Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘Curator’ posts of the week - these are riffs off articles from the artistic/’intellectual’ web.
Best wishes,
Sam
THE TECHNICAL DISASTER FLICK
The three articles that strike me this week are all about technocracy - and the very particular 20th century covenant we made with the figure of the bureaucrat expert, the hero of so many of our middlebrow fantasies, as is discussed by Trevor Quirk in an intelligent piece in The Point.
Quirk watches three movies/series, as if in split screen - Contagion, Chernobyl, and Margin Call, and notices that they’re actually all the same movie, right down to the repetition of individual lines. (Quirk pauses Margin Call and Chernobyl at a pivotal moment in which an expert under duress hands off a loaded piece of information to a trusted colleague and, in virtually the same hooded tone, delivers the same line - the expert’s mantra - “Be careful.”)
Quirk contrasts what he calls the ‘technical disaster movie’ with the ‘shlockier disaster porn which preceded it” - and which reached its logical terminus in Airplane! In ‘disaster porn,’ the crisis is an ‘existential crisis or act of God,’ which is usually addressed through some technical know-how and the heart-tugging solidarity of unlikely misfits. But the ‘technical disaster movie’ is meant to speak to the deep truth of our era. “The technical disaster movie depicts a real or realistic catastrophe that is in principle avoidable,” Quirk writes. “It is the consequence of human complacency, stupidity or resignation.”
In a series like Chernobyl, the corruption of the Soviet system is understood to be only the surface level of rot. The real issue is a sort of technological crime. Shortcuts. Budget cuts. Deferred maintenance. Etc. The idea that sloppiness leads to betraying some fundamental integrity of the technology. And then once that occurs the drama shifts to the scrappy expert-technocrats who have the expertise to understand the technological mishap and the integrity to attempt to save the public but whose very techy integrity makes them a species apart from the ruling political class. The story isn’t quite about man’s hubris in playing God in the first place, as it is about the dangers of technology being in the hands of people who don’t really respect it - much of Chernobyl, for instance, is about the nuclear scientists working to wrest control of the response to the meltdown back from local apparatchiks.
In Quirk’s historically-inflected reading, the real drama of the technical disaster movie is the schism between the public and the experts. As he writes:
The layman’s confusion [about technical matters] is a largely inevitable consequence of how technical knowledge is organized. Modern expertise is the product of specialization, the division of labor applied to knowledge production and scholarly pursuit….By 1917, this scientific reorganization had proved so effective that Max Weber proclaimed that ‘science has entered a stage of specialization that has no precedent and that will continue for all time.’”
In other words, a sort of original sin. The speculative fiction of an earlier era - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, A Journey to the Center of the Earth - comes to seem absurd given the emphasis placed on the amateurish well-roundedness of the protagonists. In the imaginative life of the 20th century, focus shifts to highly-trained experts, detached from the public-at-large, and, accordingly, dysfunctional and anti-social, who are nonetheless the people who must be called upon in the event of a crisis. And the resonance of the work of art depends not just on solving the matter at hand but somehow healing the schism, restoring the wayward expert to the fold of human emotion. That can be the love of a tough-yet-good woman in some of the classic gumshoe stories; or the wry smile that’s the payoff of a Dr. House episode, the acknowledgment that is useful to have faithful colleagues and a support staff after all; or the discreetly tender ministrations of Peter Guillam to George Smiley or Mrs. Landingham to Jeb Bartlett, the person who is more in touch with the public taking gentle care of the lonely workaholic.
In the ‘technical disaster movie,’ though, the disjunction between the public and its own technological infrastructure is revealed - and the expert’s real burden made apparent. “Only during technical disasters, storied and real, can the full severity of this bargain be recognized,” writes Quirk. “A technical elite will accept an unfathomable responsibility in exchange for the public’s unwavering trust and obedience.”
There’s a very powerful moment in The West Wing in which this differentiation becomes clear. Bradley Whitford’s character, Josh Lyman, is handed his ‘Continuity of Government’ badge - his lease on life in the event of some kind of nuclear or terrorist attack - and looks around at all of his erstwhile colleagues, the Rob Lowe, Allison Janney, Richard Schiff characters, etc, who have been his equals throughout the show and realizes that he is now no longer one of them. Or a similar moment in Zero Dark Thirty, in which Jessica Chastain’s character, a classic hero-expert bureaucrat on a lonely crusade, watches the SEAL team she’s become friendly with depart for the strike on Abbottabad and realizes how distinct her destiny is. She’s the one ultimately responsible for life or death. The ‘elite’ Navy SEALS are, in some important sense, just following a hunch of hers.
The understanding is that, in exchange for this unspeakable, unsupportable burden, the hero-expert bureaucrat becomes a sleepless paragon of responsibility, wracked with superego. In Contagion, the CDC epidemiologist injects herself with a hyper-experimental dose of a vaccine in a kind of accelerated Operation Warp Speed. In Chernobyl, Legasov ultimately commits suicide - although he’s done nothing wrong really; is just commenting, in some sense, on the enormity of the catastrophe. “A defining feature of the expert-protagonist is that they’re always exhausted,” writes Quirk.
And all of that is a lovely modern myth and surprisingly sustaining - the heroic bureaucrats, quietly and at great personal cost, bridging the gap between the public and the technological infrastructure that it is only dimly aware of. The sole issue is, as The Onion astutely put it, that these brilliant, highly trained, and dedicated professionals do not, as it so happens, exist.
The recent reflection on the Robert Caro books - the documentary Turn The Page, the stage play Straight Line Crazy - is in its way a cultural grappling with how the image of the hero-bureaucrat may have misled us. Robert Moses, Caro’s subject, was, for the bulk of his career, the image of the hero-bureaucrat par excellence - not even drawing a salary from the government but wholly dedicated to public service and able, through single-minded focus, to push through highways and parks that had bedeviled earlier generations of more amateurish reformers. But what Caro discovered in his research on The Power Broker was that that was not what Moses represented at all. Moses wasn’t some sort of detached civil servant, the ambassador of the public-itself within the halls of government. Moses had his own personal fiefdom. It was based on the carving out of the Triborough Bridge Authority and the parceling of toll fees with essentially no oversight from any branch of government - much of which went to the construction of massive highways that Moses wanted and which were built with precious little consideration of the impact they had on affected areas. And something similar emerges with the more jaundiced understanding we are developing of Anthony Fauci and his role during the pandemic - that he wasn’t quite the gentle old doctor people thought they were seeing on TV at the beginning of the pandemic, that he was in fact another keeper of a governmental fiefdom, the string holder of an astonishing amount of money and with a compliant bureaucracy in place that enabled him to spin politically efficacious decisions as being that of a detached civil service (as is very much revealed in recently unredacted e-mails from 2020 about the possibility of a lab leak origin to the virus).
The better understanding is of government as warring factions - and with control over money as the path to some simulacrum of harmony. (Not a terrible system, by the way, just not so cinematic.) However, the vision we have - of the mid-level bureaucrats always on the verge of somehow freeing themselves from near-sighted politicians - has really anchored itself in our collective sensibility. And never mind that the rule of the epidemiologists doesn’t quite work, as we discovered during the more extreme of the Covid lockdowns. And never mind that the expert predictions on Chernobyl contamination actually turned out to be more wrong than right - and led, essentially, to the shuttering of the nuclear industry, which should have been our best attempt to counter global warming. As Quirk writes, of the mentality of the technical disaster film, “The citizen and his representatives are asked to forget the many instances in which experts have been grievously mistaken, and to overlook that many disasters now originate in the cloisters of technical institutions. There is no time to consider past errors. The expert class will remain in the position of convincing the public, with every compounding crisis, that ours is a technocracy of necessity.” From the vantage-point of the technical disaster film, more technocracy, greater appreciation for the specialists, is always understood to be the solution to problems of technology and infrastructure.
The myth is there for a reason - that we are insecure about how little we know about how our own gadgets, our own society, really works. We like to pretend that somebody - ideally someone with endearing nerd-cool habits - knows better. But it’s probably worth acknowledging that, as is often the case, The Onion has the beat on this story. That nobody really knows anything. And that, in a real crisis, common sense will tend to be at least as good a guide as whichever expert-bureaucrat pops up promising to save the day.
HAYEK’S INSIGHT
A discussion of Friedrich Hayek doubles as an alternative vision to technocracy. The London Review of Books article on Hayek, by Jonathan Rée, is largely a snippy personal critique - going after Hayek for being a bad husband and father, having ‘no idea’ about domestic matters, and being unoriginal in some of his major arguments - and I’m not knowledgable enough about Hayek to really engage with Rée.
But what strikes me about the piece is how radical it really was in the 1940s to argue against centralized planning. Even thinkers whom one might have supposed to be aligned with Hayek were repelled by him. Isaiah Berlin wrote in a contemporary letter that he was “reading the awful Dr. Hayek.” Orwell rejected him with the argument that ‘laissez-faire capitalism’ involves ‘a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the state.’” And what Hayek was saying was actually very mild compared the strains of conservatism that seemed to develop in his wake. Hayek recalled the “room temperature dropping about ten degrees” when he addressed Paleoconservatives in the United States and mentioned that, incidentally, he was in favor of minimum wage, unemployment insurance, basic income for all.
Much of the governmental structure Hayek discusses makes him seem, actually, like some sort of standard Social Democrat, but it was the departure from central planning that was the real rupture and that, for the mid-century intellectual class, made him such a heretic. The only observation I want to make here is how odd it is - and how odd it seemed to Hayek as well - that the consolidation of power by a very narrow technocratic class, whether in Communist, Fascist, or ostensibly democratic countries, was understood to be a necessary component of ‘progress.’ Hayek’s core observation was, as Rée puts it, “not revolutionary but illuminating,” an idea that a certain type of market knowledge was inherently dispersed and could “never be concentrated in one mind.” Markets allow us “to avail ourselves of knowledge which individually we do not possess,” Hayek wrote, “coordinating economic decisions in a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand.”
In other words, the type of government was less important than anybody believed it to be. There simply was no ‘governmental super-computer’ that would enable a centralized authority to rationally regulate markets; and it was finally possible, as Hayek wrote, “to dispose of that skeleton in our cupboard….the fiction of ‘economic man.’”
The real insight of Hayek’s - the basis of his never-completed The Abuse of Reason, which he broke off from in order to write The Road to Serfdom - is the idea of an intrinsic split between ‘natural science’ and ‘social science,’ or what Hayek was more likely to have called ‘moral science.’ As Rée summarizes Hayek:
The [social sciences] got off to a good start, according to Hayek, when Adam Smith showed that they are concerned not with external objects governed by natural laws but with the inner logic which links human actions to their ‘unintended or undesigned results’. But then catastrophe struck: Smith’s subjectivist revolution provoked a ‘counter-revolution’ in which blinkered devotees of the natural sciences conspired, in the name of Francis Bacon (‘demagogue of science’), to crush the autonomy of social science.
In Hayek’s construction, the 18th century - Smith and Hume - becomes the body of knowledge to reach back to, with the understanding that ‘reason’ is inherently subjective and rules over a very limited domain. The villains for Hayek are the French Revolutionaries, and then above all Auguste Comte, with the doctrines of ‘positivism’ and ‘scientism’ - the beliefs that, as Rée puts it, “history is ‘subject to simple laws’ and social institutions cannot prosper unless they are under ‘conscious control.’”
Hayek’s famous arguments about the market turn out to be ancillary to this more fundamental understanding of reason - that it’s important to keep our demarcations firmly in place. ‘Natural science’ is applied to non-invasive measurements and taxonomy of a world beyond human beings. ‘Social science’ - or ‘moral science’ - is viewed, in his construction, not so much as what we would normally think of as ‘science’ and is more an aggregate body of practical wisdom as opposed to a ‘rational’ set of claims about the objective functioning of the world. Keep that demarcation in place and it becomes possible to have science without imagining, as in the technocratic vision, that ‘science’ presupposes some hyper-rational, centralized control.
GOING GNOSTIC
And one last essay on technocracy - this one a very complicated piece in The Hedgehog Review arguing that technocracy’s main opposition, really, is ‘Gnosticism,’ which is in itself a form of mental derangement.
In The Hedgehog Review piece, written by Isaac Ariail Reed and Michael Weinman, it’s taken pretty much for granted that ‘technocracy’ is the rational path forward - and that Francis Fukuyama was basically right in seeing the end of the Cold War as the end of any sort of ideological disputation.
The conflict, in Reed and Weinman’s view, is not between systems of government and not between ideas of ‘centralization’ and ‘dispersion,’ as Hayek would have had it (and which is a view that I’m partial to), but between a technocratic-system-based-on-ever-increasing-knowledge and a Gnosticism that, essentially, denies the possibility of meaningful corporeal knowledge. In their view, what we are really going through, with Trumpism, illiberalism, the rise of conspiracy theories, etc, is the same dispute as convulsed the Roman world, in which Gnostic ideas took hold and undermined any ability to lean on reason or empiricism.
Gnosticism, in Reed and Weinman’s formulation, is above all about inversions - and a constant flipping of common sense. If the world is inherently corrupt, then those ‘improving’ the world are only adding to the corruption, Gnostic thought might run. Or some world-destroying figure - Trump in the ‘stranger-king archetype’ that evangelical leaders have a tendency for seeing him as - might be carrying out a higher purpose.
Reed and Weinman write:
If we fear a negative answer to the question of whether liberal democracies can meet thymotic needs - that is, the needs for recognition and significance - we would do well to investigate the promises and fantasies of the Gnostic impulse, whose tendency to guarantee significance makes it not only an appealing alternative to an Enlightenment utilitarianism but even the expected response, in politics and culture, to the tyranny of meritocracy. Understanding Gnosticism, in other words, helps us to reframe our interpretation of the unraveling of the Enlightenment project and the fragility of liberal internationalism.
I basically disagree with this. I find it to be a very self-serving approach by the reigning technocracy. The premise is that of course the technocratic system has everything well worked out, so any challenge to technocracy is understood as irrationally ‘Gnostic’ - although, in this case, with the prescribed approach that, as one might with a patient hearing voices, it would be good practice to ask the dissenters what the voices are that they’re hearing. And a wide range of very disparate phenomena are tossed in as ‘Gnostic’ - evangelicals’ doomsdayish support for Trump; Milošević’s vision of Greater Serbia, Putin’s vision of Greater Russia, conspiracy theories, but also, very simply, the search for ‘greater meaning’ in a secular, material world that often seems to provide none. Spot any of these phenomena, Reed and Weinman suggest, and you can catch incipient Gnosticism. Once it has developed there’s no way to reason with it - “Gnosticism cannot be countered by technocratic expertise,” they write - so the solution, presumably, is to bolt the doors shut, to stay within what Reed and Weinman call the ‘world-in-common’ without ever getting into the flights of fancy of the ‘Gnostic revolt.’
There are many issues here. One is that the phenomena identified as ‘gnostic’ are all very different from one another. I would tend to think that the violent conquest of neighboring countries is more about cynical self-aggrandizement than a ‘Gnostic revolt.’ And ‘conspiracy theories,’ more often than not, aren’t questions about the nature of reality - they’re just arguments about facts; and tend to make the claim that crucial pieces of evidence needed to render judgment on various public events have not been entered into the public record. And, as for the search for greater meaning and significance, it seems cruel of Reed and Weinman to deny that to anyone, for fear that they should fall into the ‘Gnostic vortex.’
Another issue is the cozy assumption Reed and Weinman make that there has been a ‘world-in-common,’ ‘a liberal international order’ that is constructed along rational, technocratic lines - and which is now, suddenly, being challenged by a ‘Gnostic revolt.’ I’m really not sure what this intact ‘international order’ is supposed to be based on. Is it, at heart, based on American military superiority to any potential rivals? If so, that’s maybe effective but not necessarily so rational. Is it based on the ever-unfolding advances of scientific progress from the days of the Enlightenment to our own? I think that’s what Reed and Weinman are getting at, but they have an extraordinarily purist, triumphalist reading of this progression - and take their own ‘touchstone,’ Fukuyama, to task for the Gnostic tendencies he evinces, his sense of melancholy for the ceaseless consumerism brought about by ‘the end of history’ and the emergence of ‘the last man.’ In Reed and Weinman’s view, Fukuyama overlooked the ‘Gnostic’ components of Hegelian thought - its tendency to idealize and generate significance. Their vision is Fukuyama purified of Hegel - a world that truly is bloodless and secular, the Pax Americana as modern successor to the Pax Romana but combined with liberal mores and scientific progressivism.
The trick to maintaining this order, in Reed and Weinman’s view, is to stay as far from the taint of Gnosticism as possible. And in an interesting reading of what happened to the Romans, they claim that, basically, the issue was that the Romans got too involved in suppressing Jewish messianism - and that, through a classic Gnostic ‘inversion,’ the defeat of the Zealots led to the entry of eschatological and apocalyptic ideas into Roman civic life. “The destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and the ensuing defeat of the Zealots, spurred the spiritual transformation of Rome itself, bringing Roman political culture in line with the monotheistic interpretation of law,” write Reed and Weinman, “which would be the first of many inversions of interpretation common to the Gnostic impulse - in this case, it was the interpretation of destruction as construction.” So, in other words, it’s not enough even to ‘defeat’ Gnosticism. It’s necessary for the body politic to expel the impulse from itself, to remain rigorously secular and technocratic.
I guess I’m sensitive to these arguments because I have a bit of a Gnostic streak - nothing particularly defined, nothing that meets the classic definition of the word gnosis, of ‘knowing with certainty’ - but I do have a sense of idealism that’s anchored around the individual’s search for meaning and which, I believe, can bring people to conclusions that are their truth but that may not match up to some society-wide consensus. My sense is that what Reed and Weinman really want to do is cut the legs out from under that search. “As the world in common evaporates, the search for significance quickly attaches itself to stories unrelated to the world as it actually is,” they write. But this is a very false binary. The ‘world-as-it-is’ is not diametrically opposed to stories that lend significance. Plurality - as the Romans pretty well understood - is not just a plurality of perspectives; it’s a plurality of faiths as well. In a civic space (construed as being different from a narrowly political space) the nature of the ‘world-as-it-is’ is subject to constant scrutiny and debate. It’s silly to try to block out anything that hints at the Gnostic impulse in order to create the tepid ‘world in common’ that Reed and Weinman advocate for. Much more interesting, much richer, is to let in Gnosticism and to dance with it.