Dystopia Parkway:
Implants
20 July 2015
Don’t let it ever be said that I’m nostalgic for the Cold War. It was a bleak and stupid conflict, and it made millions of lives wretched. But it did have one virtue: it focused the attention of élites everywhere on a handful of issues. As a global, zero-sum game, it got everyone’s attention. The enormous pressure of its risks kept everything organized. Every action was designed to counter the opponent, no matter how ultimately self-defeating. (Consider widespread American support of Third-World tyrants.) Everybody’s to-do list was harmonized.
All that came to an end with the Cold War’s. The stupidity of Cold War “thinking” floated free. “We won!” crowed the Americans.
Ha.
Ha.
Did you see Kingsman: The Secret Service, when it came out last year? Probably not. Supposedly a larky variation on the James Bond theme, Kingsman is in fact not very entertaining. The first half meanders uncertainly between satire and danger: you don’t know whether to laugh or to close your eyes. The second half is stuffed with action and adventure, but the horrors are occasionally too kinky for genre expectations. As I recall, Kingsman was a disappointment for its producers.
However understandable, this is a shame. Kingsman is another kind of movie altogether: the Object Lesson. It makes you think, and the things that it makes you think about are not presented as cool or fun. There’s an element of science fiction, but it’s too grimly plausible to be dazzling. (And then, just when you’ve got used to this unpleasantness, the movie dazzles — with truly astonishing inappropriateness.) I was disturbed by Kingsman for days after seeing it. Seeing it a second time, I was even more disturbed, but by something else in the movie.
The story is simply told. (And, to keep it simple, I’m going to omit the actors’ names, which can easily be found at IMDb.) The bad guy, Valentine, is a telecom tycoon who has dreamed up a solution to overpopulation. He will give away mobile phones with free cellular service. When everybody’s got one, he’ll beam a signal that will make everybody crazy: totally hostile and totally unsympathetic. Everybody will kill everybody else! For some reason that wasn’t very clear to me, Valentine wants to get the élites of the world behind his scheme. (It’s not as though they could stop him.) The holdouts, people like the Princess of Sweden (or maybe it’s Denmark) who are disgusted by Valentine’s proposed “cull,” are imprisoned. The supporters are implanted with devices, located at the base of their brains, that will explode if they ever try to betray the plot.
Which of course the Kingsmen, a secret service in Britain that appears to act independently of any sovereignty (just like Valentine), must foil. But we’re not going to talk about the heroes, appealing as in this film they are.
The idea of drastically reducing the population of the earth has appealed to Western élites since the time of Malthus. One dreadful legacy of the Enlightenment was the almost automatic division of humanity into two classes: those who could understand and implement the Enlightenment program, and those who, for whatever reason, couldn’t or wouldn’t. This was, it turned out, a far more categorical division than the one that had distinguished, in the ancien régime, hereditary nobles from peasants and burghers. The new line is easier to cross, certainly — but this seems to intensify the contempt of those who crossed it for those who didn’t.
This contempt is the product of a failure of imagination that always besets élites when they feel existentially threatened. The challenge must be dealt with — eliminated — at once. In our time, it is not easy to encounter an essay about our environmental future that is truly innocent of the hope that some terrible disease will solve the overpopulation problem for us. The rich will inoculate and quarantine themselves whilst the plague ranges round. After a time, there will be no more unnecessary people.
Kingsman stamps a comic-book glossiness on this terrible fantasy.
After days of feeling almost sick about the nightmare of violently cruel solutions to global problems, I calmed down and realized that our population problem is just like every other environmental problem that we have: one that can solved only over generations, by humane planning that seeks to persuade, without binding, our grandchildren and their grandchildren and so on. Planning that alters as circumstances alter, but that always proceed toward sustainable population levels without denying anyone a genuinely satisfying life (no doping). We’ll talk about such plans some other time.
After seeing the film a second time, it was the élites themselves who got my attention. Valentine, in the best evil-genius tradition, operates a mountain fastness. Here he keeps his imprisoned critics; here he entertains his willing supporters, who are given enough notice of the coming cull to make their way to his remote caves, where they live it up in a sort of disco nightclub. This cheesy setting is of course intended to be an implicit criticism of the rich people who hang out there, and for that reason, it ought to strike a false note, because rich people wouldn’t be caught dead in such a place. They take their fashion cues from Monocle! But: rich people do take fashion cues — in fact, they live by them. Élites have enough money to throw everything away and replace it with the latest accoutrements. If Monocle were to endorse disco clubs, Davos would be remodeled into a mineshaft.
And then there are those implants. The movie’s implants are fictional, in that they have not been implanted in our fearless leaders. But, reading Paul Krugman’s column in today’s Times, it was very hard to resist the suspicion that Europe’s leaders have at the very least been complicit in a program of voluntary brainwashing. In his latest piece about the Greek migraine, he writes about the introduction of the Euro.
The only big mistake of the euroskeptics was underestimating just how much damage the single currency would do.
The point is that it wasn’t at all hard to see, right from the beginning, that currency union without political union was a very dubious project. So why did Europe go ahead with it?
Mainly, I’d say, because the idea of the euro sounded so good. That is, it sounded forward-looking, European-minded, exactly the kind of thing that appeals to the kind of people who give speeches at Davos. Such people didn’t want nerdy economists telling them that their glamorous vision was a bad idea.
Indeed, within Europe’s elite it quickly became very hard to raise objections to the currency project. I remember the atmosphere of the early 1990s very well: anyone who questioned the desirability of the euro was effectively shut out of the discussion. Furthermore, if you were an American expressing doubts you were invariably accused of ulterior motives — of being hostile to Europe, or wanting to preserve the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege.”
And his final comment makes something like those implants seem to be the only explanation for ongoing idiocy.
But we’re not having a clear discussion of these options, because European discourse is still dominated by ideas the continent’s elite would like to be true, but aren’t. And Europe is paying a terrible price for this monstrous self-indulgence.
The good thing about the Cold War, I’m sorry to say, is that there was no room for monstrous self-indulgence. But there is now.