Our Printed Modernity
The Chauvet Cave in Southern France was rediscovered in 2004, over 30,000 years after it was last discovered. The wall art in the cave would demonstrate remarkable artistic skill had it been done in an art class today, but at over 30,000 years old, the art reveals the unsettling constant urge of our species to explore our world and express our knowledge of it. The only anthropomorphic form in the cave is the body of a woman that melts into the head of a bison. The thirty-millennia-old minotaur demonstrates two taxonomic features of the upper paleolithic world: fluidity and permeability. Fluidity enables category-shift: trees may speak and humans may become animals. The natural world is not a solidified universe of discrete, unassailable categories. Permeability suggests that the known world — the natural world — is not necessarily discrete from other worlds. The spiritual world can invite, invade, and infect, contributing to the fluidity of the natural world. The success of the Enlightenment was to separate the woman from the bison, and now we live in an era in which we are returning to the world of Chauvet Cave.
The Greeks with their minotaurs and meddling gods and interlocutors with questionable motives aptly developed the features of fluidity and permeability that had existed for millennia. The concepts were profoundly demonstrated in the story of Jesus: God impregnated a woman, God became man on earth, God sent a message. It is the story of fluidity and permeability found in the Chauvet Cave.
These existential features of fluidity and permeability marked the development of knowledge. In the late Roman era, the concept of a witch could have meant something good — a chemist, a physician — or something pejorative — one who makes poisons, casts spells, or rebels against social norms. Similarly pagan meant someone from outside the city, one who was rural and not attuned to changing social and cultural standards. Only in the Renaissance did witch become a specific term, and gradually other terms — chemist, doctor, physician, anarchist, rebel, mental patient — were applied to all the other conditions that would have caused one to be labeled a witch centuries earlier. And pagan began to specifically mean one who wasn’t a follower of an Abrahamic religion, and other terms — deist, atheist — were applied to other definitions and eventually pagan became a term that was not necessarily negative.
Prior to the Renaissance, the only substantial taxonomic categories were good and evil (or perfect and imperfect), as explored in The Republic and conflated in Jesus (perfect God becoming imperfect man). The fluidity and permeability of good and evil is explored in the oldest texts (The Illiad illustrates a civil war, not a clear Star Wars delineation of good and evil) and the Arthurian legends explore treachery against the father. The Cloud of Unknowing, the late 1300s guidebook of neo-Platonic Christian mysticism, explores the permeability of spiritual world.
But by the advent of the Renaissance, the concepts of fluidity and permeability began to change. In Shakespeare, fluidity and permeability are often conduits for treachery and witchcraft and the battlefields of the spirit world against the encroaching forces of the Enlightenment — but for Shakespeare, fluidity and permeability also suggest an irrepressible truth. Words and categories have grown specific and hardened against change. Taxonomic hierarchies in explication and implication gradually petrified until words and phrases not only signaled a definition but encouraged a range of acceptable assumptions. The mutation from Chauvet to Noah Webster was provoked by the printing press. The press transformed social experience and knowledge creation from existing largely in the inexact oral world to the high-precision written world. Orally, the meaning of words released into the air evaporates with the vapor of the breath that spoke them, whereas the written words’ permanence demands precision. The Greeks applied this change to math two millennia before, bringing a new level of precision and thinking to abstract ideas. As the printed word spread, this level of precision was increasingly required throughout the intellectual and social worlds and eventually inculcated civilization with an increasing sense of stable binarism framed by an increasing faith in the products of the press.
The first few decades of the printing press were devoted mostly to printing the Bible, business and legal forms, and government documents. Then the press turned to printing Greek and Roman classics and both ancient and modern maps. To a great degree, these years reflect the lack of modern content for the press. But after a century, the press began to broaden its horizons, and after another century, a wide variety of books, pamphlets, leaflets, and newspapers began to disseminate across Europe. It was during this period that imprecision itself was viewed as a regressive flaw that brought about the downfall of Rome and ushered in the so-called Dark Ages. The Renaissance project sought to inject — resurrect — Greek mathematical precision without Greek social fluidity and permeability into all areas of thought and communication in order to forever repel the Dark Ages.
As European nations loosened their grip on the press in the eighteenth century — starting with the United Kingdom’s Act of Anne in 1709 and culminating in Rivington’s last stand — and as the press became less expensive to operate, the printed word spread rapidly. By the 1720s, newspapers, magazines, vanity books, cheap translations and printing of all sorts flooded cities. The oral world was quickly transforming into a printed world, and the printed world required precision — a preferred spelling, a definition, synonyms, antonyms, and common usages. The fluidity and permeability that defined understanding from at least the Chauvet cave up through the early Renaissance was now being rejected.
The man most responsible for replacing fluidity and permeability with discrete, stable definitions was Carl Linnaeus. While the concept of binomial nomenclature had been circulating Europe for a century, it was Linnaeus in the 1730s who captivated audiences in lectures and books by systematically categorizing the natural world. Arguments from strict categories — capitalism/socialism, left/right, Christian/pagan, marxist/free market, black/white — all stem from the Linnaean conception of the universe. Everything could have a succinct definition, placed within a nested hierarchy, and referenced to a type specimen — the specimen that reflects the archetypical example of the definition. The path out of the morass of the Middle Ages and to modernity was paved with binomial nomenclature taxonomy. Linnaeus, probably more than anyone else, is responsible for shaping the modern world.
The Linnaeus project took its next great leap forward with Diderot’s encyclopedia project, which would organize and categorize “each and every branch of human knowledge” in order to “change men’s common way of thinking.” Diderot’s Encyclopédie eventually consisted of 28 volumes, with 71,818 articles and 3,129 illustrations. In Encyclopédie, Diderot wrote “The goal … is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, & to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the works of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow….” Thus the departure from the past — from the Chauvet Cave and ancient Greece to the world of Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas — was demarcated by enormous effort to systematically categorize everything.
Implicitly and explicitly, Linnaeus and Diderot began a great transfer of power from the Ancien Régime of church and landed aristocracy to a new regime of state, academy, and urban elite. Linnaeus originally listed humans as monkeys with knowledge, and though he was forced to re-categorize humans into their own genus, he set off a century-long debate over whether humans were simply more reasonable monkeys; Darwin would introduce a kind of modern natural fluidity, but such genomic fluidity was encased in the neat tomb of Linnaean taxonomy. Diderot’s efforts to establish a new elite are transparent as his taxonomic structure was based on reason and not theology, and the entry Theology is under Philosophy and the entry Knowledge of God is conspicuously placed near the entry Black Magic. Diderot’s argument was clear: taxonomy had now been weaponized and targeted at the Ancien Régime in a battle over the very definitions of existence. French authorities placed an official ban on the Encyclopédie to appease those being attacked, but they otherwise permitted the grand organizing of the universe to proceed. Taxonomy and language were thus transformed into the siege weapon that provided fuel and justification for the French Revolution, as Marx recognized when he selected Diderot as his “favourite prose-writer.”
The century following Linnaeus and Diderot witnessed an aggressive effort to organize and categorize the universe that proceeded with fervor as social engineers and the new elite viewed each new generation as a tabula rosa on which they could restructure society; and each new category further attempted to limit fluidity and permeability by ascribing the dogma of taxonomy. This new taxonomy of knowledge and the resulting lexicon would be the hammer that would dismantle the church and landed class and enable a new class of elites to assume power. More importantly, this new lexicon would banish the old way of thinking — knowledge creation would be confined to the rigid taxonomies of the new world. Those who attempted to cross the newly demarcated strict boundaries were somehow aberrant, whether they were guilty of miscegenation or the feted dandies of the previous decade that had become the dangerous femininity of Oscar Wilde.
Taxonomy became fetishized in the Victorian era, as state and academy sought to solidify their new claims on power, and groups competed to categorize and define themselves and others. Increasingly narrow categories and complex hierarchies emerged as taxonomies for race, nationality, gender and existential value competed for positions atop the taxonomic pyramid. The state expanded its regulatory authority through increased precision and application; the law began to inhabit a new world of hyper-Scholasticism; both erected barriers of obscurantism with which to defend their Linnaean alliance with the press. Civil society aligned with this new taxonomic precision, from watches being widely available to literally ensure temporal precision to increased identification and political association with one’s class, labor, ethnic and religious genera. Fluidity and permeability were relegated to quaint hobbies or transgressive acts such as tarot card reading and spiritual mediums. As hobbies or transgressions, they were acts against the prevailing power, which was not the church but rather the state and the academy. Fluidity and permeability no longer operated within the West’s core institutions, and the shamanism that had been a central feature of nearly all cultures was soon completely dismissed with the opening salvos of World War One.
Fueled by Diderot and starting with the French Revolution, wars (civil and otherwise) were fought and won or lost on propaganda. If the popular consciousness could be convinced that the war was one of liberation and rights against oppression (and wrongs), then success in the land war would typically follow. Stalin and Mao both viewed conquest as a matter of population control, wars won by seizing and altering consciousness, wars openly fought to inject ideology via new taxonomy. The great taxonomic success of the French Revolution was to create the genus nation with the specimen type the French people. This genus was separate from the genus of church and monarch. Marx created and defined the genus consciousness to affix to France’s national consciousness. This taxonomy fueled revolutions from Russia to Germany and across late colonial Africa and the Far East. Despite Marx’s fantasy, the genus class did not create an international proletariat because it had to fight for survival in the new ecosystem with the genus nation; an older fluidity may have enabled a different outcome, but taxonomic fundamentalism creates barriers regardless of other apparent similarities, as the Soviets and Fascists soon discovered.
Early in the nineteenth century, hobbyist and transgressive shamanism was replaced with new concepts of supra-national para-governments. The taxonomy of power had become atomized without a cohesive structure in which to operate; the answer was not sought — as hobby or transgression — in permeating the spiritual world for answers (as it may have previously been at Delphi or from priests). Now, supra-national para-governments such as the League of Nations would operate not as the Hanseatic League did but rather as Empire; these new structures would supply cultural and existential answers previously supplied by dying institutions in an effort to alleviate the constant friction created by taxonomic boundaries. The friction was obvious, because in this new world the competition to create the greater taxonomic weapon witnessed the marxist invention of bourgeoisie, the creation of the International Jew, and various rights and privileges for increasingly balkanized taxonomic subgroups. The competition to be in a favored group and affix negative definitions to opposing groups grew even more fierce after World War II not so much because fewer genera survived the Darwinian World War II taxonomic contest but rather because the power of taxonomy as modern offensive weapon was evident. The great arms race after World War II was not nuclear but taxonomic and lexicographic. What both superpowers were slow to recognize was that taxonomic and lexicographic weapons were just as effective domestically as they were internationally, which is reflective of the convenient ignorance of the French Revolution from which every elite power seems to suffer.
By the 1960s, competition for taxonomic control increased as supra-national para-governments sought control over taxonomy while society increasingly atomized into smaller, more precisely defined categories. Previously, these supra-national para-governments supplied the organizing structure for the proliferation of new taxonomic groups, but now the competition between the atoms and the atomic structure was direct. At the same time, those left without taxonomic power grew distrustful of the new world. The battles for control of and against taxonomic control resulted in Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, the Southern Poverty Law Center and their taxonomic raison d’etre of labeling “hate groups,” the invention and application of patriarchy and black power and white privilege, and countless John Waters movies. The New Age movement and neo-Shamanism emerged to reintroduce permeability, gender groups emerged to reintroduce fluidity. Such challenges were initially minor — either as hobbies or purpose-built transgressions — and were only as relevant as Victorian mediums. The cultural friction of the last five decades reflects an ouroboros — the snake that eats its own tail. The ouroboros was defined (and thus taxonomically relegated) by social scientists in the first half of the tenth century as an Edenic symbol without differentiation between infancy, adulthood, and death. And yet the very taxonomic power that overpowered the Ancien Régime and enabled Ziggy Stardust was now being challenged from within.
Today, we are witnessing the transformation of taxonomic challenge from hobby or purpose-built transgression to expression of cultural will. Donald Trump runs as a Republican without regard to any precise definition of the term. Facebook offers fifty-six gender options. The definition of media and journalist have been obliterated such that what was once a precise taxonomy (print, radio, television) is now increasingly fluid. Some race to label Sweden a “socialist” success yet reject the socialist label for other countries that have remarkably similar social and political arrangements (the United States, for example). The labels matter, but they don’t reflect reality. They seek to define reality.
The great canard of the taxonomic era is the implicit assumption across all arguments that taxonomy rejects fluidity, when in fact taxonomists and lexicographers can create and destroy a genus with the quick work of a pen. New groups and new relationships can be conjured like a Victorian medium conjured the specter of a dead relative. In The End of History?, probably the most famous essay on the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union, Fukuyama suggests that the evolution of government structure may be over if it’s universally apparent that liberal democracy is at the apex of the genus; but this assumes we all agree on a definition of liberal democracy. And the definition is malleable to the needs of any aspiring socialist or grasping autocrat or elected dictator, without any reference to a type specimen. If a type specimen were used — the United States? the United Kingdom? — we’d quickly discover that liberal democracy exists as a taxonomic genus in the mind of the writer and its power is to conjure a definition and set of assumptions like a shaman conjuring the spirit world. And that definition and set of assumptions disappears as quickly as it arrived; it dissipates with the vapor as if it existed only in the spoken word — and tomorrow liberal democracy will assume another form to justify another power structure. The success of the genus liberal democracy depends entirely on the definition, and if the definition is under control of the taxonomist, then it can be argued perpetually that the genus is atop the taxonomic pyramid — with the same assumed perpetuity and certainty that previously secured feudalism atop the genus. But ambiguity, or amorphous of nature and definition, or fluidity and permeability, was the source of power of pre-Enlightenment thought. Fukuyama’s 1989 argument wholly depends on binary taxonomies buttressed by assumptions and ignorant of variation so as to enable universal explanation-by-dichotomy. It is the battering ram of taxonomic siege engines, and the inevitability of its failure is evidenced by the degree to which it requires reality to transmute in order to conform with taxonomy. The friction thus created is often outside of the engineering tolerances of society, as the Soviets — ironically the catalyst for Fukuyama’s essay — soon detected. Taxonomic applications to the universe are proving unworkable precisely because they do not reflect reality as much as they reflect power structures.
The disquieting lesson of modernity in which we find ourselves necessarily reverting to the dreary Hobbesian dream of basic civil peace is that, despite the best efforts of visionaries and despots alike, we cannot fully extricate ourselves from the Chauvet Cave. Instead of enabling an imagination wherein a woman can melt into a bison, we’ve quarantined ourselves to the first work of art among the extensive collection in the large cave. That first work is a series of hand-prints made by the artist that then progresses to horses and elk and other inhabitants of the natural world and culminates in lions and the minotaur in the depths of the cave. Intentional or not, Diderot calculated that the Ancien Régime inhabited the depths of the cave, and so he and Linnaeus stopped at the horses and elk. Marx, it so seems, was interested in little beyond the hand-prints — assuming he could provide the exegesis. And today, in an atomized world besotted with sound bites and social media, we know only the small ecosystem of hand-prints, ignorant of what lays deeper in the cave. The Platonic Cave begs us to imagine the possibility of the pure form while recognizing the probability of a life amidst the shape-shifting shadows of reality. We have now thoroughly convinced ourselves that we’ve progressed to an era of pure forms, that we live outside of the cave and exalt a philosophy of Linnaean precision. In Hamlet, the Prince and Horatio are students at the University of Wittenberg, an acknowledged pioneer in secular humanism and at the fore of the effort to weaponize taxonomy. Hamlet, like a Victorian medium transgressing the boundaries of the known world, is speaking to the ghost of his father when Horatio announces his skepticism, to which Hamlet replies:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
About Nathan Allen
Founder of Xio Research (A.I.), Applied Magic (A.I.), and Andover (data). A.I. strategy and development leader at IBM. Academic training is in intellectual history; his most recent book, Weapon of Choice, examines the creation of American identity and modern Western power. Don’t get too excited, Weapon of Choice isn’t about wars but rather more about the seeming ex nihilo development of individual agency … which doesn’t really seem sexy until you consider that individual agency covers everything from voting rights to the cash in your wallet to the reason mass communication even makes sense…. Lectures on historical aspects of media, privacy/law, and power structures (mostly). Previous book: Arsonist.
