Month: December 2020

The premise of Earth 2100, a 2009 made-for-TV movie that I’ve read about on wikipedia but never actually seen, is basically that climate change will end up destroying the world in a more low-budget way that it does in The Day After Tomorrow: flooding, drought, migration, etc. are just too much for civilization at the national level to deal with, so eventually it collapses. What gives the US government that final, toppling push – or what reveals that it has already for some time been defunct – is a pandemic.* When a disease she had earlier helped the CDC to contain starts ravaging the US without any federal agency doing anything at all to slow its spread or mitigate the social chaos that results, the film’s narrator, Lucy, concludes that this must be because there just are no federal agencies anymore.

Well, now it’s happened – many years ahead of schedule – and some people are drawing conclusions in much the same vein that Lucy did. Outside observers call the US a failed state, while internal critics point to this as the moment when our national institutions, weakened by years of Republican underfunding and obstructionism, finally cracked.

Yet one would hesitate to say that the federal government has “disappeared,” even if it’s given up on the task of keeping governed populations alive – the defining feature of modern governments being, as Foucault and others have claimed, to make those population numbers go up or at least keep them from going down. The administrative aspects of government – taxation, elections, and most grotesquely of all law enforcement – have continued to operate without interruption since the beginning of the pandemic. So we still experience government as government in the direct, unmediated ways that we have all our lives. But the flipside of these, the mediated experience of being cared-for and protected by a nearly omnipotent nation state, seems to have gone by the wayside.

What is this new form of government? Something closer to feudalism in its ethic, an apparatus of exploitation that regards its victims as deserving of their fates? Yes, but also something that’s always been latent in American democracy for most Americans. The ones to whom it was patent, ethnic minorities and especially blacks, have long been used to getting nothing back in exchange for the gold, votes and black lives that the government demands of them. So we could call what we’re all now experiencing “universal racism” or, to be more historically specific, “the lived black experience.” Something which, because it has heretofore only afflicted minorities, doesn’t yet have the dignity of a classical-sounding name.

In La France peripherique, Cristophe Goguey claims that the key to understanding 21st-century politics is the psychologizing maxim that “no one wants to become a minority.” Well, that’s probably true, but it hides this other, less well-grounded claim: that to make someone else a minority means to be a majority yourself. Because what people really want is to enjoy the privileges and rents that come with being part of a majority. That’s what Trump or Le Pen voters are afraid to lose, and according to a zero-sum understanding of the terms that probably derives from electoral politics, they think the sufficient move to protect their majoritarian status is just to force everyone else into minority. It never really occurs to these people – or, to be fair, their liberal-democratic opponents – that we could all become minorities.

Let’s call it Governmint, the light, refreshing substitute for governance. We’ll see if it’s only an artifact of this passing (knock on wood) crisis, but I doubt it.

* of something called “Caspian Fever.” The names of diseases are always catchier in fiction; in real life, we’re trapped between a bureaucracy that wants to incorporate by naming (COVID-19 vel sim) and dumb assholes who use names to trivialize or distance a disease they wish would go away (‘Rona, The China Virus, etc.)

I’ve been working with some other people in an astrobiology initiative on problems related to the ethics of space exploration. That made me think about the word “exploration” itself (dissociating during zoom meeting, searching out the nearest handhold to avoid ego death, etc.) Soon the word started to look strange. I could figure out its etymology easily enough – ex+plorare, “cry out” – but then I couldn’t for the life of me understand how you got from the etymological meaning to the one it has now (and, actually, had in classical Latin too.) Luckily, Festus’ 2nd c etymological dictionary has an entry for it:

“antiquos pro exclamare usos, sed postea prospicere et certum cognoscere coepit significare. itaque speculator ab exploratore hoc distat, quod speculator hostilia silentio perspicit, explorator pacata clamore cognoscit.”

(The ancients used it as a synonym for “shout,” but later it started to mean “look into” and “get to know for sure.” So a speculator is different than an explorer in this way, that a speculator looks into the enemy’s business in silence, an explorer comes to know pacified things while making noise.)

So the notional connection between “crying out” and the modern sense of the word “explore” is that one investigates pacified affairs by shouting out. Or one shows that one comes in peace by shouting. Or one shows one has pacified (i.e. conquered) something by investigating it noisily. Festus’ dictionary survives only in epitomized form, so we’re missing some important diacritics between these alternatives. It also bears mentioning that the distinction to which Festus points here seems to have been ignored by most Latin writers. It’s good to think with nonetheless, especially because English usage does respect something like Festus’ distinction between the words “explore” and “scout.”

In English, like in Latin, exploration is a cognitive procedure for getting new knowledge. What distinguishes it from scouting is that, notionally at least, one goes about it openly and in the service of universal knowing – though any reader of Burton or Thesiger will know how much duplicity and stealth went into the exploration of Africa and the Near East. Another way of putting it is that one scouts in fear over territories where enemies have the power to stop you, while one explores in confidence where the land is pacata – whether that means peaceful or pacified. Scouting and exploration are spatial concepts that apply to territories, and one could draw a map that divided the world up between them. Scouting would correspond to “Europe” – with due allowance being made for the admission of North America at one end and the removal of the Ottoman domains at the other – while exploration would characterize everywhere else, that is to say the nations and peoples seen from an anglophone perspective as ripe for colonization.

It matters what we plan to do in space. Are we quietly scouting a territory we suspect is hostile? Are we noisily exploring something that we regard as already ours? I ask these questions knowing that most of us (especially the people that matter) have already settled on the second alternative, but hoping that the lag between our futurism and its realization may make room for meaningful reflection. The problem is, after all, not just ethical but acutely pragmatic. Exploration expresses a confidence in our knowledge, our abilities – our power, in short – that may be not at all justified. The nascent field of astrobiology might be able to help us resolve those pragmatic uncertainties, given time. One more reason not to rush to the stars.