For the past two or three weeks I have been immersed in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and it has been a fascinating character study. I am still singly struck by the life of Jack Shaftoe who became great by winding up in a great number of scrapes. It is the kind of life I could not imagine for myself and yet in a small way it is the amount of traveling and performing recondite tasks for forgetable bureaucracies that have made me. I like my work, for the kind of sense of completeness it gives when properly done, but I can't say that in the historical scope of things that my work, or anyone's work, much matters.
I've been reviewing at a high school level, which is about all anyone needs to know, the particulars of the Russian Revolution. Or more precisely the two revolutions of 1917. It is a wonder to think that any cabinet member of the Kerensky government in its three configurations might ever be considered at length. Who would know what it took to become the right appointee at the right time? Those close to those doing the doing would know, and most everyone else would never know. That's how the circles of trust have operated.
I grew up in an odd time in American history, a time when most people believe and thereby gave permission to those who proclaimed that we lived in an era of progress. Moreover it was an era of scientific and social progress defined well in advance of the eventuality. All of the murals had the psychedelic colors of the future, round and pleasing like the shapes of the 7up Submarine. We had already decided what the future was going to be and were so sold on that vision that people still ask why certain dreams didn't come true? Where's my flying car? Where is the colony on the Moon? Where is fusion? Where is world peace? Why didn't the population boom happen? Why didn't Rachel Carson's predictions come true? Hasn't capitalism ruined the world? Why haven't we run out of oil? I once heard an excellent explanation of all this. It was the idea of Pop Culture.
Pop Culture was more than just the simple thing we think of today. It was, in many ways, the ultimate expression of democracy. It was the idea that by making high artistic concepts accessible to the average Joe, in quickly recognizable forms, that we would extend the benefits of liberty, education and all of the previously exclusive intellectual and aesthetic prerogatives of the ruling class. This is one of those extraordinary ideas that's much deeper than the meta discussion of Andy Warhol. It's one we still grapple with, and I see its evolution in much fascination with network effects and smart mobs ideas which are influential with the digerati.
So to circle back a moment, is it really true that a high school education is all we need to understand the Russian Revolution? At a certain level, yes. At a Pop Culture level this is probably true. We can all understand the negative connotations of 'Siberia' without reading Solzhenitsyn. Most human beings never will read him. But is that enough for the purposeful wisdom necessary to foreclose the possibility of embracing another version of Siberia? Probably not.
Here's the other thing. As beneficiaries of real progress and the disintermediation of various gating organizations, we Americans have come to expect more personal power. We can all have in our pockets more compute power than the entire NASA space flight control center of the Apollo Program. We can buy the sort of automatic weapons and communications gear that could enable a single regiment to beat all of Lee's Army. But how would we communicate the wisdom?
I'm saying we could not via Pop Culture or through any but the most demanding disciplines. And that is the sort of thing one tends to believe after having read a 2800 page set of books, which oddly enough I didn't actually read completely - so much as read and listened to via audiobook - a combination I find quite compelling.
We must be suspicious of mass communications and recognize what our literacy demands.
Recent Comments