“Utopia of Rules” Book Review
Debt: The First 5000 Years made a big impression on me so I eagerly scooped up The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber.
It’s a book of several essays, some of them more satisfying than others. They’re almost always entertaining; Graeber is willing to grapple with subjects that he can’t quite pin down, and his essays feature him attacking a topic from several angles, though some appear as screeds or meanders which form anecdotal arguments rather than inroads toward the matter at hand.
The weakest essay is about technology. Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit, mostly an outdated screed about the disappointment of the present state of technology for those who imagined a Jetsons-like twenty-first century. He makes a fair point, that academics are too burdened with bureaucratic responsibilities to devote time to chair-spinning breakthroughs, and competitive peer review systems serve to enforce the status quo and direct scientific energies toward deflecting criticism. There’s an interesting argument about how the Soviets dreamed a very communist dream of bringing man to space, and that’s the only reason why the US cared to put a man on the moon. After the Soviets were bested, the US turned away from glorious civil projects back to endeavors with mostly militaristic leanings. Some of his own points are grudgingly undercut at the end, when he acknowledges the recent promise of 3D printing, autonomous cars, and biotech breakthroughs, amongst other advances.
A longwinded but thought-provoking essay which Graeber admits unwittingly borrowed from feminist theory, is Dead Zones of the Imagination. Here Graeber examines an aspect of inequality: a privileged group has the luxury of not needing to devote their thought and imagination to make sense of what outside group think or feel. Using the example of the working class crew in the kitchen who has to creatively deflect the anger of a boss who storms in looking for someone to blame, the kitchen crew are the ones who must think on their feet to deescalate the situation. Another example, the servants who know and understand the families of their masters perhaps better than their own masters, whereas the masters know little or nothing of the servants’ families. Graeber suggests this as the origin of the movie trope of the Magical Negro; outsiders have little choice but to hone their sense of those in power to live their lives outside the purview by the oblivious and self-important, so of course that gets exaggerated in films to be a nearly extrasensory nature.
There’s a brief essay which tears apart the Batman film with Bane, since Graber, an anarchist, was involved in the Occupy movement, and Bane was a stand-in for the Occupy movement. It explores how superheroes are usually antagonists who exist only to preserve the status quo.
The essay which bears the book’s title is the strongest. It dives into the structures of the Tolkien-esque fantasy genre, the German post office, and frustration with being forced to learn an outdated form of the Malagasy language. My favorite insight from this is regarding the evolution of language and its implications for rules in general. Language evolves because people want to play for the sake of exploring their creative energies and to incorporate slang that describes their world, but meanwhile, a grammar and dictionary that was supposed to be descriptive is wielded as a prescriptive to portray the new language forms as wrong and bad. This tension is observed everywhere in human life, between rules and creative play. Ultimately, the ones who can freely “play”, put aside rules, and get away with it are the world leaders who can set up secret torture prisons, massive covert surveillance networks, and so on, and the people on the street who enforce the rules. Any attempts to reel in this shadowy power leads to more rules, which expand the bureaucratic scope of a society, yet can still can be flaunted by those who claim sovereignty and divine power (even and especially the Old Testament God himself). A world that operated only according to the rules might finally be a fair and even moral world, but it exists only in games, and with drastic limits imposed on creativity. There’s also an interesting aside of how the United States, ruled by bureaucracy, was borne of a series of treasonous and violent acts, the kind that would likely be labeled terrorism…maybe the author has a bit of sympathy for Bane and his disdain for Wall Street, up until the “nuking Gotham” part which doesn’t make any sense anyway.
