rising up and rising down

Richard J. Evans summarizes Pankaj Mishra’s argument:

“After a long, uneasy equipoise since 1945,” Mishra says, “the old west-dominated world order is giving way to an apparent global disorder.” We have entered an “age of anger”, in which established forms of authority and legitimacy, already seriously weakened by the forces of globalisation, have been challenged by history’s losers. We are experiencing “endemic and uncontrollable” violence, fuelled by a range of hatreds – of “immigrants, minorities and various designated ‘others’” – that have now become part of the political mainstream. In response, there is “a global turn to authoritarianism and toxic forms of chauvinism”. Societies organised for the interplay of individual self-interest mediated by the state have plunged into tribalism and nihilistic violence. To Fukuyama’s Panglossian vision of the future, Mishra opposes a nightmare.

And yet Steven Pinker continues to argue that we are simply not “experiencing ‘endemic and uncontrollable’ violence,” that, globally, violence continues to decrease. The notion that violence is on the rise may well be one of those illusions I discussed the other day.

I don’t know, of course, but I’m inclined to suspect that physical violence is on the decline while verbal violence, especially on social media, is on the rise. It is indeed an age of anger, but perhaps people are largely content to express that anger online. Almost infinitely more people cheer the punching of Richard Spencer than would actually punch Richard Spencer. One or two acts of mild violence — videoed on smartphones and watched on loop — might be enough to slake most people’s bloodlust.

And so the anger dissipates, and “enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their currents turn awry, / And lose the name of action.” Twitter is the opiate of the masses.

---

P.S. My post title.

first-person shooter

A few nights ago at the movies I saw a trailer for the last installment of The Hobbit, and caught a brief glimpse of a scene in which someone is driving a cart — pulled by mountain goats? Were those mountain goats?? — along a frozen river, sliding around and knocking into rocky walls. Oh right, I thought, that’s like the glacier track from Cro-Mag Rally.

It’s probably like many other video games as well — I don’t play many, so I couldn’t tell you — but I noted it as a reminder of the extent to which Peter Jackson’s once-excellent filmmaking instincts have been subjugated by video-game aesthetics. I say that as someone who doesn’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with video-game aesthetics, in video games; but movies are a different animal and need to be treated differently.

I’m being imprecise, though, and should take more care. What I’ve been calling “video-game aesthetics” is really drawn from a subset of games, primarily side-scrolling games (think of the hobbits running through the caverns of the goblins in the first installment of the series) and first- and third-person shooters. These are appropriate visual styles for certain kinds of game, but I think generally constrain and cartoonify the visuality of cinema.

But because those games are so popular and (especially the shooters) are so utterly central to the experience of above all males under forty, we should probably spend more time than we do thinking about how immersion in those visual worlds shapes people’s everyday phenomenology. We do talk about this, but in limited ways, primarily in order to ask whether playing violent games makes people more violent. That’s a key question, but it needs to be broadened. Ian Bogost wants us to ask what it’s like to be a thing, but maybe we need also to ask: What is it like to be a shooter? What is it like to have your spatial, visual orientation to the world shaped by thousands of hours in shooter mode?

I want to suggest that there may be a strong connection between the visual style of video games and the visual style of American police forces — the "warrior cops” that Radley Balko has written (chillingly) about. Note how in Ferguson, Missouri, cops’ dress, equipment, and behavior are often totally inappropriate to their circumstances — but visually a close match for many of the Call of Duty games. Consider all the forest-colored camouflage, for instance:

AP/Jeff Roberson

It’s a color scheme that is completely useless on city streets — and indeed in any other environment in which any of these cops will ever work. This isn’t self-protection; it’s cosplay. It’s as close as they can come to Modern Warfare 3:



The whole display would be ludicrous — boys with toys — except the ammunition is real. The guns are loaded, even if some of them have only rubber bullets, and the tear gas truly burns. And so play-acted immersion in a dystopian future gradually yields a dystopian present.

What is is like to be a first-person shooter? It’s awesome, dude.

real-life science heroes!

I recently stopped reading the much-acclaimed comic The Manhattan Projects largely because of its mindless violence — and I really do mean mindless: a ceaselessly repetitive proliferation of amputations, decapitations, and (especially!) acts of cannibalism that do nothing to advance the story or contribute to characterization but rather profoundly retard both. I do not like violence in art but can accept it when it has a purpose; in this case the mindlessness results from writers and artists having decapitated their own critical faculties, leaving them subject to the residual twitchings of their nervous systems. Page after page, the doltishness piles up and piles on.

But before I rescued my own brain from further neuronal degradation, I couldn't help noticing that The Manhattan Projects exemplifies a weird cultural archetype: a version of the comic-book science hero that demonstrates its respect for real-life scientists by turning them into action figures.

The term “science hero” is associated with Alan Moore, but while there are countless instances in the comics literature, the figure that has done the most to fix the archetype in our minds is Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. Richards is a scientific super-genius who happens to acquire superpowers but is also incredibly rich — an almost universal theme in the science-hero genre, one picked up in an especially dramatic way in Nowhere Men, another story-in-progress from Image Comics, whose tagline is “Science is the new rock-and-roll.” Its Fab Four protagonists, research scientists who created the biggest company in the world, are basically the Beatles crossed with Steve Jobs.

But though the science hero typically enjoys fabulous wealth, what makes him — of course it’s almost always “him” — a true science hero is that he acquires it, as the British were said to have acquired their Empire, in a fit of absent-mindedness: it just kinda happens. Which perhaps explains why the paradigmatic real-life science hero is Nikola Tesla, who made money only intermittently and died poor, as opposed to Thomas Edison, whose sharp and occasionally unethical business practices made him almost as rich as Reed Richards. (This very contrast is at the heart of the well-known — and highly inaccurate — Tesla-as-über-geek post at The Oatmeal.) In one of the most enjoyable current comics series, Atomic Robo, Tesla gets his fortune posthumously, as it were, through his creation of the series' titular sentient robot; and many other entertainments work similar territory, as a brief look at the “Tesla in popular culture” Wikipedia page reveals. It’s noteworthy, in light of the portrayal of scientists as rock stars in Nowhere Men, that in the film The Prestige Tesla is played by, yes, an actual rock star, David Bowie.

In The Manhattan Projects most of the famous scientists are skilled — or maybe natural-born — killers. (Pro tip: don't mess with Einstein or Robert Oppenheimer. They’ll take you out.) And they have access to an unlimited supply of money. Sure, this is a comic book, and much of this is being played for (sick, perverted) laughs, but it suggests what consumers of this genre really admire. Who really cares about Indiana Jones’s anthropological research? — well, except for his tenure committee, of course.

In some ways this kind of thing is unavoidable, especially in a society that has for many decades now — at least since the height of the Cold War, when popular magazines regularly praised our scientific leaders, like Werner von Braun and John von Neumann, for protecting us against commie nukes — wanted to think of itself as Believing in Science without actually knowing any science. So we make our scientists into the kinds of people we already admire on wholly other grounds — thus creating a new caricature that’s not any closer to reality than the older caricature of the absent-minded professor.

Not that closer-to-reality is everything, but.... A few years ago my wife and I were on a hiking vacation in British Columbia and happened to eat breakfast with the same couple, the only other guests, three mornings in a row, which naturally led to some chatting. The woman was friendly and talkative, the man friendly and quiet, shrugging apologetically at the kinds of vacations he had been subjecting his wife to over the years. (“I like to sleep in tents.”) Only on the third day did I learn that he was Peter Goldreich, a very distinguished astrophysicist. He didn’t say much about his work, but I remember his commenting that he could do it anywhere, since he only needed a pencil and a legal pad. It just might be worth our while to exercise our imaginations in an unfamiliar way, so as to entertain the thought that exceptional works of science are getting done all the time, even in this digital age, by unassuming, ordinary-looking people who kill no aliens, who lack fabulous wealth, and who do their best work with a pencil and a legal pad.