The reality shown in the novel is different from the picture painted in the promotional pamphlet of Being Inc. The advertisements are silent about the most important thing. Antitrust legislation in the U.S.A. forbids monopolies; consequently Being Inc. is not the only life arranger. There are its great competitors, Hedonica and the Truelife Corporation. And it is precisely this circumstance that leads to events unprecedented in history. For when persons who are clients of different companies come into contact with one another, the implementation of the orders of each may encounter unforeseen difficulties. Those difficulties take the form of what is called “covert parasitizing,” which leads to cloak-and-dagger escalation.
Suppose that Mr. Smith wishes to shine before Mrs. Brown, the wife of a friend, to whom he feels an attraction, and he selects item No. 396b on the list: saving a life in a train wreck. From the wreck both are to escape without injury, but Mrs. Brown thanks only to the heroism of Mr. Smith. Now, the Company must arrange a railway accident with great precision and in addition set up an entire situation in order that the named parties, as the result of a series of apparent coincidences, ride in the same compartment; monitors located in the walls, the floor, and the backs of the seats in the coach, feeding data to the computer that—concealed in the lavatory—is programming the action, will see to it that the accident takes place exactly according to plan. It must take place in such a way that Smith cannot not save the life of Mrs. Brown. So that he will not know what he is doing, the side of the overturned coach will be ripped open in the very place where Mrs. Brown is sitting, the compartment will fill with suffocating smoke, and Smith, in order to get out, will first have to push the woman through the opening, thereby saving her from death by asphyxiation. The whole operation presents no great difficulty. Several dozen years ago it took an army of computers, and another of specialists, to land a lunar shuttle meters from its goal; nowadays a single computer, following the action with the aid of a concert of monitors, can solve the problem set it with no trouble.
If, however, Hedonica or Truelife has accepted an order from the husband of Mrs. Brown, which asks that Smith reveal himself to be a scoundrel and a coward, complications ensue. Through industrial espionage Truelife learns of the railway operation planned by Being; the most economical thing is to hook into someone else’s arrangemental plan, and it is precisely in this that “covert parasitizing” consists. Truelife introduces into the moment of the wreck a small deviation factor that will be sufficient to have Smith, when he shoves Mrs. Brown out of the hole, give her a black eye, tear her dress, and break both her legs into the bargain.
Should Being Inc., thanks to its counterintelligence, learn of this parasitizing plan, it will take corrective measures, and thus will begin the process of operational escalation. In the overturning coach inevitably it comes to a duel between two computers—the one belonging to Being, in the lavatory, and the one belonging to Truelife, hidden perhaps under the floor of the coach. Behind the potential deliverer of the woman and behind her, the potential victim, stand two Molochs of electronics and organization. During the accident there is unleashed—in fractions of a second—a monstrous battle of computers; it is difficult to conceive what colossal forces will be intervening on one side in order that Smith push heroically and rescuingly, and, on the other, that he push ungallantly and tramplingly. More and more reinforcements are brought in, till what was to have been a small exhibition of manliness in the presence of a woman turns into a cataclysm. Company records note the occurrence, over a period of nine years, of two such disasters, called GASPs (Galloping Arrangementive Spirals). After the last GASP, which cost the parties involved nineteen million dollars for the electrical energy, steam, and water power expended in the course of thirty-seven seconds, an agreement was reached on the strength of which an upper limit to arrangementing was set. It may not consume more than 1012 joules per client-minute; excluded also from the actualization of services are all forms of atomic energy.
Against this background runs the action proper of the novel. The new president of Being Inc., young Ed Hammer III, is personally to look into the case of the order submitted by Mrs. Jessamine Chest the eccentric heiress-millionairess, since her demands, of an outre nature, not to be found in any catalogue, go beyond the reach of all the rungs in the Company’s administrative ladder. Jessamine Chest desires life in its full authenticity, purged of all arranging interference; for the fulfillment of this wish she is prepared to pay any price. Ed Hammer, against the advice of his advisers, accepts the assignment; the task, which he puts before his staff—how to arrange the total absence of arranging—proves more difficult than any so far tackled. Research reveals that nothing like an elemental spontaneity in life has existed for a long time. Eliminating the preparations for any particular arrange-plan brings to light the remnants of other, earlier ones; events unscenarioed are not to be found even in the bosom of Being Inc. For, as it turns out, the three rival enterprises have thoroughly and reciprocally arranged one another; that is, they have filled with their own trusted men key positions in the administration and on the board of directors of each competitor. Aware of the danger created by such a discovery, Hammer turns to the chairmen of both the other enterprises, whereupon there is a secret meeting in which specialists having access to the main computers serve as advisers. This confrontation makes it possible, finally, to ascertain the true state of affairs.
In the year 2041, throughout the length and breadth of the U.S.A., not a man can eat a chicken, fall in love, heave a sigh, have a whiskey, refuse a beer, nod, wink, spit—without higher electronic planning, which for years in advance has created a pre-established disharmony. Without realizing it, in the course of their competition the three billion-dollar corporations have formed a One in Three Persons, an All-Powerful Disposer of Destiny. The programs of the computers make up a Book of Fate; arranged are political parties, arranged is the weather, and even the coming into the world of Ed Hammer III was the result of specific orders, orders that in turn resulted from other orders. No one any longer can be born or die spontaneously; no one any longer can on his own, by himself, from beginning to end, live anything, because his every thought, his every fear, his every pain, is a short sequence of algebraic calculations run through the computer. Empty now are the concepts of sin, retribution, moral responsibility, good and evil, because the full arrangementation of life excludes nonnegotiable values. In the computerized paradise created thanks to the hundred-percent utilization of all the human qualities and their incorporation into an infallible system, only one thing was missing—the awareness of the inhabitants that this was precisely how things stood. And therefore the meeting of the three corporate heads has been planned also by the main computer, which—providing them with this information—presents itself now as the Tree of Knowledge lit up with electricity. What will happen next? Should this perfectly arranged existence be abandoned in a new, second flight from Eden, in order to “start once more from the beginning”? Or should man accept it, renouncing once and for all the burden of responsibility? The book offers no answer. It is, therefore, a metaphysical burlesque, whose fantastic elements nevertheless have some connection with the real world. When we disregard the humoristic humbug and the elephantiasis of the author’s imagination, there remains the problem of the manipulation of minds, and particularly of that kind of manipulation which does not lessen the full subjective sense of spontaneity and freedom. The thing will certainly not come about in the form shown in Being Inc., but who can say whether fate will spare our descendants other forms of this phenomenon—forms perhaps less amusing in description but not, it may be, any less oppressive.
Die Kultur als Fehler
Wilhelm Klopper
(Universitas Verlag, Berlin)
Civilization as Mistake by Privatdozent W. Klopper is a work without doubt remarkable—as an original hypothesis in anthropology. I cannot refrain, however, before I proceed to the discussion, from indulging in a comment as regards the form of the disc
ourse. This book—only a German could have written it! A fondness for classification, for that scrupulous t-crossing and i-dotting that has begotten innumerable Handbücher, makes the German mind resemble a pigeonhole desk. When one beholds the consummate order displayed by the table of contents of this book, one cannot help thinking that if the Lord God had been of German blood our world would perhaps not necessarily have turned out better existentially, but would have for sure embodied a higher notion of discipline and method. The perfection of this orderliness quite overwhelms one, although it may arouse reservations of a substantive nature. I cannot here go into the question of whether that purely formal penchant for muster and array, for symmetry, for front-and-center and forward-march, might not have exerted a real influence also on certain conceptions that typify German philosophy —its ontology in particular. Hegel loved the Cosmos as a kind of Prussia, for in Prussia there was order! Even the esthetics-inflamed thinker that was Schopenhauer showed what an expository drill looks like in his treatise “Uber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde.” And Fichte? But I must deny myself the pleasure of digression, which is all the more difficult for me in that I am not a German. To business, to business!
Klopper has provided his two-volume work with a foreword, a preface, and an introduction. (The ideal of form: a triad!) Going into the merits of the matter, he first takes up that understanding of civilization as mistake which he considers to be false. According to that misguided (says the author) view, typical of the Anglo-Saxon school and represented—notably—by Whistle and Sadbottham, any form of behavior of an organism that neither helps nor hinders the organism’s survival is a mistake. For the sole criterion of sensibleness of behavior is, in evolution, survivability. An animal that behaves in such a fashion that it survives more capably than others is behaving, in the light of this criterion, more sensibly than those that die out. Toothless herbivores are senseless evolutionarily, for hardly are they born before they must perish from hunger. Analogously, herbivores that indeed possess teeth but employ them to chew stones instead of grass are also evolutionarily without sense, for they, too, must disappear. Klopper goes on to quote Whistle’s famous example: let us suppose, says the English author, that in some herd of baboons a certain old male, the leader of the herd, by sheer accident acquires the habit of addressing the birds he devours from the left side. He had, say, an injured finger on the right hand, and when he brought the bird to his mouth he found it more comfortable to hold the prey by the left. The young baboons, watching the leader’s behavior, which for them is a model, imitate it, and before long—that is, after a single generation—every baboon in the herd is starting in on his captured bird from the left. From the point of view of adaptation this behavior is senseless, for baboons can with equal advantage to themselves attack their meal from either side; nevertheless, precisely this pattern of behavior has. established itself in the group. What is it? It is the beginning of a culture (protoculture), being behavior adaptationally senseless. As is known, this idea of Whistle’s was developed not by another anthropologist, but by a philosopher of the English logical-analytical school, J. Sadbottham, whose views our author—before taking exception to them—summarizes in the next chapter (“Das Fehlerhafte der Kulturfehlertheorie von Joshua Sadbottham”).
In his major work, Sadbottham declared that human communities produce cultures through mistakes, false steps, failures, blunders, errors, and misunderstandings. Intending to do one thing, people in reality do another; desiring to understand the mechanism of a phenomenon through and through, they interpret it for themselves wrongly; seeking truth, they arrive at falsehood; and thus do customs come into being, mores, faith, sanctification, mystery, mana; thus come into being injunctions and interdictions, totems and taboos. People form a false classification of the surrounding world, and totemism results. They make false generalizations and thus arrive first at the notion of mana, and afterward at that of the Absolute. They create mistaken representations of their own physical construction, and thus arise the concepts of virtue and sin; had the genitalia been similar to butterflies and insemination to song (the transmitter of hereditary information being specific vibrations in the air), these concepts would have taken a completely different form. People create hypostases, and thus arise concepts of divinities; they make plagiarisms, and thus arise eclectic interpolations of myths—or doctrinal religions. In other words, in behaving any which way, inappropriately, imperfectly with respect to adaptation, in misinterpreting the behavior of other people, and their own bodies, and the objects in Nature, in considering things that happen accidentally to be things that aie determined, and things that are determined, to be accidental—that is, in inventing a growing number of fictitious existences, peopie wall themselves in with the edifice of culture, they alter their model of the world to fit its conclusions and then, after millennia pass, they are surprised that in such a prison they do not feel altogether comfortable. The beginnings are always innocent and even, on the face of it, trivial—take, for example, the baboons who eat birds always from the left side. But when from such odds and ends emerges a system of meanings and values, when the mistakes and misunderstandings accumulate enough so that they can, by their totality, in their entirety, close—to use the language of mathematics—then man himself already has become imprisoned in what, though it is the most fortuitous sort of miscellany, appears to him as the highest necessity.
A scholar of much erudition, Sadbottham backs his assertions with a multitude of examples drawn from ethnology; his tabulations, too, as we recall, caused quite a commotion in their day, especially those charts of “chance versus determinism,” on which he juxtaposed all the different cultures’ mistaken explanations of natural phenomena. (And in fact, a great number of cultures consider the mortality of man to be the consequence of a particular instance of bad luck: man was, according to them, originally immortal, but he either deprived himself of this attribute by a fall, or else was deprived of it through the intervention of some evil power. Conversely, that which is the work of chance—the physical appearance of man, shaped in evolution—all cultures have provided with the name of inevitability; to this day the leading religions teach that man is in the aspect of his body unaccidental, since fashioned in God’s image, after His likeness.
The criticism to which Herr Dozent Klopper submits the hypothesis of his English colleague is neither original nor the first. As a German, Klopper has divided his criticism into two parts: immanent and positive. In the immanent he only negates Sadbottham’s thesis; this section of the work we pass over as being less material, since it repeats the objections already known from the professional literature. In the second half of the criticism, the positive, Wilhelm Klopper finally proceeds to set forth his own counterhypothesis of “Civilization as Mistake.”
The exposition begins, in our opinion effectively arid aptly, with the supplying of an illustrative example. Different birds build their nests out of different materials. What is more, the same species of bird in different localities will not nest-build using exactly the same materials, because it must rely on what it finds in the vicinity. As to which material, in the form of blades of grass, flakes of bark, leaves, little shells, pebbles, the bird is going to find most readily, that depends on chance. And so in some nests you will have more shells and in some, more pebbles; some will be stuck together primarily out of little strips of bark, some, out of pinfeathers and moss. But whatever building material makes its unmistakable contribution toward the shaping of the form of the nest, one cannot with any sense say that nests are the work of pure chance. A nest is an instrument of adaptation, howsoever constructed out of randomly found fragments of this and that; and culture also is an instrument of adaptation. But—and here is the author’s new idea—it is an adaptation fundamentally different from that typical of the plant and animal kingdoms.
“Was ist der Fall?” asks Klopper. “What is the situation?” The situation is this: in man, considered as a physical being, there i
s nothing inevitable. According to the knowledge of modem biology, man could be constructed other than he is; he could live six hundred and not sixty years on the average; he could possess a differently shaped trunk or limbs, have a different reproductive system, a different digestive system; he could, for example, be exclusively herbivorous, he could be oviparous, he could be amphibious, he could be able to breed only once a year, in a period of rut, and so on. Man, it is true, does possess one characteristic that is inevitable, to the extent, at least, that without it he would not be man. He possesses a brain that is able to produce speech and reflection; and, gazing upon his own body and upon his fate, which is circumscribed by that body, man leaves the realm of such reflection greatly discontented. He lives but briefly; on top of this his powerless childhood is of long duration; his time of ablest maturity is a small portion of his entire life; hardly does he achieve his prime when he begins to age, and, unlike all other creatures, he knows to what end aging will lead him. In the natural habitats of evolution life is lived under incessant threat; one must be on one’s toes in order to survive; it is for this reason that the gauges of pain, the organs of suffering—as signaling devices to stimulate the development of self-preserving activity—have been by evolution very strongly pronounced in all living things. On the other hand, there has been no evolutionary reason, no organism-shaping force, to balance this situation “fairly,” endowing life forms with a corresponding quantity of organs of enjoyment and pleasure.
A Perfect Vacuum Page 13
