the ramble dump
Friday, June 22, 2007
Machine Slaves
As part of some extra material I was been emailed by my philosophy teacher for the exam today, I read Oscar Wilde's The Soul of Man Under Socialism. It's full of interesting stuff. I'll probably pick out some other bits some other time, but here's a big fat one to start off with:
To start with, I was surprised to read this just because it strikes me as a before-his-time kind of thing. The Victorians had made significant technological progress (at least so far as inventing the machines, even if, as he mentions, there were huge difficulties implementing the things), but this kind of stuff is the stuff of your modern-day science fiction. Presumably, if he's talking about abolishing human labour, he has to be talking about machines at the stage of automatons, because otherwise you'd still need humans to operate them.
What's really interesting, though, is the bit about the necessity of slaves. Somebody's got to do the work, after all. In all the accounts of moral philosophers that I've studied in any detail--namely Plato, Nietzsche and Aristotle--there's been a class of 'slaves'. They don't always mean it in the strict sense of labour; usually they mean it at least in part as those who are 'slaves' to their desires and instincts and who consequently can't live truly fulfilled lives or whatever. But Plato, at least, explicitly assigns them as the labouring class, and while I don't remember any specific mention of labour in the other accounts, I don't think that either Nietzsche nor Aristotle had menial tasks in mind for their nobles. It's something that, for me, has always sat uncomfortably. The idea of machines doing it instead is an interesting one.
Wilde has the romantic sort of notion that the future of the world depends on this mechanical slavery, because then in their 'delightful leisure' the freed humans will be able to excel and create wonderful things. But are we humans really so progressive? Maybe this view is too optimistic, and maybe most people will just eat themselves into grotesque and slovenly states. I don't think you need to go as far as Wilde does, though. You don't need to claim a utopia as the outcome. I think the important thing is that the choice is there and that people aren't condemned to the life of a machine. If you don't trust in the progressiveness of human nature, or want to give people the sense of responsibility or other moral benefits that come from work, then give everyone a good education to set them on the right path and then give them some work that's meaningful; something actually productive. This is, after all, about abolishing the kind of menial work that goes nowhere: not all work. We don't live in the same regimented class system that Wilde did, but the classes definitely haven't gone away, and if there are some in the middle-classes and above able to leisure their lives away, why shouldn't everyone have the same opportunity?
Anyway, these are just a few cogitations, and I don't know the ins and outs of the economy well enough to know the wider economic effects or just how radical a restructuring it would require, but it's an interesting thought. And something that's already happening in many ways. Maybe one day something like it will be possible.
As long as we don't make the machines too human, of course.
...I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessary dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt. All work of that kind should be done by a machine.
And I have no doubt that it will be so. Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure which, and not labour, is the aim of man - or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of every one else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
To start with, I was surprised to read this just because it strikes me as a before-his-time kind of thing. The Victorians had made significant technological progress (at least so far as inventing the machines, even if, as he mentions, there were huge difficulties implementing the things), but this kind of stuff is the stuff of your modern-day science fiction. Presumably, if he's talking about abolishing human labour, he has to be talking about machines at the stage of automatons, because otherwise you'd still need humans to operate them.
What's really interesting, though, is the bit about the necessity of slaves. Somebody's got to do the work, after all. In all the accounts of moral philosophers that I've studied in any detail--namely Plato, Nietzsche and Aristotle--there's been a class of 'slaves'. They don't always mean it in the strict sense of labour; usually they mean it at least in part as those who are 'slaves' to their desires and instincts and who consequently can't live truly fulfilled lives or whatever. But Plato, at least, explicitly assigns them as the labouring class, and while I don't remember any specific mention of labour in the other accounts, I don't think that either Nietzsche nor Aristotle had menial tasks in mind for their nobles. It's something that, for me, has always sat uncomfortably. The idea of machines doing it instead is an interesting one.
Wilde has the romantic sort of notion that the future of the world depends on this mechanical slavery, because then in their 'delightful leisure' the freed humans will be able to excel and create wonderful things. But are we humans really so progressive? Maybe this view is too optimistic, and maybe most people will just eat themselves into grotesque and slovenly states. I don't think you need to go as far as Wilde does, though. You don't need to claim a utopia as the outcome. I think the important thing is that the choice is there and that people aren't condemned to the life of a machine. If you don't trust in the progressiveness of human nature, or want to give people the sense of responsibility or other moral benefits that come from work, then give everyone a good education to set them on the right path and then give them some work that's meaningful; something actually productive. This is, after all, about abolishing the kind of menial work that goes nowhere: not all work. We don't live in the same regimented class system that Wilde did, but the classes definitely haven't gone away, and if there are some in the middle-classes and above able to leisure their lives away, why shouldn't everyone have the same opportunity?
Anyway, these are just a few cogitations, and I don't know the ins and outs of the economy well enough to know the wider economic effects or just how radical a restructuring it would require, but it's an interesting thought. And something that's already happening in many ways. Maybe one day something like it will be possible.
As long as we don't make the machines too human, of course.
Labels: i am the ramblemaster, morality, oscar wilde, philosophy, science
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Organza Nousu vs Jabba the Hutt
So last night Amelia mentioned the similarities between Organza Nousu of Starcustard and Jabba the Hutt of Star Wars. Unfortunately, this is something that had bothered me before, and looking at pictures of Jabba again yesterday, I could match some pretty specific characteristics: aside from being a giant spaceslug thing, there's the leathery skin, the huge mouth, the big orange eyes and even the silly little arms. All I can say, as the one responsible for deciding that Gen's stepparents were going to be fat slugs, is that these similarities were not deliberate.
In my defence I could also point out some differences. The Nousus' leathery skin is described as just like extremely thick walrus hide whereas Jabba's is not. Our slugs don't have slit pupils, and I always imagined their eyes as a very clear, very bright orange, almost cartoony and much more expressive than the sleepy gaze of Jabba. In a similar vein, the Nousu slugs lack Jabba's general slovenly appearance: for all their plumpness and size they're much more mobile, and whereas Jabba's folds of fat collect to form a distinctive belly and head, I always pictured the Nousus as quite linear with wobbly but amorphous flab, for the most part slithering around just like regular slugs, their head only made distinctive from the rest of them by their eyes and mouth. The Nousus' arms are almost ineffectual blackened twig-like things, not fleshy, only added as a way of allowing them to hold a slavekid card catalogue. And finally, as far as I know, Jabba doesn't have teeth.
Not all of these features are made so explicit in the text, because 'more linear than Jabba' is just not something we would have included. I also can't account for exactly how Amelia imagines the Nousus (she might have different ideas of how they compare), but now that we've both become conscious of the unintentional similarities, although nobody else has mentioned it, we felt it was probably a good idea to set the record straight just in case. Back when we started writing Starcustard and I put these slugs in, I hadn't seen any Star Wars film but The Phantom Menace. The same is still true. Reading up on it recently, it turns out that Jabba made an appearance in that film too, but honestly I don't think it was memorable enough even to be a subconscious influence.
In fact, I have an amusing story about my ignorance of Jabba the Hutt. And...well, ignorance in general, too. As I told Amelia last night...
It's true. And it's a shame that there's such a similarity, because we don't want it to seem like we copied anyone. I made Gen's stepparents into fat, horrible slugs because it seemed appropriate: Gen's stepparents were supposed to be rich and horrible and giant slugs sort of personified this. No doubt George Lucas arrived at the idea of Jabba along similar lines. We could always go back and change it, of course, but then I don't think Organza would still be Organza. So a slug she remains. And we are entirely innocent.
In my defence I could also point out some differences. The Nousus' leathery skin is described as just like extremely thick walrus hide whereas Jabba's is not. Our slugs don't have slit pupils, and I always imagined their eyes as a very clear, very bright orange, almost cartoony and much more expressive than the sleepy gaze of Jabba. In a similar vein, the Nousu slugs lack Jabba's general slovenly appearance: for all their plumpness and size they're much more mobile, and whereas Jabba's folds of fat collect to form a distinctive belly and head, I always pictured the Nousus as quite linear with wobbly but amorphous flab, for the most part slithering around just like regular slugs, their head only made distinctive from the rest of them by their eyes and mouth. The Nousus' arms are almost ineffectual blackened twig-like things, not fleshy, only added as a way of allowing them to hold a slavekid card catalogue. And finally, as far as I know, Jabba doesn't have teeth.
Not all of these features are made so explicit in the text, because 'more linear than Jabba' is just not something we would have included. I also can't account for exactly how Amelia imagines the Nousus (she might have different ideas of how they compare), but now that we've both become conscious of the unintentional similarities, although nobody else has mentioned it, we felt it was probably a good idea to set the record straight just in case. Back when we started writing Starcustard and I put these slugs in, I hadn't seen any Star Wars film but The Phantom Menace. The same is still true. Reading up on it recently, it turns out that Jabba made an appearance in that film too, but honestly I don't think it was memorable enough even to be a subconscious influence.
In fact, I have an amusing story about my ignorance of Jabba the Hutt. And...well, ignorance in general, too. As I told Amelia last night...
Chris: to be honest, until recently i got him confused with atilla the hun anyway
plaid: ha
plaid: that's awesome.
Chris: i was actually surprised to find he was fictional
plaid: really?
plaid: what a strange kid you are.
Chris: and then weeks later it clicked: wait, he's real! but he has a different name!
plaid: heh
Chris: and then i thought, 'ah, poo. that's very similar to organza.'
Chris: 'but i was not to know!'
Chris: 'i shall not mention it.'
plaid: heh. ah well. no worries.
plaid: jabba the hut never wore fake eyelashes or [spoiler omitted].
Chris: no doubt a thousand million people out there will not believe that story because, like, EVERYONE knows jabba the hutt
Chris: but i didn't!
Chris: heh
plaid: heh.
It's true. And it's a shame that there's such a similarity, because we don't want it to seem like we copied anyone. I made Gen's stepparents into fat, horrible slugs because it seemed appropriate: Gen's stepparents were supposed to be rich and horrible and giant slugs sort of personified this. No doubt George Lucas arrived at the idea of Jabba along similar lines. We could always go back and change it, of course, but then I don't think Organza would still be Organza. So a slug she remains. And we are entirely innocent.
Labels: alien conversations, films, i am the ramblemaster, starcustard
