Muckers

Last time, I wrote about John Brunner’s prophetic vision of a society saturated with digital technology in The Shockwave Rider. Now, I want to address his even scarier vision of social crowding in Stand on Zanzibar. The title refers to the fact that, at the start of the novel, the Earth’s population could be accommodated by standing shoulder to shoulder on the African island of Zanzibar; at the end of the novel, those along the shoreline would be pushed into the water.

One of the background motifs of the novel is the phenomenon of random “muckers.” The term comes from the word “amok” and describes the state of mind of people who commit terrible massacres, not as agents of the state but as unpredictable acts of social violence. In the United States, these would be people shooting up schools or firing into crowds with rifles or pistols; in the rest of the world, they wade in with knives or swords and start hacking and slashing. The carnage continues until someone manages to put down the mucker.

The reason for this running amok is simple: these people have been pushed too far by social pressures, by the complexity of living in a technological world to which they are no longer attached, by the frustration of not getting their most basic needs met, and by growing anger and confusion.

Does this sound familiar?

It isn’t necessarily the guns in America that cause mass shootings—although it is easier to pick up a loaded weapon and pull the trigger than to unsheathe and swing a sword again and again. Still, the will that raises the sword against unaware human flesh or pulls the trigger to tear it apart is different from the mindset of a soldier defeating an enemy or defending his homeland. In either case, the mucker wielding the weapon is fighting demons that don’t exist within the people they are killing. And these are demons that, apparently, existed only in potential form fifty or more years ago when Brunner wrote his book.

I grew up on the East Coast: born in New Jersey, started grammar school on Long Island, then finished and went on to junior high in a suburb of Boston—genteel, urbanized places full of sheltered, middle-class kids. But my grandfather was judge in a small town in central Pennsylvania, and he was also a gun collector. My mother had been a member of her high-school rifle team and a crack shot. The judge taught my brother and me about firearms and gun etiquette by shooting a bee-bee gun in his basement target range. When I started high school myself, after my father was promoted and transferred to Western Pennsylvania, I entered a different world—different from suburban Boston and from anything that exists today.

On a Monday in October—if I remember correctly—I showed up at school, and all the other boys and half the girls were missing from class. When I asked about this, I learned they were out “getting their buck,” because it was the first day of deer season. And that afternoon they started drifting in. The boys would be driving their pickup trucks with rifles visible in the gun rack against the rear window—or they would bring their weapons into the school and stow them in their lockers. And yes, in the mid-’60s, the school still had a rifle team and a range in the basement under the administrative corridor.

These weren’t pellet guns, either, but the .30-06, scoped and accurate to about a quarter mile. This was the civilian version of the military’s M-1 Garand rifle, standard issue for riflemen in World War II. And most of the boys would also have had access to their father’s old service pistols or to souvenir pistols from the European or Pacific theaters in that war. It would have been so easy for any one of them to go up into the woods behind the football field and plink the entire scrimmage line during practice—and take out a couple of cheerleaders, too, before anyone could figure out what was going on.¹

They didn’t, of course. They wouldn’t have, because everyone was trained in gun etiquette and took their weapon seriously.² And they knew their fathers would have tanned their hides if they even joked about it. Besides, much as we were all teenagers, subject to the usual hormonal winds, tantrums, and moods of adolescents, none of us was so angry as to do such an unspeakable thing.

So, what has changed today? Maybe it’s access to weapons by teenagers in urbanized settings who were never taught a gun’s purpose for hunting or defense at need. Maybe it’s the social isolation of looking at screens all day rather than interacting with real, live people, the sort who have feelings and express them in person and in your face. Maybe it’s social crowding, being around too many people with too many demands, but still strangers because they, too, are looking at their screens. Maybe it’s because we’re slipping off the edges of Zanzibar. But I don’t think banning guns and ammunition is the answer. Then the angry people will just drive their cars into a crowd—or pick up a sword.

1. Of course, many of the kids in the suburban schools around Boston and New York would also have had access to souvenir pistols from the war. They didn’t shoot up their schools, either.

2. I remember our classmates ridiculing a young hunter who tried to shoot his deer with a “pumpkin ball,” a hollow lead slug fired from a shotgun. It makes a fist-sized hole on entry and blows out the carcass on exit, destroying the value of the meat. And it’s cruel and stupid. This was a sign of the boy’s bad attitude that encompassed both crazy and mean.

Shockwave Riders

John Brunner (1934-95) was a science fiction writer who came, I think, the closest to predicting our current future. He excelled in foretelling the role of the individual in relation to the mass psychosis of crowds. And today we seem to be living in the world of The Shockwave Rider.

In that novel, the main character is a savant with databases, able to use his phone to hack in, write himself a new identity, and move on—usually after a serial catastrophe he has created for himself. He also uses, or manipulates, the people around him to his benefit. In the novel’s opening sequence, he is a preacher running an old-fashioned tent revival with a digital presence. One of his side gigs is operating a Delphi Poll—a concept that I think the current digital world is ready for.

The Delphi Poll is based on the old country-store bean-counting raffle. The clerk would fill a glass jar with dried beans and charge people a certain sum, say a dollar, to guess the number of beans. When the time limit was up, the clerk would open the jar and count the beans, and the person who guessed closest to the actual number would win the pool. In the story, Brunner’s premise is that if you averaged all the guesses of all the players, you would come to the number almost immediately, without having to count the beans. Some fools would guess “two,” and some would guess “a million.” But the majority would instinctively home in on the actual number. In Brunner’s words, applying this tendency of large groups of people in answering online questions, “While nobody knows what’s going on around here, everybody knows what’s going on around here.”

I’ve often wondered why somebody hasn’t started—and made a fortune at—conducting their own Delphi Poll about both esoteric and everyday questions. But I guess the work of political pollsters comes close.

Which brings us to the “work” of today’s online influencers.

I recently read an article about the “Keithadilla.” Apparently, someone on social media proposed making a Chipotle quesadilla with a few extra ingredients. For a lark, the cooks at a local Chipotle franchise bought the ingredients, made the concoction, and sold it to customers. And those who bought it liked it well enough to spread the word. Soon customers all over the country were asking for the Keithadilla and giving their local restaurants one-star reviews if they couldn’t supply it. Soon, Chipotle was forced to make and sell the Keithadilla nationwide and add it to their corporate menu.

Online democracy, or the work of a clever manipulator? You tell me. But John Brunner would have loved it. We are all shockwave riders now.

The Subjunctive Mood

One of the reasons I love the English language is its use—at least for those of us old enough to have been taught proper grammar—of the subjunctive mood. Subjunctive is a step back from reality. It’s a way of speaking about things that are not cold, hard facts but possibilities, potentials, or doubtful conditions. It’s the world of maybe and of if-then clauses.

When I say “I can go to the store,” I am stating a definite capability. The store exists, I exist, and my ability to move from here—wherever “here” might be—to there is a demonstrated fact. I am also signaling my willingness to go. But if I say, “I could go to the store,” we are in a whole ’nother reality. Then my ability to go to the store is contingent upon some yet-to-be revealed conditional clause. Maybe I am prevented from going by a prior commitment. Maybe the way is blocked. Maybe I don’t want to go in the first place. The situation is doubtful. If … and perhaps then.

This is a world we all inhabit. That is, we adult humans inhabit it but, generally, young children, babies, and dogs do not. For them, the world is concrete. A child wants his candy or a particular toy now, with no irritating prior conditions. The dog wants a walk or a treat without any doubtful circumstances. Acceptance of conditionals is a point of view that comes with age and, generally, with the experience of repeated disappointment.

The subjunctive is one of three grammatical moods in English—and in several other Indo-European-based languages as well. The other moods are the indicative, heard in that initial “I can go to the store” or “I am walking,” and the imperative, heard in “Go to the store!” or “Walk!”

Use of the subjunctive has fallen into disregard these days. Students are no longer taught formal grammar or even the basics of alphabet and sounds, called “phonics.” Instead, starting sometime in the 1980s with a burst of pedagogical inspiration, they are taught to read by something called “whole language.” I have never learned exactly what “whole language” entails, but I gather that it involves looking at words in the context of the current sentence and paragraph, recognizing word shapes from the letter forms, and intuiting their meaning from surrounding words. This would be opposed to the “A, ah, apple,” “B, buh, ball,” “C, kuh, cat” approach, which most of us Boomers learned in grammar school, sounding out the words, followed by learning and memorizing their meanings, and then passing spelling tests.¹

One point of confusion is that the subjunctive uses recognizable verb forms in what looks like an ungrammatical way. For example, “I suggest you be quiet” looks odd, with the “be” harkening back to an antique, countrified English, like “Argh! We be pirates!” Or people want to add “to” and make it an infinitive: “I suggest you to be quiet.” Or for another example, “If he go to the store …” rather than “goes,” which would be the indicative present, sounds like an error in matching subject and verb in number (“go” in the indicative works with the plural “they,” not the singular “he”). Ultimately, most people just give up and use the familiar indicative, living forever in the concrete present.

Or, in the latter example, they might add an unnecessary “helping verb” like should, would, or might to make it conditional, as in “If he should go to the store …” This preserves the sense of tentative intention, the subjunctive mood, but is excess verbiage for those who know their grammar.

The subjunctive being in the realm of possibility and probability reminds me of quantum mechanics. There, every event is only in the realm of possibility or probability until it is actually observed. A subatomic particle has no particular place or trajectory, no spin state or charge, until you bounce another particle off it or apply some other detection system to observe what is really going on. And for many observations, like position and trajectory, the act of observing itself changes the subsequent state. So most of the statements in quantum mechanics, if rendered into English instead of mathematics, would be in the subjunctive mood.

Quantum mechanics renders this element of probability as a “wave function.” Mathematically, this is a way of saying that a specific property of a particle is either one thing or another, based on the probabilities of each instance occurring, and held in suspension until an observation assigns the actual property, and the wave function collapses into one state or the other. It’s called a “wave function” because it originally applied to the phase, direction, and amplitude of the wave motions exhibited by a vibrating, moving particle, based on its energy. But the mathematical wave function can apply to other unobserved states, like charge and spin. In the thought experiment involving Schrödinger’s cat, the cat’s experience of being either alive or dead inside the box would be expressed as a wave function based on the half-life of the atomic nucleus triggering the release of the poison. And the wave function collapses into one state or the other when the box is opened and the cat is observed.

In the world of the very small, the quantum world, a language that encompasses hypotheticals is necessary because our knowledge of what’s going on is dependent on interruptive observations. In the world of the everyday, we can trust that the things we observe by perceiving, say, sunlight bouncing off their surfaces does not change their nature or position. But in the world of the very large, such as astronomical observations of distant stars and galaxies, we are back to hypotheticals. The stars beyond our local neighborhood are shown to us only in light waves (and now in gravity waves, too) that may have been propagated some hundreds or thousands of years ago—or millions and billions in the case of distant galaxies. This ancient light is a look back in time. And when it finally reaches Earth and our telescopes and eyes, it may no longer represent a true occurrence. We can only speak probabilistically about what might be occurring now at great distances.² So the stars we see in the night sky live in the subjunctive mood until they one day visibly flicker and die.

The subjunctive mood should actually be the preferred language of science: hypothetical and probabilistic until proven by experiment.

1. “Whole language” reminds me of the scene in The Music Man where Professor Harold Hill urges his beginning band students to “think Brahms.”

2. Einstein would say that, given the distortions that gravity places on space and time, it is meaningless to talk of “now” in any universal sense.