A Sudden, Vast Unknowing
Way back in the late 90s, a colleague of mine, Jonathan Rosenberg, made an observation that stuck with me. “The biggest change the Internet has brought to our lives,” he said, “is just this: I no longer live in doubt. It used to be that when a question came up about something, you just ended with, ‘huh, I wonder.’ Now you just look it up.” This probably seems obvious to people who did not live through the transition from the era-of-wondering to the era-of-looking-it-up, but at the time, the significance of the internet was still a topic of debate. It was not clear how much it would transform life and in what respects, and I’ve always admired how concisely Jonathan summed up what still seems the most salient social change of the era. We no longer live in doubt.
But recently, something else happened that made me reconsider that insight. I do not mean to suggest it is wrong, but that it was only a partial vision, gated by time, its true import far more stark and groaning with the historical upset.
The something else was this: I began to notice an increasing number of questions — sometimes regarding complex things, but sometimes even very trivial ones — for which I had no answer, and could imagine no way of acquiring one. This change preceded the Trump campaign, fake news, etc, but it accelerated into that flow of confusion.
I wrote previously about the difficulty of what would seem to be very simple fact checking issues. That all pales next to something like the Trump-Russia investigation. At some point in that rolling catastrophe, somewhere amidst the addled twitter ramblings of Louise Mensch, I realized I had no idea what had really transpired, no idea whether an impeachable offense had been committed. Day-by-day, as we read stories like the recent allegation that Russian hackers inserted a fake story into the Qatari news service, kicking off a crisis of international relations, we enter deeper into the hall of mirrors.
In other cases, I’ve seen topics where loads of information were available and a thick layer of conversation had taken place atop that layer of data, and still the practical matter of assessing the truth of certain statements seemed fraught with uncertain interpretation and disputed context. (Did planned parenthood offer mammograms or not? Mostly abortions?) In others, we’ve seen extreme and almost inevitably false tales that nevertheless propagate themselves across the internet (e.g., the bizarrely fetishistic yarn of pizzagate). In each case of uncertainty (is climate change avoidable at this point or is it too late? How many genders are there really?), it became apparent to me that somehow I’d come to know less than I used to.
Yet most people I encountered both in real life and online seem to have utter conviction about these and various and sundry other arcane topics — about all the confused and conflicting testimonies, the poorly understood histories and data, the speculative conspiracies, and all the way down to the stark raving batshittery. I hesitate to make special claims, but I have the lonely sense of having been passed over by this very widespread brain-killing grace of unholy certainty. Perhaps we should mark this doubt up to age — the harsh, early morning visage of fallibility realized — but I think there is more to it. Suffice it to say that I think their confidence has betrayed them; and knowing the less for being unaware of the fact, they have reached a deep, dank, historically important threshold of confusion: they do not even know that they do not know.
How quickly the titanic assertion of “I no longer live in doubt” foundered and sank into a state of utter unknowning!
I no longer live in doubt, but in my certitude, I now know nothing.
Is it prudent to let such sudden reversal pass with a shrug, without any temptation to study it for a sign, as an adept studies a sacred text?
The great Ian Frazier once took a piss on the idea — maudlin at times — that the world’s sense and order is waiting there for us to transform it into little jewels of personal meaning that we string together onto humanity’s heirloom necklace of history. The occasion for his comedically bleak observation was a consideration of the life and works of Russian absurdist writer Daniil Kharms.
Yankelevich insists, “Kharms consistently denies us our desire to draw any moral conclusions from his work…. His texts confront the desire to interpret head on.”
Nowadays, at least in America, writers often describe themselves as storytellers. They may add that stories are how human beings live, and that we connect with one another through stories, and that every one of us has a story, and that we need to take ownership of our stories, and that we share our stories as people have always done sitting around the campfire in the evening, and that then the stories blend into one overarching, inclusive story, etc.
Whatever Kharms is, he’s not a storyteller. In fact, he is so far from being a storyteller that his work shows up all this story-storyteller-storytelling business for the humdrum received wisdom it is.
I found this flaying of the story cult all the more entertaining because no doubt the blade falls upon me. No, I’m not really a writer, and no, I won’t ask you to beat drums around a campfire with me or try to look deep into your heart and ask you to help me understand your truth. But I am reflexively given to thinking that stories are the most important thing we make, at least in part because the stories imitate actual history, which draws out its own themes in ways that are sometimes inscrutable and even drolly vacant, like Kharms’ work, but sometimes in ways shockingly instructive. Sometimes our days and works are laid out as a tableau of inescapable, prophetic, and even grim moral anatomy.
So it is with the sudden volatility of our knowledge.
Such epistemological reversal of fortune as we find in the era of networked computing reminds one of nothing so much as the story of the tower of babel. The city of Babel plays the role of the vast network and its various widely distributed pieces of hardware; and the tower plays the role of the massive pile of information, piled ever higher, cached and accessible to everyone within a few hundred milliseconds.
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
I’ve always found this bit puzzling: why does god not want them to be successful. The tin-eared new Atheist will say, “Because the old testament God is a horrible sadist.” But let’s be real. The writer of the text knew how this sounded, even if we moderns lack the sophistication necessary to interpret it. The writer intended something a little more subtle than that god is a big old meanie and you better watch out. And in context, I reckon the intended meaning stands out rather obviously.
We’re still close to Eden at this point in Genesis, Adam and Eve having just chosen the autonomy of the god-like point of view — the knowledge and judgment of the apple — over the solidarity of their prior state. In that earlier state, as the animals had been paraded before Adam, he named them, which in biblical parlance means that he understood their true nature just by looking. Similarly, he and Eve didn’t even see each other’s nakedness. They saw right though each other, and doing so, recognizing themselves. They shared a common point of view, a common pool of knowledge, a single state of being with the world in which they existed.
They didn’t have to live in doubt, even about each other. They didn’t have separate narratives.
That Edenic state of solidarity is long gone by the time of Babel. And it is unlikely that it can be restored by good communications and building codes. So what is god all in a tizzy about? It helps to think of Babel not as an attempt to retake the garden, but merely as a retelling of Eden. This time, instead of the cosmic Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, we have human techne promising to give us godlike vantage point. As in Eden, we don’t end up getting that godlike objectivity, but rather, a compelling facsimile called “subjectivity.” You do get your own, distinct point of view, but not one from the outside. You’re just one of many separated views on the inside. This utopian misapprehension — the fantasy that with sufficient study and knowledge we can achieve pure objectivity and solve all problems— often leads to tragedy. In Eden, the single point of view is split into human autonomy and the selfish individuation that comes with it; at Babel, a dissension of tribes and the cessation of common labor.
The point of these stories is that we have limited moral capacity for handling knowledge. Know too much too quickly, and you may destroy yourself. We certainly get this when it comes to bombs. But towers seems less clear. And the same goes for information and optical networking. Nevertheless, the story’s moral appears to be coming true. The only question is how far the rout will go.
8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel — because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
Confusion, the destruction of authority, falling back into separate nations and tribes within nations, not understanding one another, leaving off the construction of the future — these symptoms certainly appear to parallel the proliferation of data sources. There is no longer a consensus about very basic realities, because there is no common narrative, because there is no common source. Cable struck down Walter Cronkite’s world and the sheep scattered — some to Rachel Maddow, some to Jon Stewart, some to Bill O’Reilly, some to Wolf Blitzer. Then the internet smote cable and some fled to Alex Jones, some to Arianna Huffington, some to Matt Drudge, some to Chapo Trap House, some to Mencius Moldbug, some to this web page I saw once, but can’t remember the name of, maybe it was on ribbonfarm, some to a meme my 13-year-old son sent me trying to see if I would get mad at him, some to an app that mixes news videos with pictures of naked ladies, some of them very raunchy pictures, indeed.
It’s impressive that we have made communication with any part of the globe trivial; that we have built computing power on a scale that is truly hard to comprehend. We’re getting pretty good at automated translation, and soon we’ll probably eliminate language barriers altogether. But somehow, in spite of it all, we’ve lost the ability to communicate. Other people don’t understand our stories, and we don’t understand theirs. We don’t know what the hell they are talking about.
Frazier is probably right to be suspicious. All of the feel good talk about our stories binding us together depends on a very fragile piece of cultural architecture, one in which we respect the odd contradiction of each having disparate vantage points on a common reality (a respect not characteristic of Kharms’ Soviet Union, by the way). America proved that ethnic, racial, and religious diversity were no obstacle to a coherent national culture. Can the same be said of the gaping crevasses that have opened up in our sources of information and in the narratives we construct from them? Signs point to no. In any event, I don’t want to get to feeling too at home with the Kharms’ anti-story, or with Soviet-era absurdist alienation, the whiff of which is already strong in the air.
After all, I like my new technology. I like being able to look things up, to feel like I am right on the verge of figuring it all out. I have come to depend on wallowing in the confusion of others, shaking my head at their stupidity, judging their quickness to judgment. And I’m afraid it may all go away; that we may find the magnificent pace of our technological change soon overwhelmed by the pace of our cultural unraveling — a progressive confusion, a sudden, vast unknowing.
