Seeing What’s There

When I was a teenager, I discovered J. Krishnamurti while reading an old copy of Carl Watner’s The Voluntaryist, which itself held a wealth of treasures for a curious young freethinker. Krishnamurti’s ideas ended up having a profound effect on the way I think, particularly on how I think about the relationship between ideological structures, subjective perception, and epistemology. Krishnamurti famously said that the highest form of intelligence is the ability to observe without evaluating:

Another very necessary thing is to be aware of how conditioned we are by society, by the innumerable experiences we have had—which means that we must be totally aware of our whole consciousness, and not just of certain parts of it. To be aware implies observation through space—that is, having space in your mind so that you are able to observe without opinion, without evaluation, without conclusion. Most of us have no space in our minds because we come to everything with a conclusion, with an idea, with an opinion, with a judgment or evaluation; we condemn, approve, or justify what we see, or we identify ourselves with it, so there is no space at all in which to observe.

As human beings, we’re all toting around any number of social constructs and crude models of reality; much as Earth’s crust, these shift and shake throughout our lives at various milestones and moments of growth, but the ground beneath our feet nonetheless maintains the appearance of stability. History testifies to the power of these models to move and motivate human beings and our processes of reasoning. Today, we can use functional MRI to see the impact in brain activity—to see that power with our own eyes. Encountering Krishnamurti seemed to present a challenge: can one actually empty his cup? Is it even possible? If we hold that it’s not possible, then we admit that it’s not possible for a human being to ever truly understand the world, to see it without the filters of religions and schools of thought, these accretions of ideas deposited by years of compulsory schooling. Shedding those accretions, creating space in the mind for genuine observation, is a kind of emotional detachment that doesn’t come naturally or easily to human beings. Even if one could achieve it, losing those filters could lead to a long series of startling vertiginous experiences. Seeing things as they are might be more frightening and disorienting than we can imagine. But it might also hold the promise of a more sane and harmonious human future. Once emptied of mere philosophical artifices, the mind has room to understand what actually is—rather than attempting to reshape it to fit those artifices. And if we can understand what is, we can change it, parts of it at least. The regular engagement with these mental processes is part of what marks the anarchist.

That the work-and-consume rat race leaves one little or no time to quiet her mind and reflect is a feature, not a bug. You’re not supposed to realize that another world is possible—indeed, that other worlds have existed in long-forgotten spans of the past. It bears repeating that our fully human ancestors for untold thousands of millennia were de facto socialists and anarchists, living in a stateless order that grew up spontaneously to allow people to live together and cooperate with one another in small groups. We believe with total sincerity that we have progressed, and certainly we have more sophisticated technological tools. But whose social technologies are superior? Even if that’s a difficult question to answer—or even know how to begin to answer—it’s somewhat more clear that the answer probably isn’t “the highest GDP wins.” Ivan Illich noticed that in the modern world, “most of the time we find ourselves out of touch with our world, out of sight of those for whom we work, out of tune with what we feel.” The detachment Illich describes so well is today all around us, and so it, too, has become invisible to us. The film director Godfrey Reggio observes similarly, “We’re becoming more disembodied by the nanosecond,” numbed to the wonder of the world, the real one. We once mourned to kill other living things for food; we understood our connection to the impenetrable vastness of nature, and that filled us with reverence and humility. The massive, remote, mechanized slaughter behind our food tells a story as much about our mental health as our physical.

Today, we seem to ourselves as gods. Why shouldn’t we look at ourselves this way? Consider the power of our artifices, the power to change the physical world around us. We aren’t very good at seeing or understanding the dark side of our power, sure that we are destined to be the masters of all. But if we were masters of even just ourselves, how different history would look. Our pattern has always been to use newfound power before bothering to truly understand it, to consider only the very near term. Though the pace of technological developments has recently collapsed eons into decades, we’re still the same. This, argues philosopher Toby Ord, “leaves us in the situation where we have the power to destroy ourselves without the wisdom to ensure that we don’t, and where the risks that we impose upon ourselves are many, many times higher than this background rate of natural risks.” And what do human beings do? We rush to invent the things that will destroy us and the beings who will succeed us.

A recent story at the MIT Technology Review describes an AI program that is capable of “help[ing] scientists make tough decisions about which other proposals to prioritize.” The algorithm identifies trends in the scientific literature, looking for the best bets for research grants. While we’re not fully removing human scientists from the equation yet, what kinds of results will we get when we do? And what kinds of problems are we willing to leave to machines? As Sean Carroll has said, “There’s a whole regime in which we can imagine computers solving problems and then not being able to tell us why they got the solution they did.” For Ord, a world expert on existential risk, it stands to reason that the threats posed by artificial intelligence aren’t taken as seriously. Human beings simply cannot imagine that anything could be out of our control. Ord explains, “When you think about humanity—and how did humanity get into this position that we’re in, where we have so much power compared to any other species on the planet, and, in fact, where the other species are kind of at our mercy.” AI gives us another perfect example of our pattern: its capabilities are quickly exceeding, as our ability to control it lags. So we keep making the same mistake, blindly advancing, progressing, tragically unable to see the range of wavelengths that holds the potential answers. Our own way of life is taken as a given, thus making it invisible to us. If it is unimaginable to us that we won’t be able to invent our way out of these existential crises, then the idea that the growth and progress religion is itself the problem is treated as downright insane. Naive techno-optimism grips all major political factions and parties the world over. 

A word, then, about the above mentioned question of social technology: “The question of why early farming was taken up,” says James C. Scott, “is intrinsically more interesting than how it was invented.” Given how little time hunter-gatherers spend working (arguably, it’s no time at all, there being no real distinction in primitive lifeways between work and play), it has puzzled us what made farmers and slaves of free men. Scott explains, “It’s not as if, once shown the magic of farming, foragers and hunters rushed to embrace the advantages of agriculture.” The adoption of intensive agriculture was everywhere a “protracted and halting” process, the plow being a last resort. Scott encourages us to look at our domestication of plants from a different angle, to ask “who is doing the bidding of whom?” Agriculture made us slaves to our plants (and, it should be noted here, to each other), chained us to the metronome of those plants; in a very real sense, agriculture gives birth to time as we know it, and how the clocks torment us today. Scott’s account calls for, at the very least, a critical reevaluation of our own social technologies—what is their goal? Is human happiness even seriously considered?

We’ve become gluttons for punishment, haven’t we? I saw a headline the other day about how young people participating in China’s “lie flat” movement should be ready to “pay the price.” How difficult it seems to be for the career-as-identity crowd to understand that some people just don’t want it. It’s not that they would want it if only they understood—meaning had the right opinion, meaning agreed with what I think—but that they see the system for what it is and opt out. The truth is that these lie-flatters are doing one of the bravest and most radical things one can do today: they are striking at the very heart—not the periphery, where live partisan political “debate” and cultural war theatrics—of an accepted way of life. The level of analysis at which this question sits is lower, more fundamental, than politics or the economy or even religion, preceding all of these. It’s the way of life that is never open to questioning. By attacking it, you are attacking a level more fundamental than politics.

We will never be able to see the future, but if we can be self-aware enough as a species, we may be able to identify our destructive patterns and find a way forward by breaking free from them. We might remember the words of George Woodcock: “From now on, man will be decentralist by intent and experience, because he has known the evils of centralization and rejected them.”