On Scales, Scopes and Ladders
Society is aware of itself, moreover it is so in real time. It’s unprecedented. Before the new information technologies the public discourse was always either limited in scope or vetted by editors. It is no longer true with Twitter or other social media platforms. Being aware of the self is the door to consciousness. I don’t know how human rose to consciousness. It is very troubling because it does not appear as something gradual. Maybe the most well documented source is the Bible. The gradual disappearance of God (as noted by Richard Elliot Friedman) in the text can be interpreted as an allegory of the internalisation of consciousness. The aim of this essay is to think about a similar evolution but from a societal perspective rather than a personal one.
Introspection and society
The neverending chatting process of Twitter more than bears resemblance with our internal monologue. It is its equivalent at a world level. Some ideas take precedence over others in a constantly and never ending discussion. Participants are actors and spectators at the same time. This is what I mean by the expression that “society is aware of itself”. There are no filters (ok I know AI, bubbles and feed building), no editorial boards and it is instantaneous. To observe things you use specific objects: scopes. Let’s examine the scopes we have at hand for this task and how they can be interpreted through this lense.
Microscope: every crime or accident can now have its 15 minutes of fame. News broadcaster fill up air time with testimonies of “this young and healthy person being dragged to emergency…”.
Macroscope (aka statistics): using the internet and information technology it is almost immediate to have in *semi* real time access to statistics. Governments publish data as soon as they gather them and computers make it easy to present them. Nice pie charts, diagrams with colourful lines, regressions and gliding mean are as easy as to modify a picture with photoshop.
Rifle scope: it is used mostly by politician who wants to drag the discussion on the topic of their choice. It is generally narrow and far away (so much for accountability), think climate change, immigration etc. The narrowness comes from the fact that once the subject is talked everything else becomes outside of the scope of the discussion.
Telescope: seldom is the use of the telescope that allows you to see things that are far away. To use one you have to take a step aside and look at the society. What it is versus what it used to be for instance. The tyranny of the instant makes its use very difficult.
Kaleidoscope: to borrow from B. Patino expression that Twitter is an asymetrical Kaleidoscope.
Stethoscope: only viewing society via sanitary lenses is not something I have to write a lot for you to grasp what is at stake here. This neverending covid crisis provide daily examples. Subjecting all aspects of our lives to the medical censoreship is an ongoing struggle for each and everyone of us.
Colonoscope: this not so user-friendly medical instrument finds its place in this list of observation tools. The process of observing is not free. There are costs directly associated to it.
Periscope: this is the feature of social media that has been the most influential lately. A periscope allows you to see despite obstacles. Any resemblance with legacy media, and the partisan choices of what news are worthy of attention or not, is not accidental. The rise of Trump to the oval office comes to mind also: the most powerful tool that he used during his rise to power was this periscope. He completely side stepped traditional media and the rest is now in history books.
All of these scopes have their merits and defaults. They also opperate at different scales and changing scales while retaining pertinence is one of the most challenging task we are facing. We are not numbers, but how could we think about society without using some kind of statistical tools ? It does not appear clear to me at the time of writing. But there is one thing I am pretty confident on: there are bad ways to perform those scale shifts.
One ring to rule them all
The covid crisis is constantly displaying those kind of conversations:
A - You need to vaccinate.
B - Is it really worthy because this disease is very mild for my age group?
A - But there is this 30 years old guy without antecedent in hospital. It can happen to anyone.
B - Now that you say it, I know a guy who had an adverse reaction to vaccines.
A - But statistically there are very few adverse reactions...
This type of conversation are very frequent. They act as multiple therapies. The subtle idea behind multiple therapies is that by having a cocktail of drugs, it makes it impossible for germs to become resistant. Indeed, if only one drug would be used at a time, by selection, germs may finally find mutations that help them to resist. But if the multiple therapy is cleverly tuned, then evolving to avoid drug 1 will make the bug more sensible to drug 2, likewise resisting to 2 may make the bug more vulnerable to drug 3 etc. It creates an evolutionnary bind from which the bug cannot escape. It has worked marvelously well against AIDS. Such conversations bind you in a similar way: by changing the scope of the discussion (are we talking about statistics or about peculiar/lived experiences?) at each turn makes any progress impossible. The conversation turns into a never ending negative ring.
Jacob’s Ladder
Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.
Genesis 28:11-12
If constantly shifting scales can be used as a tactic to forbid any progress, there is still the need to know how to relate the different observations we make. My interpretation of the Jacob’s Ladder is that there is no final interpretation of the world. You constantly have to interrogate how different levels are related to one another. Like the angels ascending and descending the Jacob’s Ladder, we shall not stop on a static view of ourselves in the world. Another eternal ring, but a positive one.