Choking — Beyond Exceptionalism

On modernism, transportation and the end of civilisations

In September 2018, I was wandering in downtown Stockholm and I could not believe my eyes. Just five years ago it was almost impossible to imagine that the means of transportation in cities could change. But here I was, looking at it happening: a change of habits in last mile transportation and short trips. Previously, we took a cab, walked, bicycled or used public transportation: subway, bus, tram. These solutions vary in different areas. Nevertheless, while there is variance, the aforementioned list of means of transportation is almost always the same. For decades, there was practically no innovations in this space. Bicycle looks exactly like the “safety bicycle” of the 1920s. Main innovations in cars were made before 1950s. And not including cabs and public transportation, all the forms of transportation are owned by the traveller. All this smells like the 1960s: it’s the legacy of modernism.

But now I look at a street corner in Stockholm and see: City bikes. Chinese dockless bikes. Electronic shared scooters. A gyroscopic monowheel drives by, followed by an electric skateboard. A Tesla is parked on the street next to me. There’s an electric bike advertisement in the subway. And of course, all the previously used means of transportation are still available.

Transportation in cities is changing. This is significant: changes in transportation convert e.g. how different areas in cities are valued. This directly alters the price of apartments, which is the most important source of wealth for many. However, these changes are local.

Imagine a similar development in global transportation. Nowadays global transportation is relatively slow. A flight from Helsinki to San Francisco takes 11 hours and from Helsinki to Shanghai 9 hours.

But what if we could create a new technology that could send hundreds of people across the oceans with the multiple times the speed of sound? You can leave from London at 10AM and arrive to New York at 7AM for your morning meeting because of the six-hour time difference. The trip from Helsinki to Shanghai only takes 3,5 hours.

A global fast transportation system would shrink the planet, enhance globalisation and communication between countries and improve trade. It would connect the world’s most important cities with the travelling time that is typically shorter than the trip between the two most important cities within countries with traditional means of transportation.

We can imagine such a powerful transportation system with, say, a maximum speed of 2400km/h and passenger capacity of more than 100 people.

This kind of dream transportation system is not science fiction.

Actually…

… this technology already exists, and

…there’s one word to describe it.

Concorde.

BAC-Aerospatiale Concorde was an airplane that flew between the years 1969 and 2003. Their operation ended after a fatal crash in Paris suburbs 15 years ago. For some reason, it’s always emphasised that the Concorde crash happened in Paris suburbs, not in Paris. It has a dubious tone, hinting that “no one important died on the ground”.

The Concorde was one of the last remnants of the modernisation. Modernisation is the process where, globally, future became the focus of political action, thus ending the lifestyles of traditional societies and creating optimist societies, where the surplus resources where invested in progress and production.

The societies are no longer built for the future. The fact that Concorde was not only discontinued but would also be politically and ecologically impossible today reveals that the goal of the societies is something else entirely. The aim is not to be faster, more efficient and reach new heights. Another case in point: there are only four people alive who have been on the moon. They are Buzz Aldrin (age 88), David Scott (86), Charles Duke (83) and Harrison Schmitt (83); the last person to visit the moon will soon die.

Did we really have such an airplane? Did we really go to the moon?

All the wonders of the modern era are all soon nothing but old stories, their purpose forgotten and truthfulness dubious. Did we really have such an airplane? Did we really go to the moon?

What happened? Modernism was replaced by postmodernism.

Unfortunately, unlike their modern counterparts, postmodern devices don’t work. According to a conversation with a friend, as pointed out by Anton Monti (who I unfortunately don’t know but who just published an interesting book), modern fighter planes, such as the Hornets used by Finnish Air Force, were fast and effective.

On the contrary, the postmodern fighter planes, such as stealth fighters, are too expensive for combat action and they break down constantly, requiring over 50 hours of maintenance per each hour flown. They are also detached from nature: a simple light rain removes their stealth capabilities. They are too complicated, too much in their own world, too impossible.

Postmodern devices don’t work. The same can be said about postmodern institutions. A modern institution such as the modern corporation is effective and fast. Postmodern institution such as EU parliament is expensive and unrepresentative. It’s detached from the life of average citizen, complicated, impossible. Still these machines and institutions don’t collapse. They work and they don’t work.

There are efforts to redefine progress for the postmodern era in a nice way. These efforts are useless, because all that progress can be in the postmodern era is postponing the unintended consequences of modernism. The postmodern era is a contradiction, an oxymoron. Modern had a direction: forward. Postmodern has no direction.

Thus, the future ended around the year 1968. We didn’t notice it at first because it’s reflections were still all around us. And they still are.

Reflections of Modernism or: The Choke

There’s a bad air problem in schools that are built in the 1960s and 1970s. According to extensive research, bad air quality makes children perform worse in schools. A generally accepted current upper limit for classrooms is 1000ppm CO2. This CO2 level already reduces cognitive capabilities and makes it more difficult for children to focus to the topic at hand.

An unintended outcome of modernism: a lot of modern schools were built in areas where poor and lower middle class people live. As these schools have bad air problems, they in fact might increase inequalities. It’s impossible to estimate how many great minds would have emerged if this effect wouldn’t have reduced the impact of these schools.

Alright, how about this one:

During the next 80 years, CO2 levels in atmosphere are estimated to increase to similar levels to the 60s schools with bad air quality.

Another unintended outcome of modernism: When the air quality due to climate change is worsened, the human cognitive abilities everywhere in the planet decline.

To those of us who think that climate change can be solved later, please understand: our ability to solve, to think clearly, deteriorates every year. We are choking.

Degeneration theory: Universe is full of life

Science fiction author Stanislav Lem speculated in his spectacular nonfiction book Summa Technologiae (1964) reasons why have haven’t located any alien civilisations. Delving into the Fermi paradox, he concludes that there indeed should be life all around the universe. Everything that we know about the development of life on earth would point out to the fact that given the right conditions, life is created naturally and easily. Further, while intelligent life can take longer time to develop, obviously it also has a nonzero change at developing. On earth, intelligent life took a while to spun out, but even if we assume that it took significantly shorter time on earth than on average, the time is clearly long enough in the planetary scale to estimate that the universe is full of life. So, Lem asks in desperation, why can’t we see any miracles?

What he means is that we don’t see any star or planet formations that look, in lack of a better word, man-made. Any sufficiently advanced alien civilisation should be able to shape their own solar system, building extra suns, death stars or Dyson spheres, but there is no signs of such miracles.

Obviously for an author writing his book in 1964, such miracles would be a natural outcome of any modern society.

Lem also adds that the self-destruction theory, which became popular during the cold war, doesn’t feel right. This theory predicts that all civilisations come up with a technology so powerful that they cannot contain it and thus they self-destruct. Lem emphasises that while it’s quite possible that mankind can self-destruct, it would be quite narrow to think that every extra-terrestrial civilisation follows the same technology route and ends up making the same self-destructing mistake: while there should be intelligent life, it is very unlikely that this intelligence thinks alike.

Instead of self-destruction theory, Lem proposes a “degeneration theory”. He estimates that every intelligent civilisation comes up with goals that match their abilities. When their abilities don’t match the increasing complexities of their surroundings, they start to degenerate. An intelligent civilisation first looks outwards. A degenerated civilisation which has exhausted their natural resources and abilities to develop better energy sources starts to look inwards: the outcome is a search for inner peace via meditation or immediate happiness through substance-abuse. Such a civilisation won’t self-destruct. They would just slowly degenerate back to unintelligent, happy animals.

The universe is not empty. Rather, it’s likely that the universe is full of retarded life.

This is also the faith of the intelligent life on Earth.

Indeed, we cannot escape the Earth gravity well, because we are not going to feel like the effort is worth trying. This effect is likely to be enhanced by the discovery of life outside earth, if we are to reach that level of development. The previous modern project to reach for the stars was a project of human exceptionalism: if we are in this universe alone, there is a moral case to preserve life. The realisation that we are not in the universe alone, coupled with the degeneration through the lack of oxygen rich air, leads to the end of the exceptionalism.

Exceptionalism was the core human ideology. Exceptionalism was the base that enabled religions, enlightenment and humanism. It’s what Fukuyama has called megalothymia.

Postmodernism is an exceptionalist project, but it simultaneously acknowledges the impossibility of uniqueness and exceptionalism. This is the true contradiction within postmodernism. The contradiction needs to be solved with a new project that is the polar opposite of postmodern.

Nonpostmodernism and the cow ban

Although postmodernism was thought to be a counter-reaction to modernism, it was in fact a continuation of the modern project. Modernism was fun, postmodern is macabre. The next phase needs to oppose exceptionalism. Thus, it should be serious.

A serious age would not be a nice time to be alive. The nonpostmodernism leads to radical conservative projects to preserve the cognitive capabilities and material abilities of humankind to continue it’s expansion in physical, intellectual and artistic universes.

When we leave behind the paralysis of the postmodern and become contempt with the idea of seriousness, new opportunities to save human expansionist intelligence arise.

For example, we can imagine fundamentalist “species anticonservation activism”: to fix the climate change, they would aim to make cow abortion mandatory. Cows emit 3rd most greenhouse gasses after USA and China. There are 1.5 billion cows in the world. Their lifetime is 5 to 6 years for dairy and 10 years for meat. This could provide a transition period for their owners.

A global cow ban would not only reduce methane and CO2 emissions significantly, but it also would reduce animal suffering, increase food safety (600 million people get sick from animal based food yearly), and help to fight antibiotic resistance especially in the US. Furthermore, the cow ban would significantly increase investments in biotechnology to create in vitro meat and other clean protein, new vegetable-based proteins and insects-based food. Eventually, these are all more efficient ways for providing protein.

There indeed is a need for such a “species anticonservation activism”, although no current political party or activist group can fully support its agenda. Such activism illustrates the point of nonpostmodern radical conservatism: by not conserving the structures of the modern era it allows us to conserve the goals of that era.

The world is in flux. There is a vast number of new innovations and ideas in broad range of industries such as transportation and health. But all of these innovations aim to do nothing but postpone some of the unintended outcomes of modernisation. They are progress in the same way that moving a mosquito from inside the house to outside is curing malaria. Instead of challenging the goals of modernism and trying to patch and fix its institutions, there is a need to maintain the goal of modernism by completely metamorphosing its institutions to something unseen today.

This means radical actions that are not fun, or nothing to laugh at, to create miracles.

The alternative is happy degeneration.

You choose, also if you choose not to help to annihilate cows.