Episode 24: Synthesizing themes
We return once again to interfere with your Conversation enjoyment. Micah and I felt it was about time to synthesize a few of the broader trends we’ve seen over the course of The Conversation, partly because it’s hard to fit a general discussion like this at the end of an episode and also because we wanted a place where new listeners can quickly catch up on a few deeper themes. We touch on five specific points:
- The rift between anthropocentrists and biocentrists.
- Divisions within the broader camps of tech optimists and tech skeptics.
- Teleological explanations, narratives, and the concept of history-as-progressive.
- The Conversation as a historical phenomenon. Is it top-down? Bottom-up? An ex-post-facto construction by desperate historians?
- The Conversation as project designed to spark The Conversation. Why aren’t (most) of the interviewees interested in listening to each other?
That should be enough of us thinking out loud. What are the large trends you’ve seen in the project? Things you’ve taken away? As always, we’re curious to hear your thoughts.
Raffensperger’s line about the conversation, somehow, left me cold. She talked about environmental concerns like large-scale medical experiments being imposed upon the innocent populace by so-called “experts” of the field. Could the top-down version of the conversation she suggested be a variant of it? Is this media-based form of the conversation not unlike a large-scale psychological experiment? (If it is, then *why* must this action be considered so necessary by these powerful actors, and why is it so necessary for us to play along?)
Must we seek out these “experts” to answer our unanswerable concerns like the Greeks sought out the paegan oracle Pythia? Are our questions about the future to these supposed clairvoyants only to be answered in impossible riddles informed by obscure technical knowledge, rigid political ideologies, and quite possibly noxious volcanic fumes? And even if it is just like that, if we have so many different oracles all proclaiming the same future, then why can’t they agree on anything? … or is that supposed to be the point?
This begs the question, is the game of putting out media, in the form of this radio show, necessarily equivocal to the game of the conversation? If so, then is it a problem that those who are playing this game are in such contempt of the others? Is this a happy game? Is the play in progress work or fun?
So many stories, as games, like to keep their narratives simple. Protagonist and antagonist. Red team and blue team. Fundamentalists and atheists. Anthropocentrists and biocentrists. Heaven and hell. Do these stories truly move us and inform to be heroes of our destiny, or do they merely play off of our fears and domesticate us into the fate of others – the fate of the team? No matter that case, if we continue to divide – or merely seek out divisons in thought – should we necessarily be surprised that the people in the conversation view their opponents as… opponents? Is the problem of the conversation not happening merely just bad sportsmanship? Or is the conversation not happening because it will do something terrible to the game itself?
Or is the game not merely double-sided? Is it like Raffensperger said, and we, the audience, watch the actors on stage, and decide who wins? Is the audience as much a participant in the game? Does the audience have the necessary authority to pass judgement on who wins the game and who loses? Or is the audience more powerless than the players think? Is the audience meant to pass judgement on the players of the conversation, but for some reason or another, simply can not? Is the only viable option for the audience just to sit there and watch until one player just kills the other, regardless of how pleasing the outcome?
Bravo!
While we’re tossing ideas out there, I think we are yet to mention Foucault. Perhaps that is a good thing, but could all of this talk of conversation be little more than a smoke-screen which hides our prison within a cultural discourse? Maybe the players and the actors could be equally powerless and change could come from somewhere both related to and removed from agency.
God, my ego finds that so unsatisfying.
If you take Fouault into consideration, and all the necessary “man is born free, but everywhere places him in chains” that goes with it, then is the conversation like money? A fiction which we chose (or are pushed) to collectively believe? Is the conversation like a mythological shinto god, in as much as it only exists so long as people believe it is real and its quasi-random actions do have consequence? Is the problem of the conversation not happening, then, simply a matter of faith? If the conversation, as a god, is not real yet we chose to believe it, we are only fooling ourselves. But on the other side of things, if the conversation, as a god, is real yet so many chose to ignore it, then it will use the last of its dying divinity to curse the world with conflict and strife in its absence.
We seem to lack the certainty of traditional beliefs (believers against nonbelievers) in as much as we certainly *hope* to the conversation is a real thing that must take place, but we’re not entirely certain if it is a real thing or not. We’re trapped in a terrifying agnosticism and we’re desperately crawling for escape, regardless of where it may lead us. My personal hope is the conversation is real, but at the same time, my fear is the same lesson that so many other forms of journalism and media structures keep pushing – that beneath the civil democratic diaspora of the conversation is the ugly face of unrelenting ideological war. Select actors take up their rhetorical arms against eachother, and the indifferent and innocent audience watches from afar, terrified, but entranced, giving the agency of battle to the ideological warriors only because they fear what would happen if they dare looked away. Part of me sees no other way. Yet, part of me desperately wishes to not leave the future of our very systems of thought to such forceful barbarism.
If you are looking for other perspectives for the show on this meta-conversation level, I have two fallbacks. One is a philosophy/religion professor named James Carse, who the Long Now had a seminar about a while back. He looks at life as either a series of finite games or one big infinite game. The other is Jonathan Ball, not really an “expert” in the hardcore journalism sense of things, but a humourist who wrote a book of theatrical metaplays detailing the relationship between the “actors” and the “audience” in this ironic and darkly funny way. It is one of the two books I have that really ended up describing the exact nature of the current “conversation” that exists in the world, and why it is the way it is.