UPDATE 2/21/2020: I’ll be speaking at the #RepealAB5 rally in LA this Friday January 24. Are you in the area? Stop by!
For years, now, I’ve been toying with an idea for a book. The working title: Abstract Nation.
The idea for the book goes something like this:
- We (Americans / Westerners) live increasingly in our heads.
- We interact, increasingly, with ideas as if they were things.
- We’re doing this because of how we’re schooled. We’re taught to read at earlier and earlier ages. We spend more & more of our childhoods indoors, interacting with abstractions (e.g. “virtual” playthings) instead of physical, three-dimensional objects and materials.
- Fewer and fewer of us grow up in rural places, where “nature” is a real thing (versus images flashing on a screen, or a story in a book, or a concept you relate to sporadically by maybe hiking or looking at birds through binoculars).
- Fewer and fewer of us do manual labor, i.e. the kind of work that requires our bumbling fingers to manipulate objects, our muscles to lever against the drag and inertia and gravity of the three-dimensional world.
You see the effects of this transition (evolution?) everywhere, if you start to look.
It kills people, sometimes.
Have you seen Werner Herzog’s documentary about Timothy Treadwell, Grizzly Man? If you have, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Treadwell had an idea in his head about nature in general and bears in particular. He went out into the wilderness to interact with this idea, and for a while it worked. For a while, the grizzly bears he encountered fit his idea of bears as gentle giants.
And then a different version of the bears’ reality intruded on Treadwell’s story.
He got killed and eaten.
Consider the popular literature about stress, and stress hormones, and how we deal with stress, and the effect of stress on our brains. You’ve heard about this, for sure: our stress reactions evolved, originally, to help us deal with three-dimensional threats. Fight or flight response. We needed “fight or flight” it to assess three-dimensional threats and react to them in ways that would keep us alive.
But today, many of the our threats we face are abstract.
We worry about the future, we fret about the past, we torture ourselves with “what ifs.”
And our brains don’t know the difference! Our brains react to abstract threats as if they were three-dimensional threats. And so we bathe ourselves in a constant stream of stress hormones, wearing ourselves out, aging ourselves unnecessarily, depressing our immune systems. And for what?
Another lens on this same problem is explored in The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker [affiliate link, paying the bills, guys, tks]. One of the points de Becker makes is that we put ourselves at a huge disadvantage when we train ourselves to override our bodies’ fear signals. And why do we do that? Because sometimes, those feelings don’t gibe with our abstract concepts about the world around us. We commit to some idea about the world, and when reality hits us in a way that contradicts that idea, we get confused. And sometimes, our confusion exacts a terrible cost. We think, oh, I’m probably overreacting here and in that moment of hesitation, we leave ourselves vulnerable to a (human) predator.
Ideas can form a kind of veil between us and the world.
Ideas can be a kind of enchantment that distorts how we interpret the world.
It can go the other way, too. Watch how people interpret politicians and media personalities. When we “know” that so-and-so from the other political party is a bad person, we interpret that person’s words and body language as threatening and awful. Yet someone on the other side of the political spectrum will watch the same interview or speech and have a completely different reaction.
On the one side: stress hormones spike.
On the other: they don’t.
I’m fascinated by this.
I’m fascinated by how becoming more & more abstract is affecting us.
I’m fascinated by the role of technology. How technology makes abstract ideas seem even more real, pushes them into our faces …
Are we better off for this?
I’m not sure. I worry that certain practical skills, practical, concrete ways of interacting with reality, are starting to atrophy. How about like map-reading, for example? Old-fashioned maps are an abstraction, sure, but they are much more concrete than a blue dot slip-sliding around on a phone screen.
Old-fashioned maps have concrete correspondences to concrete directions: north, south, east west. Same with the old-fashioned way of giving directions, for that matter. “Get off exit 12, take a right, drive east for 2.2 miles, then take a left at the 7-11.” The directions are pinned onto the actual world. Clear as compass points.
So what happens if the grid goes down and you need to find your way from point A to point B? If you’ve used a map, if you’ve learned to navigate by old-fashioned directions, aren’t you better off than if you grew up navigating only via a screen on a phone?
And yet, sometimes I have hope. Sometimes things happen which seem to pull us back into a less-abstract way of interacting with the world.
Which brings me to the idea of activism.
There are, I submit, two kinds of activism.
One type of activism is based on abstractions.
There’s an idea out there — an abstraction — that resonates with you. Examples: climate change. The right to choose. 2A rights. Income inequality. Immigration.
There’s a million of ’em.
You read about the idea. You see media reports about it. You read about someone who was physically affected as a result of it, and something about this person is relatable, which makes the idea even more “real” to you.
And — depending on your temperament and bandwidth — you might even begin acting to support or oppose this abstraction. You might vote a certain way because of it, or attend a rally, or write to a politician, or join a group, or donate money. Or,heaven help us, become even more radical, become a terrorist or an assassin.
The other type of activism is based on an actual, concrete, three-dimensional threat.
In the 1980s, I joined a group of activists in Upstate New York. We formed to fight a state proposal to site a “low level radioactive waste” dump in one of two rural upstate communities (one in Steuben county, one in Cortland county).
This was not an abstract threat. It was real.
Yes, the state had a problem it needed to solve. It needed a way to store that crap.
But its solution was a terrible one. Its solution was to barge into some community and dump (hahaha) the problem into the laps of the people who had made their homes there.
And there was a backlash. A strong backlash.
Because the threat wasn’t an abstraction. People knew that accepting a new dump in their communities would cause changes — the huge, noisy trucks rolling in from across the state (and who knows, maybe out of state?), the conversion of pristine state forest into an industrial site, the risks to their well water, other potential risks to their health.
It was an issue that hit people where it really matters. It was a three-dimensional threat, a threat to peoples’ homes, their families, and their quality of life.
And you know what? Party lines didn’t matter. Left v right didn’t matter. It was us against the enemy.
And we won. We stopped the dump. The state backed down. It decided to store low level radioactive waste on site instead of trucking it to some rural community and burying it there.
Which Brings Me to AB5
Forty years later, and suddenly I’m an activist again.
And it’s for the same reasons.
I’m an activist again because once again my (state) government is trying something really stupid, and it’s sledgehammered me in a very real, three-dimensional way.
And I’ve noticed some interesting things about how the reaction to AB5 is lining up.
Some people who argue that AB5 is a great law. And it’s possible some of them are sincere. But it seems to me that their arguments are all based on abstractions. Corporations are bad. Businesses mistreat employees. Labor unions are beneficent. Laws are the best way to fix social problems. Doing something is always better than doing nothing.
OTOH, the people who have been hurt by AB5? They’re not upset because of an idea. They’re upset because they woke up one morning and discovered the California had taken a sledgehammer to their homes, their families, and their quality of life.
And guess what’s happening?
Hint: see this from a Forbes article, California’s AB5 Leaves Women Business Owners Reeling, by Elaine Pofeldt. Pofeldt interviewed several women, including mother-of-three Jessica Tucker. Tucker started doing freelance transcription and closed captioning work from her home three years ago. Now, Pofeldt writes (emphasis mine):
Tucker estimates she will lose a couple of thousand dollars a month. She has never “been political,” she says—but AB5 has galvanized her.
I’m running across that same kind of thing all over. Another example over on Twitter, where @AnoukEZMAC‘s profile reads:
I was living peacefully, doing my thing, posting my meditation posts, working as an interpreter from home. And then BAM. AB5 happened. So, I’m tweeting politics
This is big, folks.
This is cutting across party lines. Every day, people preface their comments by saying that they are Democrats, that they support protections for contractors, that they voted Democrat in 2020.
But they’re being hurt by AB5, and suddenly “voting Democrat” as an idea is crumbling against the effects of AB5 as a three-dimensional threat.
This is the stuff of which real revolutions are made …
