according to Lotto, particularly when the executive part of the brain might recommend caution.
Awe is a state of comfort in not knowing. I feel awe at the sight of my daughter, of untouched landscapes, of expressions of culture unexpected yet holding the potential for joy. Increasingly, however, we design systems and turn decisions over to machines and institutions that select against any possibility of confusion. My needs are met with few delays and often before I am even aware of them. Interactions with people become unnecessary as automated systems process my payments, arrange my day, and introduce me to those with whom
I might spend my time. A sense of awe allows us to step into new experiences, yet too often our passion is hacked or bypassed, as we are persuaded to make purchases of products or services of questionable value.
Solutions
Living in a large city in Canada, if I want to eat fish there are ample oppor- tunities to do so. Any number of restaurants are prepared to meet this need and, of course, I can go to the store, buy some fish, and cook it myself. I grew up fishing. I own my own rod and reel and might even journey into the forests and lakes north of us to catch my own fish. But I would be hesitant to rely on my own talents to feed my family. In other places and other times, I might have asked a neighbour, or traded my partner’s dumplings for the bounty of a more competent angler. I suppose I could domesticate some of the many cormorants that live on the shores of Lake Ontario, often considered a pest, to do my fishing for me. These last two solutions ring a little absurd as I imagine myself knocking on my neighbour’s door and enquiring into the presence of fresh fish, during a pandemic no less, or wildly chasing confused black birds through knee-high waters.
The reason that these last two solutions seem so far away is that they are no longer seen as appropriate ways to solve the problem of having no fish to eat. Our current system has wholeheartedly embraced a commitment to growth and efficiency.
This commitment to bigger and faster has led to a better life for many. Fish are farmed and monitored and extracted by the tonne. At some point, though, the number of people and their needs will run up against our col- lective ability to provide for them. We are in constant need of new solutions when our old ones begin to fail us. Innovations in fishing allowed for more fish to be pulled from the water and more people to be fed. Traditional fish- ing practices like ukai can appear wasteful as the mouths to feed grow exponentially. New solutions extend the potential scale and size of groups and the human species.
Innovation starts with ideas. Sometimes, it’s several ideas bumping up against each other. Often, it’s the application of an idea from one place or problem to another. Rarely do we come up with something completely new. We draw solutions and generate new ones from the accumulated experiences and examples of our culture.
Culture is our collective inheritance. It is the shared resource that we draw upon to address challenges both known and novel. The rigidity of our current order is starting to squeeze out other ways of knowing the world. Technologies like artificial intelligence will increase the reach, impact, and opacity of the assumptions that go into designing our environment. When decision-making is turned over to machines, and when those machines reflect a narrow set of beliefs about what matters, we run the risk of depriving ourselves of a rich enough set of ideas to draw upon to deal with the challenges we face and often create.
We may disagree with the idea of growth as something desirable or even possible. However, our current global economy centres on growth and on the need to generate new solutions at an increasingly rapid pace if we want to continue growing. Unfortunately, the economy we rely upon is demanding more and more hegemony over the decisions that get made and this directly impoverishes the diversity of ideas we have to draw upon to respond. Fishing for our dinner is inefficient and when efficiency is valued over all else, what answers to questions become unavailable to us?
Pace
Things are moving faster. I will elaborate on this later, but the evidence is fairly clear. The need for new innovations to extend the limits of growth also increases the experience of pace in the world. The time we are permitted to generate new innovations gets shorter and shorter. Our understanding of time in the modern world amplifies this and leaves us feeling harried and overwhelmed. Relying on birds to catch one fish at a time seems a ponderous luxury.
For most of my life, I took my understanding of time for granted. I found it comforting to imagine time as a straight line. One end of the line started where and when I was, or perhaps extended backward to my birth and beyond but not in any practical way. The other end of the line plunged into the future. I also believed in the idea of progress, that points in the future were better than the point where
I found myself. The moment of eating the fish is better than the moment of deciding I want something to eat, and anything that accelerates time to that moment of eating is good.
For me, time was an ever moving and inevitable river, sweeping all of us along, each of our stories punctuated by shared turns and landmarks. In my imagination, we share a chronology marked by the same moments: the Challenger disaster, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Soviet-Canadian hockey rivalries, the ice storm of 1998, and so on. I now realize this is a naïve fiction. There are different ways of conceiving of time. Working with Indigenous Elders in Alberta, Canada, exposed me to circular models of time that understand events as being in a constant state of returning.
Rushing to the future is irrational when the future is a return to the conditions of a previous state. Working in industry in Japan exposed me to ideas of “thrownness” where our when and where in time are matters of fate hurling beans into a field. Our station in life dictates where we work, who we spend our time with, and where our body will be placed when we die.
Diana McCarty is an independent media producer and feminist media activist. At the Berlin transmediale in February 2020, she presented the idea of time as moving outward and unevenly. To illustrate her point, she connected stories of black liberation, particularly those led by women. Sanité Bélair was a lieutenant in the revolutionary force that liberated Haiti from French rule. She was a black freedwoman sentenced to death in 1802, who died by firing squad and, notably, refused a blindfold. Bélair stared into the eyes of her executioners.
The story of this heroic death in resistance was shared in nineteenth-century America around tables of various classes and ethnicities. Harriet Tubman learned at these tables. Her escape and support of others in their freedom inspired the Bolshevik Revolution, including women such as Elena Stasova. Michelle M. Wright, author of Physics of Blackness, describes this phenomenon as “ice melting outward.”
Many of us internalize stories of progress and linear time and believe that a better future awaits. To be ready for this better future, I commit myself to my own improvement and effectiveness and to sharing my efforts constantly with casual acquaintances on platforms like Instagram and in conversations at airport bars with strangers. Previously, I was drawn to anything that moved me quickly from where I was to that better future, and I accepted the accelerating pace of life. From walking, to bicycle, to car and train, to flight, to near-instantaneous connection through digital means, things went by faster and faster. In the modern world, the time between a desire and its fulfillment contracts radically. We forfeit the expe- rience of the journey in the belief that the future must be better than the present. Order allows us more.
Disorder pulls us out of time and forces us to question what matters. Disorder draws attention to the journey and the destination and lets us forge a better bal- ance. For too many, there is no stillness to define the present.
Our current order requires us to embrace routinized precarity and accelerating pace in exchange for incredible growth and increasing comfort. By accepting rou- tines outside my control, my desires are met quickly and efficiently. However, I lose opportunities to experience awe. By accepting precarity, I accommodate the needs of the giant systems that provide me with my standard of living. However, this precarity is defined by a decreasing pool of ideas to draw upon to make sense of the world and to solve problems. By accepting acceleration, I pay the necessary cost of moving closer to a better future. Yet I lose the experience of so many mo- ments as I rush to the next one.
For many, the benefits of modern living make these small prices to pay. The world, in aggregate, is safer, healthier, wealthier. However, what hidden costs come with this bargain? What opportunities do I forego for myself and for future gener- ations by aligning systems and culture so completely with a rigid order of routine, precarity, and acceleration?
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What do the scientists say?
Physicists call disorder entropy. The two terms used to be interchangeable, but entropy eventually won out, partly as a result of the other jobs the word disorder was doing in the world. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is about entropy, a term first coined by German physicist Rudolf Clausius in 1855. The Second Law declares that isolated systems move toward equilibrium, the state of maximum entropy. We can see this in practice anywhere there is an energy gradient. A ball will roll down a hill. A hot coffee will release heat energy into the air until it is the same temperature as the room. The state of equilibrium, contrary to what we might expect, is maximum entropy or disorder. Order, then, is a state outside of balance. The word entropy translates as transforma- tion or evolution from the Greek, and it defines how and why energy moves.
There is no escape from disorder. Albert Einstein remarked that “it is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown.”
Life, though, does its very best to delay the inevitable.
In fact, opposition to entropy seems to be a defining quality of being alive. James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia theory and the inventor of the micro- wave oven, when asked how he would identify life on Mars, offered that he would look for entropy reduction, “since this must be a general characteristic of life”.
Erwin Schrödinger, physicist and theoretical murderer of cats, asked the question, “How does the living organism avoid decay?” Of course, we do this by eating, drinking, breathing, and, in the case of plants, by generating energy from sunlight. We later learned that the formula for how this is done is embedded in a set of instructions called our DNA, an algorithm to create and maintain the order of the organism. Ingredients and a complex recipe book allow life to maintain order for a while, but all life, as far as we know, dies. Even when there is more than enough food to eat, we die, and entropy continues its endless work.
If it is the nature of life to fight entropy, why would I argue for more of it?
Another way to understand entropy is by thinking of pathways. Imagine some gas molecules gathered in the corner of a room. Soon enough those molecules will spread themselves. We may not be able to track the exact routes the molecules take, but we rightly expect that they’ll expand outward to fill the space allotted to them. Keeping those gas molecules trapped in the corner would require some sort of effort. The likelihood of those gas molecules finding themselves tightly clustered in the corner by accident is quite low. The cluster is considered ordered because it is unlikely.
Now, imagine a cabin in a winter forest. A fire burning inside keeps the air warm. The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that the heat energy will try to find its way outside. The walls may insulate but some heat will escape through them, some under the door. If we open a window, then instantly the heat changes course and makes use of this easier path. We take this action for granted but it is a representation of disorder at work. Not only will the heat diffuse, but it will do so in the most effective way possible.
We are building highly ordered systems to sustain a way of life and a level of energy use to which we have grown accustomed. We seal the doors, double pane the windows, and make sure that warmth has no route of escape. Of course, no seal is perfect, and heat will gradually seep out. The more heat we generate, the more pressure there is to release. Should the structure of the cab- in fail, the energy will release suddenly and dramatically. Relying on systems that need perfect control to succeed leaves us open to large-scale collapse.
The harder we try to maintain a system in an unnatural condition, the more energy is required to sustain it. What is more, the entropy of a system only decreases if the entropy of another system increases. The energy trapped in the firewood is released to make heat and waste. We can maintain the cabin at a comfortable temperature, but the need for fuel rises, particularly as the cabin grows bigger and more and more people come to rely on it. We can shift the debt of entropy on to the surrounding forest by cutting down trees, but, in time, limits will be met.
From the perspective of physics, entropy releases pressure.
Economically, global supply chains are extraordinarily ordered, and huge amounts of attention and energy are required to keep things running smoothly. Imbalances in how energy is priced, how wages are determined in different parts of the world, and how and why decisions are made make these invest- ments appear efficient. Without a considerable influx of energy, however, these supply chains would quickly collapse.
Most of this book is aimed at exploring disorder as a quality of relationships among people and our environment. Science gives us a place to start and a theoretical framework to work from. We won’t be spending too much time on the science, though. We will be focusing instead on the strings that connect us to the world and to each other, and on the rules that dictate what happens when we pull on them.
I also want to be sure that we don’t confuse disorder with sloppiness. Art, metaphor, and science all hold no love for sloppiness. Yet these are the realms where disorder is most often explored.
How do most people understand disorder?
The concepts of disorder in physics and in everyday life are related but inverted in curious ways. For science, disorder is equilibrium. For most of us, disorder is a state out of balance.
The simplest dictionary definition for disorder is a state of confusion. This helps us a little because we are all familiar with the feeling of being confused. The idea has some negative associations, though I would argue that very few interesting things happen without it.
A second definition is more specific and refers to the disruption of peaceful and law-abiding behaviour. More context is offered through sample sentences such as “recurrent food crises led to periodic outbreaks of disorder”. The COVID-19 pandemic offers us ample examples. We hear about individuals buying thou- sands of bottles of disinfectant and reselling at a sharp profit. Or stories are shared of Chinese doctors and citizens raising the alarm about the impending crisis despite warnings from their government. The definition is clearer, but I remain uncertain how I am meant to think about it.
A third definition is primarily medical and refers to a disruption of nor- mal physical or mental functions; a disease or abnormal condition. So, here disorder becomes a countable thing, tied to poor health, and therefore worthy of treatment and compassion. In North America, one of the most commonly diagnosed disorders is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), which saw an increase of 52% between 2003 and 2011 in the United States alone.
Some research suggests that parents may be pushing for the diagnosis so the drugs can be prescribed to improve school performance. This decision is made to help their child be more competitive in the fierce battle for academic success. So, while the third definition might appear to be more objective, it still suffers from the volatility of context and interpretation.
Natural systems are also instructive when it comes to disorder. While human systems often collapse in the face of sudden, unexpected, catastrophic interventions, natural systems are designed to thrive. Fires allow for forests and grasslands to regenerate. Wolff’s law describes how bones get stronger with greater external loads. People with erratic EKG readings are less likely to suffer from cardiac arrest.
Somewhat paradoxically, then, disorder represents a place of balance or rel- ative stability while order, from the perspective of science, suggests a state out of equilibrium. From a social or psychological perspective, disorder generates confusion as our expectations about how things are meant to be are violated. I create a model of the world that I understand as normal. Disorder is an open- ing to reconsider the validity of my model in dealing with the concreteness of the world. My perception of disorder is closely tied to how much I have invest- ed in the operation of the existing system. The more I have to lose, the quicker a situation can feel chaotic.
Even the structure of our brain suggests a meaningful role for a tension between order and disorder. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of Iowa Medical School have demonstrated that entire neural networks in our brain are committed to monitoring how much uncertainty is present in a decision-making process. This activity is centered in the amygdala, the home of emotions and fear. Ian McGilchrist provides a thorough overview of current research on brain symmetry in his book The Master and His Emissary. He describes how different areas of the brain are defined by different modes of perception. One area seems to perceive in a more whole-oriented way and focuses on physical bodies and external reality. Another distinct area perceives more details and is better equipped to categorize and deconstruct sensory experience. He argues that the categorizing brain has become dominant for a range of reasons in Western culture, and this is reflected in our bias toward manipulation and atomization, as well as our struggle to understand relationships and connection as fundamental properties of human experience. When we look at things closely, order becomes easier as relationships and interconnections are removed from the picture. When we look at things broadly, disorder becomes the norm as the volume of connec- tions makes sense-making difficult.
- Disorder, then, has certain qualities that will help us to make an argument for more of it.
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Disorder inspires confusion.
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Disorder arises when our expectations of a situation prove inadequate.
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Systems move toward disorder.
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The more rigid and ordered we try to maintain a structure, the more pressure there is to collapse and disorder it.
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Disorder appears in the relationships among parts.
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Our impressions of disorder are mediated by our culture and our upbringing.
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Disorder asks that we engage directly with our senses.
How might we bring disorder out of these narrow realms and into broader conversation with the world around us? What are the dangers of continuing on the path we are on? What’s wrong with the way things are?
Ambivalence
I hope to describe the path we are on and the dangers it poses. To put it simply, to maintain the order and structure of the world we have requires the continuous supply and use of energy. Luckily for us, human ingenuity, in the form of innovation, pushes the boundary of what is possible outward. For cen- turies, from Malthus to the Club of Rome, we have been warned that the end is near. Human creativity has kept us ahead of that curve, and, some argue, will continue to do so indefinitely. Feeding these systems, however, becomes more challenging as they age. As theoretical physicist Geoffrey West observes in Scale, this applies to the size, mortality, resilience, and sustainability of or- ganisms, companies, and societies. Exponential growth means an accelerating need for new innovations and new sources of energy to keep things going. The pace at which innovations must be introduced accelerates. The treadmill gets faster and faster, and we seem incurious about how we might get off it.
Culture can be understood as a collective inheritance we draw upon to develop solutions to problems we face. As we continue to pander to a desire for growth and efficiency, the current paradigm squeezes out different ways of understanding the world. So, as the need for innovation accelerates, the pool of ideas available to draw upon diminishes. Automated de- cision-making and artificial intelligence select against experiences that confuse us. We are offered fewer and fewer opportunities to be uncertain and lose the chance to grow as a result. We become trapped in cycles of growth and acceler- ation, with fewer opportunities to generate meaningful responses, and have an impoverished market of ideas from which to borrow.
There is no free lunch.
Because energy underlies the transformation and operation of literally everything, no system operates without consequences. Whenever energy is made useful to us, it also produces “useless” energy as a by-product in the form of disorganized heat or waste products. There are no perpetual mo- tion machines. We eat to live and to maintain the miracle that is our body and mind. After we eat, eventually we have to go to the bathroom. This is the way of entropy.
Procrustes
How did we get to this point and how might that path suggest new directions?
In much of the world, the idea of continuous growth has become axiomatic. Resistance might be framed against growth, but the default remains continu- ous expansion. Moreover, we are looking for exponential growth, which is when the rate of growth is in proportion to the current size of the thing growing rather than some past fixed point. At the time of writing this, the implications of exponential growth are becoming starkly evident as COVID-19 expands. On January 5, 2020, there were fifty-nine suspected cases in China and by Febru- ary 9, 2020, there were over 40,000. On February 21, 2020, Iran announced eighteen cases and Italy twenty. The number in Italy multiplied by a factor of sixteen in four days. Iran had more than 3,500 cases just twelve days later with a new doubling four days after that.
The concept of growth is hardly new and has underpinned Western culture since the dawn of the industrial revolution. Limits to growth are encountered, and innovations introduced to extend those limits. Each extension requires a re-organization of structures and culture. Since the collapse of the Commu- nist bloc, there have been few large-scale arguments against capitalism as a model. Structurally, our systems are becoming more complex and more global. Culturally, the moral assumption of growth and efficiency have come to dom- inate more and more spaces, particularly outside traditional market activities. Privacy, community, and the natural world are quickly becoming objects to use and scale.
At the same time, much of our culture seems to persist in a state of perpet- ual adolescence. The emotional, biological, and social complexity of the current state can be overwhelming. In his 1970 book The Uses of Disorder, sociologist Richard Sennett argues that teenagers develop “pre-formed identities” to help cope with their experiences. The turmoil of puberty is filtered through an iden- tity that lets people process information without feeling it directly. We know how to respond to a difficult situation at school because our identities, to some degree, dictate how we should respond. Of course, in time, Sennett argues, these identities should prove inadequate as life’s difficulties ask for a more nuanced and internally derived set of responses. However, when those hard lessons are avoided indefinitely, the process of developing one’s own identity can be delayed.
Today, it has become easier to avoid experiences that challenge us. The sys- tems that make life so efficient also ensure that we usually are exposed to ideas and interactions about which we feel comfortable or about which we already have clear opinions. Disorder forces us to reflect. A lack of disorder tells us that our assumed identities are adequate to deal with the world around us.
Dystopia
The best way to predict the future is to control it, and current trends suggest that our behaviours and our beliefs are being commodified and used to predict and shape what we might do next. What happens when we exist in a state of perpetual adolescence, protected from ideas and experiences that might prompt us to question how we make sense of the world? We become capable only of agreement or outrage and these emotions wash through us in shorter and shorter cycles.
The time I spent in Japan was a wonderful way to have my assumptions about order challenged and contextualized. What was taken as common sense in a foreign land was utterly baffling to me, a naïve Canadian unfamiliar with how that system operated. Travel today, albeit currently suspended, is reducing even these moments of uncertainty. The pursuit of scale smooths out regional expressions. Immediate and near-infinite access to information makes research and the conceptualization of a new experience easy. I’m not sure how my first encounter with ukai would have hit me if I had already watched YouTube videos that explained the practice. Sitting in a Starbucks in Tokyo, in Beirut, in Boston, it can be easy to forget exactly where you are.
I intend to show that our current order is unusually rigid and constrained. I will also argue that the values that underpin this order are intolerant of other ways of seeing the world. Rigidity diminishes the flexibility required to with- stand the inevitable shocks that any system is subject to on a regular basis. If we ignore other ways of seeing the world, we make it more difficult to discover solutions to the issues and opportunities we encounter. Diversity and access to many adaptable components are critical for personal and collective resilience.
Nature selects for greater diversity. We seem committed to doing the opposite. Technology has helped us avoid the costs of increasing order for centuries.
However, the technologies we have prioritized in recent times reflect a growing need for certainty and they extend from the values that our culture holds most dear. By shifting the responsibility for decisions on to machines, we lose con- trol over the experiences we have and reduce the opportunities for serendipity that might trigger a desire to make sense of what is happening. Social media shows us positions that either justify our existing beliefs or trigger disbelief and outrage without the benefit of self-reflection. The automation of services once performed by other humans removes the possibility of accidental encoun- ters with others. Algorithms assess our health and reduce the need for med- ical professionals to learn more about our lives and our habits. The tools that help us connect also remove the opportunity to connect with those that see the world differently. They encourage those with different beliefs to mask these positions or seek identically minded allies to offer a sense of belonging and legitimacy.
Poaching
Sharing the story of my encounter with ukai is an effort to demonstrate the broader confusion we experience when our processes of categorization and boundary drawing prove inadequate to an experience of which we are trying to make sense. As children, nothing makes sense to us, so we interpret the world through the filter of our culture and those around us willing to offer an explanation. In time, we begin to take ownership of interpreting the world, though the impact of our culture and those around us continue to play a considerable role.
After mapping out the terrain of the issues we are addressing, I will then explore the responses we can make individually and collectively to intervene. The ideas presented here are intended for individuals and communities and focus on the relationships of which we are a part but too often are incentivized to ignore. Culture is the work of living with other people, and we will look at changes we can make to shift how we relate to each other and to the structures we are complicit in enacting and sustaining through intention or omission.
The most important point to remember is that our current structures and cultures are relatively recent and reflect choices we have made. It’s easy to imagine that things have always been this way and that taking action to loosen the grip of the present is somehow unnatural. The truth is that, over time, the preference for order or disorder has been cyclical. The tension between the two is ongoing. Where we rest is a question of collective intention.
For example, in Japan I was exposed to notions of disorder with long cultur- al and social histories. Mujō means impermanence, transience, or mutability. The word describes a way of experiencing the world, deemed necessary to be happy in Buddhist thought. As with our understanding of physics, Buddhism sees all existence as impermanent and subject to change. The argument goes, then, that any attempt to find happiness through attachment to impermanent things is doomed. Yet by embracing disorder, we can achieve lasting happiness.
Indigenous Japanese spiritual systems are tied closely to cycles of life and nature. The combination of Buddhist thought borrowed from China with local animist beliefs has created a cultural mindset that is comfortable navigating the threats and transience necessary to achieve a meaningful life. The subsequent embrace of capitalism by many Japanese people offers a different way of know- ing the world. The ongoing practice of ukai yet another.
Each of us has an opportunity to draw on the past or to imagine a new way of being that introduces disorder into our lives. How might building a capacity to linger, to move slowly, affect the experiences available to us? How might a practice of interrupting serve to preserve our dignity and limit the commodi- fication of the self that is becoming ubiquitous? How do we learn more from being wrong and use ritual and theory as ways to embrace the freedom to believe the wrong things however temporarily? How do we pay attention to the boundaries and borders being drawn by us and for us? How do we resist new categories and new containers so that we can keep some aspects of life in com- mon and outside the hands of one group or another?
We will explore these themes through cases drawn from around the world.
Many of them focus on the work of change-makers in culture, commerce, community, and the environment. We will examine their impact and a range of responses across sectors, nations, and political affiliations. These examples highlight how we are together in this and how we have a collective responsibili- ty to ensure that our communities, our societies, and our planet are appropriate places to live now and in the future.
I am writing this book for two reasons. First, because I am worried about the world my generation is bequeathing to our children and their descendants. Second, because I have built a career leveraging disorder as a means of disor- ganizing groups of people stuck in unhelpful routines. I have found myself at the centre of projects that convene diverse communities around issues of shared concern. I focus on culture in all my work as I’ve seen the power that it has in telling us what things mean and what is possible. The most effective approaches provide moments of awe, find solutions in unexpected places, and allow time for meaningful reflection to occur. Lingering, interrupting, theorizing, ritualizing, and resisting the creation of unhelpful categories and boundaries are effective practices to generate better answers and to ask better questions. The way we address challenges too often relies on the same assumptions that contributed to their creation in the first place.
I have brought Russian theatre practices to the leadership team of a global IT firm. I have supported a sector-wide approach to digital transformation that emphasizes generosity in its operation. I have driven participation in artificial intelligence by groups that are normally excluded from these conversations.
My professional career has consisted of a series of challenges that asked me to organize ways of working so that very different people could come together to get things done. Recently, I have served as the lead for the Goethe-Institut
Toronto’s Algorithmic Culture programming, exploring concretely many of the ideas developed here.
Of course, I cooperated with outstanding people along the way, and I hope to point to some of them through the course of this book. Others will be omit- ted through inattention or lack of space, but those that informed this work are numerous.
Over and over, I’ve seen that for groups of people to come together in different ways, space needs to be created and old patterns disturbed. We are undergoing a profound transformation in how our lives are organized and how decisions are made, and this will dramatically narrow the moral positions we can draw upon going forward.
In 1933, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki wrote In Praise of Shadows. With this book, he mourned the loss of a Japanese way of seeing the world. At that time, Western technologies like brass, chrome, capsule pens, and electric lights were en- croaching rapidly into Japanese life and culture. Japanese aesthetics had long been defined by shadows and subtlety, but these new Western technologies instead favored light and clarity. Tanizaki understood that economic dominance would lead to the disappearance of the things he loved so deeply. The phono- graph, radio, and electric lights, all made the aesthetics of reticence and shad- ows untenable. Tanizaki lamented that, “These machines are the inventions of
Westerners, and are, as we might expect, well suited to the Western Arts. But precisely on this account they put our own arts at a great disadvantage.”
We are in another period of profound technological change, forced to won- der what ideas of beauty or truth will be lost this time. Electric lights burned away the shadows. The technologies we are unleashing pose a similar threat to ways of seeing the world that are not amenable to optimization or scale.
The impact extends well beyond ideas of beauty. The disappearance of ways of knowing the world makes us less able to adapt to changes as they come. A diversity of ideas about how the world should work might not seem useful today, but who knows what challenges we will face in the coming decades.
While Tanizaki was offering a sad farewell to a way of life that was being supplanted by Western aesthetics, this is a more hopeful text, arguing that we can each take action to celebrate and preserve disorder in our lives, our organi- zations, and our relationships.
Cultivating disorder that enriches us individually and collectively is a practice developed over time. The idea that human beings are best measured by their productivity and that we should build systems that emphasize scale are relatively modern innovations. Those with a vested interest in these ideas will argue that the current situation is part of an unbroken, natural state of affairs. We have become accustomed to telling a particular story and disorder allows for different, often older stories to complicate what things mean.
Linger
Awe, as we have seen, is nature’s way of helping us move into the unknown.
Our early ancestors, operating in mobile bands of hunter gatherers, would struggle mightily if they consistently retreated from uncertainty. New opportu- nities and new learning require that we move forward despite doubt.
In his foreword to Brave New World, Aldous Huxley comments that “feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation.” We encounter something that disorders our expectations, we step into that uncertainty, and then we seek answers. The time between the decision to explore and its completion is where passion and feeling are derived. This logic applies to love, to science, and to the everyday. The journey to better understand ukai has taken me over fifteen years, and my passion for the activity has waned little. I may be no closer to an answer, but the journey, including this book, has been a fruitful one.
What we will see, though, is that often moments of awe are selected against by automated systems and broader structures. Moreover, the time between a desire and its consummation is shrinking dramatically. With the modern impulse for speed, the journey is now viewed as a necessary evil that takes us from desire to its realization. Everything must come faster.
Lingering is therefore a practice of being present in the journey. Lingering separates the moment of desire from its consummation. It refuses the argu- ment for efficiency and growth, and it creates space to consider new goals and paths to achieve them. Most importantly, lingering reduces the stress we might feel being in the world. When we question the logic of progress, we feel less rushed and more able to generate creative responses to what is happening.
As philosopher Gilles Deleuze observes in Negotiations, “The problem is no longer getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say.”
Interrupt
The rules around me are mostly implicit. I accept existing structures as legitimate and then alter my behaviour to align with expectations. Systems theory shows us that unexpected things can often emerge out of a simple set of rules
In the mid-1980s, traffic engineer Hans Monderman visited the Dutch vil- lage of Oudehaske to follow up on a traffic situation that weeks earlier had seen a car fatally strike two children. The general rule at the time was to include more elements to calm traffic such as speed bumps or signs. Monderman did the opposite. The complex infrastructure of traffic safety was removed, includ- ing signs and curbs, and the asphalt was replaced with red brick. The results were impressive. Without indicators to suggest correct behaviour, drivers slowed down, and the confusion and ambiguity that emerged led to greater accommodation, reduced accidents, and less frustration.
Each of us can develop a practice of interrupting the assumptions of a particular space or set of interactions. Most of the rules that dictate how we in- teract with others are adopted without reflection. Drawing attention to routines and creating opportunities for new ways of doing things weaken the power of default structures and can inspire others to interrupt in their own ways.
Interruptions also allow us to act in ways that don’t adhere to existing lines of power. Hannah Arendt argues that any new beginning is seen as miracu- lous from the perspective of the framework it interrupts. In fact, Arendt sees these interruptions as miracles that are entirely human and the source of all freedom: In her essay, “What is Freedom?“, she reminds us that, “what usually remains intact in the epochs of petrification and foreordained doom is the fac- ulty of freedom itself, the sheer capacity to begin, which animates and inspires all human activities and is the hidden source of production of all great and beautiful things.”
Ritualize and Theorize
The dominance of big data and big data businesses is increasing. The boost to machine learning came about due to advances in artificial intelligence.
Increased processing power, an internet of things providing streams of rich data, and a conceptual model that allowed machines to seek patterns without any fundamental assumptions defining the search, have all allowed for an increase in the application of data and AI to a wide range of systems.
The problem is that machines only look where we tell them to look and pri- oritize only what we instruct them to prioritize. The ease with which our own prejudices, assumptions, and preconceptions are implanted into new devices is alarming. One high-profile example surfaced as early as May 2016. COMPAS is an algorithm developed by Equivant to help guide sentencing by predicting the likelihood that a criminal will re-offend. The algorithm was found to be racially biased. According to analysis by news organization ProPublica, the sys- tem predicts higher risk levels for black defendants and lower levels for white defendants. Equivant defends its product but there is no way to explore where any bias might come from because the algorithm is proprietary and closed to inspection.
We need a well-developed conceptual framework to tell us where to look and to avoid some of the clear ethical challenges that these forms of technol- ogy generate. Awareness of our own ignorance encourages us to pursue new knowledge. Social life is complex, interactive, continuously flowing, non-linear, and difficult to model well. Rituals imbue moments in our lives with meaning. Theories become frameworks by which we can engage with the world. By gen- erating our own rituals and theories we can begin to experiment with different models of living while reinvigorating everyday activities with purpose. Rituals remove us from the mundane. Theories guide our curiosity. Both allow us to take ownership over the kind of world we want to live in. When automated systems make decisions without any sense of an organizing theory, we become better and better at doing the same thing. When the values of our economy start shaping the rituals in our homes and communities, we sacrifice a connec- tion to beliefs diverging from the dominant order.
Philosopher Byung Chul Han argues,
Theory represents an essential decision that causes the world to appear wholly dif- ferent—in a wholly different light. Theory is a primary, primordial decision, which determines what counts and what does not—what is or should be, and what does not matter. As highly selective narration, it cuts a clearing of differentiation through untrodden terrain.
Theory, therefore, establishes what matters while ritual establishes what is sacred. By regaining our ability to construct theories and rituals of the world we are better able to view things in new ways and to call into question decisions based on “how things are” and not “how they might be.”
Beat the Bounds
We make sense of the world by drawing lines. I am part of a group, and you are part of another group. Categories simplify things. Categories inevitably change over time. Something once thought progressive might come to be seen as old-fashioned or reactionary. Something that was once shared in common becomes something private that might be bought and sold. The conversations I have in my living room were once considered private. Now we know that audio is captured by a wide range of devices embedded in televisions, digital assis- tants, cameras, and smartphones. Our voices are sold to companies hoping to better understand how we move in the world and to train computers to talk and behave more like human beings.
Beating the bounds is an ancient custom still active in parts of England and Wales where representatives of the community, usually the young and the elderly, walk the perimeter of the parish property and mark out its limits in the absence of maps or fences. The practice predates Norman conquest and has both cultural and practical applications. One outcome is the prevention of encroachment by others. A folk memory of the true extent of a space was often necessary to maintain the integrity of borders.
What folk memory do we hold of spaces that are held in common and of those turned over to the logic of growth? A practice of beating the bounds reminds us of where lines exist already or could be drawn. We turn over so many spaces to the use of institutions that we can easily forget that it has not always been this way. By marking boundaries both physically and symbolically, we contest the creep of one kind of order and introduce the possibility of differ- ent uses. Much like the removal of street signs, beating the bounds introduces ambiguity and often surprisingly positive outcomes. By making the invisible visible, or the visible invisible, we change the ways in which we interact and create openings for new ways of being together.
Tubu
Either none of our current state is natural or all of it is natural. It depends on what role you see humanity playing in the world around us. We have made choices that prioritize certain ends, like growth and efficiency, at the expense of others, such as compassion and community. Scale can be tremendously beneficial. Global supply chains allow for levels of material well-being unthink- able a century ago. The successes provide confidence that these approaches should colonize other aspects of life. Being excellent at catching fish, though, doesn’t qualify me to teach a kindergarten class or bake a cake. I’m not sure that a focus on growth is compatible with decisions about the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the natural environment on which we collectively rely. Other ways of knowing are essential to create a true marketplace from which we can combine and select approaches to pursue our collective well-being. Imagine a market with only one stall selling three or four food items. The recipes available to us narrow considerably. If the food is healthy and cheap, perhaps we accept the cost, but, as we will see, there are enormous risks to reducing the options available to us to solve problems.
This book is primarily a call to practice. I am a practitioner and believe that our collective survival will depend on our ability to keep alive different ways of knowing the world. The attraction to the material wealth and benefits of scale is strong and understandable. When we’ve spent hours building a castle in the sand, it is painful to think about destroying it and starting to construct some- thing new. We must scatter and build. If we stop experimenting with ways of being in the world, we will stop generating approaches that highlight different values and preferences. If we turn our decisions over to the machines that only know the logic of growth, then every solution will resemble a better version of that approach. We will have bigger and better sandcastles, and little else.
Order is a quality of rigidity. This is not the first time that assumptions have become ossified. Medieval Europe held values that promoted hierarchy and an understanding of time as being something turbulent and unknowable. Even- tually, those values were called into question. The more deeply embedded they were, the more painful was the process of replacement.
The encouraging thing in all of this is that the current amplification of order is a choice we are making. We choose to turn decisions over to machines. We choose to get caught up in the pace of living life in the open. We choose to prioritize complexity of material life over complexity of social interactions. We can choose differently.
2. Ambivalence
Our new world rests on order. The danger is disorder. And in today’s world, it can now spread like contagion.
— Tony Blair
My last name is McGrath. A series of disasters make tracing that name dif- ficult, but it is generally accepted that this part of my family made its way from Ireland to Canada in the nineteenth century with perhaps an extended stay in Liverpool to break up the journey for a generation or two. The McGraths settled in the northern woods of Canada until the Matheson fire of 1916 destroyed half a million acres of forest and killed over 200 people. To make land usable for farming and settlement, fire was deployed to clear the existing brush. Several of these fires, amplified by a hot and dry summer, combined, and spread out of control. There is a strong likelihood that my ancestors were at least partially responsible. Surrounded by desolation and ash, they then began the slow mul- ti-week hike southward toward Lake Ontario.
My mother is a Gazo, a rarer name originating in Slovakia. We’ve been told that the word gazo is a Romani slur for those that abandon a mobile life.
There is some evidence that the adoption of the name Gazo happened during a period of closing borders and pressure to declare where one belonged. Whether the surname was taken voluntarily or was imposed remains a matter of some debate.
I owe my existence to efforts at order. For many in North America, Australia, and elsewhere, a famine in Ireland triggered an exodus by our ancestors. Across Ireland, fertile land had been turned over to grains for land- owners based in England. Thomas Kenneally, in The Great Shame, describes how potatoes became an ideal signature in pure soils and were embraced enthusiastically.
The potato was an immigrant to Europe. In Tamed, biological anthropolo- gist Alice Roberts outlines how, in the Andes, potatoes were grown in lots de- scribed as patchy and chaotic. Various breeds mingled together and with their wild neighbours in the surrounding terrain. Europe preferred tame landscapes. Potatoes quickly became a staple of the Irish diet, dependent on an industrial monoculture that was dominated by the lumper potato, breeding asexually and without risk of contamination from wild or domesticated partners.
In 1845, the phytophtora infestas fungus reached Ireland and decimated the crops of lumper potatoes. Black and liquefied rot overwhelmed the pri- mary foodstuff of millions. The fungus returned in 1846 and, again, in 1848. Historically, a failure in one crop would lead to an increased reliance on others. However, the Irish didn’t own their land and their British landlords were un- willing to sacrifice the bounty of their harvest for the lives of those working the fields. Grain was shipped to England while the starving watched under threat of violence. Low-grade corn was sent from North America, but it was barely edible and subject to several laws restricting transport. Over one million Irish people died, and many others fled to North America, England, and Australia to start anew. The Irish population still has not returned to the levels of 1846.
I owe my present life in Canada to a stubborn determination to impose order on a wet and rugged landscape. This obstinance was offered a moral justification by intellectuals of the time, beholden to Malthusian arguments of limits to growth. For a British elite that benefitted from the stream of grain, the Irish population needed to shrink in size.
My Slovak ancestors ran up against a similar desire to describe the land in new ways. The Gazos lived in a mountain village near the Slovak-Hungarian border named Svätý Peter. In the ninth century, the territory became part of the Kingdom of Hungary, but the village did not appear in the records until the fourteenth century. After the Austro-Hungarian army dissolved in November 1918, Czechoslovak troops occupied the area, of which country it remained a part until the Velvet Divorce of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The village, however, is majority Magyar (Hungarian), emblematic of a fluid history of constant movement. For much of Europe’s history, the lines that described the limits of a particular territory were held locally and their maintenance involved the larger community in its enforcement through a process of ongoing vigi- lance and brute force.
The middle of the nineteenth century saw a boom in the birth of nation states, as collective identities were forged, and clear national borders made concrete. The Roma, accustomed to moving across the landscape, found them- selves both trapped and lost in this new world of documentation and national identities. Some continued to move and were persecuted for their otherness.
Some settled down, took up respectable occupations, and tried their best to fit in. The Gazos worked with stone and wood, building walls and fences. No one will tell me if the choice reflected a general aptitude or just a sense of humour about the whole thing. My great uncle Miles remembers a large tawny dog the family had before the move to Canada and how it only ever acted angrily when a Romani person appeared in the laneway. Even the small home, lacking plumbing or electricity, had boundaries to defend.
The walls my ancestors built proved inadequate. The creation of new bor- ders was too great a temptation as armies traversed the old ones and a century of war plagued Europe and the rest of the world. My ancestors, perhaps noting the growing empires around them, moved to Canada in the 1920s during the relative calm between the two World Wars. Both the McGraths and the Gazos came through Liverpool on their way to Canada, though decades apart. My maternal grandfather returned to Europe to serve for Canada in the Royal Air Force and married my grandmother, an English woman working in an experi- mental radar station. The job came with the caveat that she should never expect to bear children because of the unknown effects of the radiation in the station. Given the nightly bombings, the idea of children seemed fantastical, and so she agreed. My grandmother was only vaguely aware of the situation of the Irish a century prior, knew almost nothing of the closure of the Eastern European borders, and moved to Canada with my grandfather, having seen little hope for a full life among the post-war ruins.
Nation states and industrial agriculture are my birthright. Others receive dif- ferent inheritances. We’re all tied up with each other in various ways, and how we experience these events is often a product of which strings we are tied to.
Henri Bergson, a French-Jewish philosopher writing prior to the Second World War, criticizes the tradition in Western thought to believe that there is one type of order, and that order is somehow a triumph over disorder. Bergson believed that the idea of disorder emerges from an encounter that disappoints or vio- lates our personal expectations of a situation. Disorder, therefore, is something we experience and how we feel is very much a product of who, when, and where we are. Mine is a story of those dislocated by efforts at order, though the material wealth, comfort, and privilege I currently enjoy are also products of this same urge. Though my history is a common one, my experience of order and disorder is specific to me and the stories I carry with me through life.
Industrial agriculture and national borders do much good in the world. Mal- thus was proven wrong as productivity gains in agriculture kept up with growing populations in wealthier parts of the world. Specialization was globally efficient even as starving Irish men, women, and children watched shiploads of grain depart their shores. Nation states allowed for organization at previously unim- aginable scales. People suddenly belonged to something larger and contributed their efforts toward this broader sense of community. Of course, these efforts at order led to me, a child of colonizers on a continent where up to 80% of the Indigenous population was eliminated by disease or violence. In fact, global weather conditions were noticeably affected by the death of so many, so quickly.
Industrial agriculture led to highly efficient monocultures around the world and complex supply chains to feed them. National borders allowed for pro- grams of growth to proceed under the supervision of a concerned state and the quest for new materials and new markets led to conflict among these newly formed nations. Closing borders ended ways of being in the world that had per- sisted for centuries. Many, seeking a new start, colonized lands and destroyed countless civilizations and the knowledge they held.
The urge to order is understandable. This is particularly true when we assume that we are here to dominate the world rather than live in it. However, the urge has traditionally been met with only moderate success. To this day,
I remain preoccupied with stories of migration, evidence of failure to keep things the same. Google alerts me to news related to discoveries about ancient people and how they moved about. The stories of the Armoricans, the Picts, the Harappan, the Olmec, the Nabateans, the Mycenean, the Khmer, the Clovis, and the Anasazi serve as discomfiting reminders that things are always in flux despite the boundaries that we erect to restrain them or our desire for things to be otherwise.
As we saw in the previous chapter, the pursuit of order inevitably leads to undesirable by-products. The universe tends toward entropy and efforts at restraint will see the disorder manifest in some other, often unexpected, area of life. The lumper potato became ubiquitous to address frequent volatility in food supplies and to ensure that the more profitable grains were sent back to their owners in England. The efficiency of the lumper was offset by its vulnerability to catastrophic blight.
Borders were erected across Europe for many reasons, including the desire to scale the gains of industry. In Chapter 3, we will explore the evolution of thinking about order and disorder over time. However, it is worth noting that the transition from city states to nation states is intricately connected to the impulse toward growth and scale. From the ancient era of city states such as Athens and Rome, to the Medieval transition from city states and principali- ties to nation states, to the emergence of superpowers in the modern era, we see an inexorable pattern of extension. Today, we have mega-corporations that transcend the notion of nation states and, economically, have greater power than many countries. The urge to connect all parts together allowed for the COVID-19 virus to expand quickly and globally. The creation of nation states and the need to control supplies and markets, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led to war.
I bring this up because the way things are is tangled up with the way things were. John Burrows, the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law and Anish- inaabe from the Chippewas of the Nawash First Nation, argues in his foreword to Entangled Territorialities that, “To be alive is to be entangled—with a past and in the present. No group or individual can function without being subject to prior conditioning; our received contexts structure our very beings.” He positions this as neither positive nor negative and recognizes that, “our entan- glements can be either liberating or oppressive.” What we enjoy in life, as well as what brings us suffering, flows through other people. To Burrows, imagin- ing that we are not entangled is a source of evil in the world. In that spirit, we will try to explore both the positive contributions of order and the shadow side of our current success, highlighting how the threads tug and pull each other across borders and over time.
Things are Good
Dependent on where you are, things have never been better—although the COVID-19 pandemic and the state of our climate do make this statement open to challenge. You are less likely to die a violent death today than at any point in human history. On average, life expectancies have lengthened, and we are con- fident that many more diseases will fall before the might of modern medicine.
For many of us, there is little threat of physical violence or repression, although the potential for violence is still implicit in efforts to curtail unrest and ensure the smooth administration of the economy and society. Frustration at persistent inequalities has led to violence, and violence can also be used to suppress these moments of rage. We are told that we live in a time of incredible freedoms. The marketplaces for food, transportation, entertainment, and rela- tionships are vast. An argument for disorder might appear absurd, therefore, given the seeming chaos of information and opportunities available to us.
Despite this feeling of being overwhelmed, we are, in many ways, living in a period of unprecedented order. The systems that provide plenty have aggres- sively colonized more and more of our cultural landscape. The current version of capitalism argues for competition, optimization, and scale. The argument is persuasive, as more dimensions of life surrender to a logic of growth and efficiency. A particular kind of order is becoming ubiquitous. Leisure, the nat- ural world, spirituality, relationships, knowledge, and our private behaviour are transforming under the logics of growth.
Murthy Renduchintala, president of the Systems Architecture Group at Intel, estimated that, by the end of 2020, there were more than 50 billion con- nected devices globally. The data created from these devices will make the de- livery and customization of various types of service highly efficient. Of course, this assumes that efficiency is desirable in the machines that monitor us. In the absence of an effective counterargument, the default logics of the economy come to occupy more and more aspects of life.
The political scientist Francis Fukuyama points to this rigidity. Fukuyama is well known for his seemingly premature claim that the collapse of state com- munism represented the end of history. Yet today, there is a sense that recent times have been defined by an inexplicable swing toward authoritarianism and a reversion to abandoned practices and ideologies. Fukuyama sees this impulse toward control as representing something older and deeper. He observes that,
“well before Trump’s election, I had written that American institutions were de- caying as the state was progressively captured by powerful interest groups and locked into a rigid structure that was unable to reform itself.” In the absence of a competing system, we see a desire to more deeply entrench the ideologies that survive.
Rules of the Game
If you grew up in an English-speaking country, you’ve probably had the experience of playing, or watching children play, musical chairs. It is a sim- ple game: while a song is played, the children walk quickly around a circle of chairs. There is always one fewer chair than children. When the music stops, a mad rush ensues to occupy the available spaces. One child is left standing and must leave the game. A chair is then taken away, and the game continues until only one child remains, triumphant.
The game of musical chairs rewards some behaviours and disincentiviz- es others. Speed, power, aggression, competitiveness, focused attention, and awareness of the person controlling the music are assets. Generosity, physical disability, gentleness, and reflection are not. We learn about the world through games like this. We come to see what the people around us cele- brate and what is punished. Most of the systems we participate in are a bit like games, with spoken and unspoken rules that define desired behaviours. The repetition of these rules, over and over, shape and are shaped by the assump- tions and values of the culture that constructs them.
Zygmunt Bauman was one of the world’s most eminent social theorists.
Born in Poland, he was driven out in 1968 during the Polish political crisis and eventually settled in the United Kingdom. Bauman, in his 2005 article “Chas- ing Elusive Society,” summarizes several useful models for understanding how any system works. One stream of thought imagines a system with:
two strong arms; one (the ‘structure’) gripping actors from the outside and setting limits to their freedom, the other (‘culture’) reaching into the actors’ interior, that place where wishes and purposes are sown and incubate, and kneading free will into a shape which makes the steeliest of structural grips feel as a comfortable, caring, embrace.
Any system can then be understood as something that structurally shapes our behaviour and that culturally informs our beliefs. For musical chairs, the structure is prescribed scarcity, the randomness of the music, and the gradual removal of players and seats. The internalized aspect is what we believe we need to do to win. Winners are celebrated, losers are ostracized. Winning in- volves pushing, changing the pace you walk at to increase the likelihood of suc- cess, and aggression when the moment is right. Beliefs that persist in culture start showing up in other places and start shaping the structures we build and inhabit. If our culture celebrates aggression, we build structures that reward aggression and apply aggression generally to a growing number of questions.
The economy elevates structures of efficiency and growth. Our culture echoes this and we start applying these ideas to zones of living far removed from where they originated. Talcott Parsons, another highly influential twen- tieth-century sociologist and an advocate of the general approach outlined by Bauman, also saw human action through the lens of cultural values and social structures. Parsons believed that systems have a purpose, and that purpose is to sustain their own existence with as little change as possible. Systems do this by seeking new territories to occupy and by becoming increasingly rigid, resisting efforts to change how they work.
It was hoped that the welfare state, championed by William Beveridge in the United Kingdom, would offset the excesses of the capitalist economy, and provide care for those who usually fall through the cracks. It also became a means for us to see how our cultural assumptions regarding what is valuable came to shape the structures for how we take care of each other.
When I was in my twenties, I lost my way for a while. I dropped out of college and drank too much. I was away from family and was too ashamed to let them know what was happening. I started receiving welfare benefits. The process was straightforward. Every few weeks, I would line up at a government office and submit a list of jobs for which I had applied. There was a minimum number of applications required if I wanted to continue receiving assistance, so the game became filling that list with a minimum of effort and avoiding any discovery of deception. I became adept at stacking my list with franchise restaurants and retail outlets as the staff turned over so quickly and supervision was suitably lax that few could document whether I had applied there at all. I also came to realize that the public servants at the government office were over- whelmed by people like me and their capacity to dig into the pages of handwrit- ten lists was severely limited. If they believed I was sincere in my search, there were few follow-up questions. I wore my best clothes for those visits to the welfare office and less often for the occasional visits to shops to drop off a résumé. So, a system meant to reward diligence, ultimately rewarded effective deception.
I am not proud of that time in my life, and a surprising intervention from a compassionate professor pulled me back into my studies and away from the path I was on. However, I remain shocked by how radically my beliefs and behaviours were shaped by the structure of rewards in place. I don’t believe I am a lazy person and I applied considerable effort to creating a plausible fiction of my work search but ultimately toward an end neither side desired.
Jennie Winhall is a social innovator and service design expert who special- izes in redesigning government services and, more broadly, the welfare state. I had the good fortune to work with her while serving as a program director at the Banff Centre for Art and Creativity. While working with the service design firm Participle, Jennie explored themes of employability in the United Kingdom. Social assistance and the welfare state are designed around the idea of deficit. An individual is incapable of productively contributing to the economy and receives assistance to reflect this. Participle was interested in redesigning the welfare state in relation to abundance. Jennie asked users what lives they wished to live and built systems so that they might realize those lives. Rather than noticing that one person can’t get a chair in our game of musical chairs and providing them with some compensation to reflect this, Participle explored what winning meant for those in a system and then built the relationships and structures to help anyone achieve a version of that good life.
Initial research on employability started in 2011, exploring in depth with 140 people covering a broad span of employment types. The group was supplemented by experts working on economic policy. The system they observed resembled my own experience in Canada. To receive support, a deficit must be shown.
The assumption was that the best way to show a deficit was to apply for many jobs and not be offered any of them. Deeper research overturned this employ- ment-seeking model. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the connection between the number of applications and the rates of success proved tenuous. In fact, the research showed that the most important factor in finding work while receiving welfare benefits was relationships with employed people. It seems that despite a feeling that jobs are found based on merit, relationships are actually how work is acquired.
As a result, Participle designed and deployed a solution, Backr. This supported jobseekers in their quest by enabling the development of networks, fostering relationships with potential employers, and emphasizing soft skills. The project had a meaningful impact on the lives of the people Participle served, in terms of capability growth, skill development, and productivity outcomes. 86% of users reported an increase in confidence and 53% of users found stable work.
Nothing that Participle proposed was all that radical. However, they faced stiff resistance from existing systems, carefully calibrated to a set of assump- tions and values that defined how things were meant to be done. More applica- tions meant more effort. Volume was the answer.
More and more of our systems are dictated by the values that define the economy at large. In some instances, this makes a lot of sense. Increased ener- gy efficiency, better crop yields, and improved medicines are helpful. In other cases, such as the very human process of finding steady employment, growth and efficiency may not be serving us well.
When we play musical chairs, we are unlikely to critically reflect on what values are being celebrated. We may like or dislike the game and, once we’re older, opt out of games we don’t enjoy. However, opting out of economic and social systems is harder to do, especially as our behaviours are deeply condi- tioned by habit. If we have been conditioned by competition, then competitive- ness is likely to be evidenced in all aspects of our lives.
Sociologists like Bauman and Parsons argue that, in service to its own persistence, unlimited exponential growth has become axiomatic. In Chapter 3, we will outline how and why this situation has come to pass. Every game we play seems to be captured by ideas of efficiency and growth. We appear only to be interested in solutions that are scalable. Self-improvement has become a relentless imperative.
The problem with scalability is that, by its very nature, some factors be- come important while others are ignored. We start by not seeing the forest for the trees. Then we stop seeing the forest or the trees as we focus on the wealth that sits underneath in the form of oil or gold. When we ignore what’s on the surface, we can apply techniques developed elsewhere with little need to adapt to local conditions. The local conditions, in fact, are invisible. The needs of the Romani during nation-building and enclosure didn’t meaningfully enter the discussion. If you wound up on one side of the line, you were Slovak. On the other, you were Hungarian. Community histories and relationships fell outside the process. The grain in Ireland in 1846 belonged to British landowners, and the pota- to famine and the starvation of millions didn’t enter the calculus of distribution.
For good or ill, scaling forces the local and the concrete to become abstract and distant. The strings grow longer and harder to understand. A company looking to hire a new employee can outline the necessary skills, the desired education, and the ideal work history. The posting becomes a vague shape that applicants try to fit themselves into. Of course, what the hiring manager really wants to know is if the person will be able to contribute, will get along with other people, and will apply themselves diligently. This type of information is harder to abstract, with companies consequently dependent on referrals and networks to fill the roles, all the while proclaiming a process ostensibly focused on efficiency and growth.
A mining company considering locations to dig will weigh geology, environ- mental regulations, infrastructure needs, and availability of skilled labour in making decisions. Understanding the different sites as living ecologies host- ing human activity only becomes a concern when the law or local resistance demands it. Making things amenable to scaling means eliminating whatever doesn’t contribute to that scaling. Sometimes the elements we eliminate are central to our experience of life.
Historically, even capitalist systems have tended to favor disorder where it has supported long-term growth. Lots of different people in lots of different places try out new things. The ideas that succeed are preserved and carried forward. Disorder is a locally inefficient, but globally effective way to improve our collective standard of living. Approaches that have worked in, say, lightbulb manufacture or pharmaceuticals are being applied today in new arenas such as childcare or social services. As the system becomes less tolerant of local messiness, widespread order inevitably results in more entropy acting against it. Wild potatoes shipped from the Andean wilderness were plucked out and replaced by an endless unchanging field of lumper potatoes in Ireland. The lumpers grow quickly and easily, and everyone is fed until the day something goes catastrophically wrong. If we are lucky, some nostalgic farmer has pre- served those wild potatoes in her yard and, from their inefficient and wasteful DNA, a new cross can be developed—something that is more resilient if a bit slower to harvest.
During the Irish potato famine, Great Britain’s strict adherence to free-mar- ket ideals exacerbated the suffering of the Irish people. Grains were shipped from Ireland as people starved. Protectionist policies, including the Corn Laws that made it more difficult for American corn to arrive in support of the Irish, also increased harm. The elimination of the Corn Laws made feeding the Irish people easier. Economic diversity enables capitalism through entrepreneurship and resilience but also undermines its hegemony. I don’t believe that growth and capitalism are bad things. The problem we seem to be facing is that capi- talism “as a moral system” is shaping how we relate to each other.
The issues in Ireland during the nineteenth century, or in Slovakia in the twentieth, or in Canada today are about choices and the solutions we can draw on to respond to changing conditions. Having a range of choices is important to generate the innovations we’ll need to stay happy and healthy. Given our abil- ity to store information digitally, it might seem unlikely that we would collec- tively forget a way of doing something. Yet one of the much-discussed topics in the knowledge management community is how we have forgotten how to put people on the moon. While most of the elements have been codified in some way, true knowledge exists in the relationships among parts and in the connec- tions between different people. Those that first brought humanity to the moon have mostly retired by now, while some have passed away. We have recordings and written documentation from these teams but as soon as something is recorded or documented it becomes separated from the human, the real, and the living. Knowledge becomes information and knowledge use differs from in- formation use. Specifically, the contextual factors are elided as efforts are made to scale the application of knowledge.
In extreme cases, traditional practices have simply been outlawed. One example is potlatch and other related ceremonies of Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest. Knowing how to do something also needs to be coupled with the right to do it.
In other cases, we may have access to a set of skills through YouTube videos or library books, but the broader culture reduces the likelihood of those skills being applied. Ukai, as a fishing technique, has only been preserved in support of retaining cultural heritage and to draw tourist dollars to the region. Ukai is not considered a legitimate approach to feeding a community and the skills involved are held by a small number of people.
In the cases of both ukai and potlatch, arguments of scale and competition contributed to the deterioration of long-held practices. Potlatch is a gift-giving feast that also serves as a means of governance, legislation, and an economic system for the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States. Through highly structured rituals and protocols, wealth is given away. Generosity becomes a means of distributing community sur- plus, establishing status, and claiming rights to fishing grounds or songs. The Canadian government rigorously banned potlatch. The idea of status being tied to what one can give away was contrary to the dominant ideology of accumu- lation. The practice is starting to recover but, as potlatch was entangled with decision-making and governance, the institutional framework to enable its full expression remains difficult for many communities.
The practice of using birds to catch fish is present in Japan, as well as in China, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere. Improvements in fishing technology made ukai hard to justify in economic terms. Ukai is beautiful, affirms rela- tionships with the natural world, and draws community together, but these arguments were not deployable against an imperative of scale.
Even breastfeeding, an activity seemingly outside our capacity of forgetting, has been affected by economic arguments. During the 1920s and 1930s, cheap evaporated milk formulas were made widely available. Research at the time, since debunked, suggested no health or well-being differences between formu- la-fed and breastfed infants. This led to massive uptake of formula-based diets. In fact, breastfeeding came to be frowned upon as unhealthy and vulgar. Since the 1970s, there has been a shift back toward breastfeeding. In Canada, 82.9% of mothers breastfeed their babies at birth. This number, however, is not evenly distributed. White mothers (91.6%) breastfeed at a higher rate than non-white (56.8%). The gap has been attributed to differences in marital status, educa- tion, and family income. In the United States, levels of breastfeeding correlate to socio-economic status. The effect is partly related to government nutritional programs that subsidize infant formula despite strong evidence that formula is not suitable for newborns.
The range of solutions available to us is becoming narrower. Growth, in absolute terms, has improved our material existence. The dominance of growth as an ideal makes certain behaviours harder to justify, with the knowledge about how and when to apply those behaviours becoming abstracted from those doing the work. Also, as we will see later, the pressure to advertise our decisions opens us up to public ridicule when our choices prioritize values that are inconsistent with the culture at large.
The evolution of growth as an ideal will be explored more fully in Chapter 3, but the implications are becoming clearer. Someone needs to think deeply about the outcomes of our decisions, whether consciously taken or assumed based on the rules we perceive around us.
What is being rewarded? What is being lost?
Stories of oppression are popular because they contain relatable and straightforward explanations for how we feel. While the system may feel op- pressive in its insistence on going bigger, faster, further, the structure is only loosely based on threats of violence. We legitimize a commitment to doing things better and our planning, particularly about large-scale systems, becomes a process of projecting that rigidity. What risks are inherent in a world focused on growth and efficiency? Who carries these risks?
Rigidity and Shocks
Large, complex, designed systems are fragile. Maintaining a structure in a state of order requires significant inputs of energy and the energy in the system is constantly looking for avenues of release. As I write this, the battle against COVID-19 is being waged across the globe. Globalized networks of travel and commerce provided the virus with numerous routes to exploit populations as dispersed as China, Iran, and Italy. As of early April 2020, 50% of the world’s population was in some form of quarantine and still the disease continued to spread. The need for global networks makes controlling an outbreak extremely difficult. The global economy relies on people and things being able to move around freely. The virus exploits this same freedom in its own quest to grow and scale. To shut down some freedoms was a cause of concern because of the sense of oppression it generated, yet any delays created more opportunities for the virus to spread.
Much of the volatility is carried by the human elements in these systems.
Retail stores, hotels, and airlines were the first sectors decimated and the financial losses showed up in layoffs and reduced working hours. Those who couldn’t afford to miss work helped spread the virus, travelling to their work- places when ill. Since 1972, the proportion of financial losses carried by corpo- rations as compared to their staff during economic downturns has decreased steadily according to McKinsey. Companies shift losses away from sharehold- ers and owners and on to employees.
The pace of life keeps on accelerating with population growth. In his book Scale, physicist Geoffrey West demonstrates how:
diseases spread faster, businesses are born and die more often, and people even walk faster in larger cities … Moreover, the social network dynamic underlying superlinear scaling leads to open-ended growth, which is the primary assumption upon which modern cities and economies are based. Continuous adaptation, not equilibrium, is the rule.
Fragile systems are sustained to preserve the current model of order, even though the best systems we’ve got benefit greatly from disorder. Natural sys- tems are designed to thrive because of rare and catastrophic events. Fires are a necessary precondition for cycles of renewal. The asteroid that struck near the Yucatan peninsula and wiped out most of the life on Earth also created the conditions for mammals to ascend and our current order to be established.
West also describes how this pattern repeats in a very local way. Electrocar- diogram readings, which measure electrical and muscle activity in the heart, were studied to establish the relationship between a steady heart rate and car- diac incidents. Individuals with greater variance and larger fluctuations in their heart rate have fewer cardiac incidents while those with steady and unvarying heart rates are more likely to experience cardiac arrest. Apparently, the heart, like the forest, relies on variance to deal with the inevitable shocks experienced each day. Short-term variation and inefficiency make us more resilient in the long run. The lumper potato was isolated from other breeds that might provide valuable adaptations to fungal invaders. Loose national borders and boundaries allowed for people to move to more stable places during times of trouble. The formation of nation states constrained migration and restricted the release of energy under times of stress.
West applies these lessons to companies, cities, countries, and global ecological systems. Nature selects for greater diversity. Humans, in the service of scale and growth, too often select against diversity. Austerity programs are large-scale examples of how precarity is pushed on to the human side of the supply chain. The shocks experienced by rigid systems are increasingly felt by individuals and communities at a distance from the benefits these systems create. To maintain these gigantic structures, the resulting entropy must be moved elsewhere. This process has fundamentally altered communities, the natural environment, and human interactions.
New Ideas
Culture is a pool of ideas that we draw upon to make sense of the world.
Culture is internalized by watching, imitating, and learning from those around us. Culture is more than art and custom but includes all the recipes developed over time, from how we organize to get things done to what technologies we in- vent to make life easier. In Wired for Culture, evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel argues that the “sheer volume of cultural knowledge acts as a vast crucible for innovation.” Culture is where we go for solutions both to existing problems and to new ones as they arise. Most animals must rely on what is present in their DNA and on direct experience. Humans can draw on a vast range of experienc- es, including from people we’ve never met or who have been dead for centu- ries. Culture selects ideas over time in the same way that environments act on genetic diversity. Ideas that work are preserved and ideas that don’t fit disap- pear. The criterion in nature is a bit different, though. If a mutation provides an advantage in propagating DNA, then it is successful and more likely to be pre- served. With culture, there is no absolute criterion by which ideas are selected.
Historically, we saw local adaptations to local challenges. Ukai worked for some parts of the world but not for others. Villages in the Andes had different types of potatoes in each community along the road. Old customs were pre- served as one could never know when a particular piece of advice might prove useful again. We don’t know what the future will look like, so why imagine that we understand the kind of thinking we’ll need to survive it?
Technologies are developed and selected based on their appropriateness to the job at hand. They come to represent a worldview about what is important and what should be supported. Innovations evolve, building on what came before, and are shaped by the assumptions of the culture developing them. If our culture values creative expression, then technologies will be developed that advocate and facilitate creativity. This is not to suggest that the process is an organized one. Rather, it means that out of the huge, frothing pool of ingenu- ity, ideas are more likely to be elevated and rewarded when they align with the values of the culture at the time.
Our current culture values growth and efficiency. Solutions then start supporting the idea of growth and efficiency. As these ideas take a tighter hold on other parts of life, they squeeze out other assumptions about what is good. There is a process of positive selection, preferring the solutions that answer questions that matter to society. There is also a process of negative exclusion, the system maintaining its pattern by defusing and neutralizing any tensions that might threaten it.
Modernity is both a period and a portfolio of norms, attitudes, and practices that have come to dominate much of the planet. Modernity has a lot of defini- tions, but it is closely associated with urbanization, individualism, capitalism, and the possibility of progress. It’s no surprise then that our technologies often prioritize life in the city, personal expression and agency, competition, and the acceleration of time so that we can achieve progress more efficiently. According to Zygmunt Bauman, modernity’s primary task was to eliminate “the acciden- tal and the contingent” and “to make the ambiguous eindeutig, the opaque transparent, the spontaneous calculable and the uncertain predictable, to inject purpose in things and then make them to strive for the attainment of that pur- pose.” Elements of culture that celebrated ambiguity, opaqueness, spontaneity, and uncertainty were marginalized. Science and engineering had less and less room for mysticism.
As our systems continue to grow exponentially, the need for new inno- vations to support that growth become more pressing and more frequent.
At the same time, the rigidity of the assumptions of modernity squeezes out other ways of knowing the world. We run the risk of losing the raw ingredients we need to generate new ideas. We often assume that new ideas are born of human imagination, but the reality is that most come about from imitation or synthesis. Imitation requires something different to copy and synthesis requires different ideas to combine. A problem with excessive order is that it sacrifices the base materials for future invention. As Laurent Bach, the Program Director at the Institut des Politiques Publiques, suggests in The Economics of Creativity, a case for diversity can be made on moral grounds but also on the grounds of adaptability and “to avoid situations of lock-ins that would be negative.” When we can’t imagine another way of doing things, we don’t try other ways of doing them. The situation is only getting worse as more and more decisions are being made by algorithms that themselves rely on a very narrow set of assumptions about what is worth keeping and what should be discarded.
At a more fundamental level, culture helps us make sense of the world around us. What happens when the mental models and metaphors we apply are inadequate to meet the challenges we face collectively? While teaching a course at the University of Basel in 1872-73, Friedrich Nietzsche observed, “Tropes are not something that can be added or abstracted from language at will—they are its truest nature.” He argues in Philosophy and Truth that there is “no real knowing apart from metaphor.” How we know the world is mediated by the tropes and metaphors that we use to describe it. Language evolves over time to better encode experience, and problems then become easier to under- stand and to share with others. There are between six and seven thousand lan- guages spoken on earth today. A study by language researcher David Graddol suggests that 90% are likely to be extinct by 2050.
The range of solutions available to any given problem is defined by the patterns we apply to experience. We learn what things mean from our culture and from those closest to us and they inform how we interact with the world.
The loss of a language is the loss of a way of seeing the world. Even languages such as English, which face no immediate risk of extinction, have ways of un- derstanding the world truncated through patterns of cultural selection. When every metaphor used in business is about war or sports, then it is no surprise that we filter our experiences of corporate activity through the lens of violence or competition.
Fairy tales are a simple way of demonstrating this. The story of Little Red Riding Hood has changed dramatically since Charles Perrault’s version was published in 1697, even more so since the likely origins of the tale in the tenth century. Perrault’s story ends tragically with the wolf devouring our heroine with little fanfare. The meaning was contextually relevant to the time of its publication. The woods were a menacing place and young women were meant to follow the advice of their mothers. There was no woodsman to save the day until the Brothers Grimm published their own version. In fact, many of the numerous variations of Little Red Riding Hood do not feature a male saviour at all, while nineteenth-century retellings explicitly refer to sexual assault and the moral and physical risks taken by unaccompanied women. The natural world had been altered by humankind to support rural industry, and with this industrialization came unsupervised young men from the city. The edition that I grew up with focused a lot on the woodsman and his efforts to rescue the girl and her grandmother from the belly of the wolf. A woman’s honor and security were guaranteed by the nuclear family. Nature had been subdued by men with axes. More recent versions tend to recount how a strong heroine fends for her- self. Some even recast the wolf as the misunderstood hero, a twist derived from our cultural exploration of postmodernism.
A child reading this tale in the seventeenth century would come away with very different lessons than a child of the nineteenth or twenty-first centuries. For children in the seventeenth century, nature was a place of danger. In the nineteenth century, the wolf was the embodiment of both moral and physical danger. In the twenty-first century, the story is about individual development and overcoming social expectations. Nature becomes a bystander.
The more stories to which we have access, the more responses we can draw upon when exposed to something new. A child that believes that nature is harmless, and that individual development is paramount, may be well-prepared for life in a modern city but will struggle if forced to survive in the wild.
We have become extraordinarily open to our economy’s influence. As Will Storr states in his book Selfie, “When we’re bathed, from birth, in our par- ticular economy, its values start to leak out in the things we say and do.” Storr argues that our self-concept is culturally mediated and that the stories we tell filter the world for us. Culture tells us what is valuable, what we notice, and changes our experience of the world. Encounters with other cultures are so powerful because they ask us to reconsider the filters that we use to make sense. What happens when all cultures come to represent the same sorts of solutions? What happens when our world is organized by machines drawing on an absurdly narrow idea of culture that only understands growth and efficiency?
Exhaustion
The final challenge regarding our current impulse to establish order relates to how incredibly exhausting it can be. There are no shortages of interested parties willing to help us understand why we feel the way we do. Paul Verhae- ghe, a professor of clinical psychology, outlines the expansion of psychopathol- ogies in modern Western societies in his book What About Me? In detailing the explosion in listed disorders, as classified in the various editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), he observes that there were “180 in the second edition, 292 in the third, and 365 in the fourth, while the latest, DSM-5, gives a diagnosis for many normal human emotions and behaviours.” Verhaeghe argues that “medically speaking, these labels have little significance, with most of the diagnoses being made on the basis of sim- ple checklists.” He also worries about the commensurate boom in treatment and how “official statistics show an exponential rise in the use of pharmaceu- ticals.” Perhaps most concerning is the shift in how the profession of psycho- therapy is understood. Verhaeghe argues, “the aim of psychotherapy is rapidly shifting toward forcing patients to adapt to social norms—you might even say, disciplining them.” Storr, meanwhile, is succinct when he observes, “the mod- ern world is giving us a greater number of opportunities to feel like failures.”
Exhaustion comes from a variety of sources. Four key aspects of modern life, however, seem to contribute disproportionately to the feeling of being overwhelmed. These are pace, precarity, transparency, and attacks on dignity.
Pace is a consistent theme throughout this book and relates to how we un- derstand time and the needs of an ever-growing system. A belief in progress is a belief that things in the future can and should be better than things are now. When that belief is deeply held, anything that accelerates us from the current moment to that better future is embraced. Our culture, including our technol- ogies, favors solutions that reduce the wait between a desire and its fulfilment.
Think about delivery services or email, but also about cars or search engines. Relatedly, our need for exponential economic growth means that we need new innovations to extend how much our planet can bear before collapsing. We are pinned on two sides. We develop and deploy solutions that speed things up while at the same time our constant growth demands new solutions to avoid entropic release.
Precarity arises from shifting the disorder of complex, global systems on to individuals and communities. To increase certainty in supply chains and commerce, uncertainty is pushed on to anyone maintaining or participating in these systems. One of the reasons that this is possible is that our culture has come to internalize a radical version of musical chairs. We value competi- tiveness and individualism. So, it becomes our personal responsibility to find success in the world around us. Precarity is not an accident of modern plan- ning but the transfer of disorder and uncertainty on to human beings. There are fewer safety nets available to catch us should we falter.
Transparency refers to the pressures to share our inner thoughts and private behavior. We are motivated to do this through technologies that offer rewards and a sense of human connection. As we will see in Chapter 4, the information we reveal is used to better predict and control what we do next, but the sharing continues. A sense of belonging, for many, surpasses any need for privacy. Revealing ourselves can make us feel insecure and narcissistic. As philosopher Byung Chul Han describes, we are shifting from neuroticism or oppression to “depressive inadequacy.” Individualism and ideas of progress point us toward bettering ourselves, while our culture informs us what better looks like.
In Han’s Psychopolitics, he elaborates on this point:
In contemporary American self-help literature, the magic word is healing. The term refers to self-optimization that is supposed to therapeutically eliminate any and all functional weakness or mental obstacle in the name of efficiency and performance. Here perpetual self-optimization, which coincides point-for-point with the optimiza- tion of the system, is proving destructive. It is leading to mental collapse. Self-opti- mization, it turns out, amounts to self-exploitation.
What is both worrying and hopeful about this idea is that transparency is something that we choose, and we can choose differently. Certainly, there will be consequences, and withdrawal from the Likes and Comments on social media platforms can feel like trying to stop smoking. Some opt for retreat and withdraw from social media entirely. Opposition is also possible and is a core theme that we will explore going forward.
Identity is the final source of exhaustion in our current order. Cultural commentator Lewis Hyde describes in The Gift how capitalism and digitization make all things fluid and fungible. Fluidity means that goods or commodities can be moved around easily as a part of doing business. Fungibility is when goods or commodities can be interchanged easily with others of the same type. A dollar bill, for example, should be exchangeable with few questions for anoth- er dollar bill.
Ideas of human dignity are built on the idea that people are not fluid or fungible, but growth too often demands that people be understood in this way. Ideas of dignity hold that people are ends unto themselves rather than means toward some end. Maintaining dignity also requires that each person be under- stood as unique and distinct. However, employees are made to move around in search of work and are understood to be exchangeable with others who have similar skills and experiences. Our dignity refers to personal properties or characteristics that are held to be inseparable from ourselves. When most other aspects of our lives are translatable into commodities, our dignity is one of those qualities that can have no price. Protecting and preserving this against commodification is a never-ending battle. The exhaustion many people feel arises from their attempt to protect their dignity and their sense of self.
Pace, precarity, transparency, and dignity, then, all contribute to a feeling of exhaustion. All four are interpreted through the lens of culture. We believe the future is better and are in a hurry to get there. We value scale and improved material conditions of life and lose control over how we interact with that life and how we earn a living. We share our efforts at improvement while chasing after a goal that always seems slightly further away. We resist pressure to turn ourselves into another product and feel that pressure as an affront to our dig- nity. The logic of musical chairs defines more of our everyday lives. We forget how to fish, how to grow potatoes, how to feed our babies. We used to work to live. Now it can sometimes feel that we live to work. We work on our meals, on our relationships, on our hobbies. Everything must become better, bigger, optimal. The tremendous irony in all of this is that disobedience is no longer an option. There is no one to disobey. We construct and enact the systems that confine us. The repercussions of ignoring an email, avoiding outrage, or shun- ning self-revelation are uncertain, but unlikely to result in violence or oppres- sion. We can choose to fish with birds.
It’s striking that when, in 2019, the Irish President Michael D. Higgins told a group of high school students that they don’t exist just “to be useful,” his comments drew international attention. Higgins added, “too many policy lobbyists have, often unknowingly, unthinkingly perhaps, accepted a narrow and utilitarian view of... education—one that suggests we exist to be made use- ful.” Pressure to confirm a national identity, to grow a potato that will succeed, or to grab one of the few chairs remaining, is intense and constant. The idea that we don’t need to be useful is somehow radical and speaks to how deeply entrenched the idea of utility is embedded in our structures and culture. We are building a world that offers us endless choices in what we buy or watch, but it can feel like the performance of freedom, safely within the constraints of economic assumptions.
The historian Yuval Noah Harari takes it further in Sapiens when he argues that “future upgrades to the human mind will reflect market needs.” To Harari, our very biology will be turned over to the needs of the market. Is this such a bad idea? The market has generated unparalleled wealth and brought billions out of poverty. Life expectancies are longer and opportunities for leisure exist that were unfathomable a century ago. There are benefits and costs to letting the values of the economy occupy other aspects of life. Everything comes to re- semble a game of musical chairs, elbow to elbow, fighting for a space to sit. Or it looks like an endless field of perfectly similar potatoes, a land of plenty until disaster strikes. Or it is an invisible line on a map, drawn thousands of kilome- ters away, forcing communities to inhabit identities and terrains they played no part in creating.
Order becomes cruel in defence of its own purity. Gigantic systems shift entropy on to human beings who must then deal with the shocks that emerge. The hegemony of scale squeezes out other ways of seeing the world and the pool of ideas we draw upon is impoverished. The only answers available to us focus on bigger and faster. When a crisis arrives, we lack the diversity of ap- proaches to come up quickly with a different approach. People become exhaust- ed keeping up with the world we’ve made. The pace of innovation, the precarity of serving large systems, the transparency required of social technologies, and the attacks on our dignity wear us down.
Before we start exploring how people respond to and oppose these forces, we should endeavor to better understand how we got here and where we might be going.
3. Procrustes
It takes a great deal of change to keep things the same.
— Nora Bateson, “Small Arcs of Larger Circles”
I like old stories. I particularly like stories that do not pretend to know the answers but seem to complicate how we might like to make sense of the world. In this chapter, I hope to offer up some complications but in doing so we will be cutting a ragged line through thousands of years of history. Make no mis- take, every bit of this is open to discussion and this is but one of a vast number of potential interpretations we can bring to bear on how culture has evolved over time and the instruments in use to entrench belief. I have chosen to focus on how cultures make sense of time and control and how this affects our rela- tionship to order and disorder. Others focus on technologies or changes in the environment and, of course, all these factors are tangled up together.
One of my assumptions is that we are not necessarily looking for right answers. Instead, we ought to seek answers that reflect different ways of making sense of things. I am not against capitalism, or modernism, or fishing with birds, or fishing with nets. But I do worry when there is only one choice available, even if it feels like a pretty good one. Throughout history, whenever a small group of people has sought to entrench their way of seeing the world in everyday life, they have tended to do more harm than good.
In Greek mythology, Procrustes was exceptionally good at making things fit. A son of Poseidon and an abysmal host, Procrustes occupied a stronghold on Mount Korydallos on the road from Eleusis to Athens. He was infamous for forcing people to spend the night on an iron bed. Those whose contours failed to match the bed exactly were modified through stretching or amputation so that they might fit. Today, the term procrustean refers to the elimination of dif- ference so that an arbitrary standard can be met. This returns us to a familiar theme, for eliminating difference makes scaling possible.
Procrustes was undone when he was strong-armed into undergoing his own procedure by a hero named Theseus. Many see Theseus’s adventures as representing the death of old beliefs and the birth of an age of wisdom and justice. The rule of capricious tradition was replaced by a virtuous order.
Theseus was a complex mix of the human and the divine. On the same night, his mother, Aethra of Troezen, slept with King Aegeus of Athens and was raped by the god Poseidon. As a child, Theseus was raised in his mother’s kingdom but eventually sought his birthright, passing through six deadly chal- lenges on his way to Athens. Procrustes and his bed served as the last of these.
Before ascending to the throne, Theseus had many other adventures, in- cluding an encounter with the Minoans on the island of Crete. Held responsi- ble for the death of King Minos’s son, the Athenians were obliged, every seven years, to sacrifice seven of their youths and seven of their maidens to the Cre- tan Minotaur. This was a creature with the body of a man but the head and tail of a bull that dwelled in an elaborate labyrinth designed by Daedalus. Keeping the peace carried a heavy price.
At the time of the third sacrifice, Theseus, as the son of King Aegeus, volunteered to travel to Crete as one of the youths and, once there, to slaughter the Minotaur. On arrival, he secured the instant love and assistance of Ariadne, King Minos’s daughter. Indeed, it was Ariadne who provided Theseus with a sword with which to slay the Minotaur and the thread that would guide him back out of the labyrinth once the deed was done, and it was Ariadne who ac- companied him as he sailed away from Crete to the island of Naxos.
There are several versions of this story, but the core is consistent. On Naxos, the goddess Athena, or perhaps Dionysus himself, persuaded Theseus that Ariadne was promised to Dionysus and that he would have to abandon her. He obeyed, returning to Athens so disconsolate that he forgot to raise the white sails he had previously agreed with his father would be a sign of his safe return. Seeing the black sails of Theseus’s ship enter the harbour, King Aegeus believed his son dead and threw himself in despair into the water below.
As the new king, Theseus is credited with the political unification of Attica under Athens. He brought greater order to the divided territory. The people of Attica celebrated this period of clarity while also continuing to acknowledge the centrality of entropy in their conceptions of the world through their culture, worship, and social life. The Greeks, for quite some time, embraced an ongo- ing dialogue between order and disorder.
Dionysus
Dionysus, the divinity that thwarted the love of Theseus and Ariadne, sat at the centre of the forces assembled to celebrate disorder and keep the desire for control of the unified state in check. The intersection of the stories of Theseus and Dionysus was no accident. The threads of their stories were entangled from the start.
The cult of Dionysus likely arrived in Greece from Crete on trade ships and through the work of missionaries. Similarities to related mythologies in Egypt and the Near East suggest an older provenance still. Evidence also points to the cult of Dionysus being primarily led by women, though this changed over time.
The Minoan culture did not look to immortal monuments to express time- lessness. Instead, as Károly Kerényi in Dionysos suggests, it did so through an “acceptance of the grace of life.” Minoan art captured moments of epiphany in natural settings, particularly high up on cliffs or in underground caves. Kerényi maps out the arrival of the Dionysian cult in Greece by sea and remarks that “the epiphany of a god was known in Greece not only as epiphaneia, but also as epidemia, ‘arrival in the land.’” He documents a divine epidemic afflicting the people of Greece. Any effort to resist the cult of Dionysus was said to release a worse punishment, or as Kerényi writes, “an intensified, wicked form of the cult action which the sinners refused to perform for the god.”
In his own book on the god, Walter Friedrich Otto describes Dionysus as, “the god of ecstasy and terror, of wildness and of the most blessed deliver- ance—the mad god whose appearance sends mankind into madness.” Karl Muller, in the Handbook of Cultural Archaeology, refers to examples of Greek art that celebrated Dionysus as “nature overpowering the mind and hurrying it out of a clear self-consciousness.” This was a god of awe.
Dionysus was well-loved, holding sway in small, local gatherings. Those working closest to the land seemed to have the greatest reverence. The worship of Apollo dominated the cities of Attica, and then all of Greece. Apollo repre- sented, according to Kerényi, the “Greek spiritual religion with its insistence on clarity and purity, order and harmony.” The mysteries of Dionysus, by contrast, represented the blurring of boundaries and categories, and were most preva- lent outside centres of power.
The relationship between the urge to order embodied in Apollo and the urge to disorder apparent in Dionysus surfaced in many ways. For example, at the beginning of winter, rituals at sites such as the Temple at Delphi switched focus away from Apollo and toward invocations to Dionysus. People started to perform the dithyramb, songs and dances that were described by Plutarch as “full of passion and change, of confusion and swaying,” instead of the hymns to Apollo, which were “orderly, measured songs.” Broadly, Apollonian religion was concerned with larger communities and states, while the Dionysian found its way through smaller communities and, eventually, books. They often shared space, though, with little sense of dissonance or conflict.
Friedrich Nietzsche wrote at length in The Birth of Tragedy about these dis- tinct yet interwoven threads in Greek life and the eventual victory of order over disorder. Nietzsche saw conflict and a fundamental pessimism in the Greek culture and argued for a conscious reconciliation within human beings and our communities of the Apollonian and Dionysian urges. Critics of Nietzsche saw not conflict but a graceful holding of seemingly contradictory aspects of the world within a model of time that demanded the existence of both. This par- adox was often represented through both an urge to deeds and an acceptance that those deeds would fall apart in time.
The consolidation of Greek communities into larger, unified bodies was counterbalanced by mystical traditions that celebrated contradiction, localness, and a refusal to categorize. The artistic traditions of tragedy and comedy came out of these impulses as well. Today, the arts can still serve to undermine rigid habits of mind.
The word tragedy comes from tragos, the male goat, which was known to be sacrificed at Dionysian ceremonies. The goat was a paradox. It represented both the god and those that would harm him. Goats were well-known as pests that devoured grape vines. The blood of the goat was intended to symbolically feed the plants for a lucky season of wine while preserving the vines from the animal’s hunger. Dionysus was the god of the grape. The death of the goat served to protect him. However, Dionysus was also the sacrificial goat. Ceremo- nies saw the animal substituted for the god, re-enacting his sacrifice as a child, when he was carved into seven pieces that were eventually returned to the land of the living. Prior to his representation as a goat, in Minoan and early Greek practices, the animal standing in for Dionysus was a bull, returning us again to the story of Theseus and the Minotaur.
Comedy also came out of Dionysian rites. The word comedy comes from komodia, a song for the komos. Komos, according to Kerényi, refers to the “swarming bands of men who went about honoring the wine god with dancing and singing, but following no strict, let alone somber, rite.” The rituals involved the carrying of a phallus, although Dionysus was not known as a fertility god. Rather, Dionysus represented zoë, or indestructible life. He embodied endless cycles of birth and death rather than individual moments of either.
The story of Theseus represents a different idea of life for the Greeks in bios, or physical, finite life. Heroic stories gain their strength from the fact that the hero could die at any point, and, of course, Theseus does die one day, and all his great acts will be undone in time. Although himself immortal, Apollo embodies the best aspects of bios and is often understood as the god with whom humanity might have a conversation. Apollo rules over medicine and healing, the maturity and development of children, the rising and setting of the sun, and the beauty of youth. So, while Dionysus represents the disordered and the absence of boundaries, Apollo represents order and limits. In fact, accord- ing to some scholars, the name for Apollo derives from the Doric word apella, which originally meant wall or a fence for animals.
The co-existence of order and disorder was not unique to Greek culture. The Vikings told their own stories that reflected cycles of control leading to destruction and renewal. The god Baldr was bright and wise and embodied all the Norse virtues. The god Loki was a trickster, and his name and domain were connected to entanglement and loops, which made him particularly important to those that relied on fishing for their survival. Dionysus, incidentally, was also represented as a tangle, including the Gordian Knot that Alexander solved with a swing of the sword. The chariot represented movement, the knot entwine- ment, and the two were linked forever as were chaos and order. The puzzle was not meant to be solved, but Alexander’s sword ended the polarity and the mysteries it might have contained.
Baldr, according to Norse mythology, began awakening in terror at dreams of his own imminent demise. His mother, Frigg, worried deeply about the fate of her brilliant child. She extracted oaths from all matter, animate and inani- mate, that they would do no harm to Baldr, thereby bypassing his ordained fate. Loki, hearing of this, committed to some mischief. He discovered that Frigg had failed to procure an oath from mistletoe, deemed too young to be a part of her efforts. Loki created a dart from the plant and tricked a blind god into hurl- ing it at Baldr, resulting in his death. Ragnarök, the Norse apocalypse, followed. From this destruction came rebirth and renewal and the cycle commenced again. Frigg’s desire to structure the world and to deny fate led to the end of everything.
What these traditions have in common is the centrality of cyclical time and the coexistence and entanglement of both entropy and life’s urge to order. Local celebrations of disorder likely served several practical functions as well. Within communities, breaking with ties of kinship required some idea and practice of disorder to avoid the need for sacrifice or sacrilege in going against the wish- es of those closest to you. Politically, a similar pattern sees rituals of disorder provide spaces where opposition to agents of control can be expressed and explored. This is not to say that Dionysian rituals, for example, were evidence of resistance to an ordered state. Rather, celebrations of disorder allowed people to express their feelings about control and to communicate to others the neces- sary and discomfiting coexistence of these ideas.
Practically and symbolically, cultures understood themselves as embed- ded in a broader cosmos that included nature and the heavens. The world around them asked communities to interpret forces of entropy, intercon- nection, and the unknowable patterns that described their existence. Those forces involved a constant returning, and the experience of time for much of humanity’s history seems to line up with this. As we will see, different conceptions of time have come to dominate human experience, leaving the mysterious workings of the broader universe as background or as only legible in mechanical terms.
In fact, the centuries-long elevation of order in the West appears to be ahistorical. In most cultures, a direct and unmediated relationship with sur- roundings demanded an experience of time that reflected what was observed each day. The sun sets and rises, the seasons turn and return, and the heavens follow a ceaseless pattern. Nature is an eternal incubator of new lives that are born, live, and die while the broader thread of life continues.
While many have noted a greater general comfort with disorder in the symbolic systems of Eastern cultures, the desire to cultivate space for both to be acknowledged is a common practice around the world. The ritualized struc- tures of Confucianism found greatest traction in periods of unrest or external threat in China. When the Chinese state shifted toward order, Confucianism was suppressed, as was witnessed during the autocratic Qin dynasty.
Lewis Hyde, in Trickster Makes the World, traces a similar thread in Hinduism. Krishna is the god of compassion, tenderness, and love. As a child, Krishna was known as the butter thief and was renowned for mischief and disruptiveness. Krishna is praised as a savior when human culture turns against human beings. In an essay on the young Krishna, John Stratton Haw- ley explores why any community might make agents of disorder into gods. He suggests that rather than the malicious actions of a disorderly god, it is our own urge toward control and order that is the true source of misrule and cruelty.
Any time the human order becomes corrupted, forces of entropy will intervene and reset the field.
In the Ancient world, both disorder and order were held to be important and neither diminished the presence of the other. Each had its domain and, as conditions changed, the representations of these ideas about entropy were nec- essarily renegotiated. If time is an endless play of death and rebirth, then both order and disorder are necessary actors.
Somehow, though, we have reached a point where disorder is understood as a contamination, a stain on the otherwise pristine. The presence of disorder has become an affront to what is good. A simple game of word association quickly reveals the implicit assumptions we hold about the idea of disorder. At one time, the relationship of these ideas was like that of the seasons. Cold in winter did not diminish our experience of summer as they were separated in time and significance. In fact, our experience of summer or winter might be augmented by our experience of the other. Now, however, disorder is a sudden, unwelcome cold rain on an otherwise warm day.
Pre-feudal societies were generally embedded in an experience of time that included all of nature. This isn’t to romanticize a relationship with the envi- ronment, but rather to highlight that the rhythms of life were aligned with the circular returns of days and seasons. It’s difficult to imagine different ways of experiencing time as we are so deeply conditioned by the models we’re im- mersed in, but prior to the feudal period in Europe, most cultures saw time as a ceaseless turning and returning and nature as an endless generator of new life. Dionysus died and returned and represented the frenzy of nature’s eternal potential for new life. Cycles of return on earth and in the heavens became the focus of ritual and everyday existence.
Moreover, when the future is just a version of the past, rushing forward seems nonsensical. A relentless commitment to innovation requires a belief that a better future is possible. Circular phenomenologies of time acknowledge an endless, undying thread, but the idea of progress is not central. Communi- ties wanted things to be better but did not assume that getting better was an in- evitability or even within their control. Entropy is a vital part of a worldview that is not necessarily moving toward something else and integrating this concept into ritual and daily life is a practical response when making sense of things.
Today, though, disorder has become understood as nothing more than the absence of order in the same way that dry is thought of as the absence of mois- ture. We forget that Apollo and Dionysus coexisted at Delphi and elsewhere.
They were not enemies. One could participate in the worship of Apollo and the mysteries of Dionysus without any sense of betrayal or contradiction. In fact, it was expected. Loki was a friend of his fellow gods and the maker of fishing nets and other useful tools for humanity. His acts of mischief led to ruin, and he fought his fellow gods during the Norse apocalypse, but his villainy only became accentuated when Christian authors began reproducing Norse myths. Loki’s actions were in alignment with entropy, a fundamental quality of the uni- verse. Confucianism and Taoism have co-existed for centuries. Embodying the beliefs of one does not preclude the other. So how did this happen? How did disorder become understood as a threat?
Tools of Order
Early in the fourth century C.E., the Christian faith came to be the official religion of the Roman Empire. Roman culture had hitherto borrowed heavily from the Ancient Greeks. Although restricted, worship of Dionysus was clearly a central part of daily life into the first century C.E. and beyond, as evidenced by archaeological explorations of domestic wall paintings at the buried city of Pompeii. Initially, the Roman Empire was defined by free and natural forms in architecture, art, and social life. Its administration was decentralized, with local responses allowing for contingency.
Over time, however, a tendency toward centralization, homogeneity, and uniformity took hold. The scope and impact of civil officials grew as the Empire leaned toward order. Rome expressed its greatness through legal regulations that allowed for the coordination and maintenance of political, social, and economic systems. The architecture and culture mirrored the shift toward increased regulation and control. Large, impressive structures embodied the might of Rome and their construction demanded state resources and careful planning. Out of this rage for order arose an innovation that continues to play a central role in how we understand our world and how it is structured for our use.
Contradictions in culture can serve to create and reveal a greater diversity of worldviews to draw upon, helping us to make sense of things. If Greeks in the countryside grew suspicious of the ambitions of the capital, then Dionysian rituals provided collective permission to explore encroachment. By the same token, ukai, as a fishing practice, celebrates a different relationship with nature and food but does not preclude the inclusion of seafood acquired through other means.
Over the past millennium, there has been no single explanation for the sig- nificant shift in attitude to order found in the West. One potential reason, how- ever, may have been Rome’s enforcement and internalization of values through institutionalized faith. Another is tied to a new conception of time that became predominant in the feudal period in much of Europe. This extended from the Church, which began to regulate the day as it sought to mirror the divine order put in place by God. Conceptions of time were altered as a result. The idea of cyclical return was overlaid by one of divine design and individual fate. People were born to a role in the broader order and that is where they stayed.
The Early Church
The New Testament tells a story of Jesus as a disruptive voice in a region under harsh Roman control. Jesus’s Gospel argues for a refutation of codified morality. Paul in Romans 7:6 (New International Version) captures this when stating that “by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.” The Gospel rejects an ethics embedded in absolute rules and ar- gues for individual agency in moral action. In fact, the capacity for grace relies on our ability to choose it. Ivan Illich, a philosopher, critic, and former Roman Catholic priest, reminds us that the story of the Good Samaritan reveals how the response to “Who is my neighbour?” is a matter of personal agency rather than tradition or requirement. This, he argues, is one of the great claims of Christianity. The people we care for are chosen rather than imposed on us by a set of shared rules or expectations.
How the Christian faith came to be a political and social force is summa- rized by philosopher Charles Taylor in his introduction to Illich’s The Rivers North of the Future. He describes how “the Church began to take with ultimate seriousness its power to shape and form people to the demands of the Gospel.” This was an enterprise almost unprecedented in its ambitions. The Church sought to become both Apollo and Dionysus, to see Christian values permeate the structures of Roman power, the local rituals of rural communities, and, eventually, the inner life of Christians in their social order. It is hard to say when this process truly began as it was gradual and faced periods of resistance as well as success. Technology and innovation also made different things possi- ble. The expansion of the Roman road system, novel ideas of ownership in the ninth century, and several innovations in the twelfth century, all provided new energy to the Church’s mission to structure society.
The twelfth century was an important moment in Europe for many reasons, including a shift in how writing was understood. Previously, writing was mo- nastic and focused on dense interpretations of scripture. In the twelfth century, writing became more available as a technology, well before the introduction of the printing press. With this shift, nature, self, and society became legible in new ways, and science, still a protean thing, began to figure out how to interpret and codify the events of the natural world. The ability to write things down, to describe them, made them available for administration.
Taylor outlines how these changes contributed to a departure from past practices as the Church exhibited “progressive impatience with older modes of religious life in which certain traditional collective, ritualistic forms coexisted uneasily with the demands of individual devotion and ethical reform which came from the ‘higher’ revelations.” Previously, the subjugation of local ritual was logistically difficult, and the church tolerated pagan activities confined
As the institutions grew in significance, the energy they put into opposing contingency increased. The faith evolved into structures hostile to uncertainty and committed to shaping the inner lives of everyone. This was founded on a desire to save and support the masses and had serious implications for com- munity life then and now. Just as the English landowners’ desire for a consist- ent staple crop imposed a monoculture of potatoes on the Irish people, Church institutions imposed adherence to the faith in each and every community.
They were so successful, in fact, that the model was widely imitated. Re- ligious and secular institutions became the most effective way to scale belief across large distances, as well as at very local levels. The social theorist Max We- ber outlines how institutions and their bureaucracies, once created, will make themselves indispensable to anyone that assumes power. Such institutions are the products of culture and, as with biological systems, solutions that work tend to be maintained, while solutions that do not, fall away. Made possible by technological innovations such as the Roman road system and writing, institu- tions themselves were evidence of cultural innovation and proved to be highly effective at what they did.
Institutions became the tools of order, with wave after wave of different ideas occupying these structures and bending them to their purposes. At the time of writing, most of humankind is focused on the global pandemic of COV- ID-19 and relieving the suffering caused by it. This goal is achieved through a rich ecology of institutions, each aimed at shifting the outward structures and inward beliefs of the world’s population in a common direction. As with the Church in the twelfth century, those trying to enhance human well-being today are motivated by well-intentioned goals. However, despite the underlying desire to save people from eternal damnation or to relieve suffering from disease, a monopoly on control can create conditions that are confining and dehumaniz- ing. Alternate ways of seeing the world are squeezed out by the all-consuming need to impose order. This binary conception—understanding order and disor- der in a black and white way—is a modern and Western creation that has since been exported around the world. As Blaise Pascal argues in The Pensées:
It is in the nature of tyranny for one realm of life to desire power outside its own sphere, and over the whole world even ... Tyranny is the wish to obtain by one means what can only be had by another. We owe different duties to different qualities
Myth was one means by which pre-Christian cultures preserved and cele- brated a collective enquiry into the nature of and need for disorder. Some of those myths persist today in various forms. Easter, Christmas, and other Chris- tian holidays still bear the mark of their pre-Christian influences. We know of many myths that served to negotiate and offer meaning around experiences of the world that were difficult to categorize. Their lack of attributed authorship, apparent timelessness, and engagement with the unknowable added to their mystique. Sadly, many more were lost. Perversely, those that survive are often coopted and reshaped in a Procrustean attempt to comply with the needs of the current regime.
In Mythologies, the literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes ex- plores how the relation of a concept to a meaning has become one of deforma- tion. He gives the example of a cover photo from a 1955 edition of Paris Match. The image shows a young black soldier saluting in a French military uniform. The image, he argues, is not meant to provide information about the young man, but rather to embody French ideas of military strength, ethnic difference, and devotion. The young man, here, has been emptied out and turned over to the work of justifying French colonization, militarization, and assimilation.
Barthes writes that “myth transforms history into nature. Intention of a myth is not read as motive but as a reason.” The youth does not explain the greatness of France, but rather represents it. Modern myths have become instruments of order. We have collectively chosen to elevate growth and efficiency. Myths that validate these beliefs are promoted. We can then point to the myths as the nat- ural justification for the behaviour and we become stuck. The saluting soldier affirms the existing structure and any deeper inquiry into his life, thoughts, or experiences are omitted.
Moreover, the implications for how Europeans came to understand time were also pronounced. A cyclical model evolved into one that was fixed. Oaths, administered by institutions, became a commitment to the future. Confession, once public, became a private commitment to the past. As philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas wrote in Two Precepts of Charity in 1273, “Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.” The feudal period saw people dislocated from natural cycles and placed into structures and beliefs derived from heaven and locked in place in the material world.
Throwing Beans
The transformation of the Church ran in parallel with a period from around the ninth century to the sixteenth century that we now refer to as feudal. Under feudalism, nature was removed as the primary framework for making sense of human experience and was replaced by a mostly fixed structure created by God. Nature remained central to everyday life but existed as an extension of God’s gift to the world and within a context of ownership, order, and control centered on human beings. When belief in God waned following the feudal period, the dislocation of nature—the transformation of it into a thing to be held or inspected—continued, and the ownership of the cosmos fell into the hands of science, technology, and the economy.
The description of the period as feudal only occurred in hindsight as a means of explaining what had come before. This is an important point, as it is not always possible to put one’s own period in appropriate context while in the middle of it. Feudalism was broadly a response to the collapse of centralizing kingdoms and empires and saw local hierarchies put in place to promote order. The Church and the feudal system were similarly organized, with a single pow- er sitting atop the structure with designates serving as regional or functional leads. A person’s position in this structure was rigid and determined at birth. Land ownership became the means to power and this right was inherited. Most people worked the land of someone superior to them in the structure. The institutions of the Church served to validate and echo this understanding of the world.
Everyone was born into this structured world and their position was fixed at birth. Should you be born to a farmer you would grow up as a farmer, your role determined by your status, gender, and other factors. In some ways, this could be a relief. From a very young age, you knew your place in the world, what work you would do, and where your body would go when you died. Local parishes supported the spiritual journey that would guarantee a place in heaven. In other respects, this idea of being thrown into the world could be oppressive.
When your personal inclinations or preferences differed from your assigned role, there existed little opportunity for recourse.
Randomness became an affront to the political structures of the time, and therefore to the Church. The system was predicated on deference to a landown- ing class. To be clear, the feudal system was a patchwork of different approach- es. Scandinavia saw little of what we now describe as feudalism and therefore has a different cultural legacy around the use of public paths, for example.
Feudalism, phenomenologically, served to dislocate human experience from the cosmos and embed it in local institutions and structures. This was done practically through many approaches, but two of the most significant were the proliferation of oaths and the change in how confession occurred.
In the twelfth century, use of the horse collar was borrowed from the Chinese and accelerated Europe’s feudal project. The collar enabled horses to replace oxen in agricultural work. As a result, the work could be performed more speedily and those that worked the land could live farther from the fields. Towns became more prevalent which led to parishes and placed the Church in more immediate contact with its congregations.
In the early days of the Church, taking oaths was forbidden. Under feudal- ism, however, oaths and the bonds they established became everything. The concept of marriage, for example, underwent transformation. What once was a matter of families negotiating with each other became an oath voluntarily taken by two people and instituted by law and the Church. Oaths became a vehicle of order and a promise to the future. How these oaths were understood and legitimized now depended on the Church.
Perhaps the biggest change arose from the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215, which saw the annual practice of confession become mandatory for all Christians. Confession used to be a public thing, undertaken in the presence of the community. Forgiveness and a relationship to past actions were collectively held. The Fourth Council made explicit the pastor’s obligation to maintain con- fidentiality about what was heard but also made absolute the central role of the pastor in the process. Public confession celebrated forgiveness and allowed for the exploration of sin to occur communally. The privatization and institutional- ization of sin had profound effects on behaviour.
Every member of the congregation, at least once a year, was required to accuse themselves to a representative of the Church, itemizing the sinful acts they had committed, or face an eternity in hell. Forgiveness would be dis- pensed after confession. The burden of determining whether an individual’s acts were moral shifted away from the community and became a private matter of conscience. Forgiveness was institutionalized. For Ivan Illich, this created the precondition for control at much larger scales. Private confession to an agent of the Church, whether the local pastor or a member of a wandering or- der, made routine the act of internally submitting to the wishes of the collective as an act of conscience. Internalizing the expectations of societal institutions in our behaviour defines the modern world.
While the beliefs of the Church are still very much present in many West- ern institutions, most have been turned over to other work that reflects the evolving values that have come to dominate society. While early universities were often extensions of the faith, most now serve interests that prioritize economic growth, personal development, and the acquisition of knowledge. However, the turn toward competition and scale was a gradual one, with the peak of the European feudal period between the ninth and sixteenth centuries offering a transitional space that suggested both the past and the future.
The military aspects of feudalism ended at the start of the sixteenth century, though the social and political institutions persisted thereafter. The decline of the feudal system was accelerated by the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which saw the hold of the nobility on the lower classes loosen. In France, the feudal system persisted until the French Revolution of 1789. In Society Under Siege, Zygmunt Bauman assesses the transition from the ancien regime, the largely feudal political and social system in France, to its replacement following the revolution. Bauman describes a network of loosely linked local communi- ties controlled in clumps by regional powers known “for their enormous greed but fairly limited managerial ambitions and capacities.”
The French Revolution was clearly a period of pronounced disorder, but
Bauman remarks on the speed by which new routines were established, “meant to bind tighter yet, and unlike the dilapidated and putrefied routines they came to replace bind for a very long time to come.” The feudal period was radical in terms of how people in that system experienced time and how con- trol was administered. However, it was not until the industrial revolution and a period of nation-building that the effectiveness of the strategy was fully real- ized. We are now firmly entrenched in this new structure and are beginning to see evidence that the structure may bind even tighter still.
Progress
Early cultures were shaped by phenomenologies of time that were circular and cyclical, echoing patterns in nature and the universe. The feudal period was centered on a model of the universe that was designed by God and that saw people assigned to fixed roles that mirrored this broader structure. Oaths and confessions to institutions kept the structure in place. Where you ended up was mostly a product of birth. In a world of divine, spiritual, and political powers, we are thrown about. We do not project ourselves into the future. Why bother?
The end of feudalism saw the emergence of another way of understanding time in Europe, which would then be exported around the world. This new situation was defined by nation states and industry. It also saw the gradual dominance of the idea of progress and a model of time that aligned with the possibility of a better future.
Nation states were efforts to match up cultural boundaries with political ones. Of course, the decisions made about cultural boundaries were largely ar- bitrary or pragmatic as life at that time involved erratic travel organized around practical needs of commerce, marriage, or sociality. The idea of modern nation states as we know them can be traced back to nineteenth-century Europe. As with other evolutions, earlier technologies contributed to the pace of these changes. Capitalism, improvements in geographical knowledge, and accelera- tions in trade all made the idea of nations visible and desirable. In some cases, states evolved from agitations by cultural groups such as within the ‘Confedera- tion of the Rhine’ in Germany. In others, the state seems to predate the nation, as was the case with France. While their creation involved significant chaos, nations quickly instituted their own routines with the assistance of the Church and its agents of local and regional control inherited from the feudal period.
Nation states combined the efforts of their people and provided a compel- ling reason for them to do so. A sense of being a part of something bigger justified massive infrastructural work. The routine of confession and aligning behaviour as a matter of conscience was translated to the logic of nations.
Industrial capitalism also came into full force during the period that wit- nessed the rise of nation states. The idea of competition and efficiency began to dominate the national programs of European countries and their colonies. The only way to promote scale was to repress chance and random encounters. Nationalism as a matter of conscience supported this ambition well. People were asked to make sacrifices in service of a greater good. Commitment to the national program became a matter of conscience rather than power or force. All the activity was in service of a better future. The underlying metaphors of the culture came to resemble the logic of industry and mechanized interaction.
The idea of progress also came to the forefront during this period. At its core, the idea of progress is centered on a belief that things can be better. By believing in progress, we come to believe that the future will be better than the present. Our efforts are therefore applied to getting to that future as quickly as we can. The current moment and all the moments between now and then are delays in realizing a better world. Seventeenth-century mathematician Blaise Pascal noted this shift in his Penseés:
We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.
If feudalism saw much of Europe pulled out of cyclical time into a concept of time concerned with fate and fortune, then modernity saw Europe, its colo- nies, and the wider world pulled out of the present and thrown into the future. There was no greater standard bearer for the notion of progress than the United States, a nation newly free, ambitious, and in denial of a history prior to colonization. The future was where people in the West looked to live, and they were in a terrible hurry to get there.
Competition and efficiency were the engines of progress. Building the bet- ter future was messy work, though. Thousands of failures were often required before the next step could be taken. However, through the collective compe- tition and efforts of markets, progress became inevitable. Creative markets became exceedingly wasteful but impressive means of solving problems. Many wondered why so little progress had been made in the past. One reason was that the idea that the future would be better was foreign. Some cultures looked to a golden past. Few could imagine a golden future in this world.
The elevation of competition was also something new. In Trade and Markets in the Early Empires, Karl Polanyi argues that cultures have historically limited economic competition. They did this to try to keep social life free of rivalry. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries turned this on its head, elevating competition as the most effective way of distributing scarce resources through the invisible hand of the market and driving progress. The need for scale, growth, and efficiency becomes obvious in a world that believes that anything good in life is necessarily hard to come by.
In the early twentieth century, socialist economist Rosa Luxemburg argued that once the globe was colonized capitalism would expire. As has been the case with many pronouncements regarding the limits of growth, her predic- tions proved incorrect. The logic of progress always led to new arenas in which competition could occur. Colonies once valued only for their natural resources and labour became attractive destinations for new products and services. Lei- sure, travel, the natural world, and even ideas were translated into the logic of a better future. Our private thoughts and behaviour may be the next frontier.
Criticism of these changes was frequent and noisy, with socialism and communism providing the longest-running alternative model to the logic of growth. However, for most people, while the rapid movement was initially felt as chaotic, it soon became habitual and ordered. Myths and a culture of pro- gress reminded people that meaning is in the future and therefore change is evidence of the pull toward it. Anything that makes progress toward meaning is ordered and desirable.
By 1900, the great driver of progress, competition, started to be seen as harmful. The violence of unconstrained rivalry threatened broader stability and a process of national and industrial consolidation began. An age of monopoly emerged to protect the public and by some coincidence increase the wealth of the most influential in society. In the cases of energy and communication, scale was deemed more effective than competition. Carbon-based energy is ordered by nature. Extraction, refining, and distribution require massive cen- tralized systems.
United States Steel Corporation was formed in 1901 out of 138 different companies and controlled 60% of the market at its birth. John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil controlled 90% of oil production and distribution in the United States. Large-scale infrastructure projects afforded these firms protection from the anti-monopoly measures enshrined in the Sherman Antitrust Act. Over a fifty-year period, monopolies in different products and resources allowed for large-scale projects that demonstrated the power of growth and some of the limitations of competition. The 1933 Chicago fair was a celebration of progress and one of its slogans echoes the logic of Thomas Aquinas: “Science finds, industry applies, man conforms.”
Although Standard Oil was broken up in 1911, other monopolies
The Rise of Efficiency
Following the Second World War, the threat of communism resulted in more deeply entrenched moral positions in the West regarding progress, nationalism, and capitalism. The full weight of state and society was diverted toward a common enemy in the communist bloc. In communist countries, the death of capitalism seemed inevitable as it was believed that the need for ongoing growth and the perceived exploitation of labour would lead eventually to fragility and collapse. However, not all agreed. For example, Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratieff argued that, under crisis, capitalism adapts and mutates in fifty-year cycles in order to accommodate new conditions and technological regimes. Progress demands a better future and capitalism borrows from that future to evolve. Foreign cultures, the natural world, and community life would be transformed to permit capitalism to continue onward. Kondratieff was exe- cuted in 1938.
English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley provided a vision of what the next evolution of society might look like in the West. He argued in his introduc- tion to the second edition of Brave New World in 1947 that:
Government by clubs and firing squads, by artificial famine, mass imprisonment and mass deportation, is not merely inhumane (nobody cares much about that nowadays); it is demonstrably inefficient—and in an age of advanced technology, inefficiency is the son against the Holy Ghost. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their Army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.
First, it was competition that moved things forward. Then competition was curtailed so that infrastructure could be grown and developed. Efficiency then gained importance in an effort to optimize the gains previously made. The marriage of efficiency and growth gave us the logics of scale.
Huxley correctly saw how the idea of efficiency was becoming a matter of conscience. What would we be asked to give up in service to this idea? The Roman Church demanded confession and oaths to bind. Efficiency required a simplification of community life. Richard Sennett, in The Uses of Disorder, re- flects on the transformations evident from the pre-war period to the 1960s. He focuses on how communities were organized and how services were delivered, remarking that:
when future generations of historians come to write the chronicle of this era, they may well note that its most marked feature was the gradual simplification of social interactions and forums for social exchange, underlying an ever-increasing elabora- tion of technological and bureaucratic systems.
We have greatly expanded the material comforts available to us and the systems established to meet our needs. But, in the process, we have limited the possible experiences we have of the world.
The collapse of Soviet Communism marked the next evolution of culture and the economy in the West. Both communist and capitalist doctrines were centered on a linear, modern conception of time. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end. For Marxists, the end involved labour taking over the means of production. In capitalism, the future led to a material utopia.
The fall of communism removed any restraints on the ambitions of capi- talism. The triumph of Western ideals gave permission to occupy territories traditionally considered outside the market. Things like weather forecasting, water, and academic science were removed from the public sphere and made subject to private ownership where they could be turned over to the logics of growth and efficiency.
However, cracks in the modern idea of time had been showing for a while.
Global conflict, a degraded environment, growing inequality, and other evi- dence called into question the assumption that a better future was waiting. What did it mean if progress was not inevitable? What work could institutions do in a world where climate change, genocide, and out-of-control pandemics were likely?
Continued on part 2: In Praise of Disorder, chapters 4 to 6.
Updated 12 November 2026. Contact: hello@jerroldmcgrath.com. Training: permitted.