ANTI-MODERN MODERNISM AND ITS ANTIDOTE: JAMES JOYCE AND HART CRANE'S THE BRIDGE

Modernist literature is anti-modern society. Most poetry and major novelists of the 20th century inveigh against the machine age, the superficiality of popular entertainment, the corruption of commercialism and urban manners. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is typical, along with Yeats' nostalgia for Byzantium and Irish myth, Ezra Pound's fulminations, Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Kafka's modernity is a bureaucratic horror; Hemingway's a code of stoic disillusionment; Dos Passos a panoramic indictment. Proust is a memorial for the passing away of elegance; Evelyn Waugh's hilarious satire hits the same target. The magic of the past would be the plumb line of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

 

Against this cohabitation of stylistic innovation and anti-modern disgust, Joyce's Ulysses stands out as celebration. Dublin is ennobled by its resonances of mythic voyaging. This most astounding outpouring of modernist style asserts that humanity is everywhere and fundamentally worthy.

 

This same claim is put forward even more explicitly by Hart Crane. He spent most of the 1920s composing a long poem to the Brooklyn Bridge over the East River to Manhattan, at its time considered an engineering masterpiece. In 1929, he wrote: "The function of poetry in a Machine age is identical to its function in any other age, and its capacities for presenting the most unique synthesis of human values remain essentially immune from any of the so-called inroads of science... For unless poetry can absorb the machine, i.e., acclimatize  it as naturally and casually as trees, cattle, galleons, castles and all other human associations of the past, then poetry has failed of its full contemporary function... It demands, along with the traditional qualifications of the poet, an extraordinary capacity for surrender, at least temporarily, to the sensations of urban life."

 

The Bridge is symbol and gateway to world history. America is a privileged site for tracing the resonances of sea voyages and prairies, red Indians and white intruders, an archeology of the land and its peoples now mounting with skyscrapers. The millenia of religion are not dead, but echoed in  Crane's anachronistic refrains: the very first section after introducing the "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge" is titled "Ave Maria" -- a prayer uttered by Christopher Columbus as he awaits a tomorrow landing, counting signs "the jellied weeds that drag the shore."

 

Repeatedly throughout the poem Crane lapses into the language of the King James Bible, "and saw thee dive to kiss the destiny..." He addresses the bridge: "Of stars Thou art the stitch and stallion glow/ And like an organ, Thou, with sound of doom--"  But this is hardly the poetic archaizing one finds in Keats. Crane is full of colloquialisms, heard speech of the streets: "if/ your don't like my gate why did you/ swing on it, why didja/ swing on it/ anyhow--"

 

In a section called Van Winkle we get:

"And Rip Van Winkle bowing by the way,--

'Is this Sleepy Hollow, friend? ...

 

And Rip forgot his office hours,

                  and he forgot his pay;

         Van Winkle sweeps a tenement

                  way down on Avenue A--

 

Crane's poem is a flowing blend, a deliberate interlarding of [brackets] and italics and ALL CAPITALS and section-introductory quotations:

 

The seas all crossed,

weathered the cape, the voyage done...

                                    WALT WHITMAN

 

Does it work?  You have to read several pages out loud to find out. Hart Crane was an extremely deliberate poet, spending six years between 1924 and 1930 on this 60-page poem sequence. Every word, every placement on the page has been weighed and calculated, read aloud, chanted. His audiences were the avant-garde writers of New York and their rural hangouts, among whom his declamatory style was their principal entertainment, its rhythms infectuous-- until Hart got too drunk, started smashing up furniture, and eventually slunk away for solitary walks in the dark.

 

Crane is hard to quote, hard to excerpt, because every line, almost every phrase is quotable. In parts of The Bridge, the significant words are so packed in that you don't know where you could pull it apart. But further on, there are narrative sections, soliloquies, walk-throughs at more normal pace -- it is, after all, a poem of the ordinary massed into an epic.

 

For all the density of verbal detail, the poem is architecture, visible enough in its numbered table of contents. At first we meet the bridge (as Crane saw it from his apartment on the river):  "And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced..." Then we meet Columbus, Powhatan's daughter Pocahontas, Rip Van Winkle awakening from a dream of Pizarro and Cortez and Captain John Smith, with further vistas of rivers, dance, love songs and Quaker women. Rounding off the poem are a section "The Tunnel", a walk through the street sounds of Manhattan, down into a subway, and coming up back in Brooklyn, having traced the path of the bridge beneath the river bed. And finally, a closing section called "Atlantis"-- the mythical civilization sunk in the Atlantic-- but here, finally, a description of what the Brooklyn Bridge looks like.  In fact, Crane wrote the first section on the bridge, and the "Atlantis" conclusion, earliest in his composing; mapped out what would be fitted into this framework, and spent years fitting it.

 

"Through the bound cable strands, the arching path

Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,--

Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate

The whispered rush, telepathy of wires...

 

And through that cordage, threading with its call

One arc synoptic of all tides below--

Their labyrinthine mouths of history

Pouring reply as though all ships at sea

Complighted in one vibrant breath made cry--"

 

The tension cables of the suspension bridge are stroked like a harp, a Pythagorean music, a sail for all the voyages from Argonauts and Odyssey to the Cathay trade, the Cutty Sark, the South Seas beach-comber-- always the same myth, triumphantly united with today's Machine.

 

The core of the book is the section halfway through, "Cape Hatteras." Of course, the place where the Wright brothers first conquered the air, depicted under the sign of Walt Whitman--- that other good-hearted extoller of contemporary life. And not without trepidation; the aerial aces of World War I evoke ever-present death:

 

"-- pilot, hear!

Thine eyes bicarbonated white by speed, O Skygak, see

How from thy path...

Thou sowest doom thou hast nor time nor change

To reckon-- as thy stilly eyes partake

What alcohol of space... Remember, Falcon-Ace,

Thou hast there in thy wrist a Sanskrit charge

To conjugate infinity's dim marge--

Anew..."

 

"Our Meistersinger, thou set breath in steel;

And it was thou who on the boldest heel

Stood up and flung the span on even wing

Of that great Bridge, our Myth, whereof I sing!

 

"Years of the Modern! Propulsions towards what capes?...

And now, as launched in abysmal cupolas of space,

Towards endless terminals, Easters of speeding light--

Vast engines outward veering with seraphic grace

On clarion cyinders pass out of sight

To course that span of consciousness thou'st named

The Open Road..."

 

"My hand,

                  in yours,

                               Walt Whitman--

                                                      so--"

 

Does it still hold? A century later, Hart Crane's prediction, or hope, for the poetry and the significance of the Machine age, seems failed. Our literature is anti-modern modernism, angry satire, or light-weight escape (space age adventure films reiterate the Middle Ages with light sabers and unshaved ruffians filmed in misty Ireland). Poetry has greatly receded from T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas, and Hart Crane is just a name in history books.

 

And yet, has it all been downhill? Surely not, in this Half-Century of Women, of all manner of liberations. And banal and ordinary and annoying as are airlines, you can open your window shade over the Southwest desert, and see a Salvador Dali landscape of cloud shadows on the painted geology. Hart Crane's paean to the Wright Brothers still rings true, if you look for it.

And can his hopeful lines encompass our future, when Machine threatens brain and human empathy?

 

Can we have another Joyce, another Whitman, another Hart Crane?

 

MEDICINE IS NOT AN ADVANCED SCIENCE

 

After hundreds of years of advances, medicine is good at fixing simple problems-- cuts, bone breaks, infections, some diseases-- but unreliable in the long run.

 

Most of its cures, both for nagging and life-threatening problems, are temporary fixes. Medicine can give temporary relief for colds, sinus, respiratory and digestive problems; but not keeping these from coming back again. There are pharmaceuticals for almost everything, which work some of the time (enough to pass a statistical significance test), but full of side-effects, drug interactions, and dosage issues. Once you start treatment for a condition, there is rarely an end to it. Everyone's personal medical history is a series of readjustments that may or may not work, to varying degrees and lengths of time.

 

Medicine is not an advanced science by the standards of physics, mathematics, chemistry, and engineering. Principles of physics hold almost without exception--- (i.e. specifying the environment in which they work, for instance on the earth; leaving aside conceptually outlying areas like the beginning and end of the universe.) Math is reliable, precise, and capable of dealing with high dimensions of complexity. Engineering is good at constructing machines that work reliably over a long period of time (like turning on or off a light switch); when they break down, it is easily traceable to defects in materials.

 

There is nothing in medicine equivalent to turning on a light switch or the ignition of your car. Medicine is moderately effective in alleviating ailments once they happen. But:  it can't stop them from happening in the first place. It can't stop them from happening again. It can't stop the cascade of one problem after another. Undergoing multiple procedures, operations and hospitalizations are a sign of impending death. Advanced medicine is good at keeping you alive when you are sick, until it isn't.

 

Even in the midst of life, medicine is poor at predicting when something bad will start. Why you get cancer in the first place, and why at that particular age. Most serious problems come out of the blue. They may have low probability, but the statistical distribution covers up ignorance over why they happen when.

 

No wonder many people still hold beliefs about God's mysterious plan, destiny, bad luck, call it what you will. Saints continue to be recognized in the scientific age, mostly on the basis of a medical miracle-- attested by a medical doctor who stated that the patient was in hopeless condition before they called on the aid of a holy person. Such events are not surprising, given the iffy record of medical prognosis.

 

In its defense, medicine is playing in a harder field than physics and engineering. Those deal with closed systems, where strong causal procsses are set up to operate without interference from the environment. Experiments in physics and chemistry were designed to isolate a specific process in a laboratory situation where the rest of the world is excluded. Engineering creates machines shielded from anything extraneous getting into its engine, its plumbing or wiring. Medicine deals with living bodies open to the external environment: germs and viruses (with their evolutionary pattern of parasitism); physical stresses, collisions, falls, aging body parts; social, psychological and emotional stresses, all coursing through the brain, nerves, muscles, tissues and organs. It adds up to multiple causes, most of them weak in themselves, impinging from an unpredictable external environment, and interacting in complicated ways inside the body's internal environment.

 

And the body itself is far from being a linear causal sequence like electric lighting or an automobile engine. Instead, it is like an orchestra of string instruments, harmonizing well when opposite processes balance each other out, and subject to far-reaching effects once it gets out of balance.

 

All of which suggests future medicine can keep on making incremental advances. But it is implausible that it will ever make people healthy forever (or past age 100, whichever comes first); or head off when serious illnesses will start within the life span.

WORLD HISTORY UPDATED: WEBER, MARX, AND FUTURE TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

 

Max Weber's great contribution to the sociology of world history was the transition from kinship-based organization to bureaucracy. From the earliest human tribes up through the medieval period, societies were organized around families and clans-- which is to say, by kinship (including pseudo-kinship of ethnic groups claiming to descend from mythological ancestors). In such societies, politics was marriage politics. Individual love or lust were secondary, if allowed at all; marriages were the fundamental tie that determined political alliances as well as property inheritance, too important to be left to personal feelings of individuals. There would come a great change in personal life -- call it the love revolution -- when the era of kinship politics gives way to another form of organization.

 

The second type of organization was bureaucracy. Although the term now is pejorative, Weber used it to point out the key features of organization not based on familistic connections. Bureaucracy is impersonal organization, administered by abstract rules that apply to everyone. It is a literate society where rules and laws are written down: a society of record-keeping. It is the administrative state that keeps track of everyone and everything -- the world of censuses, dossiers, identity numbers, passports, licenses, school grades and everything else (not to mention budgets and business inventories).

 

Bureaucracy is often defined as "meritocratic".  This is true at least in the negative sense that personnel are chosen, not by family background, but by impersonal criteria such as examinations and performance evaluations. As we know from a couple of centuries of experience, bureaucracies are not necessarily the most efficient way of doing things; and records such as educational degrees are not the same as being the best at a job. But the great virtue of bureaucracy is as a safeguard against lapsing  back into nepotism. The coming of bureaucracy was thus a liberal or modernizing approach to social life.

 

Bureaucracy is the epoch-making transition in the history of the state towards centralization. In the familistic era, conquests and astute marriage politics could expand into far-spread empires. But these were also prone to disintegrate into feudalism, as locally dominant families consolidated control. To counter this tendency, monarchies tried to replace local aristocrats with their own administrators, chosen for their abilities at record-keeping, logistics and finance, and whose loyalty could be assured by moving them around and hiring or firing them for performance. Thus arose the distinction between aristocrats and the "middle class", who henceforth would become the prime movers of social change.

 

Regions where centralizing bureaucracy took hold underwent a change in social identity: the ideal of a state whose boundaries contained a unified people, and hence the ideology of nationalism. It was originally a liberal idea, replacing the cosmopolitan marriage politics of aristocrats and court favorites. Nationalism also implied that local ethnic groups (reflecting family ancestry) were merged into one national identity-- we are all Englishmen (as Shakespeare proclaimed), all Frenchmen (as the 1789 Revolution proclaimed).

 

And since bureaucratic ideology of non-hereditary "merit" and formal equality before the law applied to everyone, centralization and nationalism inspired revolutionary movements. Revolutions start by mobilizing mass enthusiasm, and demanding some form of democracy-- rule by the people through representative government. Like all ideals, initial enthusiasm gives way to organizational realities, and tends to slide back into rule by bureaucracy -- in the name of the people but in practice rule by officials, elected and unelected. Democratic revolutions have never been the end of history, but staging grounds for an endless struggle among political movements. And thus bureaucracy gives rise to that now-pervasive modern phenomenon, social movements for protest and change.

 

Class conflict

 

At this point Marxism enters the picture. This is the emergence of class conflict, focused no longer against hereditary aristocrats, but on the taken for granted working class, servants, poor people, the repressed, exploited or otherwise underdogs of the population. From this matrix would come all sorts of movements of rebellion and protests, flowing in an apparently inexhaustible sequence of social identities, diversities, and inclusions. Karl Marx is emblematic of a spectrum of protest movements organized by a similar process of mobilization.

 

Marxism in the narrow sense did not itself have a good track record at predicting the future of revoutions. With its focus on factory workers, it failed to foresee that most revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries would be revolutions of nationalism. Most unexpected of all were the Fascist revolutions, a combination of nationalism with populist ideology of representing forgotten or oppressed peoples, a right-wing version of Marxist revolution. The successful Marxist revolutions came not from industrial strikes but state breakdown in costly or lost wars -- Russia, China, and the colonial empires. But these too did not prove to be the end of history, and by the turn of the 21st century underwent another round of revolutions, including anti-communist ones.

 

Another mixture not anticipated by Marxists was capitalist democracy. This is a compromise between private property and all-out socialism-- the welfare state based on taxation. Welfare states are necessarily bureaucratic, with all the rules and record-keeping involved in administering services, deciding eligibility, and handing out payments --- mirrored as well in private insurance coverage, as we all experience around medical bills. All this is a constant source of political squabbling that makes democracy less than utopian. In short, capitalist democracy is a blend of those two big ingredients, bureaucracy and class conflict.

 

Where does technology come in?

 

There is a much simpler (not to say simplistic) theory of history, called technological progress.

 

This has gone on in an endless series since the earliest proto-humans discovered fire, tools, hunting, fishing, and edible wild plants. Then came how to plant your own garden, build shelters, homes, burial places and monuments. Herding and breeding animals provided a new source of power, while innovations in metallurgy and weaponry brought military power, adding massed human muscles to create large-scale agriculture, irrigation canals, pyramids, the Great Wall, built by slave labor and its equivalents. The result was what we call ancient civilizations. History took a new direction when human and animal power were supplemented and then replaced by new sources of inanimate energy, even during the so-called stagnant Middle Ages-- wind and water mills, gears and crankshafts, pipe organs and mechanical clocks. The industrial revolution added power from steam, coal, oil, and eventually electricity.

 

The innovativeness of modern capitalism

 

But technological innovation does not just happen by itself, not without a sociological component. The pace of innovation was deliberately accelerated by the combination of bureaucracy and capitalism. Bureaucracy because keeping records and calculations led to systematic breeding of crops and animals, an acceleration of agricultural capitalism at the same time steam engines and factory machinery were being developed. A more calculating form of capitalism came to dominate, as bigger companies added research departments or were started by scientists and engineers. Economics was invented, having new processes to calculate when banking turned into financial markets where investors calculate which profitable developments were likely to happen in the future.

 

As Schumpeter emphasized, always-expanding modern capitalism takes off when finances become the control center of capitalist markets. The entwining of finance and industry became the driving force of technological innovation. In the modern era, technological progress does not stand on its own; it is a social invention.

 

The digital age

 

This is where we are now, a quarter of the way through the 21st century. The rapidly moving front of computerization-- the personal computer, the Internet, smart phone, AI-- is familiar in the following respect: they are all forms of high-tech capitalism, fundamentally no different from the technological, organizational, and financial innovations of John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. The digital age is the financial-industrial complex in spades. The financial maneuvers of high tech innovators like Gates, Ellison, Zuckerberg, Musk, Bezos, Altman et al. show that the linkage between finance capitalism and the high-tech cutting edge is tighter then ever. It is hard to imagine how this would change in the future.

 

The big issues in the future of technology are sociological. The central controversy from here on out will be the threat by high tech to eliminate jobs of a substantial portion of the labor force.

 

The optimistic argument is that technological innovation has eliminated jobs in the past, but new jobs have always emerged. The argument relies heavily on the historical period of the industrial revolution in the 1800s and early 1900s, as factory machines replaced manual labor; but each mechanical innovation was compensated by expansion of white-collar workers, administrators, and professionals. The difference is that AI is now taking away jobs not only of low-level clerical workers, but managers, scientists, and programmers in the AI industry itself. AI is now being trained to shadow the daily work of the middle class elite, in effect making them train non-human replacements for themselves.

 

Cheerleaders for AI and robotization declare it's wonderful; everyone will have more leisure, machines will do all the work. Technological innovation will create new products for people to buy, a future of yet unimagined luxury.

 

This ignores a fundamental fact about the capitalist economy: profit depends on selling your product. If customers with money don't exist, it doesn't matter how great your product is, if no one can buy it. The prospects of putting 50% or eventually 80% of the population out of work would create a depression far deeper than the one beginning in 1929 that reached 25% unemployment.

 

For the near-term future, a saving grace would be if it turns out that AI isn't that good at doing human jobs. In recent years, introducing computerization has created jobs for humans trouble-shooting automated systems that don't work well. This may be especially true for Large Language Models; not a human-like intelligence at all but a statistical memory bank which estimates which words tend to follow from other words. This is a far cry from the psychology of human intelligence that children grow up learning how to navigate with all their bodily senses in the world of other persons and things -- and what gives us what we call common sense.

 

Not to say that AI taking a different route than LLM might not eventually be better. If and when that happens, we are back in a mega-Marxian crisis-- the reserve army of the white-collar unemployed, demanding government intervention if not socialist revolution.

 

Ironically, this means future government will continue the trend towards ultra-bureaucratization. Politics will focus on doling out tax money from the few surviving mega-capitalists so that the masses can buy their products and keep their businesses from bankruptcy. Politics in democracies will be an ongoing tug-of-war  over how much will be doled out by the equivalent of depression-era bread lines and soup kitchens.

 

To further the irony, it will mean that the master trend of modern history is bureaucratization. The essence of bureaucracy is written rules and records, which is what computers do-- following rules to process information, the programmed rules-based based manipulation of memory stores. An AI-managed world would be omnipresent bureaucracy.

 

Plus climate change

 

Any discussion of the future needs to factor in the other big crisis already in our midst: climate change. It will go on at the same time as technological unemployment of the labor force. How will the two crises interact?

 

One point of connection: the root cause of climate change is the same as the cause of high-tech displacing the labor force, the capitalist economy.

 

Why has global warming accelerated so much since the 1950s? Because world population has grown from about 2.2 billion to 8.3 billion, about four times as large. Why did it grow so much? Because economic prosperity has increased, improving health and food conditions, and accelerating a trend that began in the countries that first went through the industrial revolution. In the US alone, population went from 140 million in 1950 to 340 million today. During that period, the population of South Asia (India, Pakistan etc.) went from 430 million to 1.8 billion; China from 590 million to 1.4 billion; Africa from 200 million to 1.6 billion.

 

And throughout the world, economic growth has raised the standard of living. Almost everywhere people have been consuming more, buying the products and imitating the lifestyle of the most prosperous Western countries, and taking over production for world markets. With aspirations spurred on by global communication via the film industry, TV and the Internet, world-wide consumption has rocketed, increasing the energy spent on transportation, air travel, automobiles, construction and infrastructure.

 

Multiply population expanding by a factor of 4 by consumption increasing at a similar rate, and the result is global warming.

 

The solution is obvious, if unwelcome. If population were to return to early 20th century levels, global warming would slow down. Consumption of energy might still be high; but a large enough decline in population would eventually bring global warming to a halt, or even reverse it.

 

Below-replacement fertility

 

There is already a move in this direction. Since 2000, in one country after another, the fertility rate has fallen below replacement. In many European countries, the number of children born per woman has fallen below the 2.1 level for stable population -- in Italy and the Mediterranean countries, down to 1.3. In the US it dropped to 1.6; in Japan to 1.3; in China a precipitous fall to 1.0.

 

If fertility rate keeps on dropping to 1.0 per woman, world population would be cut in half. And population decline would concatenate in the following generations. Two generations from now population would be down to one-quarter what it is now (for the US, roughly from 300 million to 150 million to 75 million). *

 

* This simplified calculation does not take account of rising life expectancy. But life expectancy is rising at a much slower rate than the declining rate of fertility; given current trends, population decline starting about 30 years from now is inevitable. In France, where fertility is 1.5 and heading downwards, a recent projection is that total population will peak before 2040, and that by 2070 the population of childbearing age will be cut in half. The population of any particular country also depends on migration in and out; this is a political process that we will look at below.

 

Economists and financial investors blanche at the possibility of a shrinking population. Capitalism thrives on growth. Investors invest on prospects of further growth. When any product sector shrinks, capital flees. Consider also that the amount of money itself is multiplied by booms in investment markets. For the past century, money no longer represents any fixed material value like gold; it has a purely sociological reality, consisting of promises to pay. Valuations based on the price of stocks, credit available, or debts payable hold up as long as the amount of financial exchange continues high. The amount of money at any particular time exists in collective psychology, the confidence of investors and consumers (e.g. credit-card borrowers) holds up.

 

A declining population is the formula for a feedback cycle of economic depression: falling consumption, falling investment, falling profit, falling employment.

 

Thus the one clearly feasible solution to global warming is anathema to economists, capitalists, and policy makers.

 

Three big questions remain in the scenario

 

[1] How will population decline interact with job displacement by robotization and AI?

 

In all likelihood, massive technologically-driven unemployment would make people even less likely to want to have children, or to be able to afford them. Huge population decline could come even sooner than two generations, depending on when fully effective AI and robots arrive.

 

[2] Would socialism help solve either of these problems? It would force the remaining rich people to share their wealth, in order to keep the rest of the people alive and consuming. Would socialism be good or bad for population decline? These may be the horns of a dilemma.

 

[3] Both the negative effect of global warming and the negative effect of below-replacement fertility will happen unevenly. Countries less penetrated by AI would be able to keep up their population levels better. These economically-lagging countries might however be the ones most subject to extreme heat, drought, or low-lying areas subject to rising ocean levels.

 

The result would be that pressure for global migration would increase-- from countries worst-hit by global warming to those less hit by it. In conjunction with national concerns for maintaining the home country's cultural identity, this would increase political struggles over closed borders and immigration policy.

 

The caveat here is that the traditionally rich countries (the most technologically advanced) would also be those whose population is most displaced into unemployment, and whose economic depression would be the worst. This would make them less attractive as a destination for migrants.

 

This is as far as sociological prediction, as of today's conditions, can go. We have three crises ahead through the remainder of the 21st century, plus a series of complexities that give rise to a range of specific scenarios for different countries. This is what a theory looks like where multiple causal processes (below-replacement fertility, economic investment and consumption, technologically driven unemployment, political movements such as nationalism and socialism) interact.

 

And the interactional flow chart will be strongly affected by which processes are much faster than others. At present, fertility decline is speeding along in many parts of the world; although Africa still has a very high birth rate around 4.0. When AI will really rampage through employment is anyone's guess. Global warming moves at a slower pace, with the crisis point around the year 2100.

 

One thing is certain. No realistic view of the future will emerge as long as each issue is treated in isolation from the others. Can we find a combination of conditions that offers better possibilities? Some scenarios may offer hope.