Monotonism: Seduced By Sameness

I argue that there is a movement toward using social, scientific, military, and other public and private resources to advocate in favour of sameness. This is different from traditional conservatism. It is a dangerous religion that memorialises a state of "good enough" that occurred some time during the Clinton administration. This movement, which I term monotonism, basically says that things were OK in the mid-1990’s and resources should be spent on making the world more like it was when Warren Christopher reassured people what was happening in Rwanda wasn’t genocide or when Rivers Cuomo reassured people they could both be cool and wear glasses.

There are monotonist environmentalists: There are people who want the climate to be roughly what it was in the 1990's. There are people who want the world to be inhabited by the same animals that existed when Animal Planet became a television channel. There are people who want the same types of power generation to be popular (wind, solar), unpopular (hydro, coal), and underutilised (geothermal, tidal) as during the Clinton administration, regardless of what any pesky intervening science or research might have found.

The same problem afflicts political theorists, many of whom are stuck in the 1990's idea that less-blatantly-rigged elections are the "special sauce" that lets anyone mix up a handy batch of democratic bliss. I encounter these people with staggering frequency – to them, the issues in Africa, China, India, and elsewhere are essentially the same as twenty years ago (in reality, the key issues are wildly different today in all three places). Often caricatures from a generation ago dominate discussions of places like China and Russia, despite sweeping change in both places (not everything in these places is better, but nearly all of it is different from in 1995).

Even technology suffers from this. The "everything touchscreen" world envisioned in the 1990's (when Patrick Stewart interrupted his Shakespearean career to take command of a starship running a beige version of the Microsoft Surface interface) is now here. The iPhone and iPad, also 1990's Star Trek-esque, were nice when they were new and continue to enjoy occasional timid, unimaginative improvements. But a person from the mid-1990’s would not be amazed by technology today; it might take the person a day or two to adjust. Air travel, credit cards, and even Internet browsers don’t look or feel or function wildly differently from the mid-1990’s.

Cars are marginally improved since the 1990's in quality and safety, though few great advances have been made. The antilock brakes and airbag systems of today are slight tweaks of what were revolutionary improvements in the 1990's. Traffic in nearly every major urban area is worse, not better, than in 1995, and dramatically so in cities like London, Beijing, Cape Town, Singapore, and Melbourne. Even cities where it seemed traffic couldn’t worsen substantially, it has – including Hong Kong and Tokyo. One notable exception to this grinding non-progress is taxicabs, where nearly every major city worldwide has undergone a substantial upgrade of its taxi vehicles since 1995.

Most social and dietary norms are the same as in the mid-1990’s; this is unsurprising, as twenty years is a short period of time. Japanese still save too much, while Americans still save too little. Americans are still primarily monolingual, while the Swiss continue to lead the world in polyglottery. “Calories available per dollar” continues to increase, a trend gradually and predictably continuing since 1975. As in the 1990’s, most children worldwide grow up playing with toys made in China, but watching movies made in America. In percentage terms, American children are four times as likely as their Chinese counterparts to consider themselves "remarkable" or a "genius" - the same as the first time this study was run in 1994; a Chinese student is roughly eight times as likely to get a perfect score on the international math boards as the American student (who is perhaps too busy believing he or she is a remarkable genius or, as Chuck Palahniuk unforgettably put it, a unique and beautiful snowflake).

Volatility in the “good” world continues to show higher variance and directional-change frequency than the “bad” world. Since 1995, the street price of cocaine in metropolitan American (an index kept by the US DEA) remains more stable than any OECD country’s currency (1995-2012) or any major export commodity (on delta against CBOT dataset 1995-2012). The price of vegetable calories (derived from USDA TYP0-08 subtracted from the aggregate retail estimate) has varied more than the price of gold (a high-variance commodity in recent years), while the price of a McDonalds hamburger has stayed remarkably stable.  The same patterns hold true for five-year subsets of the same data.

Legislatively, the world is stuck in the mid-1990’s. Still limited to university campus debates are serious discussions of legalisation of illicit drugs or building a functional market in transplant organs. The laws discussed in the New York Times thusfar in 2013 have included the Assault Weapons Ban, the Violence Against Women Act, and anti-stalking/bullying/harassment legislation – all of which were drafted (and passed) by the 103rd Congress in the mid-1990’s. The debates over taxes, urban gentrification, and opportunity for young people today are reminiscent of the 1990’s, though one or two newspapers has leaned further right or left. Still, there is no nationwide (let alone worldwide) agreement as to how much it should help your application to Chicago or Harvard or Oxbridge if you are poor or black or brown; there is even less agreement as to how much it should hurt your application to these places if you are Asian or the nephew of the (in)correct so-and-so.

This whole concept of monotonism reminds me of Gibson's untitled 2009 essay which appears at page 43 of the new, and very good, compendium of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor.

In this essay, Gibson explains his generation dreaming of the Future with a capital F. Today, children look ahead to a meandering and everlasting now (consciously with a lowercase n). I see this difference in my childhood conversations with my father, who was a “Future with a capital F” type of guy even in the 1980’s when the news about the future was quite gloomy. Having grown up in the wake of the Second World War, his childhood occurred in a world defined by achievements in science: rocketry, military technology, space exploration, the transistor and solid-state electronics, early computers, widespread childhood vaccination, and the list goes on. It was a time of technological wonder and scientific triumph. My parents were entering college when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, and there was a feeling in their early adulthood of great progress and social inertia.

I always envied the seemingly limitless optimism and hopefulness that I’ve always attributed to the mix of scientific and social progress in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The 1980’s had little of this excitement. There was a distinct feeling by that point that stagflation would be prolonged and painful, that the Cold War was a waiting game of fragile politics and proxy wars that would ruin all sorts of countries with nice climates, and that the eulogies of the disco era would last at least until the year three thousand.

Perhaps this contrast between the 1950’s/1960’s and the 1980’s explains why the mid-1990’s seems such an attractive compromise point to return to, both economically and socially. It is, on nearly all fronts, from a Western developed-world perspective, a time when things were “good enough” for most. The Cold War was over, it was a time of plenty, and a series of self-fulfilling prophecies professed by various elected leaders had been fulfilled.

But why can’t we strive to do better than “good enough”? Is monotonism so seductive, so intuitively inviting, that we should ignore avenues to improvement? Is our current predicament so locked up in the permafrost of misery that throwing the lorry into reverse is better than facing the road ahead?

Gibson’s piece offers insights in this regard, as well. The present is as complex as we want to make it; we control our experience of the presence to a staggering degree. And we can choose between a limping, impotent, meandering now and an invigorating, creative, interesting Future. How?

One thing worth examining is that the relationship between budgetary health of the wealthy countries and the amount of exotic stuff being researched seems positively correlated. When there is “extra money” (and anyone who has ever worked for Westminster or Washington knows there is simultaneously always and never “extra money”) lying around, it gets spent on faster computers, faster airplanes, and so on. But it also gets spent on exotic research.

Cold War research (we now learn from declassified papers from both America and Russia) veered into the bizarre, looking at the possibility of telepathy, teleportation, robots on the bottom of the sea, and machines that could turn lumber into biscuits. It didn’t all work – much of it failed. But these ridiculously ambitious projects are what capitalises the F in our now-lowercase future. And the gains from this type of research are simply too remote for shareholders to bear, so the private sector is unlikely to engage in this research.

I’m, in much of my writing, a tireless advocate of tiny government and a society dominated by corporations and the private sector, where major long-term directional decisions occur after proxy battles among shareholders rather than screaming among policy wonks. But I don’t believe the space race could have been conducted with private funding alone. And I don’t think many of the civilian advances that grew out of 1950’s and 1960’s projects (these include everything from Velcro to Pyrex to Concorde) would have come out of private labs or private experiments.

You may say, at this point, that I’m advocating government research and development spending as a species of entertainment. And, in a way, I am. If we want the best and brightest people working on the hardest problems (and I believe we do and that encouraging our brightest people to do things that test their intellectual limits is an essential part of a meritocratic society), then we have to attract them. People don’t work for Apple or Google or Microsoft simply because they want a fancy business card or a big paycheck; people work at these places because they believe they will be able to put their talents to use building interesting things and solving interesting problems and, most importantly, working with interesting people.

The sad part about the decline in public spending on more exotic projects (and I’m not saying we should stop fixing sidewalks and instead build cool robots, but that there’s a middleground) is that it kills the interest of the next generation in doing this type of work. The “f” in future begins to shrink to an ever-smaller font, eventually becoming a sad subscript of its Philip K. Dickesque glory. So, I propose that policymakers have a role in making sure the next generation has cool companies to work for, cool people to work with, and cool projects to work on in the future. Perhaps, after a decade or two of work (in both the public and private sectors), we can renovate the dilapidated “f” in future and capitalise it once again.

After all, can we really expect top achievement and motivation from the next generation when we only offer a lowercase [f]uture to look forward to?