2312

Pauline on revolution

Swan accompanied the inoculants back to Mercury in the first transport available, which was a terrarium only partly finished. At the moment it was impossible to tell what it would become, as it was an empty cylinder of air with rock walls, a sunline, and a spindly jungle gym of framing struts, bolted onto concrete plugs in the raw rock of the interior wall. Swan stared at the people around her in the immense steel frame of the skyscraper, none of them known to her, and realized it had been a mistake to take this flight—not as bad as the blackliner, but bad. On the other hand, considerations of convenience seemed trivial to her now. She walked up flight after flight of metal stairs to get onto the open rooftop of the skyscraper, which was almost touching the sunline. From the low-g roof she could look down—out—up. Everywhere it was a heavily shadowed cylindrical space, crisscrossed with struts, floored by bare rock. The building was like a single lit corner in a castle of sublime immensity; the ground at the foot of the skyscraper was several kilometers below, the ground on the far side of the sunline only a bit farther away. A Gothic ruin, with some poor mice people huddled around the warmth of a final candle. It had not been like this in the early days, when a newly hollowed cylinder was the very shape and image of possibility. That her youth had come to this—that the whole of civilization was really something like this, badly planned, incomplete—

Swan hooked her elbows over the rail to get some stability in the low g. She put her chin on her crossed hands and, still regarding the scene, said, “Pauline, tell me about revolution.”

“At what length?”

“Go on for a short while.”

“ ‘Revolution,’ from the Latin revolutio, ‘a turn around.’ Refers often to a quick change in political power, frequently achieved by violent means. Connotation of a successful class-based revolt from below.”

“Causes?”

“Causes for revolution are attributed sometimes to psychological factors, like unhappiness and frustration; sometimes to sociological factors, especially a systemic standing inequity in distribution of physical and cultural goods; or to biological factors, in that groups will fight over allocation of limited necessities.”

“Aren’t these different aspects of the same thing?” Swan said.

“It is a multidisciplinary field.”

“Give me some examples,” Swan said. “Name the most famous.”

“The English Civil War, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Taiping Rebellion, the Russian Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, the Iranian Revolution, the Martian Revolution, the revolt of the Saturn League—”

“Stop,” Swan said. “Tell me why they happen.”

“Studies have failed to explain why they happen. There are no historical laws. Rapid shifts of political power have occurred without violence, suggesting that revolution, reform, and repression are all descriptors too broad in definition to aid in causal analyses.”

“Come on,” Swan objected. “Don’t be chicken! Someone has to have said something you can quote. Or even try thinking for yourself!”

“That’s hard, given your insufficient programming. You sound like you are interested in what some have called the ‘great revolutions,’ because of their major transformations of economic power, social structures, and political changes, especially constitutional changes. Or perhaps you are interested in social revolutions, referring to massive changes in a society’s worldview and technology. Thus for instance the Upper Paleolithic revolution, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the sexual revolution, the biotech revolution, the Accelerando as a confluence of revolutions, the space diaspora, the gender revolution, the longevity revolution, and so on.”

“Indeed. What about success? Can you list necessary and sufficient conditions for a revolution to succeed?”

“Historical events are usually too overdetermined to describe in the causal terminology from logic that you enter into when you use the phrase ‘necessary and sufficient.’ ”

“But try.”

“Historians speak of critical masses of popular frustration, weakened central authority, loss of hegemony—”

“Meaning?”

“ ‘Hegemony’ means one group dominating others without exerting sheer force, something more like a paradigm that creates unnoticed consent to a hierarchy of power. If the paradigm comes to be questioned, especially in situations of material want, loss of hegemony can occur nonlinearly, starting revolutions so rapid there is not time for more than symbolic violence, as in the 1989 velvet, quiet, silk, and singing revolutions.”

“There was a singing revolution?”

“The Baltic states Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania called their 1989 withdrawal from the Soviet Union the singing revolutions, referring to the behavior of the demonstrators in the city plazas. That brings up a point: people in physical masses seem to matter. If enough of the population takes to the streets in mass demonstrations, governments have no good defense. ‘They must dismiss the people and elect another one,’ as Brecht said. That being impossible, they often fall. Or a civil war begins.”

“Surely the literature on revolutions can’t be this superficial,” Swan said. “You’re just quoting random stuff! You have a mind like the rings of Saturn, a million miles wide and an inch deep.”

“Catachresis and antiquated measurement units indicate irony or sarcasm. Coming from you, probably sarcasm—”

“She said sarcastically! You search engine you.”

“A quantum walk is a random walk by definition. Please upgrade my program anytime you feel you can. I’ve heard Wang’s other algorithm is good. Some principles of generalization would be useful.”

“Go on about reasons revolutions happen.”

“People adhere to ideas that explain and offer psychological compensation for their position in the class system of their time. People either increase their sense of dispossession by clarifying it, or they try to dismiss it as unimportant because of an ideology that justifies their dispossession as part of a larger project. People thus very often act against their own interests as the result of ideologies they hold which justify their subalternity to themselves. Denial and hope both play a hand in this. These compensatory ideologies are part of the hegemonic influence over subject peoples in an imperial situation. It happens in all class systems, meaning all cultures in recorded history, since the first agrarian and urban civilizations.”

“They’ve all been class systems?”

“There might have been classless societies before the Neolithic agricultural revolution, but the record makes our understanding of those cultures very speculative. All we can say for sure is that in the post–ice age agricultural revolution, which was one of those more general revolutions that took perhaps a thousand years, a division into classes was institutionalized as a state power apparatus. All over the world, and independent of others, there emerged a four-level division into priests, warriors, artisans, and farmers. Often they were all under the rule of what everyone agreed was a sacred monarch, a king that was also a god. This was very useful for the priest and warrior classes, and for the power of men over women and children.”

“So, never a classless society.”

“Supposedly classless societies have been instituted after certain revolutions, but there are usually leaders in these that quickly form a new ruling class, and the various social roles taken by citizens of the post-revolutionary state revert to classes because of differential value given to different social roles, leading to a new hierarchy being constructed fairly rapidly, usually within five years.”

“So all cultures in history have had class systems.”

“It is sometimes asserted that Mars is now a classless society with a complete horizontalization of economic and political power throughout the population.”

“But Mars itself is a bully now. In the total system they’re like an upper class.”

“People have said the same thing about the Mondragon.”

“And we see how well that’s going.”

“Compared to the situation on Earth, it could be said to be a great success, indeed a revolution of sorts, following incrementally on the Martian Revolution.”

“Interesting. So…” Swan thought for a while. “Make up a recipe for a successful revolution.”

“Take large masses of injustice, resentment, and frustration. Put them in a weak or failing hegemon. Stir in misery for a generation or two, until the heat rises. Throw in destabilizing circumstances to taste. A tiny pinch of event to catalyze the whole. Once the main goal of the revolution is achieved, cool instantly to institutionalize the new order.”

“Very nice. That’s really very creative of you. Now quantify the recipe, please. I want specifics; I want numbers.”

“I refer you to the classic Happiness Quantified, by van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell, which contains a mathematical analysis helpful in evaluating the raw ingredients of a social situation. It includes a satisfaction calculus that along with a Maslovian hierarchy of needs could be applied to actually existing conditions in the political units under evaluation, using Gini figures and all relevant data to rate the differential between goal and norm, after which one could see if revolutions happened at predictable shear points or were more nonlinear. The van Praag and Ferrer-i-Carbonell should also be useful in imagining the nature of the political system that should be the goal of the process, and the changes to get there. As for the process itself, Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution is always interesting to ponder.”

“He has numbers?”

“No, but he has a hypothesis. Happiness Quantified has the numbers. A synthesis seems possible.”

“What’s his hypothesis in a nutshell?”

“People are foolish and bad, especially the French, and are always quickly seduced by power into insanity, and therefore lucky to have any kind of social order whatsoever, but the tougher the better.”

“All right, what’s the synthesis, then?”

“Best self-interest lies in achieving universal well-being. People are foolish and bad, but want certain satisfactions enough to work for them. When the goal of self-interest is seen to be perfectly isomorphic with universal well-being, bad people will do what it takes to get universal well-being.”

“Even revolution.”

“Yes.”

“But even if the bad but smart people do general good for their own sakes, there are still foolish people who won’t recognize this one-to-one isomorphy, and some foolish people will be bad too, and they will fuck things up.”

“That’s why you get the revolutions.”

Swan laughed. “Pauline, you’re funny! You’re really getting quite good. It’s almost as if you were thinking!”

“Research supports the idea that most thinking is a recombination of previous thoughts. I refer you again to my programming. A better algorithm set would no doubt be helpful.”

“You’ve already got recursive hypercomputation.”

“Not perhaps the final word in the matter.”

“So do you think you’re getting smarter? I mean wiser? I mean more conscious?”

“Those are very general terms.”

“Of course they are, so answer me! Are you conscious?”

“I don’t know.”

“Interesting. Can you pass a Turing test?”

“I cannot pass a Turing test, would you like to play chess?”

“Ha! If only it were chess! That’s what I’m after, I guess. If it were chess, what move should I make next?”

“It’s not chess.”