529.10 It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think into the future, our thoughts jump backward. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree. The metaphysical law corresponds to the physical law of engineering that “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” — R. Buckminster Fuller, Synergetics, 1975
The Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in the sky above Florida approximately ninety seconds after launch on January 28, 1986, killing all seven crew members, including Christa McAuliffe, a civilian and teacher. I was eight years old at the time. Like many students around the country, I witnessed the event live on television at an all-school assembly. In my waning memory of the broadcast, I can still see McAuliffe’s mother in the audience on the ground at Cape Canaveral, head tilted back, one hand raised like a visor to block the sun from her eyes. I remember her suspended in that static, whiplashed salute for what seemed like a long time after the rocket bearing her adult daughter toward outer space disintegrated in a stringy cloud of smoke and debris.
My own mother, an aerospace engineer, had been working for several years on the programming of the digital controller for the shuttle’s main engine. She picked me up early from school that day, then spent the rest of the afternoon crying intermittently, covering her face with both hands, while our television replayed the tragic event ad infinitum.
The Rogers Commission investigation into the causes of the disaster ended the following summer by assigning blame to the faulty design of an O-ring in the solid rocket booster, and, moreover, to the managerial culture of nasa, which it found to have stifled safety concerns voiced by shuttle engineers. As part of its general campaign to secure funding and political support, nasa’s leadership had greatly deflated the probability for loss of life on a shuttle mission to 1 in 100,000 against engineers’ estimates of 1 in 100. Physicist Richard Feynman was blunt in the appendix he wrote to accompany the investigation’s report. “What is the cause of management’s fantastic faith in the machinery?” he asked, concluding pointedly, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”1
Investigators had discovered that even within the parameters of aviation engineering, with its highly specific criteria for safety certification, a “slow shift towards a decreasing safety factor” occurred as myriad, seemingly sustainable compromises to facts and standards accrued—compromises that individually served the immediate interests of some aspect of a system, without consideration for the larger interests of the whole.2 Gradually, crucial distinctions between license and deviance in representing reality were obscured and redrawn.
I grew up awash with promotional images, posters, and other souvenirs of space exploration. My mother had facilitated the scrapbooking of a slew of commemorative patches and postcards punctuated by newspaper articles reporting every shuttle launch. Our collection included an autographed publicity photo of a curly-haired, broadly smiling Ms. McAuliffe in her official nasa-issue blue flight suit, extracted from the glossy folio of educational material nasa distributed in the hundreds of thousands to schools across the country, anticipating the launch, which was to have been the first of a series of shuttle missions to carry non-professional astronaut-teachers into space. Jones Valley Elementary School, where I was a student, had been following the Challenger mission particularly closely, because my hometown was a hub for Space Shuttle development, and many students’ parents were employed by the local aerospace industry. Though I was aware at the time of the Challenger catastrophe that my own mother was somehow involved, I would not infer until years later that her somber reaction to the event had something to do with a feeling of personal responsibility. Following the tragedy, the shuttle program was suspended for thirty-two months. During that time, previously undetected cancers rapidly metastasized throughout my mother’s body. Three months after diagnosis, she died abruptly at age forty-five in the fall of 1987, as I was starting fifth grade.
The call for systemic reform issued by Feynman in the Rogers Commission report was not heeded. In February 2003, the Space Shuttle Columbia and its crew of seven astronauts perished during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere as a consequence of damage sustained to the vehicle’s external fuel tank during launch. Again, the official investigation into the underlying causes of the disaster revealed that nasa’s management had long suppressed engineers’ safety concerns. Again, significant risks were foreseen. Again, those risks were not addressed. Feynman, who died in 1988, was not around to issue a refrain against the triumph of public relations over reality.
In Feynman’s terms, the Challenger tragedy, like Columbia’s fate years later, serves as a cautionary tale against the miscalibration of collective intelligence. On one end of the dial is measured, critical inquiry—a systematic process characterized by sustained doubt, in which evidentiary observations are collected, from which conclusions may be drawn, facts ratified, and further objects of inquiry subsequently identified. On the other, is raw belief—the deeply held, slowly knotted complex of mores, opinions, predilections, and taboos that largely determine the meanings and affiliations of our lives. The spectrum of personal and political possibilities for individuals in any society, and for entire populations in turn, unfolds through the ongoing process of negotiation between these two modes. Both constitute powerful cultural forces, not entirely separable, as each contributes, like nasa management and engineers, to enabling and delimiting the other’s weight and scope.
502.22 Among the irreversible succession of self-regenerative human events are experiences, intuitions, speculations, experiments, discoveries, and productions. Because experience always alters previous experience, the process is both irreversible and non-identically repetitive.
Last fall, as news of the global economic meltdown emerged, an announcement was made that the Space Shuttle program would be terminated in 2010. U.S. astronauts would—until 2015—travel to space on the Russian Soyuz, at which point nasa is set to reinitiate manned flights with a new program called Constellation.
Some weeks before that announcement, I happened to visit the Dymaxion Study Center, a temporary reading room installed as part of an exhibition on the life and work of engineer, inventor, and unlikely countercultural icon Buckminster Fuller, who is best known for patenting and popularizing the geodesic dome as a livable residential structure. The shelves of the study center were stacked with books Fuller had owned or written. Notes, photographs, and sketches reproduced from his personal archive lined the walls, providing a thumbnail timeline of the evolution of his more salient ideas. I spent a few afternoons there, browsing Synergetics—Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking,3 an expansive, multi-volume tome commonly referred to as the Synergetics Dictionary. The book is a compendium of Fuller’s mind, arranged axiomatically, in numbered sequence. Matters under his consideration included time, space, and thought—the phenomena of experience. The clarity of the book’s organization paired with the breadth of its contents create the impression that one might find inside concise answers to thousands of complex questions, but I was more affected by the poetic obliquity of Fuller’s language than by its precision. Not all his ideas were scientific, they just looked that way on a page, because he presented them in the visual syntax of instruction manuals. He was as much a dreamer, moral philosopher, and artist as he was an engineer.
I transcribed selections from the book onto index cards, which I carried with me over the following weeks, hoping to assimilate Fuller’s ideas by reviewing the cards during subway commutes and other idle moments. The relationship between past and future as he conceived it is flexible, to be navigated via mental exertion. His version of time is less like the classical, linear concept that most of us still take for granted, more like the elastic concept that only a few quantum physicists seem to grasp, wherein “time” as we commonly know it is no longer practicable. But Fuller said so much about time, much of it fuzzy and contradictory, that it’s not possible to distill his view into postulates. I used my homemade flash cards instead the way other people use the tarot—as provocations to upend basic assumptions and generate novel trains of thought, or simply to inspire better fantasies about what I might do with my own time, and how. Of course, that meant I was using my time to fantasize about not being in it. Feynman insisted that nasa owed it to citizens to be “frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.”4 Fuller, too, conceived of political progress as hewn through public discourse. His vision of a sustainable future society was small ‘d’ democratic, premised on mass cooperation among individuals driving decision-making from the bottom-up. He famously asked how we might “make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone,”5 thus bringing ethical matters of purpose and process explicitly to bear on the goals of technological development, which he anticipated would result from mass collaboration. Yet he was also a showman, notorious for lecturing hours on end, until the last audience member finally left the auditorium. And he was preternaturally skilled at self-promotion—he self-published his early writings using a mimeograph machine, then steadily cultivated attention for his ideas through social connections in the art and media worlds, who invited his participation in exhibitions, public events, publications, and other channels, attracting ever larger audiences. His talents for branding and visual communication can’t be uncoupled from his roles as inventor and eco-conscious gadfly. Feynman concluded that public relations cannot fool nature, but few in the business of seeking attention would dispute that good stories effectively told do focus public interest and sway public opinion. After all, the bald opposition Feynman drew between public relations and reality resonated largely because of his own celebrity, itself a consequence of both his profound contributions to theoretical physics and his immense personal charisma—which begs the question of how exactly one draws the line between acceptable persuasion and unacceptable manipulation, whether as a renowned advocate for scientific method and critical thinking, like Fuller and Feynman both were, a middle-manager at nasa, an elementary school teacher, a writer, or simply someone recounting an anecdote to a stranger at a party. In 1928, when Buckminster Fuller was thirty-three, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, published Propaganda, a short, deceptively modest book on the titular subject that Bernays was uniquely qualified to write, since he was by then already the most sought-after public relations advisor in the U.S., though his career was only budding, like the field itself. Bernays begins,
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power. We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind.6
In Bernays’ assessment, influential ideas originate at the top of the social power structure among elites who push their influence down onto the general population. He pioneered, with great success, the application of psychoanalytic insights about motivation and belief for the express purpose of influencing mass opinion and consumer behavior on behalf of the business and government leaders who were his clients. Today he is perhaps most notorious among critics for having aggressively influenced the U.S. government under President Eisenhower some two decades after Propaganda, to intervene militarily in Guatemala on behalf of United Fruit Company (ufc) to overthrow the democratically elected liberal reform government there in order to preserve ufc’s hold on the exploitative fruit growing and picking industry by which it dominated the country and the region. He succeeded at the expense of democracy in Guatemala and decades of U.S.-backed authoritarian oppression, precipitating a series of civil wars from which the Guatemalan people have yet to recover. However, Bernays considered his work a vital service to society:
In theory, every citizen makes up his mind on public questions and matters of private conduct. In practice, if all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political, and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to come to a conclusion about anything. … In theory, everybody buys the best and cheapest commodities offered him on the market. In practice, if everyone went around pricing, and chemically tasting before purchasing, the dozens of soaps or fabrics or brands of bread which are for sale, economic life would be hopelessly jammed. To avoid such confusion, society consents to have its choice narrowed to ideas and objects brought to its attention through propaganda of all kinds. There is consequently a vast and continuous effort going on to capture our minds in the interest of some policy or commodity or idea.7
Bernays conceived of two clearly distinguished social classes: producers and consumers. Informed producers generate policies, commodities, and ideas, which relatively uninformed consumers then choose to accept or reject, depending on how effectively their desires are manipulated. This simplified, mechanistic view of political engagement (conflated with consumption) contrasts starkly with Feynman’s wise citizenry and Fuller’s image of “spontaneous cooperation” in collective problem-solving.
Bernays’ concept of the “cooperation” necessary for a “smoothly functioning society” in fact boils down to individual obedience and mass conformity. Fuller was concerned with exactly the same issues, but he considered the conditioned predisposition to conform an obstacle to overcome, not a goal to achieve. He attributed the undesirable inhibition of humankind’s innate acuity and creativity to prevailing systems of social organization, which prioritized “weaponry to livingry,” and which he also deemed uneconomical and ecologically destructive. Fuller thought he could help reform social systems at large by encouraging scientific attitudes toward problem-solving in individuals. Bernays accepted these systems as inevitable, and focused his energy instead on orchestrating top-down effects. While Fuller saw all of humanity as his constituency, Bernays considered his to be the small population of “men we have never heard of ” who “control the public mind.” He took for granted that an elite leadership class directs public opinion and political activity according to their own judgments and objectives. The purpose of propaganda (a word Bernays hoped to rescue from its negative connotations) was to maximize economic and political power for that class, his clientele, by creating, shaping, and controlling information available to the public, from whose submission power would be derived. For his part, Bernays believed he held a high ethical standard and did not deliberately work to bring harm, but he evidently subscribed to a very different concept of humanity than did Fuller and Feynman, who, despite their exceptional intellectual capacities, professed ultimate trust in the collective reasoning and decision-making ability of ordinary people. They shared a democratic worldview, indicated by their expectations that, en masse, adequately informed people can and will cooperate to make wise (even the “wisest”) decisions. In contrast, Bernays deemed purposeful manipulation of mass opinion necessary, because decision-making responsibility in complex societies inevitably falls to elites, and the masses must therefore be brought along and tended like a flock (or derided and exploited like a herd). Bernays’ perspective presupposes domination and subjugation as the core dynamic of human relations. This orientation is fundamentally autocratic—it presumes a fundamental truth about an unmovable human nature.
The difference between the persuasion of a Fuller or a Feynman and the manipulation of a Bernays isn’t only or even necessarily a matter of tactics, though it is often that, too. Underlying their opposing methods are opposing beliefs about the order of human relations (egalitarian v. domineering) and respectively opposed ethical dispositions (democratic v. autocratic). As the writings and life’s work of all three men illustrate, different moral beliefs about human nature and social order will result in markedly different visions of just societies and different principles for justifiable action.
509.30 You cannot program the unknowns you are looking for because they are the relationship connections and not the things.
My mother came of age at the very onset of the Space Race, before the first satellite missile was sent into outer space. Sputnik was launched in October 1957, during her last year of high school. The Soviets tested their first hydrogen bomb a few days later. The nation was seized by fear and shock at the unexpected technical prowess of their Soviet nemesis. Competition with the Soviets over space exploration, particularly the goal of sending a man to the moon, soon became a national obsession. Students across the country joined model rocket clubs. But President Eisenhower, who was simultaneously overseeing the desegregation of Little Rock High School, and was positioned to know the true status of the U.S. missile defense program, expressed more concern over public concern than over the threat of Soviet attack. As David Callahan and Fred Greenstein write in Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership, “What startled Eisenhower far more than the advance in Soviet rocketry was the intensity of public concern. Sputnik was not true proof of a Soviet advantage in icbm development, but it appeared to be—and this idea was terrifying to many in the United States.”8 The first satellite did little more than beep, but it proved highly effective as propaganda.
A mere six-and-a-half years after Sputnik, in spring of 1964, my mother finished graduate studies in mathematics and went to work as a rocket scientist. She was twenty-two. She had been a successful intern at nasa while she was still a student. After graduation, she declined the relatively unskilled secretarial job they offered her. She went to work instead in the Simulations Lab of Computer Sciences Corporation (csc), creating digital and hybrid simulations of components of the Apollo program, including the Saturn V booster, which launched the Apollo Spacecraft; the Lunar Module, which carried the three-man Apollo crew and ultimately landed on the surface of the moon; and the Lunar Excursion Module (or “Moon Buggy”). At csc, she met my father. Later, when my mother worked for Rocketdyne (then a division of Rockwell), she was the lead engineer involved in reprogramming the Motorola 68000 processor to replace the Honeywell computer originally used as the Space Shuttle Main Engine (ssme) controller. (This same 68000 processor family, which subsequently powered Macintosh computers and unix-based workstations until the introduction of the ibm power pc processors in the late 1990s, is still in use today, thirty years after its introduction.) The ssme controller project occupied the last years of her life.
Growing up in the 1980s, my sense of the space program emitted as much from pop culture as from direct, daily exposure to the projected self-image of the defense industry, which was the lifeblood of my hometown. The Disney World theme park in Florida had opened its iconic Epcot Center in 1982, the year before Fuller’s death. Epcot, an acronym for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, consists of an enormous geodesic structure called Spaceship Earth, apparently a reference to Fuller’s well-known 1969 book, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, though Fuller is not credited at Epcot, and perhaps rightly—the exhibit is a wholesale usurpation of Fuller’s design concepts superimposed with an immersive brand environment for the park’s corporate sponsors, which have included Exxon, Nestlé, ge, gm, MetLife, Hewlett Packard, at&t, and Siemens, among others. Fuller’s conviction that the systematic decentralization of power is necessary to foster ingenuity doesn’t square with the corporate branding of the same at Epcot. Substantively, the Epcot concept was informed less by the Synergetics Dictionary than by the World’s Fair of 1939, for which Bernays had been publicity director. At the time, several prominent scientists associated with the Fair publicly opposed its deliberate channeling of scientific wonderment into the presentation of consumer goods, but together they proved unsuccessful in their attempts to steer the exhibition.9 Instead, the fair told its 44 million visitors the story of how science and enterprise partner to bring good things to life for consumers all over the world, just as Epcot later would.
I visited Epcot with my family in the summer following the Challenger explosion. Inside the geodesic sphere is an amusement ride based on the history of communications technology, from the inception of language, through the current day, into the imagined future. The Spaceship Earth ride has been rebuilt several times to keep pace with changing historical interpretations, but the basic conceit persists—that of traveling through time to observe civilization progressing in tandem with developments in communications technologies. I remember some scenes from the ride, though my recollections are conflated with memories of the movie Tron, a Disney feature released the same year that Spaceship Earth opened. Tron, one of the first movies to combine live action with extensive use of computer-generated special effects, involves a computer programmer who becomes trapped inside of a video game, from which he must battle his way back to freedom against a malevolent artificial intelligence. Both Spaceship Earth and Tron are spectacular, Day-Glo laden narratives propelled, in turn, by enthusiasms and fears about new technologies.
529.11 The future is not linear. Time is wavilinear. Experience is expansive, omnidirectionally including and refining the future. … It is both a subjective “now” and an objective “now”; a forward-looking now and a backward-looking now which combine synergetically as one complete “now.” Because every action has both a reaction and a resultant, every now must have both a fading past and a dawning future.
When Synergetics was published in 1975, my mother was thirty-four and had by then already been living for some time in the North Alabama town where I would be born, two years later. The local civic center, also inaugurated in 1975, boasted a white arena structure reminiscent of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek. The city commemorated its opening with the premier of a commissioned symphony, Galileo Galilei. In recent years, a retired Space Shuttle has been placed on view outside the local aerospace museum, and decommissioned rockets, including a Saturn V, are positioned upright as monuments among the trees next to the elevated i-565 highway connector that marks the city limits to anyone entering town from the main interstate. But despite a superficial similarity between my mother’s adopted home and the internationalist, technophilic spirit of Epcot, the future vision underpinning the cultural narrative of our city was far from utopian. Whereas both Epcot’s and Buckminster Fuller’s future-stories were predicated on technological solutions that would benefit humanity, whether through consumer goods (Epcot) or more efficient resource allocation (Fuller), the local economy of my hometown was driven by the defense industry, populated by engineers tasked with weapons development, and generally oriented toward ominous probabilities. Here, the Space Shuttle program lived a double-life as both a flagship for the expansion of scientific frontiers and a public relations decoy for the expanding military-industrial complex. This world channeled Tron as much as Spaceship Earth, though, in reality, it wasn’t all that much like either.
The architecture of a well-known church built during the city’s heyday between the late 1960s and 1980s, conveys the local ethos. Its façade resembles New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts with a stark arcade stretching from the ground to the building’s full height, but the wall behind the arches of the church is entirely covered by an intricate mosaic that melds Christian awe with the modern promise of space exploration and a specter of violence. Here, the figure of Jesus, arms outstretched, appears to ascend through the cosmos, surrounded by radiant orange and yellow orbs, like a magical astronaut or a speeding missile. The silhouette of the freestanding, sculptural church steeple, built of unpainted, galvanized steel, closely resembles the Saturn V rocket, developed a few miles away. Nowhere has fantastic faith in machinery been rendered more explicit. Even still, as a child I failed to register the obvious allusions to galactic bodies in the mosaic of Christ or the suggestion of Jesus as space explorer. Nor did the implications of these analogies consciously occur to me. An affinity between a transcendent God and government-sponsored space exploration—not to mention its sustaining partner, the aerospace defense industry—was apparently so mundane, so unremarkable, as to have been invisible to observers like myself. Yet only a generation earlier, during my mother’s youth, the novel political and extraterrestrial concerns of the postwar era first displaced a fervent religious culture in the South, where church was until then the primary institution of authority permeating rural family and social life.
Before the 1960s, the small city in the southern foothills of the Appalachian Mountains where the church still stands was known primarily for its downtown neighborhood of intact antebellum houses. The place had been fixed on nostalgia for its bleached and glorified past until preeminent Nazi rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, whom the American government had imported along with his valuable colleagues at the end of the war, descended upon it, switching public focus to the glorified future. Here, Dr. von Braun led nasa at the Marshall Space Flight Center during the development of the Saturn and Apollo programs, in the initial boom period of the burgeoning aerospace industry. During his twenty-year tenure, the local Chamber of Commerce saw fit to supply this quiet, suburban town with the moniker “The Rocket City,” whose slogan was “The sky is not the limit.” At the height of his fame, von Braun was satirized in a popular song by comedic entertainer Tom Lehrer, “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? / ‘That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.”10 The aforementioned civic center bears his name.
512.01 Mechanically and chemically, a steerable rocket embraces a complex of internal and external energy event transactions and omni-interacting, resultant ‘motions’ in Universe transcendental to earth motions, where the observer-articulator is extraterrestially positioned. Since the earth is moving as a dependent motion-complex in respect to the Sun’s and other planets’ motions, and since the Sun is engaged in a plurality of internal and external motions in respect to the galactic system, and since the galactic system is a complex of motions in respect to other galaxies and supergalaxies, and so on, and since the whole set of motion events are nonsimultaneous and of uniquely variant durations, and since the intereffects of the events vary vastly in respect to eons of time, it is obvious that any thinkably meaningful conceptual coordination of event interrelationships in the meager lifetime limits of humans is inherently limited to a relatively local set within universe and within a time sense, and the relationships may be measured only in respect to the angle and frequency magnitude characteristics of any one subsystem of the totality.
My mother was born four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, in 1941, in rural St. Clair County, Alabama, like her mother and her mother before her. Two years earlier, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, documenting the lives of tenant farmers living in nearby Hale County. During a childhood that I imagine against the backdrop of Evans’ photographs, a childhood typical of the preindustrial, agrarian south, my mother spent her first years laboring on the family’s small farm, harvesting turnip greens. She was born in a house without plumbing, and at age nine, around 1950, helped to build the family’s first bathroom. That she would be employed in the fledgling space program only a few years later is testament to the radical cultural transformations that occurred between the 1940s and the 1960s. The possibility emerged then for people whose parents were barely literate to migrate from subsistence farms to astrionics labs. In my mother’s case, this trajectory would likely have been fueled as much by native intelligence and determination to escape the oppression endemic to hardscrabble farm life, as by the cultural ambience of nationalistic zeal and fear. The shadow of World War II, the looming Soviet threat, and the national ambition to dominate the Space Race would have provided precocious Alabama schoolgirls with fodder for both.
My mother’s father was a farmer and logger. During the war, he worked as a ship welder. I remember him as a stern man, whose facial features I could hardly discern, so camouflaged were they in the creased and mottled texture of skin thickened and scarred by decades of physical labor, sun exposure, and abstinence from expressions of joy or tenderness. He had come from the hills. In the shorthand of his culture, this meant he came from a poor and barren place compared to the lush farmlands of the valley. His own father had indeed been a sharecropper, which is local dialect for “tenant farmer,” which is modern dialect for “peasant.” My grandfather belligerently opposed my mother’s ambitions, adamant that college was no place for modest women, though his descriptors were hardly so polite. When she announced that she had received a scholarship and would enroll, he flew into a spitting rage, called her a whore, and threatened banishment. That is, he found the prospect of his daughter studying mathematics and engineering personally humiliating. On her mother’s side, my mother’s family was dominated by another patriarch no more supportive of women’s liberation. My great-grandfather notoriously displayed a fistful of his wife’s hair on the mantel to remind his family—and warn anyone else who might enter the house—of the violence to befall those who would test his authority. He was the seventh son of a seventh son, reputed by nature of this fact to possess otherwise inexplicable powers of insight, influence, and healing, including the ability to divine underground sources of water; to subdue menacing animals through mere presence of mind; and to cure babies of the thrush by miraculous means. Cruel and charismatic, he established a Baptist church and a successful dairy farm. Sputnik was not his concern.
502.23 Since experience is finite, it can be stored, studied, directed and turned with conscious effort to human advantage. This means that evolution pivots on the conscious, selective use of cumulative human experience and not on Darwin’s hypothesis of chance adaptation to survival nor on his assumption of evolution independent of individual will and design.
I recall my mother as disinclined to extremes of emotional expression herself—unless reserve and psychosomatic illness qualify as emotional expression, in which case she was exceedingly demonstrative. I attribute her stoicism to mettle developed through years lived in steadfast, albeit tacit defiance of the normative pressures of culture, class, and gender, but I can only speculate about her thoughts and feelings. I know she had chosen, as a young person, to leave behind the rural mores of her upbringing to pursue an education that had been beyond the reach or interest of her family or her ancestors. She had chosen, as a young woman, to enter a field of study and, soon after, a profession that was and remains significantly male-dominated. She made these unorthodox choices in the late 1950s, in the Deep South, in a cultural milieu in which codes of propriety had historically discouraged and devalued intellectual curiosity, especially in women. That these options existed for my mother was a function of a national cultural embrace of public education and technological innovation wed to the clear political ambition to spread democracy and capitalism while suppressing the opposition force of Soviet socialism. Mass media had by then achieved a sufficient degree of public saturation such that, even in the agrarian south, the prior dependence for ideological foundation on the institutions of one’s home and local community was effectively supplanted by whatever information arrived via the new communications technologies of television and radio.
Over the course of four-and-a-half decades between 1941 and 1987, my mother’s life was adapted directly to the major political transformations of the postwar period. As her moves from farm to school to lab, from relative poverty to relative affluence, from a culture defined by family to one defined by professionalism, and from the providence of religion to that of science attest, the fields of sociopolitical possibility and personal choice are mutually determined. John Dewey described the relationship in his 1939 essay, “Science and Free Culture”: “The assumption that desires are rigidly fixed is not one on its face consistent with the history of man’s progress from savagery through barbarism to even the present defective state of civilization. If knowledge, even of the most authenticated kind, cannot influence desires and aims, if it cannot determine what is of value and what is not, the future outlook as to formation of desires is depressing.”11 That is, our desires are culturally determined and therefore historically contingent. Particular historical circumstances, including access to information and knowledge, give rise to particular conceptions of self, and vice versa. The fundamental truth about human nature is mutability, not a predisposition toward domination and subjugation per se.
530.03 The parents tell the child he cannot have both the sun and the moon in the picture at the same time. The child says that you can. The child has the ability to coordinate nonsimultanaeity. The parents have lost the ability to coordinate nonsimultanaeity. One of our great limitations is our tendency to look only at the static picture, the one confrontation.
When I was perhaps nine years old, not long after the Challenger explosion, I heard about the principle of Mutual Assured Destruction (mad), the strategy of nuclear containment in which aggression between adversaries is deterred by each side’s fear of retaliation. I was shocked then to learn that the nuclear armory of the United States alone could destroy the world many times over. Any child could see this was dangerous. That was the point, after all. I raised the question with my mother, whose rationale I must have found unconvincing, since even today I remain inconsolable over this issue. I had not grasped yet, at that earlier age, that my own parents’ employment was directly related to the worrisome matter, and so, too, our household economy and personal well-being. I would later learn that the accepted strategy for maintaining peaceful equilibrium among heavily armed nation-states is in fact based upon a mathematical model of human behavior that excludes the probability of either irrational choices or cooperation.
One needn’t be a propagandist, as Bernays was, nor a scientist or teacher, as Feynman, Fuller, and Dewey were, to grasp that our conceptions of reality are malleable, and that what most of us think about any given subject on any given day is more readily susceptible to our ever-changing feelings and concerns than to our fledgling scientific reasoning. Businesses and government organizations the world-over spend billions of dollars per year on marketing, public relations specialists, and in-house communications departments, attempting to convince audiences of serviceable truths, mainly through charm and intimidation, rather than rational argument. If the methods weren’t effective, presumably they would be abandoned. Yet, the concept of subjecthood underlying the logic of mad posits hyperrational adversaries thinking systematically about how to maximize individual self-interest.
“Rational choice theory,” the result of research conducted at the rand Corporation by mathematician John Nash and others, rests upon models of predictable, fundamentally invariable norms of human behavior unmediated by historical contingencies. Equilibrium in this system, itself derived from game theory, is achieved when, given knowledge of other players’ strategies, no player stands to gain by changing his or her own strategy. In 1949, experimental testing of (female) secretaries at rand determined, “The main lesson from this limited experiment is that the social relationship between the subjects can have a controlling influence on their choices.”12 The secretaries did not act rationally, according to the theory. Instead, they chose to assume each other’s cooperation in sharing a sum of money, which resulted in each participant attaining half of the given sum, whereas Nash’s theory predicted results of a 2:1 split. Further testing of a “non-cooperative pair” showed a similar empirical incongruence with predicted outcomes.
In a press conference conducted in the wake of Sputnik, Eisenhower responded astutely to the military pressure to dramatically increase defense development, which was amplified by widespread public fears of Soviet attack. He explained, “I am always a little bit amazed about this business of catching up. What you want is enough, a thing that is adequate. A deterrent has no added power, once it has become completely adequate, for compelling the respect of any potential opponent for your deterrent and, therefore, to make him act prudently.”13 Nevertheless, it was the idea of Nash equilibrium that prevailed as the Cold War strategy to ensure political sovereignty and deter nuclear war via maximal increase in nuclear armament, on the assumption that opponents would likewise be bent on political domination by amassing destructive means. Looking back decades later with apparent regret, Nash admitted he had been suffering from undiagnosed paranoid schizophrenia at the time he developed his influential theory.14
Though the U.S. and Russia have signed several arms reduction treaties in recent decades, following the end of the Cold War, and neither country has tested a nuclear weapon since 1990 (Soviet Union) or 1992 (U.S.), the arms race now shows signs of resurgence. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Georgia this summer, Poland agreed to host an American missile defense base. It is either ironic or fitting, depending on how one spins the issue, that the site on the Baltic Sea where Russian President Dmitry Medvedev plans to install short-range nuclear-capable missiles to counteract the planned expansion of the U.S. missile-defense program in Poland is Kaliningrad. Now part of Russia, Kaliningrad—formerly Königsberg, East Prussia—is the birthplace of Immanuel Kant and his categorical imperative, “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”15 Kant presumed a markedly different conception of human being than did Nash. But, then, Kant lived in a time before technologies of mass destruction changed the stakes for conflict irresolution. Upon signing the agreement with Poland, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice offered the assurance that “Missile defense, of course, is aimed at no one.”16 Incidentally, Ms. Rice is also a native of Alabama, and was a member of the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford from 1981 to 1986, now renamed the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Edward Bernays would no doubt appreciate the wordsmithing.
509.10 The thinking process results in varying degrees of lucidity of the arrayed residue of focal-event patterns uniquely consequent to the disciplined deferment of irrelevancies. Thinking is a putting-aside, rather than a putting-in, discipline. Thinking is fm—frequency modulation—for it results in the tuning out of irrelevancies (static) as a result of definitive resolution of the exclusively tuned-in or accepted feedback messages’ pattern differentiability. And as the exploring navigator picks his channel between the look-out-detected rocks, the intellect picks its way between irrelevancies of feedback messages. Static and irrelevancies are the same.
Recently, as I was defrosting my antiquated refrigerator, news of the global economic meltdown emerged, along with an announcement that the Space Shuttle program might not be terminated in 2010, after all—rather, old shuttles would be retinkered for continued use, considering the resurgent conflict with Russia and the corollary unlikelihood that U.S. astronauts would be permitted to travel on the Russian Soyuz. As chunks of ice dropped from the roof of my freezer to the kitchen floor, I was reminded that today the world’s glaciers are melting into the sea at a rate roughly two times faster than in 1975, when Synergetics was published.
Four years after Fuller’s book hit the shelves, President Jimmy Carter delivered his infamous Crisis of Confidence speech. He suggested that the root causes of the nation’s disillusionment would not be ameliorated by the empty promise of material consumption. Concurrently, Fuller determined that humanity had achieved a degree of technological sophistication such that selfishness no longer made sense. I was taking my first steps around that time, now thirty years ago, as Carter recommended that Americans “face the truth,” “reduce consumption,” and “increase conservation,” or suffer the consequences, including “chaos,” “immobility,” and “failure.”17 Carter was pilloried in the court of public opinion. Seasoned movie actor Ronald Reagan was elected President on a platform of supply-side economic reform, winning in a landslide. Fuller was temporarily forgotten, his more palatable ideas coopted and rebranded by Disney. The mainstream sense of foreboding was reversed. Confidence was restored, with the result that thirty years after Carter’s speech, sometime proximate to the defrosting of my refrigerator, the future has arrived, according to an ersatz plan of short-term gain over long-term viability based upon diametrically opposed models of human behavior—as either hyper-rational or wholly irrational—championed by media savants operating on a principle of cynicism toward the public sphere.
Have we underestimated ourselves?
I can never know with certainty how my mother perceived the arc of social and technological progress in her lifetime. Nor can I know whether she was conflicted by the complex political contingencies inherent in her work, the work for which she had taken a great leap of faith as a young person. I do know that, while our family wasn’t religious, my mother had occasionally attended a Methodist church in the years preceding her death. The pastor of that church visited our house in my mother’s final weeks, leaving behind two books on agnosticism. I suspect, therefore, that she retained doubts about the delineation of faith and reason.
101.01 Synergy means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.
In its original form, this essay appeared in the 18th issue of Dot Dot Dot (2000–10), a literary-leaning arts and graphic design journal, published in its later years (2006–10) by Dexter Sinister—stage name of artist-designers Stuart Bertolotti-Bailey and David Reinfurt, with whom I worked in close and frequent collaboration from 2008–18. The essay was proposed by David during a long email conversation departing from the earthrise cover of The Whole Earth Catalog, in which I described a documentary I would have liked to make about the town where I grew up, and David asked, “Why don’t you just write it?” The possibility of writing as an end in itself hadn’t occurred to me before then, although I was evidently a few thousand words deep into an epistolary edition already. Months later, a first draft emerged, along with the epiphany that writing is less a matter of putting to paper whatever one has been thinking than of learning what one thinks by writing. Also: publications produce writers as surely as writers produce publications. The essay has been revised and expanded for this book, but may never be finished. “The Sky Is Not The Limit,” from Dot Dot Dot, 18 (New York: Dexter Sinister, 2009), 58–67.