Neolithic Survivor: Role-Playing Globalization, Culture, and Technology

Note: I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art.  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

Note: What follows is an experiment.  I had a very productive class session last semester using this activity to teach about cultural globalization, and decided to write it up for publication in a pedagogy journal.  I just finished a rough draft, and decided, what the hell, might as well make it available for teachers now rather than waiting for publication. And while I'm at it, I might as well solicit some last-minute editing tips, right?  In particular, I'm a bit concerned that this somewhat complicated game is not really clear.  So, if you enjoy this and find it useful, you might repay me by offering any pointers in the next couple of days before I submit.  Thanks!

“Neolithic Survivor” is a single-class activity exploring concepts of cultural formation, intercultural communication, and technological change.  The activity is appropriate for courses on intercultural communication, cultural globalization, and communication and technology, and is intended to help students think expansively about the role of technology in shaping cultural values and ethnic identity.

A Neolithic Survivor game in progress.
Note the three different colors of figures,
representing three different teams.

Theoretical Grounding:

The spread of communication technology has combined with more open post-Cold War trade regimes and social liberation movements to increase the flow of information, goods, and people across cultural and political boundaries.  This condition of the current world system is commonly referred to as “globalization” (Beck, 2000; Castells, 1996; Pieterse, 2009).  Globalization involves a distinct heightening of the frequency and intensity of the interaction of nations and groups from different cultural, economic, and historical positions.  The mixing of these different cultures includes not just the sharing of cultural texts (music, movies, television), but also the increasing uniformity of the global technological infrastructure.

There are long-running arguments about what impact communication and other advanced technologies have on the structures and practices of disparate cultures, particularly including traditional cultures or those still in the process of modernizing.  Some have argued that the spread of communication technology is sufficient to transform traditional societies into modern ones, and that this process should be celebrated and promoted (Lerner, 1958; Schramm, 1964). Others, particularly after the failure of early ‘modernization’ efforts globally, have argued that the implementation of new ICT (information and communication technologies) can conflict with basic cultural values, either rendering the technologies less impactful or altering the culture’s underlying values (Kyem, 1999, 2012).  Finally, more and more scholars have pointed out ways that both technologies and messages are re-articulated to local needs, resulting in significant differences in how similar communication tools are used across cultures (cf. Appadurai, 1996).

This debate builds on ideas about the relationship between technology and culture explored by Harold Innis and Marshall Macluhan, who argued that the formal properties of communication technology have a more profound impact on societies than the content of the messages those technologies transmitted.  For instance, Innis argued that certain forms of communication emphasized extensions of a culture’s power through space to construct empires, while others provided superior duration of cultural influence through time (Innis, 2008; McLuhan & Lapham, 1994).  To fit the curriculum of my courses, my version of “Neolithic Survivor” emphasized and specifically rewarded students for engaging with these concepts of ‘time-binding’ and ‘space-binding’ media.  Technology cards and other elements of the game can be easily modified to emphasize different key course concepts.

It can be difficult for students to get a big-picture view of how the dispersion and adaptation of technology can restructure something as subtle as culture.  As with most communication courses, the first task in teaching about globalization is often to get students to look at themselves and their own surroundings as ‘unfamiliar,’ as having origins and differences , as something other than a completely natural and taken-for-granted norm.  The goal of the “Neolithic Survivor” activity is to take students out of their familiar settings and push them to think of culture as a ‘blank slate’ that is formed in a complex interaction between cultural practices, ideas, and interactions between groups.

Preparation:

Technology Cards:  Use the attached file to print and then cut several dozen cards representing a randomized selection of ‘technologies’ that will be handed out to teams.  These are the most important element of gameplay.  We define ‘technology’ quite loosely here, with a few examples of things teams can ‘discover’ being: stonecarving, navigation by stars, pottery, money, bronze, large stone structures, numbers, writing, the wheel, agriculture, musical instruments, religion, stone inscription, fire, stone tools, smoke signals, and the bow and arrow.

Obviously these do not represent any ‘logical’ progression, and sequences of discoveries that might seem strange do arise – but as we’ll see, this is part of the game’s learning potential.

I would encourage instructors to use their own creativity to add technologies to the stack that are either relevant to specific lessons, or that they just think would be fun to work with and talk about.

Playing Pieces:

You’ll need about a dozen markers or figures about the size of nickels to represent players’ tribes.  They should be four different colors, or otherwise marked to be distinguishable by team. If you happen to be a board game fan, you can probably find something appropriate around the house – I was able to use various figures from a Dungeons and Dragons board game.

Playing Board:

You’ll need a playing surface divided into roughly even-sized squares that fit your figures.  The attached file representing the Fertile Crescent may be used, or if appropriate for your class you may use a different regional map and turn it into a play surface.  Scale is not really important to gameplay.

Depending on your technology circumstances, you may want to print your map out on a transparency.  The ideal possibility would be if your classroom is equipped with an overhead projection camera, allowing the image of the board to be magnified for the whole class, in which case you can just print on plain paper.  Otherwise, you may need to project the board as a transparency, or in a worst-case scenario you can place the playing board in the center of the room and allow students to look at it more closely as needed.

The Activity:

Neolithic Survivor is a turn-based game that simulates cultural change and hybridization over time as a group of small tribes in a nonspecific prehistoric period move, grow, and adopt new technologies.  While it is played in part on a game board, the largest portion of its gameplay consists of collaborative storytelling, in which the players make decisions whose outcomes the instructor determines.

This kind of gameplay is based largely on the creative and collaborative model of tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons[1].  While such games often involve complex statistical systems to simulate probability and outcomes (most often in combat), their more deeply distinctive feature is the way players make choices and a gamemaster improvises the consequences of those decisions in a way that constructs a larger narrative.  Neolithic Survivor focuses almost exclusively on the storytelling element of such games, with the instructor serving as gamemaster-for-the-day.  As we’ll see, this means that the game calls on an instructor’s ability to be creative on the fly.

A game of Neolithic Survivor tells the story of three or four primitive tribes and their transformation, over the course of hundreds orthousands of years, into sophisticated communities with distinct identities and mutual relationships.  The emergent story is a parable, and is not meant to reflect any real instance of similar development.  Instead, it is intended to capture a sense of what it means for a culture to make decisions about technological usage and interactions with others, and to develop in particular ways as a result of those decisions.

At the beginning of the game, read this script:

As the game starts, you are playing as the leaders of a tribe of very early humans, living a very rudimentary nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the Tigris/Euphrates river, far back in human prehistory.

Each receives one technology card per turn, for every five population.  After receiving your card, you have three to five minutes to work as a group to write one or two sentences about how you will use your new knowledge.  How will you use it increase your power?  How can you use it to influence your population?  The population of another tribe?  Can you use it to claim territory?  Be creative!  Try to come up with actions that will either improve your tribe’s monopolization of space or your monopolization of time. You may use a computer/smartphone/tablet to research ideas for how you will act each turn.

But you can only use your new technology in ONE way, so be thoughtful!  For example, if you discover fire, you can use it to construct a system of communication by smoke signals or to cook food, but not both.  Your communication enhancement might give you greater ability to move or more prowess in battle, but more healthy food would increase your population.  Also note, some technologies can interact with previous discoveries!  For instance, if you have already discovered bows and arrows, you can use fire to make flaming arrows.

After all groups submit their actions for the turn, I will determine the outcome of the turn.  I will award “population points” based on the creativity and effectiveness of your planned actions each turn (or I may take points away!). Everyone starts with five population points.  Each additional five population points earns you an extra population marker, which grants you an extra population figure, which allows you to control an extra territory and gain an extra card each turn.

Following this introduction, the game proceeds as follows:

11.     Divide students into three to five teams.  Ideally, this is an activity in a class of no more than 30 students, so that each group is small enough to operate collaboratively.  Have each team, or tribe, pick a name.  The instructor then creates a visible scoreboard on a whiteboard or the like, with a column for each team.  Each team begins with five points.  In this game, ‘points’ represent the population of a tribe, and can grow or shrink on the basis of game outcomes.

22. Using an overhead projector, display the map.  Using any method to decide order of selection, have each team pick a starting location, with each team represented by some sort of figure or marker.  Council them that map features make a difference – encourage them think through what it might mean to plant their tribe on a river or coastline, for instance.

33. Distribute, at random, one technology card to each team.  Give teams three to five minutes to collaboratively write a one- or two-sentence description of how they will use their new technology on a slip of paper, with team name.

44. Game master (instructor) collects all technology decisions.  At this point, teams may also move their figure one space, if they wish.  During later turns, when they may have more than one game piece, they can move none, some, or all of their pieces.

55. Game master (instructor) evaluates all technology decisions, and assigns population points, generally in a range between one and three, depending on the creativity and effectiveness of the teams’ declared use of the technology.  Outcomes of decisions may depend on each tribe’s geographic location, or on the interaction of more than one decision.  For instance, land near rivers will provide better results for tribes that choose to invest in agriculture.  Also, in the event of a conflict between tribes (almost guaranteed sooner or later), the game master has to resolve the conflict, deciding how many population points each side lost or gained, and what territory each tribe controls at the end of the turn.  This determination is based on any number of factors including teams’ declared strategy and relative level of technological development.

66. Each turn is identical in structure, though they will get more complex.  Each turn will take at least ten minutes to resolve, so games will generally involve between four and seven turns in one class session. 

77. As the game continues, teams accumulate more population points, and one figure is added to the playing surface to represent every five points of population.  This allows teams to control multiple types of terrain.

88. Teams ALSO receive an additional Technology Card for every five population points they have on the board.   Teams need to describe how they will use each piece of technology.

9 9. As the game continues, teams accumulate more technologies, at random, and become more differentiated from one another, with different advantages and disadvantages.  If teams get a new technology card identical to one they have already received, they can use the same technology in a new way (remember, each new technology can only be used one way).

1 10.  Remind students that because this is a narrative game, decision making and planning are very open-ended.  Students can get very creative, and you may have to improvise, as I’ll show in the sample game described below.

111.  The game ends when time is up.  If you want to debrief in the same class session, allow at least ten minutes, but you may also want to devote a second class session or substantial chunk to discussion of the game.

112.. Count up population points to determine the winning team.  Students will be drawn into a game they think they can ‘win,’ but as with all educational games, who wins isn’t of as much interest as the process.

Gameplay Examples

The rules for Neolithic Survivor are relatively simple, but the real engagement and learning opportunities for the game come from students’ creativity and the game-master’s responses.  Each student decision about how a team will ‘use’ a technology or otherwise act or move produces unpredictable results as they interact with the decisions of other teams.  A few examples taken from games played in the authors’ classrooms will help show how this can work at the level of individual technology uses, on a turn-by-turn basis, and over the course of a game.  To help show the bigger picture of the game’s flow, these examples are drawn from a single real game.  These examples show that while the game emphasizes communication technology and practices, more material aspects of life and technology are also represented.

Example Technology Use 1: A team receives a card giving them the ability to draw durable images on stone.  Drawing on Harold Innis’ discussion of time-binding media, they specifically choose to inscribe religious imagery.  The game-master responds by declaring that they have successfully founded a new religion, increasing social order, and awards them two population points.

Example Technology Use 2: A team, who earlier in the game had learned agriculture and chosen to settle near a river basin on the map, are later given the card granting the ability to create pottery.  They choose to use this technology to store food.  The game-master declares that this drastically increases their durable food supply and grants them four Population Points.

Example Technology Use 3: A team who had earlier discovered the bow and arrow and established a military subsequently invent musical instruments.  They choose to use music as a form of military control.  The game-master awards them 2 population points to represent their increased ability to defend small threats, and informs them that their military is now particularly potent.

Example Turn: A team that has developed both military power and a powerful religion moves to attack a team that has built a larger population by focusing on agriculture and social structure.  There are no rules in Neolithic Survivor for combat – the game-master simply has to make a decision based on what makes sense given the circumstances.  In this case, the game-master chooses to reduce the population of each team, which is much more damaging for the smaller, aggressive tribe.  As a result of this mistake, the smaller, religious, militiarized tribe decides in the next turn to pursue peace with the tribe they had attacked.  The game-master chooses to allow it, and the two teams negotiate a peace and then merge, along with their technology, to form a culture with strong agriculture as well as intense religious practices and military strength. 

Debriefing:

This game simplifies culture to a Neolithic context, with a small population, limited geography, and only a few ‘moving parts’, and shows how it grows larger and more complex with innovation.  This model provides easily digestible insights into many fundamental ideas of communication, technology, and culture.  Though the game-master should always dictate outcomes that are sensible and proportionate (i.e. punishing teams that make unstrategic decisions and rewarding those that act carefully), there will ultimately be no neat, linear progression to the game, and the game can be actively engineered both before and during play to emphasize different concepts depending on the course context.

In a course focused on technology and communication, the game could illustrate the idea that communication is constitutive – that forms of communication do not simply ‘reflect’ the cultures that use them, but in fact shape those cultures in non-deterministic ways.  Observations of how fire can be used in different ways can build into discussions of how modern technologized communication has different impacts on the various societies that adopt it.

In a course about identity or globalization, the game could show how cultures and ethnicities are not pre-given, but emerge through a process of change over time.  For instance, in the gameplay example above, the struggling team that chose to ‘merge’ with a more successful team illustrates a fairly historically common process of melding or hybridity (cf. Kraidy, 2005). The game’s mix of randomness (in the discovery of new knowledge) and strategy (in teams use of technology) is particularly suited for illustrating the concept of contingency – the idea that any given cultural formation is the result, not of the logical unfolding of some inherent national or ethnic ‘essence,’ but of a series of historical events that are the product of the strange alchemy of purpose and luck.  The game may, then, serve as a powerful support for a course that advances a position of cultural anti-essentialism (see West, 1990).

The game’s main shortcoming is that it relies heavily on the improvisational skill of the instructor/gamemaster, and on a sense of cameraderie and exploration in the classroom.  The game’s structure is intentionally open-ended, and there are relatively few hard rules in place to deal with the vast number of possible actions undertaken by a team.  An instructor/gamemaster must be prepared to quite literally make things up as they go along.  Particularly in the awarding of points and declaration of a winner, this might lead to student unrest if the course as a whole is not already on a steady footing of collaborative exploration.

Works Cited:

Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1st ed.). Univ Of Minnesota Press.

Beck, U. (2000). What Is Globalization. Polity.

Castells, M. (1996). Rise of The Network Society (Information Age Series) (1st ed.). Wiley.

Innis, H. A. (2008). The Bias of Communication (2nd Edition.). University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division.

Kraidy, M. M. (2005). Hybridity: The Cultural Logic Of Globalization (1st ed.). Temple University Press.

Kyem, P. A. K. (1999). Examining the Discourse About the Transfer of GIS Technology to Traditionally Non-Western Societies. Social Science Computer Review, 17(1), 69–73. doi:10.1177/089443939901700107

Kyem, P. A. K. (2012). Is ICT the panacea to sub-Saharan Africa’s development problems? Rethinking Africa’s contentious engagement with the global information society. Progress in Development Studies, 12(2-3), 231–244. doi:10.1177/146499341101200309

Lerner, D. (1958). The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Macmillan Pub Co.

McLuhan, M., & Lapham, L. H. (1994). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Reprint.). The MIT Press.

Pieterse, J. N. (2009). Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Second Edition.). Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Schramm, W. L. (1964). Mass Media and National Development: The Role of Information in the Developing Countries. Stanford University Press.

West, C. (1990). The New Cultural Politics of Difference. In Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Culture (pp. 38, 19). MIT Press. Retrieved from https://my.ucdavis.edu:443/main_frame.cfm

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[1] So as not to waken students’ skepticism, it might be best to omit the roots of the game they’re about to play . . .

Norman Towle: St. Petersburg's Henry Darger?

Note: I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art (like this!).  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

Last night I hit the opening of one of the more exciting and challenging gallery shows I've seen in a while. The show is at the Venture Compound, a D.I.Y. music and art space in St. Petersburg, FL, and the opening coincided with the 29th installation of the Pangaea Project, an ambitious noise/avante-garde series curated by the Venture group.  The art is by Norman Towle, who died recently at the age of 99.  The show is said to encompass 95% of the work Towle produced in his lifetime.

Knowing Towle's story is key to understanding why this apparently unassuming work is so interesting.  After spending time in the Merchant Marine, Towle attended a technical art institute, then spent several decades as a commercial art retoucher, largely working for the New York Times.  He retired to Florida, only after which, apparently, he actually began to produce art of his own.

And what art.  The works - over a hundred of them - cover everything from local St. Petersburg landscapes, portraits of public figures, nonspecific scenes of everything from dancing to ocean life, abstract works that include elements of collage, and a little bit of softcore pornography.  These are all rendered in a hand that can be described as inexpert, even clumsy.

But the whole body of work, and many of its individual pieces, are profoundly absorbing and multidimensional.  This interest isn't because the work is 'good' in any conventional sense, either technically or because it advances some coherent, self-conscious aesthetic or social message.  Towle falls in that troubled and weird category known with measured condescension as 'folk art' - works and artists whose interest derives from the unselfconsciousness of their process, which allows them to represent, at best, a set of truths as deep as those in more conventional 'high' art.


In Towle's work, as in those of so much folk art, those truths are dual-edged.  On the one hand, when we connect Towle's story to his work, we see the way that modern society can limit human possibility.  These paintings show a man with a profoundly foreshortened vision of life, someone attracted primarily to the most banal of public figures and the safest modes of existence.  There are numerous pictures here of 'beautiful' farmhouses, churches, golf courses, suburban homes, and parking lots (!), and dozens of portraits of presidents and film stars and singers and models. Towle, at least according to his paintings, saw the world exactly as NBC, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have wanted him to.

At the same time, the traces of his own life in Towle's paintings show, through no intent of the artist, what utter lies he was reproducing.  Just as his life fulfilling the commands of others seems to have left him with little ability to reflect critically on the culture around him, decades of touching up other people's images as part of a process that reduced art to nothing but another industrial, assembly-line product seems to have left Towle himself with an imperfect command of fundamental artistic principles of perspective, figure, and color.  His apparent naive reverence for Pope John Paul and suburban normality, filtered through the imperfections that this banal world imposed on his abilities, reveals the absurdity, beauty, and even brutality of modern 'everyday life.'

There's also something profoundly troubling about a man trained in 'art' who produced no work of his own until retiring from his career in the art world.  There's a particular piece here that captures that poignancy - a desolately kitsch landscape of a flower garden, which nonetheless stands out from the other paintings in its technical refinement.  This is apparently another artist's work that Towle gave a few small touch-ups . . . and then signed.  It's one of those instances where the unvarnished reality of folk art manages to convey the desperation and sadness of the human condition far more effectively than 'high' art.  Here and elsewhere, Towle's work, in its way, shows the darkness that lies beneath the facade of normality better than Francis Bacon's.
 

But Towle's work also shows the ability of people to transcend the limits imposed on them by society.  Every observation of Towle's technical limitations comes with the caveat that a great deal of this work was completed when he was in his 80s and 90s, with a hand that would have been unsteady for reasons having nothing to do with skill.  That he persevered at that age at producing any art at all is some kind of testament to human creative energy.  And there's a real joy to lot of the paintings,  something that could be seen as either childlike or just sincere.  It's particularly worth remembering that, as someone born in the early 1920s, who served in the military during the 1940s, Towle would have been close to enough darkness in his life that he might not have had much interest in reproducing it.  What looks to people my age like suburban banality and empty-headed celebrity culture may have been a fully justified retreat to psychic safety for those brutalized by world history and the machinations of social elites.

Actually Awesome Anarchism: Valve Software

Note: I now blog at Blownhorizonz.com.  It's much prettier to look at, and more focused on fun stuff like weird fiction, extreme music, and awesome art.  Also check out my Tumblr at blownhorizonz.tumblr.com.

In the semi-weekly discussion group run by the Tampa Anarchist Collective, we have several time broached the topic of examples of anarchistic ethics and practice that can be found in the world around us today - particularly those that don't explicitly declare themselves as such.  Many of these can be found in the world of software, particularly in the Open Source movement (file sharing communities are another one that has been thrown around, but I have some issues with that example as my views on copyright evolve).

Another sterling example has just come to my attention - Valve Software, probably the single most creative large video game studio in the world, is run on nonhierarchical syndicalist lines.  Projects are not assigned, but are created and spearheaded from the bottom up by self-constituted teams subject to flux.  There are even serious elements of communalism, as pay rates are at least in part based on a system of mutual value ratings.  You can read more about these practices at The Wall Street Journal and Develop Online.

The example does highlight a consistently emerging caveat - obviously, a software development company is generally staffed by people who are already highly trained, motivated, and disciplined.  And even within the company's own literature, there's an acknowledgment that when someone who doesn't fit that mold lands a job at the company, it can be disruptive and take some time to shake out.  Does this indicate that anarchism, for all its bottom-up rhetoric, works best at its highest level of institutional development when it's being used to organize the elite?  Regardless, it's yet another exciting sign that we're looking at the political philosophy of the 21st century.  Not only is it right - it works.

Regarding Workers

I took the above photo a couple of days after the 3.11 earthquake, mainly to illustrate the amazing speed with which Tokyo returned to everyday normality. The guy in the middle is just one subtype of an eternal Tokyo presence - the sidewalk promoter. He's giving out flyers (and probably tissue packages) to promote a contact lens shop, but you'll also see people doing much the same work in service of Italian restaurants, Karaoke boxes, manga kissaten, Korean barbecues, and hostess clubs (including the vile subspecies who harass passing young women to try and lure them into the sex industry).

I've lately been thinking about how little I understand the human element of a job like this. It's just one of a variety of undeniably crappy jobs you see people doing every day in a city like Tokyo, from fast-food server to Donki clerk to construction-site traffic-director.  The last time I worked a job of this sort was about a year ago, when I did short stints as a parking-lot attendant and line-cook as part of my confused attempts to deal with unexpected funding shortfalls in my last year of grad school.  Both were part-time jobs, and the line cook job was actually a hell of a lot of fun, but  I ended up quitting both jobs with no notice in moments of frustration and/or overwork.

I had that option, because I knew I was on my way to other things, but I was nonetheless able to hold onto some (facile, superficial) sense of solidarity with "workers," thanks to my cushioned, provisional version of poverty, and the genuinely merciless grind of grad school, in some ways undeniably more demanding and even exploitative than this sort of service job.

Now, though, I'm realizing how much that illusion of lived solidarity was insulating me from a real consideration of the challenges posed by living in a mercilessly stratified society.  Job-wise, I'm now living a ridiculous fantasy, which if not quite financially secure does happen to include total freedom.  I'm suddenly not sure how to feel about the legions of workers through whom I float, to whose daily struggle I find it more and more difficult to truly relate.

The 2011 Great Touhoku Earthquake: Civilization and Enlightenment Triumphant?

UPDATE: As the New Yorker has pointed out, early casualty estimates have turned out to be vastly short of reality.  This piece was written back when we still thought we'd dodged a bullet, and I'm going to let it stand as evidence of that moment.  More commentary on the process of unfolding knowledge, however, will be forthcoming.

Three days ago I lived through what has now been confirmed as one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history.  Luckily, I was a small but crucial distance from the epicenter, in Tokyo, but the ground here still rolled and tumbled in a way that even Japanese people had never felt before.  For the two or three minutes of the quake, I stood in the doorframe opening onto my porch, watching the tangle of power lines passing along the street sway crazily.  It seemed not just possible, but probable that one or more of the complicated systems that sustain this mass hive of human life would come crashing down, its shards spreading death and destruction.

Tokyo 1923

That didn’t happen – Tokyo stands now almost as if the quake never happened.  Just a few crumbled facades, quickly covered with neat tarps and scaffolding, remain to indicate what happened.  For the moment, we’ve been lucky – by the time it got to Tokyo, the quake was only about a 6.0 magnitude.  But there’s no guarantee that a quake of equal or greater magnitude won’t hit Tokyo more directly, within the next couple of days.  This means we could all be in a new, unpredictable situation with little or no warning.

But what exactly is that situation?  The last major Tokyo quake, the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923, struck a much different society.  Compare that quake, a magnitude 7.5 which killed between 100,000 and 140,000 people out of a regional population of 7 million, and the 1995 Kobe quake, a 6.8 in which 6,000 people died out of a total population of something like 1.5 million (That’s the 2006 census number, as I couldn’t quickly find data from the mid-1990s).  The earlier quake killed something like 2% of Tokyo’s population.  The latter, less than 1/10^th of 1% of Kobe’s. 

There are too many variables to make the comparison airtight, but it’s obvious that many things changed in the intervening years.   The New York Times did a good job of summing these up – they include training and preparedness, but most important of all is a dedication to buildings that can withstand major quakes.  For anyone who felt Friday’s quake, the fact that Tokyo is standing now is nothing short of a miracle – the way the earth kicked, it seemed like a power pole would have little chance to withstand it, much less a ten-story building.  Even since 1995, the government has stepped up regulations and pressure, which means that unless something pretty extreme hits Tokyo almost dead-on, the damage, while significant, is unlikely to be as cataclysmic as it was in 1923.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a fair amount about a fundamental question – is civilization itself a good or bad idea?  Much prodding has come from my (still pretty limited) reading of Jonathan Zerzan, a major figure in the movement of ‘green anarchists’ who advocate, very broadly, the reversion from advanced capitalism to some modified form of hunter-gatherer society.  As I sit here, waiting for a disastrous quake that could come at literally any second, I’m turning this idea over in my head, still unsure what the quake might make clear.  On the one hand, most of the risk of death in a quake comes from collapsing man-made structures.  More generally, we have built up such a complicated, crowded, and delicately balanced system that it is easier than ever for something like this to cause dramatic losses.  Think about what northern Japan would have been like on Friday if there were no factories, no buildings, and only a few thousand people - it’s clear there would have been nothing like the mass destruction we’ve witnessed.  Quite simply, the level of suffering would have been much, much lower.

Kobe 1995

But there is another way of looking at it, particularly if we shorten the time scale a bit.  Whether you’re talking about a feudal castle, a one-story hovel, or an early-modern brick train station, most of the structures humans have recently called home are horrendously prone to complete collapse in the face of a serious quake.  The past century has finally seen genuinely successful attempts to achieve some safety from this awesome force of nature.  This isn’t just a matter of buildings, either – we’re also now enmeshed in global networks that allow both communication and direct relief to flow into devastated areas.  This can’t save everyone, but it has already saved tens of thousands in the past few days.  And then there’s education –as the Times poignantly points out, many of the dead in the southeast Asian tsunamis of a few years ago were swept out to sea because they failed to evacuate to safety, even though they had plenty of time.  In Japan, evacuation was not complete, but it was still incredibly effective.

Obviously, we’re still far from secure (either on a day to day basis here in Tokyo, or on the larger scale of society as a whole), and it seems unlikely we ever really will be.  But it also seems undeniable that the large-scale organization of human beings, in an explicitly hierarchical way, has produced huge gains in our collective safety.  It’s also important to point out that this isn’t one of those situations where human beings are struggling to solve a problem that they themselves caused.  Tectonic activity is simply something the earth does, with or without our influence.  And while, all other things aside, the growing density of settlement makes the problem progressively worse, where do you draw that line?  Again, a primitive dwelling is at least as prone to kill its inhabitants as a more ‘civilized’ structure, as the comparison between Japan and Haiti makes tragically clear.

Sendai 2011

I’m sure that anarchists of all stripes have answers for what their ideas would mean for the long-term developments of science, of architecture, of organized education, and of communication and mutual support networks.  (And I don't mean to politicize this in some petty, short-term way - dealing with these real issues is why politics matter in the grandest possible sense, and I can't think of a more important time to talk about them).  But having (at least for now) lived through a true existential threat to one of the world’s great civilizations, I find myself comforted by the embrace of Enlightenment.  Maybe it’s the secular version of a deathbed conversion, but I would not have chosen to face the earthquake in a society less advanced, well-organized, and disciplined than Japan.

Plato on Music as a Threat to Order

I'm teaching Mladen Dolar's excellent book A Voice and Nothing More, and came across a passage that I had unforgivably forgotten, in which Dolar joins with Plato in laying out the fundamental reason I study music - because it has profound anti-authoritarian potential.  Remember, of course, that Plato himself is rather a Machiavellian apres la lettre.


A change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes.  For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions . . . it is here, then, I said, that our guardians must build their guardhouse and post of watch.

It is certain, he said, that this is the kind of lawlessness that easily insinuates itself unobserved.
Yes, said I, because it is supposed to be only a form of play and to work no harm.


Nor does it work any, he said, except that by gradual infiltration it softly overflows upon the characters and pursuits of men and from these issues forth grown greater to attack their business dealings, and from these relations it proceeds agains the laws and the constitution with wanton license, Socrates, till finally it overthrows all things public and private.  (Republic IV, 424c-e)


As Dolar demonstrates, the greatest risk of music comes (according to Plato) when it doesn't match the words, when its meanings are ambiguous or its tone feminine.  Plato elaborates on what follows unregulated music:

So the next stage of the journey toward liberty will be refusal to submit to the magistrates, and on this will follow emancipation from the authority and correction of parents and elders; then, as the goal of the race is approached, comes the effort to escape obedience to the law, and, when that goal is all but reached, contempt for oaths, for the plighted word, and all religion.  The spectacle of the Titanic nature of which our old legends speak is re-enacted; man returns to the old condition of a hell of unending misery. (Laws III, 701 b-c)


Right on, brother.  Right on.

Against Greatness: Tim Ferriss and the Ideology of Achievement

Two days ago I managed to grab the last copy of The 4-Hour Body on display at Kinokuniya in Shinjuku.  I can't lie - I'm a devoted follower of Ferriss, which started about two years ago when I adopted a simplified, catch-as-catch-can version of the "slow carb" diet that he endorsed on his blog.  By following the eminently sensible advice to cut white carbs almost entirely from my diet, I lost about fifteen pounds in something like three or four months.  I've since plateaued at a very respectable 181 lbs (at 5'11"), and I picked up the book in hopes of following some of the more detailed advice in it, and getting past that plateau. I'll be writing at least a little bit about that process at my other blog, Flexy Beast.

So, I'm a fan, and I believe in his program - I've seen for myself that at least part of it works.  But at the same time, I find myself questioning the whole premise of his project (I'm like that scorpion - it's in my nature).  Should we, as the tagline for the new book puts it, be interested in "becoming superhuman"? Achievement, excellence, and overcoming are the foundations of Ferriss' empire, in a very concrete sense -  his financial success was initially built on selling vitamins, which (true or not) promise miraculous personal advancement. His first book, "The 4-Hour Workweek," is intended to help you 'have it all' - to have both the money provided by a successful career, and the time to enjoy it.

In my own work and life, I constantly encounter people for whom this model simply doesn't hold.  Musicians, writers, artists, and activists have measures of success that don't map to how much you can deadlift or how much money you make.  Last week I talked with DJ Muta, the producer and turntablist for the group Juswanna, and he couldn't have been more explicit: "If your aim as a musician is just to make a living off your music, you're setting your sights too low.  I make music so I can help people, give them the inspiration to go out there and make it through their struggles.  That's the top of the mountain.  Money is only halfway up the mountain."  We were talking about this while sitting in the closet-sized space of his studio, which is actually the 'living room' of his tiny apartment in western Tokyo.  Muta, despite something that's probably closer to a 70-hour workweek, seems like a pretty happy guy.

But he wouldn't be considered a 'success' by Ferriss' standards, which, though they often remain implied, are only slight modifications on the Anthony Robbins "achieving greatness" vibe.  Though Ferriss clearly has a (narrow) creative streak, and a hunger for new experiences, what he doesn't seem to have much of is capacity for or interest in reflection, either on himself or on society.  Most obviously, he has no apparent use for art or culture.  More subtly, his entire approach to life - scheduled and strategized to the nth degree - leaves no room for real leisure, aimless laziness, even boredom, all of which actually leave the space for new things to emerge.

It's not surprising, then, that Ferriss' books are both bestsellers - he appeals directly to the way our culture already works, to the values of the ruling class, basically defined by the desire to both live a materially rich life (iPad in one hand, four-dollar latte in the other), and also to be "fulfilled," whether that means climbing mountains or doing aikido in your free time.  This "fulfillment" is rarely associated with, say, writing poetry or other creative pursuits, but instead by more quantifiable achievements - a fact Ferris has capitalized on, quantifying everything from his world-record in Tango to, in The 4-Hour Body, his utilitarian, mechanistic guide to the sex.

Now, like I said, I've drunk the kool-aid on much of this. There's a part of my brain that's very competitive, and I take pride in all of my accomplishments.  Particularly, I'm proud my current situation, which, while temporary, is a version of Ferriss' own globe-trotting lifestyle, earned by doing what I love (you can see even there how much I, like Ferriss, love not-so-subtly touting my own achievements).  Every success I have gives me a little jolt of endorphins - but as I get older, I've started to register just how quickly those doses wear off and every "achievement" begins to look like the new normal.  It takes something far more profound and deep than success to get to that most elusive achievement of all - happiness.  From reading Ferriss' book and seeing how he presents himself, he seems like a genuinely happy guy, and I'm sure that has fueled his success.

But I wonder what the relationship is between Ferriss' relentless achievement-orientation and his apparently genuine happiness.  In The 4-Hour Body, he explicitly lays out his belief that achievement leads to confidence and from there, to happiness.  But as others have pointed out, "achievement" can also become a framework for hilarious and pathetic self-delusion, and a distraction from the real substance of life.  I can't yet say I'm practicing this - I pulled a ten-hour workday yesterday, followed by yoga - but even as I pursue some of the tips Ferriss provides in 4HB, I also want to recommitt to indolence, to aimlessness, to self-abandonment.  I think they might be where the real joys of life lie.