Legally, we are already in the posthumanist era. Corporations have long been considered persons in certain jurisdictions, despite not facing the same potential limitations on their freedom as actual people. A couple of years ago, a stretch of the Magpie river in Canada was also granted legal standing as a person, as part of an attempt to provide it with environmental protection.
Don’t feed the cocaine hippos – even though they’re people now.
Ordinarily we understand posthumanism to be some sort of utopian merging of man and machine, but perhaps it might also, and better, be understood as a way of treating non-human entities with the same respect generally extended to humans.
Of course, I feel that implementing human rights (and responsibilities) for all humans might be required as a priority. We’re at risk of stratifying the world into a place where non-humans have more rights than some humans.
Which is the fundamental problem with posthumanism as a utopian ethos. Like all utopian ideals, it is utterly blind to the stratification it ushers into being, even while denying it is doing so.
Temporary decloaking continues apace, in order to acknowledge the existence of David Graeber’s final meisterwerke, which is no less than a history of everything. Alas, it’s only volume one, and he is no longer with us on this plane of existence to expand into the envisaged volumes two and so on. This makes it all the more valuable, in a sense, and there remains the faint hope that his co-writer will assume the mantle.
In short, I’d like Graeber to be right. It might offer us some routes (roots?) out of the post-Enlightenment “progress”-ratcheting one-way road to Hell we are now quite advanced along. And I think the politics of the time (and Graeber’s untimely death) mean this book will be enormously welcomed, in itself probably a net good, whether his theory is true, half-true, or not at all.
You Are Here ———————————————————————————————–^
I suspect, though, that the established big histories, as popularised by the likes of Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker and of course Yuval Harari, are far from entirely defunct just yet. Furthermore, the undoubted impact of those existing grand narratives gives them a certain momentum which will hardly be slowed by the late intervention of Graeber.
(Full disclosure: I am complicit in such momentum, which I consider to be a positivist intervention/disruption in the current thanatocentric vector of humanity, as I am working with Sapienship, Yuval Harari’s educational vehicle. From what I can discern, the great insight of Homo Sapiens – that humanity’s tendency to collective fictions brought about an explosion of mass collaboration – does not appear to be challenged by Graeber’s work.)
Does Graeber offer us something new? He appears to be offering us a more complex picture, crucially one that suggests a greater sense of choice and agency for humanity writ both small and large. Is this itself a net good? Probably yes, even if his arguments transpire ultimately not to hold much water. We need hope, goddammit. Choice, even the illusion thereof, is a form of hope.
I’ll know more when I read the book, of course, which is all I want for Christmas (apart from world peace, an end to hunger, climate stability and Irish reunification.) Or let me rephrase – I look forward to reading the book and finding therein some antique answers to current questions with the same degree of utopian optimism that I apply to resolving war, climate change and the intractable identity politics of the island of Ireland.
We exist today in coercive macro-societies afflicted by gross inequality and inhuman scale, which limit human potential and freedom. It will come as little surprise to know that, at times past, Graeber was all over that too – see his work on the perniciousness of debt or his theory about “Bullshit” jobs. If our macro-history was a series of choices rather than some kind of inevitability, the Whiggish ratcheting ever forward towards an often illusory or treacherous progress, then perhaps we still have the chance to choose otherwise. That’s why I hope he’s correct.
Big history always brings us, or at least me, back to a futurist perspective of course. What can we learn from the past to arm us in the face of the existentialist threats currently facing humanity? One of the most evident and positive truths in narratives like Harari’s Homo Sapiens is the miraculous similarities we share as a species, being the ingenious survivors of a series of genetic bottlenecks and previous existential crises.
Perhaps in identifying some roads not taken, or insufficiently taken, Graeber’s last sigh may prove to be a singular intervention we can apply to our own approach to the future. Perhaps. I’ll find out at Christmas, if Santa Claus is good to me.
It would of course have been more useful had I told more people about this in advance. Nevertheless, I’m a firm believer in the principle that people who need to know things find their way to that knowledge somehow. So it’s more as a marker of record, a waystone en route to the actual publication of an actual book, that I note the passing of this particular conference and my particular contribution.
So firstly, this was the conference, co-organised by my co-editor (of the forthcoming Religious Futurisms volume) Sumeyra Buran Utku and her colleagues.
I really wish I’d been able to attend more of the conference, not least because Francesca Ferrando is always box office, and I was especially intrigued to see what she had to say about violence and posthumanism, or alternatively posthumanism AS violence. (OK, she was unlikely to take that angle, but I must question her along those lines some day.)
Anyhow, as I said, as mark of record and waystone on the winding path to publication, here’s what I was talking about, nicked wholesale from the book I wrote last year and this on A Clockwork Orange:
So, yes, as you may have gathered, it featured some examination of women as victims (and as subalterns) in ACO, considered the novella as an anti-carceral text in the wake of the BLM calls to end incarceration (spoiler: ultimately it’s not, of course), and explored the extent of Alex’s psychopathic tendencies, and whether they can indeed be rehabilitated, and whether they are indeed rehabilitated in chapter 21 of the published novella (aka Schrodinger’s last chapter, the now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t chapter which materialises and dematerialises depending on which edition of the text you read), in which Alex waves goodbye to his misspent youth and embraces a life of banal domesticity.
I’ve probably said too much. But I will say more in the book. I just need to find the time to edit it first. More, as they say, anon.
Postscript: Apparently it was recorded and the stream is now on YouTube. If I’d known that, I’d have scrubbed up a bit more.
The abstract for his last book starts like this: “A blab droid is a robot with a body shaped like a pizza box, a pair of treads, and a smiley face. Guided by an onboard video camera, it roams hotel lobbies and conference centers, asking questions in the voice of a seven-year-old. “Can you help me?” “What is the worst thing you’ve ever done?” “Who in the world do you love most?” People pour their hearts out in response. This droid prompts the question of what we can hope from social robots. Might they provide humanlike friendship?”
Campbell thinks not. He has a philosophical reason, and it’s very plausible.
Bless me, blab droid, for I have sinned…
But I got stuck at this intro. WHY do people pour their hearts out to the blab droid? Do we, as the Catholic church discerned, have an inate desire to confess? Or are we all such egotists that we can’t help talking about ourselves? And like social media, the blab droid raises an ethical question. What happens to the answers it receives? What happens to the DATA? If you tell the blab droid/confessor your secrets, where do your secrets go? Who gets to access them, and what will they do with them?
Forget the droid, and its fascinating ability to expose the universality of both human egotism and loneliness. Social media is the real blab droid, and it doesn’t even need to ask us questions in little girl voices to make us confess. But the same issues apply. Where does the data go? What happens between me posting this on Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg banking his next billion? Shouldn’t we know?
I asked some students who their favourite literary characters were. Cue a lot of Harry Potter. One asked me in return, first time it’s ever happened, oddly enough. So I said Scátha, as you do, and then had to explain who she was.
Scátha is a wise warrior woman who lives on the Isle of Skye. She trains Cú Chulainn, the hero of the Red Branch cycle of Irish mythology (and fails to stop him shagging and fighting of course.) She is also very weird and magical, and so before she bids him farewell, she foretells his bloody and violent future for him. A typical stubborn Ulsterman, he goes ahead and does it all anyway.
She crops up on the margins of the myths. The stories are about others, not her. But we sense her danger, her aloof isolation and her weary wisdom. In the Bronze Age cockfight that is the Red Branch cycle, she’s the alluring and frightening outsider, adept in all manner of arcane wisdom and power.
We have the poem wherein she tells Cú Chulainn’s fortune, the “Verba Scathaige”, and for decades I’ve meant to write a (very freeform) translation of it, set in Eighties Belfast, which I finally finished tonight and is below. I imagine, in one of Scátha’s timebending feats, reading it in a smoky Eighties Belfast bar, with a crackly PA playing “The Sickbed of Cú Chulainn” by the Pogues throughout.
I am Irish by birth and inclination, British as a result of colonial occupation. But my people were, are and always will be the Ulaid. We need another Scátha now of course, but we’re probably still too boneheaded to listen.
Scátha Foretells Trouble
Well, big lad, even if no one
dares lift their fist to you,
you’ll still face troubles
if they all gang up.
You’ll have to slap a few hard men,
do a few kneecaps down the entry,
shed some blood,
until all, all you can see is blood.
You’re gonna wreck the place, the lot of you,
blowing up buildings,
painting the walls,
the wreckage adorned with flags and emblems,
telling the names of who’s the real hard men around here.
What’ll you gain by it? Scundered when they rob your house
and get away with it?
They’ll come after you for weeks at a time. You’ll lose
everything.
You’re all on your own this time, big man.
They’ll need punishing properly.
A wee slap won’t suffice. It’ll take might,
armalite, a crack in the night.
There’ll be blood.
Your mates are all wasters, son. Just like
yer ma always said.
No less thieves than themmuns, you know.
No point gilding the lily here, mucker.
It’s going to hurt. Hurt and hurt again.
You’ll hurt bad.
Did I say it would hurt?
And they’ll get their own back, tit for tat,
until there’s neither tit nor tat left.
Not a word from you, with your red face
like a slapped arse!
You know you’ll hold your own, smacking one
hallion after another.
You’re the big fish in this wee pond.
You’re built for destruction, but everyone wants to hook the big fish.
It’s alright for you ganshes, but these people just want
I had some travelling to do so I picked up a cheap copy of Martin Amis’s somewhat recent Inside Story. I like Amis, but it’s hard to conceive that he’s now over 70, the aged enfant terrible, the bad boy turned pensioner, the literary equivalent of the long superannuated Johnny Rotten. Or is that too unfair?
In short, it’s a good book, but much too long, and somewhat shapeless. It’s also, despite his repeated protestations (and contra his heavily credentialled track record), NOT A NOVEL. He comes close to conceding this on numerous occasions, only to backtrack at the last minute. It’s life-writing, autofiction, self-faction, call it what you will. It’s one of those careful hybrids – mostly autobiography but with added caution – a fake name here, a relocated event there, lots of invented conversations which may (or may not) fairly capture his interlocuters in those (often long-distant) conversations.
We meet real people, who might be voicing other people’s opinions. We read conversations that are recollections of a flurry of electronic exchanges. This is real life with a cartoon edge, a rotoscoped biography, simultaneously animated by Amis’s drive to – well, what exactly? Confess? – and by the utter dominance of his point of view. Amis becomes the unreliable narrator of his own life herein. This is the postmodernist sequel to the superb Experience, which he wrote, chillingly, over two decades past. As the earlier book primarily dealt with the death of his father Kingsley Amis, the current text is a similar in memoriam for his lesser fathers, Philip Larkin and Saul Bellow, for his soul mate and brother-in-arms Christopher Hitchens, and for a mostly made up crazy ex-girlfriend.
Before I lay the boot in properly, let me pause to enumerate some of the very good things about Inside Story. Firstly, it’s very readable. Amis Jr has long been the consummate Anglophone stylist. That’s his sin and his salvation really. You’ll race through the 500 pages in no time, as I did. Secondly, the title isn’t lying. It really is the inside story, a tale told affectively, interpreted through Amis’s own preconceptions, reinterpretations, and anxieties, which are addendumed by the actual documented facts.
Some of this is familiar turf of course. We have gallopped these pastures before, cantering alongside the magic pixie dream girl antagonist who embodies sexual heat and puritan rejection simultaneously. We have trotted past the name dropping so many times in his non-fiction (and this kind of counts as non-fiction) that after a few pages it no longer rankles or startles, and he at least has the good grace to apologise in advance. Some of these bridle paths are no less enjoyable for being familiar, in fact may even be moreso for avid fans.
(Less appealing than the fact Amis has famous friends is the fact that he has rich ones. This is a highly moneyed memoir, full of jets and soirees and fashionistas, holiday homes in Florida, and impromptu relocations to NYC, or Uruguay. Poverty, or deprivation, don’t live herein. They’re like tramps seen from the window of a passing limo. Amis does point them out, but within a paragraph they’re gone, because they were never really there, in the affluent reality of his later years, if indeed they were ever there at all.)
But all that does bring us to why this is not a novel and why it is not a fully functioning text, whether taken as fiction, autobiography, life writing, or some strange chimaera of all three (strongly laced too with bouts of astute literary criticism, and occasional forays into advice for wannabe writers.) (Amis is the master of measured digression, often in parentheses, and it is infectious, sorry.)
Death stalks the book, a hand perhaps on Amis’s own shoulder as he wrote it. We get ringside seats for the death rattles of Hitchens and Bellow, as well as reportage of the demise of Larkin, and a final, deathbed-like attendance to the aforemention fake ex, who is morbidly (literally and metaphorically, not to mention medically) obese. This is the enfant terrible in old age, ticking off his elders and his peers one by one as they pass, but also feeling it. That’s why it’s not a novel. For all its contrived ambiguity and deliberate fictionalising, this may be his most honest book yet.
This is Amis visiting hospitals, Amis the gentle caregiver, graveside Amis, Amis in his widow’s weeds, Amis in mourning. It’s ultimately life-affirming, especially in its loyal defence of the acerbic and divisive Hitchens. But also, and less predictably, in its curious weaving of fictions and personal preconceptions around Larkin, whose shuffling off this mortal coil is depicted ultimately as a good thing, despite Amis’s somewhat unalloyed affection, due to the fact that Larkin’s life was basically shit from start to finish.
Inside Story won’t win Amis any new readers. He’s not looking for them anyway. He is, one suspects, approaching the kind of tailing off that many writers experience in old age, the kind of thing that made Philip Roth (another of Amis’s pseudodaddies) give up entirely and retire. You need to already know the outside story, you see. You need to know a little of his own works, and those of Bellow and Larkin, and of Hitchens, though he does assist the reader by judiciously quoting from and critiquing all three. Amis was always an excellent reader, and the lit crit component of this book is by far the best of its many ill-fitting alloyed components, if one is able to isolate and enjoy it.
Perhaps more broadly useful however, are the testimonies from within the tabernacle, from where the miracle of fictionalising takes place. Amis in turn describes his own creative method, and its variants over time, and offers multiple entire chapters of advice to aspirants. Much of this is on the level of style, as one might expect from him, and the importance of euphoniousness and elegance in prose. Much of it too is practical. One can only hear of so many successful writers (Kingsley, Bellow, the Hitch, Elizabeth Jane Howard) religiously writing a thousand words daily to become convinced that, pace Martin himself, this is probably the best habit for wannabes to procure.
Certainly, they don’t want to procure the tobacco habits of the protagonists, all of whom smoke prodigiously and many of whom die as a direct result therefrom. Oesophageal cancer makes a number of special guest starring appearances. They probably don’t want to procure the sexual habits either. Here we have a septuagenarian looking back on the roistering and rogering of his carefree youth, which sounds appalling of course, and at times it is, especially since he appears to be making quite a bit of it up (as people do in novels, admittedly). But Amis is too good a writer to offer boastful braggadocio or bedpost notch counts, even though there is no doubt that his conversations with the dying Hitch probably went down that route more than a few times.
(An aside: has anyone ever previously noted the astonishing resemblance that Amis’s second wife, Isobel Fonseca, bears to his stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard? In the portraits of the two herein, only a handful of pages apart, they are of approximately the same age and look almost identical.)
All of Amis’s curious obsessions are here too, of course. He just can’t help returning again and again to the Nazis and the holocaust, despite multiple books already under his belt on this sensitive and well-explored theme. This obviously connects to Amis’s own Judeophilia, which manifests in terms both familiar (his marriage to a Jewish wife; his relationship with Bellow) and not (his love of Israel; his repeated climbing of Masada; his implicit envy at Hitch discovering his own Jewish background.) For Amis, the 20th century novel was primarily the Jewish-American novel. Once this is grasped, his adulation of Bellow comes more sharply into focus, as do aspects of his own work.
But it’s not just the holocaust he remains worrying away at. The sexual revolution and its darker ramifications again loom large here, perhaps as large as in any book of his since The Pregnant Widow. We get, partly mediated by Hitch, the Gulf War and 9/11. And from outside, as if stood alongside the tramps looking in on the soirees, the repartee, the canapes, we get tantalising glimpses of how Amis’s Rat Pack ran in the Seventies and Eighties. Prodigious smoking and drinking and bedhopping, of course. But it’s not far from there to get to Keith Talent or Lionel Asbo, to name his most and least successful fictional protagonists.
So all the familiar elements are there, from both his journalism and his fiction. But the manner of glueing the parts together seems badly awry. Amis relates how he previously tried to write this same book a decade earlier under the title Life: A Novel, but found that it failed. One wonders how much of that book ended up in this one, and whether Amis’s florid bow and stride offstage at this book’s conclusion reflects more of an enforced retirement than a choice to ease back on the throttle.
The last autobio I read was that of Brian Aldiss, who, more honest than most, and also wiser than most, both admitted to having affairs during his marriage and avoided discussing it for more than a paragraph or two out of 500 pages. Is that honest? Not entirely, no. One presumes that some of those affairs actually mattered to him. But writing from the end of his long life and career, Aldiss knew that to dwell on such things is not merely offensive to those who were not jettisoned along the way (Mrs Aldiss for starters), but also a form of self-indulgence akin to masturbation.
There is, in short, a decorum about Aldiss’s memoir that’s missing from Inside Story. Decorum about things like sexual fidelity of course, but also the decorum required of an autobiography structurally. Aldiss begins with his childhood, moves through his wartime experiences into life in Oxford, the first science fiction publications, marriage, divorce, remarriage, children, and eventually we come to the end, which naturally is not quite the real end, since Aldiss was still alive to write the book.
By contrast, Inside Story lacks all such decorum. Amis does skirt over his own first marriage failure, which he wrote about previously elsewhere, but is otherwise indiscreet (and disloyal?) enough to leave readers frowning at the behaviour of Kingsley for hundreds of pages, not to mention including a proper character assassination, a hit job performed on Monica Jones, Philip Larkin’s long-suffering amour. Note, I’m not critiquing this on its content. We expect Martin Amis to be indiscreet, unusually honest, and highly opinionated. I’m criticising the baggy shape of its presentation – the trademark Amis time displacements here failing, despite his careful marshalling of decades-striding metaphors and comparisons, to resonate at all.
Towards the end, after writing highly movingly about Hitch and Bellow, Amis seems spent entirely. He throws his hands up in the air, abandons all pretext that he’s writing a novel, and begins inserting entire how-to-write sections, as if to offer some tangible useful didactics to make up for the failure to generate a coherent plot out of his life. Perhaps he saw this coming, or perhaps he edited afterwards. But this is where and how the book opens, with Amis saying that “life is dead”, meaning that its shape is not conducive to arresting fiction.
If this really is it, if he fully intends to follow his Jewish-American pseudodaddies into retirement, then it’s a somewhat a missed target. Amis has been remiss. Amis has produced a bit of a mess, in fact, stylistically and structurally (though probably not personally, despite the outrage of Antonella Gambotto-Burke.) But even at his weakest (and there are parts herein which are among his best prose yet) he’s still one of England’s most compelling writers. And of course, we will always have Money and Success. Whereas Amis himself has money and success (see here, look through the window, fellow hobo, at his townhouses, his transatlantic shuttling, his fabulous friends…)
He is stone cold correct about one thing, though. Younger people often consider that having children is a trap, he tells us by way of telling Hitch. (Or perhaps the other way around; Amis often struggles in dialogue herein to distinguish his own voice from Hitchens’, tellingly.) But in fact, as he or Hitch or Amis-Hitch confirms, not having children is the trap. The trap poor miserable Larkin fell into, but not Hitchens (three kids) or Bellow (four kids) and certainly not Amis himself (five kids, two grandkids). Inside Story comes to read like a counterblast to Larkin’s (in)famous poem “This be the Verse”, in which the old curmudgeon concluded:
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
Amis’s inside story seems to be: we are all going to die, and before we die we will mourn for others and grieve, and these things are all best done – the grieving, the mourning but especially the dying – with family close by. It mightn’t be the end note one expected from the author of The Rachel Papers, but it’s reasonable.
I still have no idea why he invented the crazy ex-gf plot, though.
Even the strange and murky currency of academic citation throws up pleasant surprises sometimes.
Academics are in some ways regulated by their accumulation of this fiat currency, the citation mill, which requires them to write for the best (ie allegedly most influential) journals, and then subsequently incite references to their work in similarly published articles by others.
There are even aggregators now, from Google Scholar to Scopus or Orcid, which exist to compile the magical measurable impacts which academic administrators and hiring committees so adore.
But citation need not be reduced to this quantitative measuring tool. It was created and intended as a mode of acknowledging the influence of ideas, attributing merit to the previous work of other scholars on whose shoulders, as Newton said, we stand.
It’s of course true that the citation mill is now regularly hacked and gamed by the more cynical academics, in ways ranging from the utterly immoral (like the citation rings discovered in some journals in recent years) to the merely dubious (such as scholars writing deliberately provocatively.) But like many things, just because the system is abused and mispurposed does not entirely eradicate its importance or validity.
No, knowledge is not (or should not be) a popularity contest. But democracy has shown us the weird benefits of being governed by the wisdom of crowds. And similarly, a lot of well-cited papers are well-cited because many people legitimately are influenced by their ideas.
But not all citation need be reduced to this number-crunching game. And for me as a kind of purist, the best form of citation is an acknowledgement or engagement with something I’ve said or written.
I was therefore very moved to read Dennis Wise’s excellent new article on the alliterative turn in 20th century American genre poetry. I should note that I am not an expert on either alliterative poetry or American genre poetry. But I HAVE read a lot of James Blish, and I was able to have a great discussion with Dennis about a James Blish poem he was looking at.
It’s the sort of thing academia ought to be about, and increasingly isn’t. Chatting to another scholar, trying ideas and theories out on one another in realtime, and eventually happening across an interpretation that seemed to account for both my knowledge and Dennis’s.
I didn’t expect to be thanked for it, so I value Dennis’s citation more than any other my work has received, precisely because it was a purist kind of citation. It won’t boost my Google Scholar rating in the eyes of the number crunchers. It won’t impress those who seek to measure knowledge quantitatively. But for me it is a succinct and generous example of what citation was meant to do.
Dennis has astutely identified something in US genre poetry that no one has really discussed before. His ideas are excellent and should change how we understand the history of alliterative poetry and its intersection with modernism, science fiction and 20th century American letters. It’s a genuinely great paper. I’m flattered to be associated with it in any way. I really enjoyed talking with Dennis about his ideas, and I’m glad he valued my thoughts.
If only more encounters in academia took the form of chatting with people like Dennis about their ideas, rather than answering to bean counters about dubious metrics, I’d be a happier academic. I’m going to go and thank more people in the credits of my next book now.
This is, I suppose, the first evidence of the work on Buddhist Futurisms that I’ve been doing for the past half decade or so. It had an eventful pre-publication history, actually. At one point, it was destined for a book, but that failed to transpire. On another occasion, it was repeatedly sent back for corrections by Reviewer Number Two (accursed be thy name!) for failing to cite his (it was a he) own research. Which wasn’t remotely relevant.
Anyhow, this is the overly-detailed explanation for why this is only appearing something like four years after being written. I’ve not been lazy. There is much more to this project, including multiple other publications already scheduled.
But it is gratifying to see the first bit in print. Last year I missed out on a big scholarship, primarily because there was no evidence I knew anything about Buddhism or had ever researched it. So at least now that evidence exists, albeit a little later than useful, to me anyhow, but hopefully not for others.
It actually tells an interesting story, which is not something one expects of academic writing generally. It’s a positive story too, of negative stereotypical preconceptions being overturned by a cultural encounter which shapeshifted into an ongoing interaction of mutual benefit between Buddhism and the West, and America in particular.
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest,” said Benjamin Franklin, who ought to have known as a highly successful businessman and politician. But the world no longer rewards us directly for our knowledge and intellect, or to put it another way, merit is no longer the metric, or even among the metrics now valued.
The academic system, which rightly in the past faced accusations of being a redoubt of privilege for certain demographics, is broken and all the attempts to fix it appear only to be breaking it further in some regards. The marketisation of higher education in places like Britain and America has led to reliance on precarious underpaid staff, the primacy of student as customer or client, and the incessant rise of a class of highly remunerated apparatchiks who dictate market values to academia.
Today I saw yet another inspiring and astonishing colleague out of work. Someone with multiple well-regarded books to their name, the recipient of international scholarships, with experience teaching in multiple countries. There’s no merit in this. If people like that are dispensable, one becomes baffled to see those who remain in position, despite losing fortunes in speculative ventures like foreign campuses, rash restructuring of institutions, and declining standards and institutional reputations.
Academia has really sickened me in the past few years. I’ve seen some truly horrendous things. Professors without doctoral theses. People who have literally never published a paper criticising the work of colleagues with multiple monographs. Demands that extend into the weekend, the evening, days off and even when staff are literally hospitalised from overwork.
I’ve seen some astonishing people laid off and let go from academic posts. Truly inspiring teachers, highly qualified, whose research is globally renowned. I’ve also seen cabals of admins backslap each other with ridiculous pay increases for shuffling reports back and forth at each other.
I don’t know how it can be fixed, or if it can, and I don’t know if everywhere is as bad as things appear to be in Britain. Maybe they’re actually worse elsewhere. The system is broken though, and if we don’t fix it we will literally enter a dark age – a time of ignoring experts, not checking facts, considering preening on social media to be preferable to learning about the world. At times I feel we are already deep into that process.
Today, I offer solidarity to my many colleagues worldwide, the ones who got hounded out, the ones who wouldn’t put up with it anymore, the ones who are still being ground down and bullied by the apparatchiks, the ones who literally died too young as a result of overwork. It’s all I have to offer, alas. But I can’t change the system. Only all of us can.
SF often envisages a post-religious future. In other words, it often fails to foresee a role for religion in the futures it imagines. Far from always, which is what you might think from most SF criticism, but certainly a lot of the time.
Usually, this is just by simple omission. There is a kind of unexplored assumption of societal evolution that runs from multi-religious (including non-religious as a range of strands among the range of religious strands) present to monothematic post-religious future (often fully automated luxury communism enabled by post-scarcity) without ever explaining the intervening steps.
I wondered if it helps to understand how a post-religious future might come about by considering how a religious past came about out of a pre-religious past. In other words, was there a time before religion, and how was it?
This question arose in my mind when I was reading about Çatalhöyük, widely considered to be possibly the world’s oldest town.
The site in rural Turkey at its peak during the Neolithic era contained a population in the thousands, and there is clear evidence that even at that early moment in human civilisation, ritualistic behaviour was a significant part of people’s lives.
Exactly what that was, is hard to tell. Some people think the town’s residents were goddess worshippers, others feel it was a cult of masculinity, focused on fighting bulls and bears. Mostly, the evidence is open to wide interpretation, but the nature of burials, the room adornments, the special ‘history houses’ and especially the wall art all seem to suggest ritualistic practices, if not actually spiritual ones.
But at what point does ritual activity become religious devotion? There are various schools of thought on that, which I won’t delve into here, but one rule of thumb is the development of dogma and doctrine, ie precepts which are passed down from generation to generation in terms of behavioural proscription, narratives, or a cosmological understanding.
In Çatalhöyük, this may have occurred about half way through the site’s settlement, at around 6500BC, when building use changed, modes of burial and adornment changed, and the site slowly began to depopulate.
Debate has gone back and forth as to what the cosmology or beliefs of the people of Çatalhöyük might have been. Were they goddess worshippers as James Mellaart and Maria Gimbutas believed? Animists? Ancestor worshippers? Shamanistic? A cult of masculine leopard, bear and bull fetishists? One particular opinion stood out to me. M. Bloch wrote a book chapter entitled “Is there religion at Catalhoyuk . . .or are there just houses?” Intriguingly, he concludes there were just houses.
So can we speak of human civilisation BEFORE religion? If so, what do we mean by that? And if we can speak of human civilisation before religion, does that give us any clues, however dim and distant the archeology may be, as to what civilisation AFTER religion might look like?
Furthermore, Bloch’s position is heavily contested, and many scholars insist in various ways, basing their arguments on evidence such as the burial practices, figurines, wall paintings and animal skulls, that religious practice WAS central to the residents of Çatalhöyük some 8,000 years ago.
Fundamentally, in terms of religious futurism, the question I’m asking is whether religious faith is somehow inherent to the human psyche, or at least to sufficient human psyches in any particular polity to make it a significant presence?
We can see from the histories of the great atheistic communist regimes of the twentieth century, all of which sought to suppress religion and clergy of various ilks, that religion in recent times has proved strangely resilient under state disapproval, despite Weber’s disenchantment of society and the slow ebbing away of faith practitioners in Western countries with freedom of worship.
Most SF, as I noted above, tends to envisage a future without room for faith, often predicated on the Enlightenment idea that eventually science will provide answers to our deepest questions. These ubiquitous attempts to depict a future without religion in some senses may well be the most speculative and imaginative SF concepts of all.
More intriguing to me are the narratives in which SF alterities, whether artificial life or alien, emerge with either an attachment to terrestrial religion or else a faith format of their own. These seem to me to be more plausible than the idea that society will at some point casually jettison as retrograde the accumulated cultural capital and transcendence attached to the faith experience.
They are also more plausible than Bloch’s suggestion that houses which contained the bodies of ancestors, imagistic figurines, animal heads and other non-practical items were as he says “just houses”.
Maybe human civilisation and the religious impetus (setting aside its truth content as being a matter for the individual to invest in or not, as the case may be) are intrinsically entwined. We can presume that religiosity predated Çatalhöyük.
Even if we accept that Çatalhöyük was, as Bloch argues, “just houses”, it eventually fell into disuse as a residential site and that region of Turkey is today rather devoutly Islamic (having experienced no doubt many differing religious beliefs in the interim). Let’s agree with him and accept that they were, as far as we can tell, non-religious. Who knows what faiths or beliefs lurked in the hearts of those who, like devout Orthodoxy during the Soviet era, kept their dangerous thoughts to themselves?
If religion is somehow inherently human, would becoming truly post-religious require us as a species to become truly posthuman? Could we, in fact, define posthumanism in terms of non-religiosity? Must we become posthuman in order to become post-religious? And how might we do that?
