The decline and fall of… what, exactly?

I want to start this post with a confession: I bought my first books from Amazon around September 2002 (actually, that was my second purchase at the then budding site, as I had previously attempted to buy a book by William Burroughs which ended up being a cassette recording of him reading Cities of the red night, and which I think I never got myself to listening). My first order included a nice, hardback copy in three volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, cloth binding and all. Back then, I did with my Amazon orders what I was well accustomed to doing with my brick-and-mortar book purchases: I kept on indulging in them well before I had finished reading the haul from the latest one (or with the ones previous to that), so there were always books that sat in my nightstand unread for years, as I always found some newer, glitzier (or for some reason just more urgent) ones to turn my attention to. Also, I used to read multiple books in parallel back then, so finishing something or other always seemed more pressing than going back to the ones that, inadvertently, had been bought long ago. Be it as it may, the thing is that the imposing boxed set containing the first half of Gibbon’s masterwork had been sitting for 16 years in a corner of my library (the “history important books” corner, alongside the much revised, commented and dog-eared editions of Toynbee’s Study of History, Spengler’s Decadence of the West and Collingwood’s The Idea of History).

Since then, my reading habits have noticeably changed, as long ago I started reading a single book at a time, and not opening a new one until I had finished the one I was currently engaged with (no matter how boring or disappointing… indeed finishing boring and disappointing books has turned out to be a most rewarding endeavor, and a superb training method for attention and intelligence in general,  see my posts Why reading boring books is good for you and Maybe even better ). I also reined my obsessive-compulsive buying behavior, not ordering (or buying in a physical store) anything until I had cracked open the last exemplar hauled in the previous order. During those years of subtle but persistent change, whilst occasionally I remembered with regret the mountains of unread books I had accumulated in wilder, less disciplined times, I was still too attracted by the allure of new volumes to pay much attention to the former. And thus the Decline and Fall languished in a corner both of my physical library and of my mind, very occasionally giving a gentle tug to my attention, reminding me it was still there, unfinished business from the past. Long story short, a couple weeks ago I finally gave it a go, as it fitted neatly within my overall intent of understanding better how civilizations have collapsed in the past, to better be able to judge how our own may develop, when its particular collapse seems more evident by the day.

A few words about Gibbon’s work, then, before I turn my attention towards what we may learn from it. I (like every other half-cultured rube) was already familiar with the basic shape of the argument: the empire fell because of its internal contradictions, exemplified by the loss of civic virtue of its elites, with a little help of that obnoxious and most irrational heresy (Christianity) that was carelessly elevated to the role of official religion by Constantine. Such sketchy outline has been rehashed by so many later historians and thinkers (it very much permeates the Essay on the History of Civil Society by Adam Ferguson, and we can still find the basic idea of elites losing their ability to respond to external challenges because of the adoption of a universal religion better suited to proletarians underlying most of Toynbee’s understanding of social dynamics) that it has become a commonplace, and it’s difficult to evade or to challenge its main tenets. I had already high hopes for the writing style, as it is generally acknowledged to be a high mark of XVIII century English prose. Maybe I harbored unrealistic expectations, but I found the prose a bit flat and unenticing. Not abysmal, mind you, but stilted and clichéd at some points, and with some quirks certainly grating for modern sensibilities (Gibbon almost never encounters anything coming from Asia, be it a custom, a ruler, or a cultural artifact like a building, a painting, a vase or a statue, which he doesn’t automatically qualify as “effeminate”). Interestingly, it is a style that I’ve come to associate with German philosophical writings of the following century (the same standard turns of phrase being used and abused, the same highfaluting appeals to national character and the same understanding of a certain kind of exalted, highly emotional spiritual contemplation as the highest good, described in very similar and a bit conceited terms), which may be explained by the influence that Gibbon exerted on them (I may need to get to a contemporary translation to confirm that hunch, though). Not entirely my cup of tea, although competently executed.

However, I also felt it a bit lacking in the elaboration of a consistent theory of why things happened as they did, where the particular events narrated (colorful and amusing as they undoubtedly are) are weaved as different strands of causal ingredients that serve to highlight a common thread, making us believe that things were as they were for a reason. There is, of course, the underlying narrative I sketched before (the Senate just went soft and corrupted, let unworthy rabble become emperors, and in the end they couldn’t even defend themselves), but that barebones narrative leaves too many questions unanswered: did the whole senatorial class slumped wholesale into stupor and irrelevance? Doesn’t seem likely, as with few exceptions it kept producing some very redoubtable emperors; why did some noble families slid into irrelevance (other than by being exterminated by political enemies, which at some points seemed like all too common) while others kept on producing imperial scions for centuries? How did the development of latifundia and the disappearance of tenant farmers affect the civic spirit of both classes? (not that we should expect Gibbon to provide a class-struggle based analysis that would only appear in the intellectual scenario with Marx almost a century later); Why weren’t there any significant technological developments in almost a millennium? Was that a cause or a consequence of a society where more and more of the production was being carried out by slaves, lacking thus the incentive to economize in manpower?

It is probably my fault that I’ve come to enjoy “big history” (the “grand theory” as described/ warned against by Quentin Skinner) and in contrast seem to enjoy less the traditional way of telling it, which I find too much “one damn thing after the other” (long chapters of Gibbon seemed to me little more than:

…so Valerian went to that city, and fought that battle and (probably, we can’t be sure because our sources are crap and most ancient historians are not really very reliable, ya’ know) lost it, so he was murdered by his soldiers, who appointed Valerianus, who in turn went to that other city, where he fought that other battle, which he won (yay!),but then lost a subsequent one, and was in turn murdered by his soldiers (or slain in battle, according to a not-very-reliable source again, lovingly quoted in Latin), who this time appointed Valerianulus, who, who would have guessed! Went in turn to a third city where he fought a battle that he either lost or won…

I get it that most of those dudes a) reigned for just a few months b) didn’t do anything remarkable or leave any perdurable trace other than minting a few coins and may be erecting some memorial column or other and c) have reached us through chronicles written some centuries after their deaths by unscrupulous hacks with an ax to grind and some spurious interest in maligning/ whitewashing them, depending on the inclination of their patrons, but the succession of their exploits sometimes makes for some winding, unfocused and boring passages. So there you have it, I have the gall to, being and absolutely shitty writer myself (and egregiously overindulging in winding, unfocused and boring passages as much as the next guy), criticize one of the universally accepted masters of the English language… in words he would have considered fitting: o tempora, o mores!

Which doesn’t mean I’m not highly recommending the book. As Hugh Trevor-Roper remarks in the introduction (an introduction that would have benefited itself from some judicious editing), Gibbon is our first “modern” historian, trying to discern longer-term trends below the hurly-burly of battles, murders, rapes, illegitimate accessions, revolts and plagues that afflicted such unhappy and tumultuous interval of our common history, and applying a discerning critique to the different sources he masterly commands, trying to adjudicate between the sometimes wildly differing reports of his predecessors with (mostly) unerring authority. Just be aware that the discipline has evolved, language itself has evolved (mostly for the worse, I’m afraid, as we use less and less words to express poorer and less structured thoughts), and the classics, worthy of attention as they undoubtedly are, keep growing more alien to us by the day, and thus their books present some difficulties that should not be underestimated. 

But surely of more interest to my modern anxious readers than my (highly idiosyncratic) opinions on Gibbon’s work is what I coyly suggested in this post’s title it may teach us about our current predicament. To such juicy comparison I now turn, starting with a quick recap of the underlying causes Gibbon identifies as being the real culprits of the collapse of Greco-Roman civilization (although only the Roman half of the empire is dealt with in the first three books, whilst the Eastern part would get its own subsequent three volumes, I haven’t bought those… yet!):

1.       Loss of public spirit by the elites (senatorial class), and of civic virtue, sense of decorum, and of obligation first and foremost towards the common good.

2.       Extension of the benefits of Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of the Empire, thus debasing the value of such citizenship, and the homogeneity of the social body (and thus losing the ability to easily collaborate in common projects).

3.       Loss of discipline of the legions, that found there was more benefit to be had from deposing whoever happened to be emperor, and then choosing a successor (whose first decision would then be to rewards them generously in a vain attempt to ensure their loyalty) than from defending the ever more porous frontiers against continuous Barbarian incursions.

4.       Loss of faith in the common narrative shared by the elites (whose external manifestation was a traditional religion whose beliefs were, in the author’s arch-famous words “considered, by the people, as equally true; by the philosophers, as equally false; and by the magistrates, as equally useful”). Needless to say, that common narrative would be substituted by a new one, Christianity, that in Toynbee’s analysis was the expression of the universal religion of the estranged proletariat that already exhausted empires always formulate in their decomposition phase

Although of course Gibbon, like any other thinker, could not avoid projecting in his understanding and interpretation of events the forms, mores and most salient features of his own age, and his Roman citizens are thinly veiled Englishmen in the eve of the Industrial Revolution, threatened by external forces (mainly France) he identified with barbarism and a lower level of civilization (a civilization he, of course, understood as linearly progressing and having reached its apex in his own society) and subjected to a loss of traditional virtues for the love of commerce and material gain (the most forceful denunciation of such “corruption” of mores being found in a contemporary of Gibbon, the already mentioned Adam Ferguson, whose Essay on the History of Civil Society was published the year after Gibbon’s first volume), the parallelisms with our own age are nothing short of amazing:

1.       Whatever you consider the elites of our time (the media, politicians of every stripe, and millionaires, be them from show business, sports or industry), the confidence or admiration the public expresses in them is at an all-time low in all advanced societies. The reason is their evident selfishness, self-regard, narcissism and disregard for traditional norms of solidarity, decorum and simple common decency. Our forebears called that “loss of public spirit and civic virtue”, and it manifested itself in a perception of corruption and extended decadence not different at all from the one we have.

2.       Any attempt to somehow limit the public benefits to the native-born citizens of those same advanced societies where the elites are loathed and distrusted is regularly denounced by those same elites (plus most of the academic establishment tasked with ideologically justifying and perpetuating their dominion by the proper indoctrination of the young), as nationalist/ populist/ retrograde and most uncivilized and hateful drivel. The non-elite population can, with great difficulty, notice that those who so ardently preach in favor of the extension of public benefits to all are pretty zealous to preserve the enjoyment and transmission of their very private benefits for themselves and their descendants only (see my Problem with open borders ), without noticing any contradiction at all. The fact is, advanced societies (more markedly, Western ones, Asians are more circumspect in welcoming foreigners) show a clear tendency towards universalizing the benefits of citizenship, and that indeed causes tensions, fractures, and makes more difficult for them to coordinate their actions.   

3.       The military, in those advanced societies, has stayed loyal and disciplined so far. Although the 70s and 80s saw their share of military coups (mostly in East Asia, Africa and Latin America), a good deal of those devolved power more or less peacefully to civilian leaders in the last decades, and the threat of a “new authoritarianism” so far seems to come from the civilian part of the social body. But beware men with arms in a fragmented society slowly sliding into chaos and disorder, as ours is doing (so slowly, indeed, most commentators have not yet noticed it). I would expect armies to have a much greater role (not necessarily for the good) in the second and third decades of this century, but will have more to say about them in a moment.

4.       If we resort to François Lyotard’s concept of “postmodernity”, it is precisely the loss of legitimacy of every previous “grand narrative” what is most characteristic of our own time. Traditional (Christian) religion is bleeding adherents and authority, but the “secular” (whatever that means) alternative that appeared in the XIX century to crystalize and exemplify the hopes and desires of the disenfranchised proletarians of the then-crumbling world-system is as much discredited, if not more (I’m talking of Marxism, as much a religion as the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, Mayans or Incas). Which means that the true universal religion (again, in a Toynbeean sense) that captures the imagination of the proletariat of our times (the non-elite masses that cannot share the ideological tenets of the dominant belief system any more, and are thus growingly alienated) has still to take shape, or, seen from a different perspective, is still up for grabs. May be that role can be played by a re-energized Christianity (my own and very idiosyncratic preference, although I wouldn’t bet on it), may be by a rekindled nationalism (with whatever foreboding overtones you want to paint it: neo-reaction, neo-fascism, traditionalism, populism…) if and when it somehow acquires the ability to provide credible meaning and an action plan to a society sorely lacking both. May be by something entirely new we still don’t have a grasp of.

So I would say, except for the military running amok, we are quite advanced in a process of massive social disenchantment and hopelessness and loss of faith in a common future not too dissimilar to the one that precipitated the collapse of the Roman world. There is one difference, though, and to that difference I will now turn my attention: technology, which between the II and IV centuries of our era we believe was extremely stagnant, is nowadays progressing royally, and will surely deliver us from any kind of decline, decrease of living standards, or regression. Or so they tell you, don’t they (the same people, remember, that defends openness and generosity with the public goods they don’t use or need, while at the same time guarding jealously from competition or access the private goods they have amassed in an increasingly unequal system)? Well, I’ve got some bad news for you: technology is not progressing at all in any meaningful sense, except in one area: the ability of giant corporations to trade with your attention, which should be your most precious asset and which you are squandering and giving out for free (as attested by the fact that you are reading this blog -that is, if you managed to make it this far!).

Want proof? I’ll give you three pieces of evidence: total factor productivity (the ability of the whole economy to produce more material goods -the classical four F’s we humans need to be contented: food, fiber, fuel and procreation) doesn’t rise significantly since the 70s of last century; the median salary (what half the population has to live with) has barely budged since that very same decade in almost all advanced economies, despite the average GDP per person having grown fivefold (which means most of the increase in wealth creation has been corralled by a tiny percentage of the population); and in most of those same advanced economies, the guys currently in their 20s-30s are wont to become the first generation since the Industrial Revolution that will not live better (in terms of material wealth) than their parents.

But hey, they will have Internet! Smart phones (to communicate more impoverished messages with more brainless peers)! cheap giant plasma TV screens (on which to look at utter rubbish)! That is, they will have a shitty house, shitty clothes (very much like the ones I myself wore as a teenager, for what I see), a shitty urban environment (public squalor amidst great private wealth, albeit for the majority that great wealth will be held by other people) and a shitty health, partly caused by the polluted atmosphere and partly by the shitty food they will eat, which they will pay with the shitty salary provided by a shitty, precarious job. But they won’t mind, because they will also have a thousand shiny screens so their attention will be almost continuously held by wonderful algorithms away from their shabby surroundings into wondrous realms of amazement and entertainment and fun! I doubt even the most refined virtual reality will, in the long term, prevent them from at some point revolting and overthrowing such anti-humane, meaningless system, but who am I to know?    

Well, before being labelled a loony pessimist and total nut (not that I would care), I’ll point my hypothetical readers’ attention to an additional parallelism, as shocking as the previous three (remember, the one about undisciplined armies is still the only element missing from a full-decadence scenario, and we may not be as far from that as we like to believe). Do you, dear reader, know which are the two only ages of recorded history of “voluntary population contraction”? that is, of decreasing population in the absence of major wars or epidemics, just by the sheer lack of belief in the common future, by sheer lack of commitment with the continuation of one’s own system of beliefs, by sheer abandonment of the participation in a shared narrative that gives meaning to one’s life, and makes one want it to continue in his descendants. A hint: one of those ages is precisely II-IV century Europe, which saw Rome go from a million inhabitants to maybe a quarter of that, and saw the surrounding fields and villages, all over the continent, being depopulated and left uninhabited. And it was not a catastrophic event, but the result of millions of individual choices, of individual couples deciding that, in the end, life itself was not worth living (a question that was already dangerously close to the balance for their Greek cultural forebears), and if life was not worth living, it was not surely worth creating or passing to the next generation. The barbarians kept crashing at the gates until, when the gates finally went down, they came inside a mostly empty territory, with nary a functioning army to stop them. The other only age that has seen a similar phenomenon? Our own, our very current enlightened and hyper-prosperous day. So prosperous indeed, that we have collectively decided to enjoy ourselves so much that we don’t have enough time or energy to do things as little enjoyable as raising the next cohort of enjoyers…

Don’t give me, then, sophistic answers about the greatness of the technological revolution we are supposedly in the midst of. About how the awe-inspiring creativity of the unchained human intelligence, free of the bounds of superstition, held firmly by the wings of sacred Science, and soon to be complemented by that of the machines we are creating, will soon overcome every and all limitations and create a post-scarcity society where we will all be rich as Croesus, healthy as a fit teenager, and live happy forever in the land of plenty. We are a decadent, wasted, spent bunch of pathetic and deluded hairless apes that have forsaken the traditions and rituals that gave their short lives meaning. And, alas! Meaning is in the end more precious, and more difficult to obtain, than material wealth, than bodily comforts. At some point in the next three or four decades we will realize we are not a iota closer to “defeating death” as the Egyptians priests were. Not a iota closer to developing a real general-purpose artificial intelligence as Leibniz was. Not a iota closer to a society of unlimited material riches freely available for everybody as the slave societies of Greece and Rome.

Which brings me back to this post’s title. Who are those “we”, exactly, bound to decline and fall? Because decline is a relative concept, and for “us” to decline (relatively) somebody has to be (relatively) rising. If we are to fall, it has to be at the feet of somebody else who is apt to benefit from our falling. Some would say the Chinese are the ones better positioned to succeed “the West” as Earth’s foremost society. Bollocks. I hereby enunciate what I will call the “Vintage Rocker Rule” (VRR): “no society has ever become hegemonic with a fertility rate below 2.5”. How many babies are Chinese women having these days? A quick look at the CIA World Factbook tells us it is a whooping 1.6. No wonder they have ended their one-child policy, but so far everything indicates it’s too late, and the reversal is having almost no effect. Since decades ago it was not the fear of punishment what kept Chinese couples from having more than one little boy (and man! Did they prefer it to be a male! As shown by one of the most skewed male-to-female ratios at birth ever recorded), but the pressure of pursuing a competitive career in the crazy environment of keeping-up-with-the Joneses-dialed-to-eleven of contemporary Chinese society. So good luck dictating to the rest of the world how to behave and what values to acquire when 50% of your population is 65 years old or older, as theirs will be in a couple decades (when the USA finally crashes, if they continue in their current course)…

The fact of the matter is, there are no barbarians with the demographic oomph to seriously challenge the Western model, with its accompanying dominant reason. Islam? Fuggedaboud it. In the heart of Ayatollah-land (Teheran) devout ladies are having 1.4 babies on average. Immigrant populations in the social democracies of Europe are freaking out conservatives and nationalists of their host countries keeping a fertility significantly above that of the natives, but they can’t escape the pull of the times, and in 2-3 generations they revert to the mean (as Mexicans are doing in the USA). The only geographically significant place substantially resisting the trend towards sub-replacement fertility is Sub-Saharan Africa, which doesn’t offer much, at this moment, of an example of social organization one could think is required to present a semi-credible bid for world domination. But, if demography is destiny, just give them time…  

Convergent vs. Divergent Technologies

It amazes me that there is still a considerable majority of writers on technical issues that, in good faith, still proclaim that we are in the midst of a technological revolution and that the pace of innovation is constantly accelerating, so we are in the eve of witnessing the most significant revolution in all history affecting how humans live and interact with each other. Hardly a day passes by without some guru gravely and in all seriousness letting us know the epochal changes almost upon us. I know prediction is difficult, specially, as Yogi Berra famously stated, about the future, but it makes me wonder how is it possible that so many brilliant people, with vastly more information than myself about their specific field, may be so utterly wrong.

Some cases are pretty easy to understand, however, when you look at the incentives. Predicting wonderful, never-before-heard-of innovations that threaten every job and can upend any forecast can be very profitable if you make a living from “teaching” people how to adapt to such disruptions, or just by selling books (or newspaper articles) about the dazzling future just around the corner. Posts and columns about how tomorrow will be essentially like today (except with people less motivated and more pissed off as they accumulate less material wealth than their parents and the wonders they have been promised all their lives somehow fail to materialize) tend to fare significantly worse than those with a more cheery outlook, as a constant feature of human nature is to be more attracted to good, promising news than to bad ones, regardless of how well grounded on reality the former turn out to be.

However, a lot of people fully engaged in techno-utopian balderdash really have no dog in the fight, and should know better. I can understand Tom Friedman (an updated version of venerable Alvin Toffler, wont to be similarly discredited by how things turn out to happen) blabbering about the wonders of new (unproven, in most cases overhyped and underdeveloped) technologies in almost every one of his NYT columns of the last five years, or Michio Kaku peddling an imminent progress that will never actually come to pass (Poor Michio! Probably his best days as a physicist are behind him, and nowadays he surely hopes to make more money from the TED talk circuit than from potential scientific discoveries, although I just cannot avoid noticing he will need to be more discerning about the nonsense he spouts, as see him here harping on the greatness of the “marshmallows test”: M Kaku on the mashmallow test, only it seems that all the arch-famous test measures is how affluent were your parents -which is, doubtlessly, greatly correlated with success in life, albeit it sounds much less heroic and self-serving: The marshmallow test doesn't prove what you thought it proved (if anything) ). Same goes for charlatans like Aubrey de Grey or Ray Kurzweil (although with the latter one has to wonder if he is trying to actually fool somebody, or mainly to fool himself in the viability/ inevitability of that ages-old conceit of living forever and cheating death, now that it is getting undoubtedly closer for him), but what about the likes of Bill Gates, rich enough and old enough not to be foolishly deluded by the gewgaws and wild predictions of a bunch of self-styled “visionaries” obviously hoping to make a buck from the delusion? I can only suppose that, coming from the tech industry himself, he is as steeped in its biases and distorted perceptions as the next guy, and can only fail to see the negligible impact it makes in the lives of the majority of human beings as any of his Silicon Valley imitators, a root cause of such baseless techno-optimism that was already identified in a book by Richard Barbrook edited more than ten years ago, Imaginary Futures: Grauniad book review 

Be it as it may, the best antidote to such unfounded optimistic pseudo-predictions is to go back a couple of decades and see how there is little new under the sun, and the same miraculous technologies we see being presented today as about to change everything forever were already slated back then to be fully developed and implemented by now. For example, in this priceless Wired article from 1997 about the long boom that started in 1980 and would (they confidently assumed) last until 2020: Futurists never learn! the predictions (electric cars! New energy sources that eliminate the need to burn fossil fuels! Nanotechnology! Biotechnology!) are surprisingly similar to the ones we hear as about to cause an immediate seismic change in our lives any day now… only twenty years later, and after all of them (not just one or two) having failed in the meantime to, ahem… actually happen. All those wonders didn’t come out as expected when predicted towards the end of the last century, and won’t come out any more so at the end of the second decade of the present one.

However, it’s not like there isn’t absolutely anybody with eyes to see realizing that the majority of the predictions of cornucopians and techno-optimists alike have a very slim, unscientific foundation. Robert Gordon did a magisterial effort to point out how the supposedly disruptive technologies that are already ten to twenty years old were not causing that much disruption, at least where productivity statistics are concerned (as I commented on here: On Robert Gordon ). Tyler Cowen famously announced the onset of a “Great Stagnation” (but has been hedging his bets since by announcing in his blog at MR that there is no such a thing almost weekly, usually with the most obnoxious examples so we know he is half-joking about it).  Every now and then you find a contrarian view: Pace of technological change NOT accelerating but I think we can all agree such opinions are in the minority, and 90% of people out there assumes we are in an age of undiminished technical advance and ever-accelerating progress, along the most publicized lines, to recap:

·         Computers and, as a practical consequence, General Purpose Artificial Intelligence (not to fall in the IT consultants trap of Internet of Things, Big Data, Quantum Computing, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, etc.)

·         Biotechnology, Genetic Engineering (extending normal human lifespan beyond 130 years, may be 180 years, may be forever)

·         Nanotechnology or, alternatively, 3D printing

·         Self-driving cars and trucks (something most cities have known for a century… they were called taxis back then)

·         Green energy production (limitless amounts of cheap energy produced with no cost to the environment whatsoever)

·         Space exploration a go-go (permanent base on the moon, mars colony, cheap satellite launching to ensure high-bandwidth access to the internet anywhere on Earth with almost no cost)

Once again, and I’m really sorry to have to play the Cassandra here, none of those things will be widespread (and some will not exist at all, not even as more-or-less credible “proof of concept” in some marketing whiz’s powerpoint presentation) or actually rolled out, not in ten years’ time, not in a decade’s time, but in our lifetimes. In the whole lifetime of any reader of this blog, regardless of how young he or she is (and sorry, but that lifetime won’t go much beyond 100 years, doesn’t matter how much they take care of themselves or medicine advances). Believe, this is not a rant of your average fifteen-years-old living in his parents basement that has read this and that in the interwebz without understanding much. I worked for 15 years as an IT consultant. I work now in a company that designs and engineers power plants (of all technologies and stripes) and manufactures thermal control system for rockets and satellites. I teach in a university, which gives me a good overview of the real (present and future) capabilities of that “most trained ever” generation of future geniuses we are setting loose on the world (and which may shows the first signs of reversal of the “Flynn effect” we have been benefiting from for decades: Things looked bad enough already, and now it seems we are getting dumber! ) . I know a bit about what the current level of technological advance can and cannot deliver. About how long it takes to deploy at scale a new technology, it doesn’t matter how promising it seems on paper. And I am constantly puzzled when apparently serious people tell journalists, investors and the general public, with a straight face, that they are going to produce some miracle in blatant violation of the laws of physics, sociology, economic rationality and what we know of human (and animal) nature, and the latter swallow it hook, line and sinker. But such is the sad state of affairs we have to deal with, and it behooves us, like in so many other fields, to understand why it is so.

And in this case, I think there are a couple of distinctions that both “entrepreneurs” (a term that we should know better than to lionize, as the more congruent cognate is not “beneficent genius”, as so many people seem to believe, but “psychopathic snake oil peddler that got lucky once”) and said general public fail to make. The first distinction is that between science and technology, a well understood one I won’t delve much into. The second one is within technologies, between “convergent” and “divergent” ones. Convergent technologies are predictable, repeatable, reliable and because of all that, boring (they don’t attract much attention). We know how much it costs to produce something with a convergent technology; we can replicate it in different environments and cultures, because we understand the underlying principles and processes at play, and we have vast historical data series from which to extrapolate the future behavior of the different underlying systems and components; we can measure the different performances of the involved processes, and thanks to that measurement, tweak them here and there to improve some aspect marginally, but they don’t lend themselves easily to major alterations or “disruptions”. Finally, convergent technologies are considered boring because it is difficult to wring out a “competitive advantage” from their application, thus their products end up sooner or later being commoditized, and the rate of return they can produce tends asymptotically to zero (so good ol’ Marx erred in his universal prediction, in Vol. 3 of Das Kapital, about the falling rate of return dooming capitalism to a crashing end in that he didn’t consider the other half of the equation: the existence of divergent technologies).

Divergent technologies, in turn, are the exact opposite: if we are honest with ourselves, we only have the foggiest idea of what it costs to produce a single unit of whatever it is that this kind of technology is supposed to deliver, and we may fail by orders of magnitude (although errors of 50-150% are more common); we understand only a fraction of what they require to work, so for every new attempt of establishing it we find new elements that were missing we hadn’t considered, and that have to be hastily commandeered (adding to the total cost creep); because of such limited and incomplete understanding, they are highly unreliable, and if in one location they seem to function all right in the next one they fail or misfire, and they generally exhibit very poor production statistics (they have to be frequently stopped for unforeseen maintenance/ repair/ adjustment); finally, they are very exciting, promise above-market rates of return, and tend to make the life of everyone involved miserable (see Elon Musk sleeping in the factory floor to try to personally fix all the problems of Tesla Model 3 manufacturing, something he has as much chances of accomplishing through such heroic strategy as I have of winning the next Nobel Prize in Economics).

To clarify a bit, I’ll give some examples of each category:

·         Building complex and “big” physical infrastructures (i.e. nuclear power plants, highways with bridges and tunnels, high speed trains, harbors, airports) – highly divergent

·         Building complex and “big” infrastructure for moving data (land based communication networks, be they copper based, optic fiber based or antennae based -mobile and TV) - convergent

·         Manufacturing technically complex things highly adapted to their mission, so in very small quantities and with lots of differences between one piece and the next (satellites, rockets to put things in orbit, components for fusion reactors, supercomputers) – divergent

·         Manufacturing a lot of identical things (cars, running shoes, parts of furniture that the customer has to assemble himself…) – convergent

·         Manufacturing a lot of identical things in quantities that had never been manufactured before, which means it is uncertain which features are valued by consumers, and by how much (electric cars, wall-mounted batteries, electric car batteries, virtual reality headsets, augmented reality glasses, 3D printers, DIY gene-editing toolkits) - divergent

·         Developing software - divergent

·         Providing low end services (cooking, cleaning, cutting hair, serving tables, washing clothes, personal training) – highly convergent

·         Providing high end services (strategy consulting, financial and tax advice, psychological counseling, surgery) – divergent

·         Providing cookie-cutter entertainment (TV shows, run-of-the-mill apps, LPs of most big-name bands) – convergent

·         Providing cutting-edge entertainment (blockbuster movies, high-budget videogames) - divergent

You may see where the problem lies: moving a technology from the “divergent” category to the “convergent” one is really hard, it takes a lot of time, and requires a sustained commitment from the whole of society to endure overcosts, delays, frustration, disappointments and the occasional tragedy. If the benefits of turning the technology in question convergent are clear enough, and perceived to be widely shared enough, all those efforts are endured indeed, and the darn thing becomes commonplace, unexciting, and part and parcel of our everyday lives. But if they are not, people get tired of it (what in some circles is called “future fatigue”, or the weight of so many unmet expectations and promises not honored) and it may well  never come to fruition, like it seems will be the case with nuclear energy (as much as it anguishes me to recognize it).

To make things worse, some of the technologies that techno-utopians are announcing as imminent are not even in the “divergent technology” phase (when at least there is a draft of a business plan with some rough numbers of what it costs to produce each unit of the new good and what people may be in theory willing to pay for it), but in the pure “scientific application that we can trick some VC to pay to develop in the hope it will produce something vaguely marketable someday” phase. And guess what? A) things take an awful lot to transition from that phase to the “convergent technology” one (think generations, decades at best, not years, and certainly not months) and B) a lot of scientific wonders never make it to that final stage.

You may also have noticed that the classification is subtle and tricky at some points. Is building communications infrastructure convergent or divergent? It depends of what communication it intends to enable. Infrastructure to communicate physical goods (highways, airports and the like) is divergent (and prone to corruption, regulatory inflation and countless inefficiencies, but that is another matter). Infrastructure to convey electric signals (data or power), or gas or water, is mostly pretty convergent. A similar thing happens with manufacturing: convergent for combustion engine cars, divergent for electric ones. Convergent for laptops and mobile phones, divergent for satellite platforms and large telescope equipment. So if you bet in huge societal changes dependent on cheap, super-abundant electric cars (or in ubiquitous satellites) you will be sorely disappointed, as those are not coming anytime soon (if ever). Of course the people tasked with building those things requiring divergent technologies will try to convince you of the opposite, and will claim that their technology is already convergent or really close to becoming so: solar concentration plants are already widespread (they are not, the few ones actually built have every kind of technical problems and terrible performance), fusion energy is around the corner because the ITER experimental reactor is already almost built in Cadarache (it is not), and MIT just signed with Enel the financing of a project to deliver a similarly productive reactor for a fraction of the cost (they still need to find more than 90% of the money, which will turn out to be less than 10% of the total amount actually needed, and the whole thing will never go beyond the preliminary design stage); Elon is experiencing some minor glitches that will be finally ironed out in a few days, and it’s been a year and a half of him saying that starting in two weeks his Fremont factory will churn out 5,000 Model 3 cars per week (which is still short of the half a million cars a year he said he would be producing by now), but what he is really and indisputably doing is firing 9% of his workforce (the surest signal the company is going nowhere, but industry analysts, those sharp cookies, reward him with a 3,5% rise of the share price… Tesla's travails ); VR glasses are finally about to go mainstream, and the technology is so breathtaking that they will reach 50% of homes in  no time at all (they won’t, actually that announcement is from almost two years ago, I fear journalists have already given up on that one); AI is so much around the corner that whole panels of ethicists (and may be a presidential commission of experts for good, if we heed the recommendation of Dr. Kissinger!) are already convening to help guide it towards a morally responsible behavior towards us, poor humans, that it may almost inadvertently obliterate (although, of course, we don’t have the darnedest clue of how to actually produce, program, implement, embody, develop or whatnot said AI, never mind have it harbor positive or negative intentions towards us… or towards anything else for what it’s worth).

Before we go into the consequences of the convergent-divergent distinction, we have to take into account how it is different from the classification of technologies in mature-immature. Some technologies, like building nuclear power plants, breaking ground and laying down highways, or producing and filming blockbuster movies, are very mature, but never stopped being divergent (and driving the companies that attempted to market them to bankruptcy). Some technologies were, when commercially launched, groundbreaking and immature but made a profit from the start, as they were predictable and repeatable enough to be convergent since the beginning of their commercialization, like cars, oil extraction, radios (or many home appliances on which huge brands were built: washing machines, refrigerators, TVs).

You may notice that the latter category (innovative products that become convergent almost from the start) have one thing in common: they are all quite old, most of them being introduced at the end of the XIX or beginning of the XX century. In contrast, the last wave of consumer oriented innovations (PCs, mobile phones, LED color TVs and may be autonomous vacuum cleaning devices, like Roomba) are not generating that much profit. That may be an indicator of the comparatively little impact they have on people’s lives (which translates into a reduced marginal value, which in turn means people is willing to pay for them only moderate prices), and thus their inability to command a high margin. By way of comparison, back in the day people were perfectly OK with parting from a year and a half of average salary for a car, or many months of salary for a TV receiver.

Some readers may object that there is one bright spot of both innovation and high margin (and lots of people being still demanded): IT. Unfortunately, regardless of how much has been invested trying to industrialize it, developing software is still divergent (most Sw projects are behind schedule and over budget, many times absurdly so). However, using it, applying already developed Sw to the intended areas (like using an excel spreadsheet to develop the annual budget of a company), or even extending it to some new ones, is convergent, and that has created the mirage that a) Software is eating the world and b) Software (and virtualization) has any real impact on how people live and interact… when it has not.

We may spend increasing fractions of our lives in front of a screen, typing (or just watching), but saying that a new app is going to change the world is like saying in the 50’s (when TVs were already common enough) that a new show would change the world, or, going back even further in time, that a new novel by the romantic author du jour would change the world. They may have had everybody talking about it for a while, they may have gently nudged the attitudes and opinions a little in this direction or that, but they would have actually changed very little, as people would have gone on about their daily lives exactly as before. I’ve read in some reputable magazines brainy pundits declare that the mobile internet has changed everything because now we have things like Uber, which has utterly revolutionized how people move around in cities. Uh? Dude, Uber is a semi-convenient means for getting a guy to take you from point A to point B in exchange for some money, something that has been around for a century, and its innovation is to circumvent stifling licensing and regulation (which may or may not translate into a societal gain, as with any “artificial” monopoly).

If that is your idea of a society-shaking, business-disrupting (well, it has been pretty disruptive for incumbent licensed taxi drivers, which in most European cities are fighting back with some success, whilst they have a more formidable enemy in car sharing companies), life-altering innovation… I suggest you go back to The Rise and Fall of American Growth and ponder the impact of running water, the internal combustion engine, electricity and light bulbs or the radio, and how was life before and after the advent of such true innovations. Listen, one of my grandfathers was raised as a peasant kid in the Canary Islands countryside at the beginning of the XX century. He didn’t know running water, electric lightbulbs or motor vehicles until he moved to the capital in his teens (and he almost had to kill another suitor of who would be my grandmother to avoid being killed by him, life was indeed nasty, brutish and short back then). My maternal grand-grandmother, only slightly older, was still amazed when I first met her by people moving inside a little box (the TV set, still balck & white). So when a guy tells me that Waze is a life-altering innovation because now he knows in advance how much time he will spend in a traffic jam I can only nod my head in disbelief.

In summary, part of the stagnation and stasis we are mired in (regardless of how intently a bunch of interested fools may try to convince you of the opposite) derives from the fact that most of the technologies we are developing since the 70s of the past century are still divergent, and we don’t seem to have the collective willpower (or wits) to make them converge. Which means most effort devoted to their further refinement is squandered and lost, while our daily lives remain as before, only a little more cynical and a little more disenchanted (the weight of all those unmet expectations). Are we doomed to trundle along such unexciting path? Not necessarily (as there is very little totally necessary in human history), and I would like to end this post with a (cautious) appeal to hope: The areas of promise and development you hear of in the media (recapitulating: biotechnology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence, electric cars, “renewable” energy, machine learning, big data, the internet of things, virtualization, industry 4.0) will go through the usual hype-cycle and most likely fizzle out and disappoint:

Such is the nature of capitalism and a spent dominant reason. But human ingenuity, even when unfathomable amounts of it are wasted in dead-end alleys with no prospect of producing anything of value (remember, many Nobel-prize-winning-IQ-level guys are spending their professional careers trying to improve in a fraction of a percentage point the conversion ratio of some obscure advertising algorithm, and call that a meaningful life), won’t be subdued forever. Popper made a convincing case against what he termed “the poverty of historicism”, which he identified as the delusion of being able to predict the future extrapolating from the tendencies of the present. Some true, unexpected, entirely off-the-blue innovation will arise in the following decades, probably outside of the stifling environment we have produced for “R+D+I” within corporate or academic behemoths that provide the wrong incentives and the wrong signals of what is worthy to pursue. And from that spark, likely of humble origins, the whole cycle of (truly) creative destruction may start anew. But from the current bonfires stoked by greedy firms’ research departments and hapless universities, more focused on publishing than on expanding human knowledge and welfare, I expect little creativity and lots of destruction indeed…  

An unexpected use of philosophy (how to speak six languages… and counting)

It is frequently argued that we live in distinctly unphilosophical times: Our attention spans have been shortened by the deluge of messages we receive 24 hours a day through our hyper-connected existences, making it difficult to engage with the long (like really, really long!) texts that dominate the field. Having been habituated to almost instant gratification in most areas of life (from super tasty food to exercise “regimes” where electro-stimulation supposedly does all the hard work so you don’t have to exert yourself too much) we disdain any discipline that requires many years of patient study to bear its fruits. Being reared in a dominantly audiovisual culture we find it alien and uncomfortable to have to resort to that quaint contraption, a written text, to find you bearings (I suppose you can find the Nicomachean Ethic in audiobook format, or have Siri read it to you if you are too lazy to do it yourself, but I wonder how much mileage you may extract from that).

But the main problem seems to be the utilitarian, pragmatic nature of our era, in which time has so many alternative uses (the opportunity costs have grown so big) that we expect an immediate, measurable payback from every activity we engage in, and in that department the study of philosophy comes woefully short: you devote countless hours to read abstruse books, and what do you have to show for it? A hunch that being… is? The revolutionary idea that you shouldn’t do unto others what you don’t want done unto you? The nagging suspicion that what you thought you knew is a social construction so you can not be entirely sure of anything anymore? I can understand the potential disappointment of parents that have invested a few thousand quids in the education of their progeny (sorry mates, been in the UK these days, picked some lingo, ya’ know) if they see those answers coming from their kid’s mouth after a few years of grad school on their dime.

I will not enter in a more nuanced discussion into the truth of the previous assertion, as I’m not entirely convinced that these times are indeed more materialist, or obsessed with the practicality of the endeavors it celebrates than other times in our history (somehow, I can’t see wealthy parents in classical Greece being any less disappointed with their children coming out of Socrates’ school and spouting some gibberish not so distinct from the one I just spoofed… well, that probably explains how good ol’ Socrates ended), but I leave such discussion to Pitirim Sorokin and the like (latest iteration of the like being Peter Turchin and  Sergey Nefedov, whose Secular Cycles I read this summer, and although mainly deals with the correlations between the material aspects of agricultural societies quiet nicely dovetails with my own construction of socioeconomic dimensions that in turn determine the evolution of the ideological ones… like the amount of idealism vs. materialism prevailing in a given society at a given time; but I digress). The previous unusually long-winded sentence (even for my admittedly ultra-lax own standards) was my way of saying that however our own epoch compares with other past times regarding its distaste for abstract thinking, that would be immaterial to the argument of it being distinctly unwelcoming of the pursuit of philosophy.

A symptom of such lack of congeniality would be the continuous and seemingly unstoppable diminution of the time devoted to the study of the topic in most countries scholarly curricula. A diminution, in turn, systematically and frequently decried by any self-respecting member of the cultured classes and the ruling intelligentsia. Every review of what we should teach the poor kids in the last half century has seen a further extension of what could roughly be called STEM disciplines, at the expense of the humanities, and typically philosophy (or history of Western thought and its correlates) has been first in line for seeing the weekly hours devoted to it reduced, and the number of courses on which it is taught at all further shrunk. I can understand that the philosophy professors at every level protest and complain of such societal choices: the work prospects of the kids’ teachers-to-be are significantly curtailed, and as forming teachers-to-be is the main purpose of the university departments of philosophy, the mighty professors join the chorus and decry the short-sightedness of the politicians that are contributing to the nurturing of future generations of uncritical asses, oblivious to the greatness of their own cultural tradition, which counts between its biggest contributors the revered figures (Plato! Aristotle! Kant! Hegel! And lets rather stop there, as when we reach more recent ages the subject becomes irredeemably ideological and murky) that poor little children will have to grow in abject ignorance of.

As bashing politicians is a nice and almost risk-free activity, most self-appointed “public intellectuals” also join enthusiastically in the denunciation, but in another sign of their own diminishing relevance, as far as I know they have been pathetically ineffective to stem the tide, and in one country after another (Germany, the UK, France, the USA to name but a few) the curriculum has been more and more lightened of “classic” humanities, substituted by some easy science and math, some pop sociology and watered-down history and, in some cases, eve some more modern-sounding alternatives which are truly the same stuff repackaged (so the International Baccalaureate program does not offer philosophy as an option, but it does offer “theory of knowledge”, which is but the old epistemology renamed as to be consumed without alarming the picky parents that mostly want their boys and girls to be well-prepared to pursue successful careers in economics in prestigious international universities, and mostly do not have the slightest interest in them being exposed to old, mushy stuff with Greek names).

As regular readers well know, joining any kind of tribe or clique or group is not my cup of tea, so far from my intention to extoll the virtues of old-fashioned philosophy, as it is taught both at school and university level. Rather, I’ll play the contrarian again and declare that most of the defenses I’ve seen in all of these years leave me pretty cold. Before moving to the main subject of this post, I’ll briefly recapitulate them (and spice them with some critique of my own, as critiquing things is one of my most well-known weaknesses):

·         The teaching of philosophy helps the children (or the young) to develop critical thinking abilities, and is fundamental to them being well-rounded citizens, able to rationally judge the actions of its government and thus collaborate in the construction of a more perfect polity. Let us leave apart for a moment the fact that 99% of the thinkers included in the typical philosophy course were a bunch of scoundrels that devoted their best efforts to justify the society of their own times, presenting it as the pinnacle of human perfection and the most conductive to the happiness of its members. I just can’t see what social interest (or individual interest, for what it’s worth) is served by enhancing the capability for criticizing and judging harshly of the citizenry. That would make sense if we conceded that the current social arrangement was somehow “wrong” and needed urgently to be amended, which in theory is what the critiquing ability should establish in the first place…

·         The teaching of philosophy is distinctly “useful”, as in a “knowledge economy” our reasoning ability and our capacity to manipulate symbols is more important than our ability to perform mechanical, repetitive tasks (as such tasks will be performed, supposedly, by robots or algorithms any day now). Such argument probably presupposes that such ability and capacity are best trained by the study of what (mostly) dead white males wrote a bunch of centuries ago, rather than (say) by actually manipulating symbols (what mathematics teaches) or learning and practicing the rules for communicating them (linguistic and presumably literature). I’ll just dwell for a moment in the incompatibility of this argument with the previous one. If philosophy succeeds in developing the critical faculties of the alumni, they may very well realize that the definition of a live well lived that society is presenting them with (earn as much money as possible so you can rise in a social hierarchy determined exclusively by how much of it you possess) is not that attractive to begin with, so excelling at it (by mastering a “useful” ability) is meaningless.

·         The teaching of philosophy is necessary so we can have a sufficiently big pool from which to draw great thinkers that help us understand the human condition, as it is particularly expressed in our peculiar historical circumstances, and that can offer wise guidance on how to best deal with the hand we have been dealt. As much as I would love, really, really love to sympathize with this one, it reminds me of the old definition Einstein gave of insanity (doing the same thing over and over again but somehow expecting to obtain a different result). It is not as if in the last half century the old system has been very successful at producing powerful, original, persuasive thinkers that have helped steer society away from its current, destructive, dominant reason. So I’ve just given up any hope that the current educational establishment, which has been tasked to process a raw amount of potential talent unrivalled in all of our species history (if only because the total number of pupils sent to school and higher education has been the greater one, plus thanks to the Flynn effect and the universal spread of literacy those pupils have been probably the brightest ones ever), may able to somehow extract from that enormous pool even a tiny fraction of the intellectual daring and verve and sheer energy you could find in a tiny (for modern standards) town in Attica 2,500 years ago (What made Athens so great?)     

In summary, my thought until very recently is that philosophy is almost entirely useless, both from the individual perspective and from the societal one. Just to make things clear, that doesn’t mean it lacks any value. Rather the opposite, it is precisely because it has no use that its value is not only unmeasurable, but also extremely high. So high, indeed, that I would concur with Socrates that the non-reflective life is not worth living, and to properly reflect on it (i.e. to be able to have a life worth living) it is absolutely essential to have a quite extensive exposure to philosophy. But, but… such exposure doesn’t necessarily has to happen at the earliest age, and almost certainly there are better ways to make it fruitful than to have it unenthusiastically explained to you by a poorly paid, unmotivated teacher that would like to do almost any other thing rather than droning about Aristotle’s works in front of a class of uninterested children. Which is an again probably unnecessarily long and circuitous way of saying that I’m perfectly OK with philosophy being entirely taken out of education, and all the faculties and schools of philosophy being closed (remember I already proposed the same fate, albeit for entirely different reasons, for the schools of Economics: Modest proposal ), and its learning, its research and its development being entirely left in the hands of private citizens so inclined, unaffiliated with any formal institution.

But, for the sake of honesty, I have to confess to my readers that I’ve recently found a (totally unexpected, as I openly declared in the title) practical, utilitarian, honest-to-God useful application of the study of philosophy, which somehow shames me, as it tarnishes the selflessness and just-doin’-it-for-the-heck-of-it shtick of the whole endeavor. It is an application that helps explain why so many noted philosophers were polymaths, and spoke a multitude of languages: what philosophy really enables you to do is to read unbelievable amounts of crapload, and retain substantial amounts of it. Let me explain: any student of humanistic disciplines will develop good, sophisticated reading skills. In fields like history, law, or literature you have to read many, many pages, but they normally… make sense. Not so in philosophy, when you may discover long after the fact that whole tracts you have duly digested and mulled over for a good long time (and that you considered very thoughtful and deep and profound at the time of reading them) doesn’t really make any sense at all.

Now I recognize that this may sound a tad extreme, a bit nonchalant and surprising (although I claim no originality, this line of thought was awakened in me by a reporter in the Spanish journal “El País”), so I’ll expand a bit, with a dab of personal experience. I’ve always been quite a bookish person, and I read more than my share of history and philosophy when young, but after my (first) university career, finding my bearings in a very demanding job and founding a family I really eased off for some years. I tried to sneak one or two “serious” books every now and then, but it was difficult to give them the attention span they required, so although I always had six or seven books I was reading more or less simultaneously (poetry, fiction, politics, history, some social commentary… what I’ve never been a fan of were “management” and “self-help” books, then as now I avoided them like the plague), the more abstruse ones could sit in the table besides my bed for months on end until I found the willpower to have a go at them.

However, the tug of devoting more time to philosophical pursuits was definitely there, the impetus to put my thoughts on paper to clarify them and sharpen them and see where they took me never entirely dried, and the satisfaction every time I managed to finish a more philosophically bent text was so marked (the mental equivalent to finishing a grueling workout… you feel you are a better person for having put yourself through such an ordeal and having survived) that I never entirely stopped buying that kind of books. I remember having a breakthrough (but I would only recognize it as such many years later) reading the Critique of Cynical Reason by Peter Sloterdijk: I was working something like 100 hours a week, my wife and very young kid had just moved with me into Brasilia (where we knew absolutely nobody) and all the strength I could muster allowed me to read something like ten minutes per day, just before going to sleep, normally at about 1:00 or 2:00 AM, knowing I had to wake up in 5 or 6 hours to go back to work, Saturdays and Sundays included. You may guess I was not in top intellectual form, and my eyes typically glazed over in the second or third word (I had originally written in the second or third sentence but Sloterdijk style is not that different from my own, and his sentences may go no for one or two pages, so it was not uncommon for me not to be able to finish a single one). I usually fell asleep in the middle of long-winded, convoluted and highly self-referential paragraphs, and if the next morning you asked me to summarize what what I had read the night before was about, I would have been grossly unable to give even a hint of an explanation. So I wondered why on God’s green earth I was putting myself through such a misery, and if there could not be some less absurd way of passing my preciously few leisure minutes. I can’t say I had an epiphany, or I came to some sort of redemptive answer, I just trundled along until I finished the danged book, after which I picked another one of a similar tone…

If you are waiting for some clear-cut moral I’m sorry to disappoint (but bear with me a bit longer -although certainly much less than a full-Sloterdijk length, do not panic! and I still think you may draw some useful lesson). The thing is, by dutifully, stubbornly, joylessly reading almost unintelligible books (without expecting to obtain any utility from them), I slowly developed an ability to, wait for this… read almost unintelligible books. Indeed, I ended up enjoying them so much that they become my almost only source of reading material. I abandoned my old habit of reading six or seven books simultaneously. I started one and didn’t start the next one until I had finished it. And finished meant finished: footnotes, notes at the end, bibliography (I still spare myself the index when there is one, though). I allowed myself to order a new batch from Amazon only when I cracked the spine and started the first page of the last exemplar of the previous batch. Now, I know what some of you are thinking: “nothing new here. Pierre Bourdieu already described it. The poor guy was just accruing tons of symbolic power which he then could translate into an enhanced status within his social milieu. The old trick of acquiring high culture as a surefire status-marker”. Bollocks. I was working in a consulting firm, so the amount of status I got from telling my peers I had read Hegel was exactly zilch. It is not just they could care less (they could not), it’s that such conceit was actively frowned upon, as the time devoted to such patently fruitless pursuit was time detracted from more useful applications, like playing golf with would-be clients or, if some reading had to be involved, memorizing the WSJ, “Forbes” and, for some extra intellectual stimulation, who ate my cheese.

But again, it was strangely fulfilling to be able to read what I knew nobody else around me would be able to read, and to see how it more or less helped create a complex, sophisticated, reasonably coherent understanding of what this thing called life was about in a “deep” sense. I know a lot of people don’t need to read much philosophy to reach that point, just a chapter by Paulo Coelho takes them to the same point. Good for them (for the record, I hate Paulo Coelho, but that is besides our current argument). However, what I was able to extract from so much idiosyncratic reading is beside the point, what I discovered is that reading without much understanding, without much seeing the point of it (without caring if there is a point to it after all) is in itself a skill that, through constant practice, can be improved. And man, did I practice and improve it! OK, so at this point you may legitimately wonder: so what? So philosophy is likely to help develop the skill to read boring books that nobody cares a rat’s ass about… how is that supposed to be useful at all? We’ll get to it in a moment.

But before I have to continue with my little story. Just for funsies I decided that knowing so much philosophy I may as well get some official recognition for it, and I embarked in a doctoral program to obtain a PhD. I thought I could be done with the mandatory credits in a year, and have a dissertation written in two more. It finally took me seven in all, which was a superb enticement to amp up my reading habits even more, as suddenly all that seemingly pointless exposure to the thoughts of long-dead guys may had a use after all (to be regurgitated in a document -the PhD dissertation- that most likely not even the members of the tribunal tasked with judging it would read in its entirety). So the dissertation was written, defended and lauded, and it all was great fun. After having completed that milestone I wanted to do other things, and something that weighed on me was having to rely on translation for so many of the works I was interested in. So having a bit more time learning additional languages seemed a sensible investment, and that’s what I did. At the beginning of 2016 I could fluently speak Spanish, English and Portuguese, and had the joyful experience of having devoted all of four weeks to learn French (plus read the collected works of St. John Persee in a bilingual edition), so French seemed a reasonably easy place to start expanding my language base.

So I just started buying books in French (heeeeello Amazon.fr! a new compulsive client has arrived!) and reading them. The first ones were somewhat disappointing, as I didn’t understand much. Just like with Sloterdijk’s Critique back in Brazil, I told myself. I googled the declinations of 20-30 common verbs, plus some adverbs and prepositions (so I could get an inkling of how the elements of meaning I could gleam connected with one another) and I just trundled along. After having read 10 books it all was easier and clearer (let’s say I felt I understood 85-90% of what the writer was trying to convey). After 20 books (that’s more or less where I’m now) It really doesn’t make a difference if the book I’m reading is in English, in Spanish, in Portuguese or in French, and it doesn’t matter how abstruse or abstract it is (I just finished L’art de penser, a treatise on logic by XVIIIth century Antoine Arnauld, and am currently reading Matière et mémoire by Bergson… both a piece of cake). Seeing how easy it was to “learn” French (I still have to get practice in writing it to consider myself truly tetralingual, but I’ll get there soon) I started in January this year applying the same approach to Italian. With similar results, although the learning curve was steeper (Italian is really very close to Spanish, and the few words that are more different are normally very similar to a French one, so you can pick it up really fast knowing already another three Romance languages). Almost pentalingual then.

Time, then, to push it a little further, and go for a non-Romance tongue. German was the almost unavoidable option, as I have always wanted to master the German language to be able to read Kant’s works in its original form. So I’ve started reading in German, and am pretty stoked by how easy it seems to pick it up.

Only a couple books so far, and I’ve tweaked my method a bit: with French and Italian I focused on reading philosophical work, and that has created certain lacunae in my vocabulary. I can draw on an ample panoply of words to describe mental events (memories, opinions, intentions, emotions and the like) but I’m at a loss if I have to describe everyday objects like clothes, furniture, foodstuffs and the like. With Romance languages that is not an unsurmountable problem, as the words are normally very similar to the Spanish equivalent, but with German that’s not the case. So instead of jumping directly into philosophy (and man, do they have a rich philosophical tradition to draw from!) I’ll read some fiction, starting with children books (I’ve found that many of the books I read translated as a kid were from German authors, so am delighted to revisit them in their original form), then up to YA, and finally some hefty XIX and XX century classics (Hesse, Mann, Gräss -all of which I’ve read in translation, but also Döblin, Kraus and Müsil, and Holderlin, Rilke and Trakl). I intend to spend a little more time consolidating the German language acquisition (2-3 years, and about 50-60 books read before I finally order Kant’s Gesammelte Werke… the Academia version, if I can, although I’ll need to sell a kidney and an eye to afford it), but after that the sky is the limit (my current plan: who cares about living languages? Next three are Latin, Classical Greek and Hebrew).

So there you are: without the ability to read through books I barely understood (but keep on reading anyway, and retaining more of them than what initially meets the eye) I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to apply this idiosyncratic method of learning, and this is the only method, given my time commitments, that I can afford. And I owe that ability entirely to my training in philosophy, as I’m also pretty sure there isn’t any other subject that forces its practitioners to go through such unappetizing reads. But, Alas! That is not what the current academic climate prepares you for. The way philosophy is currently taught it has to be pre-masticated, pre-digested so it “easy” for the poor fellas that have to learn it. It has to be presented excitingly and energetically so it seems attractive and “fun”. Well, you know what? I don’t think the Nicomachean Ethic can ever be made exciting, or fun, ditto for the Critique of Pure Reason, as much as I have enjoyed reading both (and for what it’s worth, if I were asked if I would rather read the Critique for the first time again or relive the most pleasurable orgasm I’ve ever experienced, I would go with the Critique without hesitation, but please don’t tell my wife). That’s why most standard arguments for teaching philosophy ring hollow to me, as the single real benefit I can see coming from the conscientious pursuit of the field can only come from doing it in isolation, and requires a certain level of seclusion that the current aversion to demanding effort from the students can only curtail, rather than incentivize.

And yes, I know in a few years we will have AI’s translating online any text in any language directly in our ears, so learning another language is a big waste of time and effort (but if you believe that is really going to happen, and that the jumbled translations of Google, as much as they may improve, somehow compare with understanding a foreign text or foreign speech yourself, I still have my proverbial bridge in Brooklyn which I’m willing to sell).