Two Dreamers, One Nightmare is an essay by Jack Rusher, published here Monday, May 05, 2008. It is part of Appreciation.
An appreciation of several dead prophets and their living communicants.
After Newton and Descartes cracked nature’s code and read her secret books aloud, the epistemological reaction called the Enlightenment moved man from an ancient faith in persons to a newfound one in systems. The bearded village elder called God moved aside in favor of a clockwork universe, and the intellectual might of Western Europe focused itself on finding equations with which to describe all aspects of the world in the same tidy, predictable way that one could now address light, heat and motion.
This hunger for final solutions — a phrase turned dark by the weight of the twentieth century — found outlet in many disciplines. In each domain, the creators of systems claimed they had found a logical, natural order hidden beneath surface chaos. If the system seemed unfair, the unfairness was an illusion caused by one’s ignorance of the system’s perfection. One sinister side-effect of this belief in perfectible systems is that no person need take responsibility for actions he undertakes on behalf of the system: the executioner is merely playing his role in the natural order.
While many authors have addressed the dehumanizing nature of a world in which personal judgement has been supplanted by a system of rules, the examination of this aspect of modernity was pioneered by two men: Franz Kafka and Yevgeny Zamyatin.
1. It isn't hard to imagine that Gregor Samsa was driven to metamorphosis by one too many TPS reports.
Kafka, born near Vienna, lived within a state influenced by the ideas of Carl Menger, the founder of the Austrian school of economics. He spent most of his life as a clerk within one or another multinational insurance firm, experiencing an early version of depersonalized, paperwork-intensive nine-to-five office work1.
2. Karl Marx and Carl Menger produced diametrically opposed theories, both of which viewed macroeconomics as a mechanism that can be understood. Neither had recourse to later findings in complex systems theory that might have helped him to see the hubris inherent in trying to codify and predict the behavior of a large dynamical system using a few simple equations.
Zamyatin was a Socialist intellectual in Czarist Russia who supported the October Revolution and then saw what became of Karl Marx’s ideas under Lenin and Stalin2.
3. German-speaking friends tell me this work is, like most Kafka, brutally funny in the original. The original title is a play on the German word for “closed,” and the official K. is trying to reach is called Mr Klamm.
4. Translated by Edwin and Willa Muir, available in various collections.
One feels Kafka straining against impossible bureaucracy throughout The Castle3 (1922), and the arbitrariness of ritualized begavior has never been better illustrated than by one of his parables, Leopards in the Temple4 (c. 1920):
Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry. This happens again and again, repeatedly. Finally it can be counted on beforehand and becomes part of the ceremony.
5. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg.
Zamyatin was the first to foresee the logical endgame of the former Soviet Union. One cannot read We5 (1921) without seeing the subsequent dystopias of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley standing in its shadow:
“The building of the Integral will be completed in one hundred and twenty days. The great historic hour when the first Integral will soar into cosmic space is drawing near. One thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subdued the entire terrestrial globe to the power of the One State. Yours will be a still more glorious feat: you will integrate the infinite equation of the universe with the aid of the fire-breathing, electric, glass Integral. You will subjugate the unknown beings on other planets, who may still be living in the primitive condition of freedom, to the beneficent yoke of reason. If they fail to understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, it will be our duty to compel them to be happy. But before resorting to arms, we shall try the power of words.”
The second half of the twentieth played out a slow motion struggle between the followers of Menger and Marx. Menger’s team won, leaving most of us living in a world more like Kafka’s maddening bureaucracy than Zamyatin’s totalitarian state, which is why Kafka and his artistic descendants — Kurt Vonnegut, George Saunders and the makers of the television series The Office, for example — provide us with some of the best, most truthful criticisms of the modern world.