Week 5: Living in Interesting Times

This week began on quite a startling note. I had just gotten back to my apartment after a rather grueling return trip from Delphi, and was rather looking forward to carrying on business as usual. One of my roommates, in one of the rare conversations I had with him inside of our shared abode (my two roommates were both very private when it came to our accommodations, a circumstance which suited me just fine), asked me if I had heard about the coup attempt in Turkey. I hadn't, of course, as not hearing about things was rather the point of going to Delphi, and so he explained the basics to me, beaming with the same degree of fascination as I would were I to lock some unfortunate soul into a discussion of history. I must admit, it was fascinating: but then, watching a house fire is also fascinating, but that doesn't mean I enjoy it.

No, after he finished, I continued to look into the event, with a gnawing sense of dread welling up inside me. The first two reasons are rather personal: first, because several Turkish officers involved in the coup had fled to Greece, and I try to make it a habit of not being involved with the weaker party of a major diplomatic incident involving historic enemies. (As it turns out, the Greek government was of the same opinion and ended up denying asylum several months later). Second, I had actually had originally intended to visit Istanbul that very weekend, but decided against it because I decided that I couldn't be bothered to go through the effort of international travel. Once again, my own lethargy proves to be to my advantage. Suck on it, Protestant Work Ethic.

Aside from my personal safety, however, the incident moved me in a rather deeper way. Prior to this incident, I had always considered politics and the grander state of the world with a sort of bemused detachment. Like my roommate, I had been fascinated by it: I am a history major after all, and the only difference between contemporary politics and historical politics is a span of time. But, much like history, I had sort of internalized it as something I was separate from. Politics, at least public-facing politics, was some inane horse-and-pony show, a distraction from the real sausage-making that was done behind closed doors. As such, my own contribution was necessarily rather limited, and that I ought to focus on getting the necessary credentials to contribute my own voice to vast institutional machine behind the curtain.

To be honest, Brexit should've been my revelation that this isn't the case. Or really, my education in history. But Brexit, insofar as I could tell, was a bizarre institutional hiccup in an otherwise stable country, and history, as has been drilled into my head by nearly two decades of my education, was different, and that comparing the present to the past was inappropriate. But, having learned that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the man who said “Democracy is like a train. You take it where you have to go, and then you get off,” had just learned that he was approaching his stop, all of the little worrying little details about what seems to be the global erosion of political and civil rights seemed to come flooding back.

In retrospect, it should've seemed more obvious. I had been aware enough about the US intelligence apparatus which had developed behind the scenes that I marveled that people were shocked by the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013. I had been aware of climate change even before An Inconvenient Truth had been released, because my elementary school's sole science teacher was an ecologist by trade. I had been aware of the vast potential of automation to undermine the labor market since I took up futurology as a hobby in 2013. I watched 4chan, which, for better or for worse, I used to browse regularly, turn from an undoubtedly wretched, but ultimately harmless hive of scum and villainy turn into the spear-tip of the  Alt-Right, and fascism percolate from being one of any number of edgy shitposts (I apologize for the language, but it is a technical term) into being a wholly sincere and  evangelical movement across the entire internet. I knew all of these things, and yet, they did not form a cohesive picture in my mind. For all of the various things that were going wrong, everything was fine.

As it turns out, this comic is the great reflection of our times.

As it turns out, things are not going to be fine. The coup attempt, for whatever reason brought together all of these things in my mind. This realization manifested as a sort of schizoid disloyalty to aligning myself to any particular field of study. Those who have been following my projected career in academia no doubt have been very confused and even somewhat frustrated at the fact that I appear to change my mind as to what I'm doing after I graduate on a weekly basis. This has in fact been the case, even more than you might realize, as I try not to reveal any change of plans unless there is a decent likelihood that I would actually follow through with it. But this apparent chaos is not actually arbitrary at all. I think that the most profound thing that the Coup in Turkey actually did is force me to think holistically: it's not actually possible to understand anything without understanding anything else.

Historians, I believe are in a position to be uniquely aware of this. The secret foundation of any historical writing is that basically everything about a work of history: where it begins, where it ends, which facts and theories are included and which are ignored are, if not arbitrary, then deliberately selected to limit the scope of a work to a functional level. There is no really compelling reason, for example that history should begin at Sumer: by the time we get our first documents, the entire Mesopotamian civilization had been established for at least several thousand years before the "beginning of history" actually starts. Likewise the convention of being an X Historian, that is to say a historian that is restricted either by Geographic region, like a Chinese Historian, by time, like a Medieval Historian, or by field of study, like an Economic Historian. Likewise, the 20 year rule, the rule that things that happened up to 20 years ago don't count as history, is a mechanism to filter out bias and human ignorance than any ontological difference.

Where this comes back to me is that, since the coup, I've grown more convinced that there's something very important that we're not getting because of the gaps between disciplines. So me saying last week that I'm going to research intellectual history, this week that it's environmental history, next week the history of walruses in Colonial French Indochina doesn't mean that I'm breaking the tablet and starting over every week. What I'm actually doing is finding ways to erase the gaps and redraw them in different ways to see if it works better. To be honest, I don't really expect to succeed. I am just a dude, after all, I can't actually know everything. But to be honest, the way we understand things now isn't exactly doing a bang-up job, so might as well give it the ol' college try.

Sincere Regards

Michael

Week 4: Power Outage

So this week my phone died -for good. I'm not entirely sure what happened; insofar as I can tell, the internal wiring of the power jack was damaged, which resulted in a slow, drawn out death as my phone exhausted the reserve of energy in its battery's final charge. This was a bit of a problem for me because my phone was a very important tool in my archaeological arsenal. It was my primary timekeeping piece (I never really got into watches. Usually they just seem redundant), my navigational tool, a functionally effective translator and, importantly a vessel for audio-books. Although I couldn't make use of them during the dig, I was plugged into one at any other moment I wasn't free to actually sit down and read something: walking, mostly, too and from work, to get groceries and other supplies, while exploring the city and while traveling outside the city. As it was, it was too important for me not to have a phone by the end of the dig at least (for international travel: not having ready access to information while at airports always leads to trouble, doubly so in different countries) so I had to make arrangements to get a new one. The fastest turn around time I could manage was a week, which turned out to be more along the lines of two and a half, so in the mean time, I had to make do without.

Now, I'm sure that many people would be thrilled to be forced to put down their phones, intellectually at least, and given my discussion of Zen last week, you might think that I was one of them. If that is the case, you would be wrong. I did receive encouragement from my brother to be more present when listening to the sounds of the city, but to be honest I was not very eager to be sensually present in a city with a terrible noise pollution problem, especially after an intensive initiation to it while I was trying to sleep for the first couple of nights before I bought some earplugs. Really, I kind of feel that the whole idea of "unplugging" to be a bit misguided. I mean, by all means, if you feel that you are spending an unhealthy amount of time on the internet then stop: readjust your lifestyle accordingly. Notice, though how I phrased it. I have seen many people frame the problem as "the internet is hurting you," but that just isn't the case. Technology doesn't do anything: it's a tool, not an agent. The internet doesn't care whether you spend every waking moment on it or if everyone in the world decided to unplug at the same time and left every server farm in the world to rust. What matters is relationships: your relationship with yourself, with your peers, with technology and with the rest of the world. Technology can change the relationship, but it certainly is not inherently good or bad. Letter from a Birmingham Jail and Mein Kampf were both written with the same tools in the same environment by the same kind of animal. The tangible, objective realities were largely the same, but the relationships of the agents, both subjective and inter-subjective varied wildly.

One of the first lessons you learn as a historian is to identify relationships. How did x affect y, how was person a related to person b, how did such and such historian relate to this or that event that he wrote about? Human's relationship with technology is one that is hotly debated: you can have two experts about some technology or other, while one is an anarcho-primitivist, while the other is a techno-utopian. I personally have been satisfied with neither extreme, not because I don't see their points, but because I think they are missing the bigger picture. Technology, by in large, doesn't change the relationships that people have with most things. That is why, as a historian and a classicist, I am still in business. War is hell, whether on the plains of Ilium or the jungles of Vietnam. Cult leaders, whether with wood-carved print pamphlets or Twitter accounts turn people into suckers the same way. The ephemeral, soul crushing pain of lost love feels the same whether eulogized in a Latin ode or a Youtube video. There's probably some good stuff that stays the same too, but those are boring. My point is that I don't need to force myself to "unplug" from my phone, because I already cultivate good relationships with the digital and analogue worlds both.

Oh, in other news: we found a head this week! By we, of course, I mean someone else. The rule in archaeology is that whenever something interesting is found, it is found by someone who isn't you. Way of the world. I would post a picture, but the whole publishing rights business is a bit trickier than I'm comfortable with, so I found a suitably representative substitution from the internet.

It was like this, except different

Sincere Regards,

Michael

Week 3: Zen and the Art of Digging Straight, 2cm Deep Lines

So this post is a tiny bit anachronistic, as I did not actually read/listen to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance until a couple weeks later, but to be fair, most of what I'm writing about is only tangentially related to the book. The main portion of what I will be writing this week is about the nature of "hard work" and how to approach it.

If you have not gathered already, I am a particularly lazy person. I am not terribly interested in doing work that I don't have to do, and look to avoid it if at all possible. Don't get me wrong: I can and do work very hard, but under most circumstances that enthusiasm for labor is predicated largely on how it will enable me to expend less effort overall, even if that effort is front-loaded. To be honest, I say this with pride, and see absolutely nothing wrong with it. In fact, I would argue it's the most natural way of doing things: Water always takes the path of least resistance, flowing to the lowest point. Chemical reactions will only ever take place if the energy required to take place is less than the energy required to stay separate. Animal behavior of every kind is inclined to laze about and do nothing unless something: hunger, fear, lust, boredom, compels it to do something. Even human invention is regularly spurred not by genius or necessity, but just because some guy was spending too much time on something for his liking, and so front-loaded his effort in inventing some tool to make his life easier.

And so, with all this being the case, here I was, alone, chipping away at an empty clay pit, first to be exposed to the sun, too far away from everyone else to even hear their conversations, let alone converse with them myself. I understood why I was digging straight, 2cm deep lines in the soil: even though the pit turned out to be as empty as I figured it was going to be, we had to make sure there was nothing interesting in there: Apparently last year they found a golden tunic bauble in that same pit. You never know when you're going to strike it rich again. But as I scraped away at barren clay with my medium-pick and trowel, I remembered my past realization that work, in general, is a sucker's game.

Now I know what you're thinking: I must be some kind of reprobate. How can this student not value hard work? It's what we strive for! To work hard so that one day we can "make it" To this I say: yes, it is what we strive for. Why exactly? What even is "making it?" I'm sure everyone has their own idea of what "making it" means: often it will be some material standard: to upgrade yourself to the next social class, to keep up with the Jones, to retire and not have to work, but live in relative luxury and explore the world! All of these are fine goals, but from my own pragmatic laziness, there is a major flaw the work/payoff ratio is terrible. Unless you're scraping your way out of abject poverty (and good luck with that in this economy), you really aren't getting much out of the rat race. Sure, you get your bigger house, fancier duds, more attractive children, but give it two or three months and you're right back where you started, vaguely uneasy and anxious to get more. The fact of the matter is, there's diminishing returns to material satisfaction, maxing out around $85,000-$212,000 p/a depending on how stratified your community is (turns out, it gets lower the less stratified it is: thus the pragmatically lazy would necessarily support higher social equality). So hard work to "make it" is indeed a sucker's game. If our dear leader leading Republican candidate (this is late June 2016 remember. It was a simpler time), has yet to be satisfied with his life of stupendous alleged wealth and luxury, I can't think of how taking on more work and responsibilities to raise that portfolio a couple more decimal places is anything but playing yourself. To paraphrase one of the most venerable sage of our age, DJ Khaled: don't do that.

So then, what does all this philosophical nonsense have to do with digging straight, 2cm deep lines? Well this is where the Zen comes in. Well, unlike the Protestant Work Ethic, in which you're supposed to work hard because God wants you to hate yourself  wait hold on, because the poor deserve to be poor nope, still not it, it's because fun is evil and being miserable builds character  dang it, one more time: you're supposed to work hard because "hard work, discipline and frugality are a result of a person's salvation in the Protestant faith." (thank you Wikipedia), the Zen Work Ethic is something along the lines of "work hard and become skilled for the sake of being fulfilled by the work itself." Ideally, this should result in a trance-like state in which you are skillfully performing your task entirely intuitively without any conscious focus, known to people who don't actually know what Zen is as "going all Zen," but under most circumstances, a deliberate meditative focus on your work is good enough. For the Protagonist Formerly-Known-as Phadrus in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the work which he usually focuses on is, well, maintaining his motorcycle. For me, it was digging straight, 2cm deep lines in an empty clay pit. When I started doing this, this is when my abject misery started to snowball into sincere enjoyment. Turns out, the pragmatic idler can be convinced to work hard for no describable reward. If the work itself is the reward, then it's not really work, now is it?

Dang. I think I just played myself.

Michael