Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
These days I hear a lot of people talking about whether it’s possible to change the world, and if so, how to go about it. It’s understandable that this should be so, since the world around us is such a steaming mess. Nor, despite the bleatings of true believers in progress, is it getting better. Quite the contrary, for most people in the modern industrial world—and especially here in the United States—conditions have been getting worse for decades.
Yes, I know this is a controversial thing to say just now, at least in some circles. It’s not just that the Biden administration has been shouting at the top of its collective lungs that the economy is doing just fine—Biden’s rich friends are raking in big bucks, after all, so what’s your problem?—and brandishing carefully massaged statistics to suit. It’s not even that corporate media flacks are mindlessly mouthing these same soundbites in a desperate attempt to get anyone to believe what their masters want the rest of us to believe. The reality of our accelerating decline flies in the face of some of the most deeply rooted habits of American thought. Thus the worse it gets, the more frantically denial and handwaving become the order of the day.
The fact remains that there was a time not so long ago when most Americans, irrespective of sex, race, and the rest of the current round of hot-button categories, could readily find jobs that paid enough to cover the costs of food, clothing, shelter, and the other core necessities of life. It was a time when inept medical care hadn’t become the third leading cause of death in the United States, and its wildly overinflated costs hadn’t become the single most common cause of bankruptcy; when starting a small business hadn’t yet turned into a labyrinthine nightmare of endless bureaucratic barriers meant to keep big corporations from facing competition; and when young people with good grades could go to college without mortgaging their entire future by way of predatory loans, and come out with a genuine education at the end of it.
We don’t even have to get into the crumbling Dickensian hellscapes of modern American cities, where the budgets for necessary maintenance long ago got diverted into the pockets of the well-connected rich, rents have been artificially propped up to the point that buildings stand empty while the poor huddle in ragged tents at their feet, and the police are too busy arresting people for “hate speech,” whatever that remarkably flexible label means in any given week, to spare the time to keep the streets safe. Take a good look anywhere outside the well-guarded bubbles in which the well-to-do live, and you’ll see ample signs of precipitous decline.
The question that remains is what to do about it all. The politicians all have their canned answer—“vote for me!”—but after this many abject failures to follow through on the implied promise, I trust none of my readers are so naïve as to fall for it. Plenty of political groups have an equally facile answer—“donate to me!”—but here again, we’ve all seen just how little that accomplishes in practice. Off in various corners of the internet you can find people who insist that armed revolution is the only answer; how many of them are agents provocateurs paid by the FBI to entrap the clueless is an interesting question, but the number is unlikely to be small. It’s not surprising, all things considered, that so many people cope by filling their minds with daydreams about vast catastrophes that will flatten the current system and most of its inhabitants, or that so many others hunker down and try to ignore the world around them, with or without the assistance of drugs, alcohol, or a bullet to the brain.
I don’t claim to have the one true answer. As a longtime student of the history of ideas—that’s what my degree is in, for whatever that may be worth—I do have something to suggest, however. Look at the way social changes have unfolded, whether in our time or further back in history, and an interesting set of patterns emerge. Those patterns can be summed up very simply. It’s been pointed out, and quite correctly, that politics is downstream from culture—but culture, in turn, is downstream from imagination.
Thus the changes that matter, the deep changes that mark turning points in the life of a civilization, don’t begin in the realms of practical affairs, the worlds of politics, economics, and war. They begin, rather, with changes in the far more tenuous realms of ideas and attitudes. Nor do these changes follow the dictates of the rich and powerful. Quite the contrary, they begin on the fringes of society and work their way inward, and the rich and powerful tend to be the last ones to notice the forces that are shaping their future.
Examples? Consider the dawn of the Space Age. That didn’t happen because some faction of wealthy and influential people decided to make it happen. It happened because of a genre of pulp literature mostly read, back in the day, by teenage boys who belonged to a disreputable fringe subculture. These days, science fiction is respectable stuff, which is a large part of why it’s gotten so boring, but the Golden Age of science fiction took place in an era when the notion of space travel was dismissed by authoritative voices as something close to crackpot pseudoscience.
Quite a few of the teenage boys who drooled over scantily clad cuties on the covers of Amazing Stories, though, grew up to be scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, politicians. The dream of space travel retained its hold on enough of them that when they came into power after the Second World War, satellites and space capsules followed promptly. By 1969 fully 15% of the US federal budget was devoted to space technology. That’s the power that a dream can wield.
As it turned out, humanity’s future in space turned out to be a pipe dream. Outside our planet’s protective magnetosphere, deep space is drenched with hard radiation from the Sun, and the other planets in our solar system are far more inhospitable to human life than the most lethal environments on Earth’s surface—it’s vastly more feasible to settle central Antarctica or build a city in the Marianas Trench than it is to colonize Mars, and all the other planets and moons are even worse. That’s why the US and the Soviet Union both gave up their manned interplanetary space projects after space probes in the 1970s brought back the bad news. Yes, I know plenty of people haven’t gotten the memo yet; that, too, shows the power that a dream can wield.
Another example? Consider a flurry of equally cheap publications that saw print three hundred years earlier. The place was England right after the English Civil War; the disreputable fringe subculture was a gaggle of radical religious groups—Diggers, Levellers, Fifth Monarchy Men, Muggletonians, and more—who went zooming off past the conventional debate between Puritans and Royalists to embrace giddy visions of the complete transformation of society.
In any practical sense these groups accomplished little. In a deeper sense, they had immense impact. Their cheaply printed pamphlets and broadsheets introduced a set of ideas most people at the time considered hopelessly impractical: freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, equality under the law, the separation of church and state, and more. A hundred years after their time, those ideas had percolated all through Western societies and found an audience among earnest practical thinkers. In 1776 and 1789 they shook the world.
I was thinking of all this the other day when, like the seed crystal dropped into a saturated solution, the idea I needed found its way into my brain. The person who put it there was the highly respected occult historian Christopher McIntosh; I was in the middle of a podcast with him and another very capable scholar of occultism, Arthur Versluis, when McIntosh brought up a story by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. The story’s name is “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” If you know Borges’s writing at all, you already know that the story is subtle, wry, historically and philosophically literate, and self-referential. It’s also, in its own sidelong way, profoundly relevant to the deepening crisis of the modern Western world.
Without giving too many spoilers, the story refers to the weird emergence of another world in the midst of ours. First, hints about a mysterious country called Uqbar start appearing. An article here, a reference there, and then a volume of an Uqbarian encyclopedia turn up. The world in which Uqbar is set, Tlön, catches the attention of scholars on the fringe, then of the general public. Then physical objects of Tlönese manufacture start to appear. People begin to treat the history and philosophy of Tlön as more real than the equivalents in our world. None of this is accidental; a secret society, laboring since the 17th century, has constructed a vision of another world so enticing and perplexing that it draws our world slowly but surely into its pattern.
It’s a fine story in its own subtle way, and it’s also a useful meditation on the way that cultural forces shape the collective perception of reality. There was, for example, a movement (though not quite a secret society) in seventeenth century Europe that changed the world in very much the way Borges sketched out. The founders of the scientific revolution cobbled together an imaginary Tomorrowland in vivid detail, and most of the Western world got caught up in the dream and did its level best for more than three centuries to make that dream a waking reality: yet again, that shows the power that a dream can wield. That it never quite managed to live up to its promise—well, the same thing happened with space travel or the democratic institutions envisioned by the Diggers and Levellers, of course.
Among the most intriguing features of the story is its date. It first saw print in 1940. In that year an eccentric Oxford don named J.R.R. Tolkien was busy writing a gargantuan adult fairy tale that did very nearly the same thing as the work of Borges’s secret society, but much more quickly. Middle-earth, Tolkien’s manufactured world, became so overwhelming a presence in the Western world in the second half of the twentieth century that it’s quite literally true that you can’t understand modern Western history if you ignore its influence. It’s not just that most of our countercultures of Left and Right alike are as full of the traces of Middle-earth as the world in Borges’s story was with those of Tlön; it’s also that the strident moral dualism that is the worst flaw of Tolkien’s work—as I noted in an earlier post, it’s a fine bit of Jungian synchronicity that the adversary in the story is called the Shadow—pervades our political and cultural discourse these days to an embarrassing extent.
In that same year, another writer was hard at work on an equally imaginary and far more subtle creation of the same kind. I’ve written in these essays about Hermann Hesse and his last and greatest novel, The Glass Bead Game, but that book is just as relevant here. Hesse was just as popular as Tolkien in the late Sixties counterculture—you saw paperback copies of Hesse novels about as often as you saw the weird Barbara Remington covers of Tolkien’s trilogy—but his work dropped out of fashion along with long hair and love beads, though he retains a quiet but passionate following. The Glass Bead Game’s vision of cloistered scholars pursuing a synthesis of all human culture in the form of an elaborate game hasn’t yet leaked far into our world, but then Hesse set his story in the twenty-fifth century, long after the era of convulsive wars and corruption of intellectual culture Hesse saw emerging in his own time. It may just be that Hesse played a long game and the time of his vision hasn’t yet arrived.
What all this suggests, of course, is the same point I brought up earlier in this essay: the world of practical affairs can be shaped, through the intermediary of cultural patterns, by vivid creations of the imagination that seize the attention of the fringes and work their way in from there. That offers at least two implications for the present. The first is that close attention to the narratives that are catching fire on the fringes right now can offer helpful clues to what to expect later on. The second is that, like the secret society Borges portrayed, those who want to have an impact on the future just might have a way to do it that most people never get around to noticing.
The first option offers some unsettling news. These days the science fiction the media likes to talk about is the kind that gets bought and marketed by the big corporate publishing conglomerates, and endlessly rehashes the same approved clichés that have been dragging Hollywood down to irrelevance. You have to get in under the hood and look at sales figures, though, to find out that this sort of bland respectable stuff is a niche market at best. By a hefty margin, it’s outsold by a subgenre the media doesn’t talk about at all and the corporate conglomerates won’t touch: old-fashioned space opera pitting square-jawed heroes and mighty galactic fleets against alien monstrosities. There are whole galaxies of this stuff, self-published or issued by small presses, feeding a passionate international subculture.
Zoom in toward one of the central star systems of that subculture and you’ll find the spectacle of Warhammer 40,000—WH40K to its fans. Warhammer started out decades ago as a fantasy wargame influenced by Tolkien, with armies of elves, orcs, humans, and the like. Then some bright soul thought of transplanting the whole thing into space in the far future…and things got weird. The orcs became Orks (sic); the elves, Tolkien’s Eldar, became Aeldari (even sic-er); eldritch presences and Chaos Gods came sweeping in from rifts in the fabric of spacetime; and the whole thing took on a grim splendor that many young men find irresistible. Now the good guys are mutant Space Marines and legionaries in power armor serving under the double-headed eagle banner of the Imperium of Man, a galactic religious tyranny with a hierarchy modeled on medieval Catholicism and a theology borrowed from Japanese Imperial Shinto. The reason they’re the good guys is that the other sides are much, much worse.
In the best Uqbarian fashion, the lore of WH40K is already seeping through into our timeline. During Trump’s presidency, many of his young male followers liked to call him not POTUS (President of the United States) but GEOTUS (God-Emperor of the United States), in a nod to the God-Emperor who rules the Imperium of Man. Right now, for that matter, there are units on both sides of the current Ukrainian war that have taken names and heraldry from the Warhammer 40,000 cosmos. That’s not surprising, because WH40K and the broader realm of space-war science fiction offers young men an imaginary cosmos in which their genetically hardwired cravings for adventure and achievement can be acted out in lurid detail, and they don’t have to spend their whole lives apologizing for the sin of having testosterone in their blood. Actual warfare takes that same possibility right through into the real world.
It made the news a little while back that something like three-quarters of Americans admit that they wouldn’t be willing to fight for their country. That’s not surprising, as the people who run this country have lost track of the first law of leadership: you can only get loyalty from your subordinates if you give your loyalty to them. Decades of seeing our political classes treat ordinary Americans as chumps to be exploited and despised have worn down the once-potent patriotism that sent young Americans charging onto battlefields around the world, and replaced it with pervasive distrust and contempt toward those classes and the institutions they control. That doesn’t erase the genetically hardwired cravings in young men that I mentioned above. It simply means that come crunch time, those cravings won’t be at the disposal of the people who think their grip on power is unbreakable.
That could spin out of control in any number of directions. Civil war, the obvious one, is not necessarily the most likely. Unfortunately the standard name for the one I consider much more likely—hint: it begins with “f”—has been so completely misunderstood and misinterpreted by all sides in today’s political discourse that it’s not even worth uttering the word. Let’s use a less easily garbled phrase, then, and talk about charismatic populist authoritarianism: the rise of earnest (and usually young) political leaders who reject the corrupt and ineffectual status quo, organize movements capable of acting both within and outside of current political arrangements, occupy the abandoned middle ground between the squabbling parties, and brush aside the dysfunctional mechanisms of a failed democracy in order to fix the problems that the current system won’t even attempt to address.
That’s not an outcome I want to see, though I’m well aware that it may be inevitable by this point. My question is what will come afterwards, since charismatic populist authoritarianism is always a transitional phenomenon and gives way eventually to a new era of institutionalization and a return to some form of the rule of law. The visions that will shape that new era may not exist yet, and that leads us back to the second implication I mentioned earlier, the possibility of creating new narratives that might catch fire in the collective imagination in the years ahead.
Those years will be shaped powerfully by forces most factions in today’s political debates haven’t yet begun to grapple with: the ongoing depletion of nonrenewable resources, the rebalancing of global political and economic power away from Europe and the European diaspora toward south and east Asia, the aftermath of the current peak in global population and the implications of long-term population decline, and more. It encourages me to see some people dealing with those concepts in fiction—especially but not only in the pages of New Maps, currently the only magazine I know of dedicated to deindustrial science fiction—and others sketching out first drafts of constructive responses in the world of everyday life.
I’ve written some things with the former goal in mind, most obviously in my novels Star’s Reach and Retrotopia (both currently between publishers but scheduled for reprint next year), less obviously in quite a bit of my other fiction. I have further ideas I want to develop along the same lines in the years ahead. Will any of these find the kind of passionate fringe audience that kickstarts collective change into motion? I have no idea. But new visions—not, please note, the same old schlock decked out with a thin layer of the latest fashionable jargon like so much spraypaint, but genuinely new, different, unsettling visions—are desperately needed just now. I hope that at least a few of my readers will make the effort to craft them.
Source: Ecosophia
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