kubilai khan's four elephants

A few years ago, I kind of stumbled into earning a living by teaching history at a junior college. My lessons tend to have grand, portentous titles like “The History of Western Civilization” or “Twentieth Century World History,” but they’re actually rather silly, cobbled together affairs. What I do is delineate very simplified historical narratives to longsuffering students whose enthusiasm for history, and bookish learning in general, is moderate at best. We get along though, because they’re nice kids mostly, and I’m quite ducky and patient and clever and funny. To their relief, I really don’t expect much of them in terms of academic engagement: I feel no particular drive to preach a kerygma of high-cultural fluency that, in any case, would be perceived by them as merely alien and irrelevant. So instead, like a ham (but a pedagogical one), I strive to be entertaining, and I present Mesopotamia, and the Greeks, and so on, in a kind of spirited didactic tap-dance, with lots illustrative anecdotes and “fun facts” about this Pharaoh or that Empress, like bold tabloid headlines: “Fat Kubilai Khan Went Hunting On Platform Born By Four Elephants!” or “Slutty Theodora From Family Of Circus Performers — Worked As Prostitute Before Reigning Over Byzantine Empire!” I suppose I’m trying to use memorable characters like beacons in the night of my students’ nonchalant ignorance… As a joke, on occasion, I give out little stickers to people who volunteer to answer questions. After a long slog through Mercantilism or the Black Death or whatever, I sometimes break out into song (“Don't be mad once you see that he want it! If you liked it then you should've put a ring on it…”), or perhaps recite some William Blake, or decree “mental breaks” to talk about amusing animals like tarsiers, or giraffes, or boogie-woogie birds of paradise. I show pictures and offer intriguing factoids: “Do you know how a giraffe holds its head up all day without getting tired?” Or I mime what a pug’s reverse sneeze might look like. And then, abruptly, I go right back to the treaty of Versailles. It’s a rather good show, as far as it goes. Part stand-up comedy, part “happening,” and part well-meaning instructional pap.

Almost none of my students read books at all, and they have only the vaguest, most perfunctory notions about the past: Hitler was very bad… There were mummies in Egypt… One girl once earnestly asked me at the end of a profitable semester: So who came first Julius Caesar or Napoleon? Because for her, as for most of my students, neither are persons residing in a structured, coherent human reality that she can recognize as in any way congruent to her own; their names don’t even have the abstract value of signs associated with a an acknowledged “high culture” in relation to which she might position herself; instead, they are merely foreign, extraneous flotsam that she can negligently stuff, higgledy-piggledy, along with whatever other educational debris she happens to stagger across, in a largish metaphorical box marked “school shit.” More recently, it transpired that a bewildered boy could not complete an assignment because he just didn’t know that, conveniently, you could locate books by their call numbers in the library. Now, these are young people in their late teens and early twenties, sometimes quite intelligent, mostly from middle-class backgrounds, and heading for university — not nitwits, or the helpless products of blighted ghettos. They are not technically illiterate, of course: they can read and write — if, for the most part, with a rather limited proficiency. Their literacy is shaky simply because the culture they’ve acquired consists almost entirely of a haphazard mishmash of television, trashy pop music, advertizing, “social media,” and, as an anthropological twist pertinent to my own school in particular: whatever usually rather macho and conservative values they have imbibed from their family’s exotic native folkways. Indeed, most of my students are first or second generation immigrants to Canada — many from strongly patriarchal societies. This, as well as the fact that English is sometimes their second or third language, no doubt adds to the disconnection they must feel to whatever I’m babbling about — but, in truth, the native English-speaking students are no more engaged. I find that most of my pupils are quite shiftless intellectually, and that they all share a fidgety propensity to cultivate perpetual distraction.

Of course, much of this is the result of the ubiquitous contemporary technological pollution of everyday life: the myriad hypnotic screens soliciting your attention; the thin, exciting music blaring in your ears while you unmindfully hurry up to get to where you’re going (or perhaps clamoring from an obnoxious dolt’s mobile phone speaker, on the bus); plethoric incoming text-messages that demand to be checked willy-nilly mid-conversation, and, like an itch, call for an immediate response; callow video game fantasies of mayhem; solipsistic pornographic dreams; hysterical public shaming perpetrated at a distance and anonymously; status updates and tweets and Instagram pictures of your lunch; Tinder (or Grinder) pictures of your cock. And, in the midst of all that noise, there’s also the whole involved business of fitting in, and of friends, and romantic relationships, and cigarettes, and having all the right symbols of status and generational communion. But I don’t think the problem is just teenage agitation in the context of a crass technologically induced philistinism. In the introduction to The Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm’s marvelously lucid history of the “short twentieth century,” he wrote that:

At the end of this century it has for the first time become possible to see what a world may be like in which the past, including the past in the present, has lost its role, in which the old maps and charts which guided human beings, singly and collectively, through life no longer represent the landscape through which we move, the sea on which we sail. In which we do not know where our journey is taking us, or even ought to take us.

I feel that my millennial students’ broadly shared aimlessness and inarticulate ineptitude betray that much deeper perplexity which Hobsbawm is referring to, and which seems to have afflicted all “advanced” societies for the past several decades. Like the kids in my classes, we all feel ourselves mired, as if in suspension, in a kind of bewildering, fragmented, amorphous, a-historical present. Hobsbawm again:

[…] in some ways the most disturbing, is the disintegration of the old patterns of human social relationships, and with it, incidentally, the snapping of the links between generations, that is to say, between past and present. This has been particularly in the most developed countries of the western version of capitalism, in which the values of an absolute a-social individualism have been dominant, both in official and unofficial ideologies, though those who hold them often deplore their social consequences. Nevertheless, the tendencies were to be found elsewhere, reinforced by the erosion of traditional societies and religions, as well as by the destruction, or autodestruction, of the societies of ‘real socialism.’

So the world has become, in many ways, quite “illegible” to most people. The traditional framing narratives offered by religion have long been abandoned or devitalized — or they’ve been distorted and monstrously transformed by shotgun weddings to foreign and much more recent revolutionary ideologies (as in the case of militant Islamism). In a real sense, we seem to have lost our way. The sheer confounding pace and radical scope of historical change since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution — a steady acceleration punctuated with dramatic, violent lurches of increasingly global consequence — seem to have broken our compass. Most recently, we witnessed the communist block crumble under its own weight in the late eighties and early nineties, opening the path for the quite obscene and hubristic ecumenical triumph of neo-liberal market fundamentalism, but this too is now shaken by the ongoing financial crisis, and the calamitous handling of it by governments and the grimly obstinate international organs of plutocratic and anti-democratic reaction (IMF, World Bank, European Commission…). In his own age of confounding upheavals, Nietzsche had already identified the alarming trend:

For a long time now our whole civilization has been driving, with a tortured intensity growing from decade to decade, as if towards a catastrophe: restlessly, violently, tempestuously, like a mighty river desiring the end of its journey, without pausing to reflect, indeed fearful of reflection.

            Most of us seem to be at least diffusely aware of such a sinister evolution: that we’re being played for fools and victimized; that the system is perverse and broken; that the gross inequalities swelling once again between rich and poor are scandalous, noisome, and unendurable. We’re in fact persuaded that these injustices should somehow be remedied: "Somebody better do something!" But more, we’re freaked out about global warming and dead pandas and the irreparable degradation we’re causing to the environment; we’re convinced that the politicians who so casually pretend to represent us, far from contributing solutions, are, for the most part, merely craven blackguards, unimaginative fools, crooks, scoundrels — the minnows and puppets of the extravagantly wealthy. We perceive that a corrupt, ubiquitous media, largely instrumentalized by these same vested interests, lies to us, or at least tends to distort and obfuscate factual reality as a matter of course to manipulate us and exploit our sluggish credulity. But alarmed, angry, and disgusted as we might feel, overall we find ourselves quite powerless to mobilize our defiance in a way that’s more than merely reactive and rambling. We are lost, and bereft even of the flimsy security blanket of prayer when we behold a pale horse and its dread rider. Notwithstanding the valiant and meritorious activism of some, we struggle to form enduring organized mass movements, which might articulate programs aiming to resist, to overcome, to tear asunder, to replace the system’s present deleterious configuration.

            I feel that out difficulty isn’t solely organizational or conjunctural, but that it stems from the forlorn intimation that, unlike our optimistic forebears of the Enlightenment, who so earnestly believed in progress and the perfectibility of humankind, we are condemned to fumble through an anomic fog. We are stymied by the anxious, paralyzing conviction, which so many of us seem to share, that everything we can say about the social world is always to some degree divorced from authentic veracity; that it is equivalent to any other such statement anybody else might make; that, as a rule, our relationship to this elusive social world might itself be incoherent; that values are slippery and impermanent; that words are empty shells, clumsily chanelling bursts of affect rather than transpicuous meaning; that abiding by the prescription of the young Wittgenstein, to pass over in silence what we cannot speak about, is intollerably frightening and that we must instead at all cost attempt to drown it in discursive noise; that, in our unsteady so-called “post-modern” era, as in the mind-bending physics of relativity, there can exist no absolute frame of reference for our disquiet hearts to find certainty and solace. The idea that no ideology or single set of values may usefully or perhaps legitimately be endorsed to represent and structure society appears to have debilitated our collective capacity to imagine a positive future to aspire to. The neo-liberal right itself still clings to the hope that it can definitively naturalize its own peculiar fetishism of free markets in the collective imagination, but in the face of our corrosive epistemological moment, as well as overwhelming historical confutation, even it has failed — although, since the representatives of this cult still hold most of the institutional levers of power, they can probably continue to pretend they have succeeded for quite a while still. It seems that the “truth,” at least in terms of some sort of broad social consensus reality, has become deeply problematic, making it all the more arduous to get our bearings. Undoubtedly, elites have long relied on the “noble lie” of Plato to keep the hoi polloi in check, but now the anomie is such that even the keepers and promoters of such lies can’t seem to help falling under their own mendacious spell — leading to the particularly toxic brew of confusion, denial, bad faith, manipulation, incoherence, terminal mediocrity, and desperate, impermeable fanaticism that so characterizes contemporary politics and the attitude of the global elites. As a byproduct, I suspect it also significantly contributes to the kind of listless disengagement and nurtured ignorance that I’m confronted with every day at school, but which my students share with broad sections of the public in countries like Canada.

            In a memorable short film, Adam Curtis — that inspired virtuoso of the ironic audiovisual collage as a device to highlight penetrating analysis — points out a fascinating illustration of how this post-modern mental bric-a-brac of reticence and befuddlement can actually be actively exploited by sufficiently shrewd and cynical political actors to wield power. In the film, he presents Vladislav Surkov, who was one of Vladimir Putin’s closest acolytes in Russia, and one of the main architects of the so-called "managed democracy" that has characterized Putin's regime. Surkov's contribution was to propose the generation of a stupefying, elusive, kaleidoscopic political “reality” for the Russian people thanks to an elaborate operation of political theatre. It consisted in conjuring up artificial "grassroots" pro-Putin nationalist movements like Nashi on the one hand, while on the other, also funding all sorts of opposition groups — a constantly evolving mix, which included neo-Nazis as well as progressives. The point of this rather surprising (limited) support for opposition groups by an authoritarian regime wasn't, of course, to foster pluralism and political choice, but rather to muddy the waters, as it were, and to make it very difficult for the public to discern what was actually going on. But the weird and brilliant final twist was that none of this was done in secret, quite on the contrary: Surkov publicly flouted and acknowledged his manipulations. According to Curtis, this strategy is really the application of practices inspired from contemporary conceptual art to politics: since no single discourse plausibly describes the world in its entirety anymore, such descriptions must be multiplied and left to coexist, no matter how contradictory, or even internally incoherent they might seem. Unlike in the age of innocence that preceded our muddled, anxious times, it seems that meaningfully singling out one narrative as "the truth" to the exclusion of all the others is impossible. Things are happening — bad things surely, a crisis... But we all remain hypnotized, wrong-footed, mired in the fractured mindset the authorities assiduously strive to cultivate in us with their bewildering stories, which are neither clearly truthful nor indubitably mendacious. And so we remain consternated and befuddled, but, most importantly, impotent witnesses, who can only say "Oh dear!" while the people pulling the strings are able to have their way, unseen, untouched, unrecognized. In a way, this reminds me of the strategy that the famous Palo Alto polymath Gregory Bateson proposed to the US army during the Second World War to secure its signals communications. Coding messages was useful obviously, but codes could be broken, and there were only so many Navajo “code talkers” to go around, so Bateson remarked that a good approach might be to drown the signal in an ocean of noise — in other words, to send not one message, but a profusion of them, all at once, with only the recipient able to distinguish the valid one. So the message, like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, would simply be hiding in plain sight.
            In any event, what Curtis then argues is that such manipulations are in fact also at work in advanced liberal democracies, like the UK. People in authority assure the public that the economy is picking up — but actually wages are down and unemployment is up. They explain that austerity budgets are a necessity to cut the deficit — but the deficit keeps growing, and in fact, through "quantitative easing," huge amounts of public funds are being transferred into the pockets of the very richest individuals. British soldiers are back from the Afghan war — but it’s quite unclear what the results of this conflict were, and what it was all for. The public is offered no linear explanations, only a profusion of sound bites — and things just don't seem to add up. Governments are doubling down on absurd and unpopular neo-liberal economic policies, which ought to have been utterly discredited by the present ongoing crisis — but, on the contrary, we are told in patronizing tones by the self-appointed grown-ups, the right honorable people in charge, that there is no other choice. Even the most dim-witted of citizens can't help but suspect that they are being steered into the rocks, and yet there are no stirrings of revolution, only quiet desperation, or alternatively, a frantic search for the vulnerable scapegoats provided by racism and xenophobia. Of course, here or in the UK, there probably doesn’t actually exist a self-conscious conspiracy of sinister men called Dr. Evil perhaps or Cobra Commander, or even Vladislav Surkov, meeting in darkened rooms to weave their webs of deceit. There are no Illuminati. But there are corrupted governments and ruling classes completely divorced from the people they are meant to represent. There is a capture and subversion of democratic systems by shockingly avid, ruthless oligarchies, with the complicity of their henchmen in the media and the professional classes. But although the public might have intimations of this, might in fact be confusedly outraged, or furious, or exasperated, nevertheless, no discourse coherently articulating the road to an alternative reality has yet captured the mainstream; no groove yet channels the collective discontent. For now, it is still unclear what to do and where to go.

            I certainly don’t have any straightforward, unequivocal answers. I'm not active politically, and for now at least, what I feel I'm able to contribute is merely to strive to reestablish, in myself and (to some very limited extent) in my pupils, some sort of articulate coherence in our apprehension of the world — a vital sense of continuity between the present and the pregnant sediment of our shared experience. At the beginning of my little history classes, I usually try to connect the history of civilization with the much longer span of natural history, to give my students a sense of the relative scale of things, and the idea that we can adopt a perspective outside the scope of our familiar everyday understanding. I start by asking them what the age of the universe is, and sometimes I get the right answer (or anyways, within an order of magnitude…); then I ask them how old the earth is, and then how long it has supported life (congratulations are in order for all the correct answers naturally, but also for valiant guesses). I then ask how long humans just like us have been around. Once this has been established, conjuring the spirit of a young Nijinski, I stretch out my arm with dramatic flair and announce that it represents “the staggering and in fact scarcely fathomable interval of three and a half billion years of life on earth” — and then, with my free hand, after a solemn pause, I mime filing away the tip of my outstretched fingernail. On the spot, I bombastically exclaim that I have just wiped out the whole of human history! This always elicits a very gratifying reaction. After these theatrics, I usually transition more soberly to discussing what “civilization” might mean for a while, and then ask whether anyone knows why living next to horses is preferable to living next to zebras…  And I go on to tell them about Jared Diamond’s theory of geographical determinism: that the reason why certain people ended up establishing complex settled societies, mastering advanced technologies, and generally having lots of stuff, while others did not, had nothing much to do with any innate superiority of certain groups over others but everything to do with the physical environments they evolved in — the availability of domesticable plants and animals, and a group’s cultural and epidemiological connection to or isolation from other human groups. (Though at this point, I’m momentarily possessed by the infuriated ghost of some Kipling-loving Victorian colonial officer, who heatedly corrects me in the snottiest of Eton drawls, by reminding me of “the white man’s burden,” before I can curtly dismiss this retrogressive apparition and recover my composure…) It’s quite fun to go through this routine, and the students love it, mostly, or anyways those who are not too hopelessly obtuse and sullen — but I’m not sure they actually end up getting anything out of it except a passing diversion. I suppose what trying to do, in my own small way, is to combat not only their basic ignorance, but also to help them shake off the broader socially conditioned discombobulation they are laboring under by presenting the broadest historical context with which to frame their lives, and hopefully sparking some sort of insight. But it often feels like I’m writing with water, if indeed with a bold flourish.

            To be honest, I’m actually not that bothered by what my students get or don’t get out of my lectures. I suppose it’s up to them, really. In terms of this whole teaching thing, I feel more like a stranded tourist making the best of it than like an earnestly conscientious professional. I do try to be quite engaging and to make “the material” interesting, but for me, as long as I get on reasonably well with the kids (I do), and I can give my lessons freely, with little effort and even less supervision (I can); as long as I collect a decent wage (bah!), and have enough leisure and energy left over for art and writing and friends and clumsily chasing women and yoga and dining in cheap restaurants (blessed are those who hunger for chicken koobideh…), I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content. But more positively, giving these classes has been a wonderful incitement for me to read a lot of history and anthropology and economics, and to think about these things in an active, engaged manner — to hoist myself out of the murky vagueness of a “dogmatic slumber” I had let myself wallow in. Since adolescence, I had nurtured quite a broad and deep artistic and literary culture, and I had also acquired some grounding in psychology, philosophy, and the natural sciences. But in many ways I remained quite a naïve person, and to this day, my experience of life has been rather confined. I grew up very sheltered, but also curious, open-minded and bookish; I’ve always been interested in people, and strongly, if diffidently drawn to them — despite a terribly inhibiting timidity, as well as a certain natural pessimism about my fellow man. As a dashing clever brittle young man, I had a strong tendency to assume the existence of psychological explanations for everything, because I was good at reading people and imagining what they might be thinking; this led me to grossly overestimate the contribution and influence of individuals in society, and systematically to underestimate the extent to which broader social and material structures determined their lives and actions — simply because I either wasn’t aware of the existence of these structures, or if I was, because I didn’t understand them. But like a lot of people, the ongoing economic slump and the pernicious policies systematically attacking the weal and welfare of people like me, which it brought out into the open, served to sharpen my focus — to pose social life and the way ideas spread and power operates as the central issues one needs to elucidate. So now, following my own readings, I lard the official curriculum not only with my needy buffoonery, but also with bits and pieces of the progressive social consciousness I’ve myself so belatedly acquired. Just Marxist rudiments really, with a dash of David Graeber and a smidge of Emmanuel Todd and perhaps a pinch of Freud and Michel Foucault and (why not?) Spinoza or Kurt Gödel on fancy occasions: but mostly class struggle, and the brutal, pitiless clash within settled civilization of the happy few who inherit the earth and the shabby many who seem fated for a quite while still to pine in vain for the great VIP room in the sky, where the last shall be first, and the organizers do serve fantastic canapés. I notice now that a good deal of my intellectual effort of the past few years, such as it is, has been to arm myself in some way against the ambient confusion and deliberate misinformation that makes it so difficult to grasp what’s going on — and perhaps more importantly, to figure out what to do about it. A lot of the time, I suppose I’m addressing myself when I teach my students. Or rather, I seem to be using this captive audience as a contrivance to clarify my own understanding. No doubt fatuously, I like to think of whatever enlightenment they happen to pick up in the process as merely a happy maieutic side effect, but one that nonetheless richly justifies my emoluments.

            Boiled down, for those of you unhappily deprived of my tuition, my pitch goes something like this: people are complex and contradictory, and whoever tries to feed you simplistic, reductive explanations for intricate realities is probably either a fool or a villain — or perhaps both. Ideas, like waves in the ocean, take on a life of their own, and societies are traversed by them. Our rationality is bounded, our lucidity imperfect. Misunderstanding and noise are fundamental features of communication. These things must be accounted for. Individual men and women can be fascinating, so they should be examined with interest, critical discernment, and compassion, but all the while keeping in mind that what determines the outcomes of historical processes are broader, more diffuse collective movements: the flood of conjunctural interactions, of internal and external contending forces and factors, straining, twining, surging, merging to compose the open, complex, nonlinear system we call society, whose emergent nature is certainly more than the mere sum of its parts. Geography is perhaps the most crucial of these factors, because it determines both our natural evolution as a species and the reach of our material culture. People in the past understood and related to the world in a very different way to how we do now, and to understand them, as well as our relationship to them, a tremendous effort of research, erudition, and of the imagination is required. But this effort is worth making because contemporary values, ideas, attitudes, ideological preferences all largely stem from the more or less distant past — and, more profoundly, from a kind of slow-unfolding anthropological substrate of collective experience, such as the often long bygone or “fossilized” but nevertheless still vitally influential multifarious traditional configurations of the family. In countless ways, we are still bound and determined by the past. Such was the vision, the knowledge, the wisdom, the science, the light that arose in me concerning things not heard before. Life is beautiful and transient. The mighty Kubilai Khan himself, ruler of all under heaven, who rode four elephants into battle, could not hold on to it forever. So try not to worry too much. And don’t wrestle with bears. Be kind to one another. Resist taking yourself too seriously. Maybe read a book once in a while… A big one.