Bruce Sterling on 'prepper graveyards', death and a 'poetic priest-warrior gangster chieftain'

At the Well, Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky engage in this year's version of their now-traditional 'State of the World conversation/rantfest'.

It's a lengthy conversation (to which more than the two named hosts contribute), but, as in previous years, I find it one of the more readable contributions to the inevitable round of year-end musings.

Sterling, for example, cites a few of the groups that he sees as having had -- all in all -- a good year. You might be surprised (given other verdicts) to find that he includes the Tea Party among these.

I'm not sure that he's right, but I find his reasoning worth considering:

It's always "the worse, the better" with these Trotsky-style fanatics. Every failure, rejection and common-sense setback galvanizes them to new extremes of faith-based ideological weirdness. As someone who hangs out in Europe, I'm used to bizarre political movements, but the Tea Party is truly impressively strange by anybody's standards. Acidheads have had more coherent thinking than these Creationist Randite gold-bar-eating pro-coal zillionaire market fundie people. They lost the American election, but winning one and governing a superpower never seemed to be on their agenda. That hasn't discouraged them, though. They've got ladder notches and fallback positions all the way to the prepper graveyard.

Sterling, who lives in Belgrade, also raises some thoughtful points about what he sees as the differences between 'civil society' and 'social capital':

The Balkans has always been pretty low on "civil society," because most political decisions are made in smoke-filled rooms by angry drunk guys. But in terms of "social capital" they're quite keen on looking after one another. The populace is very polite and considerate, by American standards. Hold-ups, muggings, drive-bys, gang rapes, maniacal outbursts by guys with automatic weapons, they're all practically unheard-of.

The feeling on the streets of Belgrade is vastly calmer and cozier than, say, Los Angeles. By the standards of Belgrade, you'd think that LA was a para-militarized civil war zone, even though LA has got "civil society" like nobody's business.

He also makes some interesting points about death:

I lost a favorite uncle this holiday season. He was elderly and frail, and he had a good life -- a remarkably jolly character, really, the life of many a party -- so it's not a tragic loss, but I find that the grief touches everything I see.

Grief is a worldview all its own. Grief gives reality a lunar glow. It's healthy to be placed in touch with the tragic side of life, the losses that make life's value so clear. It's like winter daylight.

My uncle wouldn't want me to be all upset about his passing, and to tell the truth I'm not "upset," but I am diminished. Changes in the state of the world are marked by absences as well as by novelties. The year 2013 will be the first year of my life that does not contain my uncle.

It'll be different.

Finally, in the course of the discussion, someone brings up the idea of art as a (socially) transformative activity; Sterling admits admiring the 'very bohemian approach' and 'cool notion' of the artist as this 'the mental-liberationist Greek trickster figure who steals most of his material', but he sees it nevertheless as limiting, which inspires some thoughts on Montenegrin literature:

That's why I enjoy art such as Petar Njegos' epic of early Montenegrin literature, "The Mountain Wreath."
http://www.rastko.rs/knjizevnost/umetnicka/njegos/mountain_wreath.html

Here we've got this very intelligent and determined hillbilly aristocrat, a poetic priest-warrior gangster chieftain, out of a half-forgotten province of the Ottoman Empire. His people are pre-literate; he's one of the first to read and write his own language.

This poem, the "Mountain Wreath," is mostly about tribal patriarchs flying into a righteous rage and cutting each other's heads off. It's very like the Iliad in that way; it's full of noble perorations that are mostly along the line of, "Rascal, you've done something unbearable for years now, and I was constrained to get involved in this awful mess you've created; but this time it's personal. So, prepare yourself: I'm taking your head, your pistols, your horses and all your women, and I may even burn your farm." In the context of this artwork, it's certainly the right thing to do. It's the definitive thing to do; it's how you know you're alive.

Then you compare that artwork -- written by an aristocrat, an authority figure in deadly moral earnest -- to this kind of ontological-trickster writing, this kind of "What is Reality, Mr Njegos," postmodern gendankenexperiment, of which me and my sci-fi colleagues are so enduringly fond... Well, keen as I am to write that stuff, it can seem like pretty thin soup.'

And...

Brian Aldiss once told me that science fiction was full of guys who would write about Martians without ever visiting Indonesia. But visiting Indonesia is one thing -- if you actually *hang out* within Indonesia, you *become* Indonesian. You don't visit it, or steal it, you are it.

You have to get past the stark fact that Njegos is an Ottoman Christian-sect hillbilly on horseback who knocks people down with spiked clubs and cuts their heads off as trophies. He is, but he's also a great poet. Njegos even has a wry sense of humor; it's just not what Americans would consider "wry" or even "humor." When you understand his jokes, when you know they're genuinely funny, that's a bigger mental yoga-stretch than we're supposed to allow ourselves within the USA; it makes a "galaxy far far away" look like a Hollywood backlot in Southern California. Which is what it is, pretty much.

Science fiction triple feature

I've been in a science fiction state of mind recently, which is perhaps why I was particularly struck by a few things I ran across in the last day or so.

First, there was a lot in author Charles Stross's discussion of 'world building' (part of a series) that reminded me of my own efforts at 'past reconstructing': i.e. how closely related efforts to understand the past and predict the future can be. (Even if the problem of 'unknown unknowns' plays a rather different role in each case.) (Thanks to Chris W. for pointing me to Stross's excellent blog!)

Second, another 'future building' track brought me to SF author Bruce Sterling, some of whose novels I've liked for many years now (such as Islands in the Net or Holy Fire).

Sterling downplays both his blog and, by implication, his 'State of the World' discussions at The Well, as being 'rambling, open-ended, eclectic blather'.

Without being utterly inaccurate, however, this description does insufficient justice to Sterling's ability to write things that are well-phrased, insightful and funny all at the same time.

For instance, I like his summary (at the Well discussion) of what he sees as the key society-shaping factors of the coming century, i.e., demographics and climate change. The mid-century world, he quips, is going to be dominated by 'old people in big cities who are afraid of the sky.'

Or put another way: 'Futurity means metropolitan people with small families in a weather crisis.' Also quite good, but not nearly as memorable.

Of course, there are other visions of futurity to be dealt with, such as those of right-wing talk radio hosts, the People's Republic of China and Cyberculture ('Smartphones! They make the Silicon Valley of the 1980s look like the railroads of the 1880s!').

In Sterling's summary of what he sees as the sorry state of 'fringe beliefs about the future', I am embarrassed to discover an apparently well-known fringe group of which I had never heard: the 'chemtrail' conspiracy theorists. (Sterling: ' These guys are pitiable loons, but they're interesting harbingers of a future when even scientific illiterates are deathly afraid of the sky.')

I have to admit more sympathy for two other fringe beliefs that Sterling observes seem to have disappeared a bit:

Space Travel people.  Visible mostly by their absence nowadays.  About the only ones left are nutcase one-percenters of a certain generation, with money to burn on their private space yachts.  This was such a huge narrative of the consensus future, for such a long time, that it's really interesting to see it die in public.   There's no popular understanding of why space cities don't work, though if you told them they'd have to spend the rest of their lives in the fuselage of a 747 at 30,000 feet, they'd be like "Gosh that's terrible."

Transcendant spiritual drug enthusiasts.  People consume unbelievable amounts of narcotics nowadays, but there used to be gentle, unworldly characters who genuinely thought this practice was good for you, and would give you marijuana and psychedelics because they were convinced they were doing you a big, life-changing favor.

You go into one of those medical marijuana dispensaries nowadays, they're like huckster chiropractors, basically.  The whole ethical-free-spirit surround of the psychedelic dreamtime is gone. It's like the tie-dyed guys toking up in the ashram have been replaced by the carcasses of 12,000 slaughtered Mexicans.

Finally, Sterling -- who spends a lot of time in Italy and Serbia -- offers two interesting perspectives of these countries' views of future change based upon his experiences in each.

With regard to the Italians' views of 'Europe':

The Italian version of "Europe" is different from other people's versions of "Europe," mostly because "Europe" is so much better-governed than Italy.  If Italy hadn't founded the European Union, Italy wouldn't be allowed into it now, because Italy's too decadent and ramshackle to live up to the standards.  So, every once in a while some kind of cold European economic/political breeze will ooze over the Alps; and Italians rarely complain; on the contrary, they're grateful for it and hope for better.  Like, maybe "Europe" will somehow dispell the "Crisis" without Italians having to do much of anything, and wow, that would be great.

With regard to the Serbians' views of Russia:

Serbia's fantasy version of Russia is like nobody else's conception of Russia; most everybody else thinks of Russia as some half-blind, yellow-fanged ursine creature bristling with rusty nuclear weapons, while for Serbia, Russia is a fluffy angelic-winged flying bear to be depicted in stained-glass windows in a cloud of Orthodox incense. Tremendous emotional energy is invested in imagining that Russia will somehow show up and set everything to rights someday,even though Russia has never really done that anywhere for anybody.

Third, and finally, at 21C magazine there is quite a good discussion of J. G. Ballard among Sterling, V. Vale and (our friend) Simon Sellars. (Who also has an essay in the Ballard collection I noted here recently.)

This is by no means new, but I failed to mention it at the time and ran across it quite by chance again yesterday. 

Sterling again:

You’re not suicidal if you understand J.G. Ballard. On the contrary,this guy’s a consummate survivor. Burroughs and his friends and the beatnik movement had a tremendous casualty list, whereas Ballard and his friends in the British New Wave movement and the Pop Art scene were actually fairly solid, well-balanced if unconventional individuals – people with jobs and children, they were not reedy figures. This is a towering oak tree of a writer, who wrote many volumes of consistently good, accomplished work.

This reminded me a little bit of some similar comments on this blog that we offered a few years ago now on the occasion of Ballard's death.

OK, enough 'open-ended eclectic blather for one evening, methinks.