#preemption

Sometime in mid-2019 a police officer tapped a student who had been studying at a university on the West Coast of the United States on the shoulder. The student, who asked me to call her Anni (安妮), after the famous Dutch-Jewish diarist Anne Frank, didn’t notice the tapping at first because she was listening to music through her ear buds. Speaking in Chinese, Anni’s native language, the police officer motioned her into a nearby People’s Convenience Police Station. On a monitor in the boxy gray building, she saw her face surrounded by a yellow square. On other screens she saw pedestrians walking down the street, their faces surrounded by green squares. Beside the high definition video still of her face, her personal data appeared in a black text box. It said that she was Hui, a member of a Chinese Muslim group, and that she was a “converted” or rehabilitated former detainee. The yellow square indicated that she had once again been deemed a “pre-criminal.” Anni said at that moment she felt as though she could hardly breathe.

[...]

The guards told her that she was not in jail, but rather at a center for life transformation and vocational training. Like as many as 1.8 million other Muslim women and men she had been sent to a “reeducation camp.” Camera and audio recording systems monitored detainee movements, preventing them from sitting on their beds except during prescribed sleep time and speaking anything other than Chinese. During the day they were only permitted to stand or sit on plastic stools while they watch “reeducation” TV programs on a monitor mounted on the wall. Anni said, “the most terrifying thing about being there was not knowing if you would ever be released.”

After several months, as the facilities became more and more crowded, Anni and several other students were released on the provision that they report to local social stability officers on a regular basis and not try to leave their home neighborhoods. Every Monday Anni was required to go to a neighborhood flag-raising ceremony and participate loudly in singing the Chinese national anthem.

[...]

[After being allowed to return to the US,] She has begun conversations with a therapist who specializes in the trauma of Holocaust survivors. She has begun new friendships with Uyghurs and Kazakhs whose family members have also been affected by the camp system.

She is troubled by the lack of support she received from her university. Aside from some good wishes, they did little to intervene on her behalf. They still asked her to pay tuition for the quarter that was interrupted by her detention.

Students like Anni are beginning to demand that their institutions do more to protect them. At UCLA, a group of students is organizing college students across the University of California system to divest from the technology companies that benefit from the digital and biometric surveillance systems that targeted Anni and millions of other Muslim minorities. They understand that from Western Digital’s involvement in Xinjiang to Microsoft’s involvement in the West Bank, Muslims around the world are disproportionately affected by involuntary surveillance systems. The global discourse of the war on terror affects all of them.

Anni’s story shows that the minds of people cannot easily be transformed by such systems. Although the gaslighting she experienced in the camps did make her begin to question her culpability, once she was released, she quickly began to understand the deep injustice that had been done to her and many others. [...] The surveillance system did not change her fundamental sense of reality, or “wash clean their brain” as government documents describe the system goals. While it did make her adapt her behavior, this change was slight compared to the experiences of millions of Uyghurs and Kazakhs who did not possess her relative ethno-racial and class privilege. As a Han-passing, college-educated speaker of Chinese, she was able to navigate the system in ways that are not available to millions of Uyghurs and Kazakhs. She said one of the deepest effects of the system was that she no longer felt as though she could trust other people nor could she rely on government to protect her.

In The Dissolution Threshold I made some remarks about the long, slow decline of Mayan civilization. The decline of Mayan civilization did not occur in a vacuum. I take Mayan civilization to be one among the civilizations that constitute what I call the Mesoamerican cluster. Mesoamerica and what is today Mexico were highly productive of civilizations. There were the Olmecs, the Teotihuacan, Zapotec, Mixtec, Huastec, Purepecha, the Toltecs, the Maya, and the Aztecs. Possibly there were others as well.

The Maya were among the largest and the longest lasting of these Mesoamerican civilizations of the Mesoamerican cluster, and the only pre-Columbian civilization in the Americas to develop a written language (Quipu was a record keeping device, but not a written language -- an interesting counterfactual would be a civilization that developed elaborate record keeping systems like the Quipu, but to a higher degree of sophistication, without developing a written language; this might have happened in South America if the Europeans had not come). The Olmecs may have had a written script, but the evidence at present is ambiguous; interestingly, Nahuatl became a written language after the Spanish conquest, using Roman characters.

Suppose that the Maya were more isolated, and that they did not appear among a cluster of civilizations, except perhaps for predecessor civilizations. Suppose that the Mayan civilization followed its known trajectory of development and dissolution, but no Aztec civilization arose to the north (or, if it did, it was much further away, so that it was not an immediate influence). Suppose further that Europeans did not arrive when they did, so that the development of civilization in the Americas continued uninterrupted in its indigenous development, at least for another several hundred years, if not for another thousand years.

The Mayan people would have been surrounded by the monumental ruins of their previous civilization -- much as the people of medieval Europe were surrounded by the monumental architecture of the Roman Empire -- though these ruins would have been rapidly overtaken by the tropical rainforest, as in fact they were. Mayan life would have continued on a scale of much lower population density and much less social and technological sophistication.

Suppose, however, that not all of the Mayan civilization were lost. Suppose that the daykeepers continued to keep the Mayan calendar (as in fact they did), and, since no Spanish language would have displaced the native language in this counterfactual scenario, further suppose that the daykeepers continued to keep their record of the Mayan calendar in the Mayan language (as in fact they did not).

Certainly over time the Mayan language would have changed, just as Latin changed from the Latin spoken by the Romans into the Latin spoken by the Catholic church and monks who studied ancient Latin manuscripts, but there would be enough of a continuity that later ages, looking back, would be able to rediscover their link with the past.

If civilization were, under these counter-factual circumstances, to emerge once again in the region, or in a nearby region, also a civilization of the Mayan people (like the earlier Mayan civilization), we would in retrospect be likely to term the period between the end of the first Mayan civilization and the beginnings of the second Mayan civilization a “Dark Age” for Mayan civilization, whereas today we do not identify a Mayan Dark Age because Mayan civilization and the Mayan people have become submerged under a transplanted European civilization.

Moreover, we would recognize a tradition of Mayan civilization that was constituted by more than one Mayan civilization -- distinct civilizations in time, but part of the same tradition, with the later being the inheritor and descendant of the former.

Both the rise of the Aztecs to the north -- which, as part of the Mesoamerican cluster, borrowed from the common cultural stock of the region -- and the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas, served as preemption events that, by their presence and their influence, displaced any long-term development of the Maya civilization. This also had the result of “eliminating” a Mayan Dark Age, though whether this elimination is a matter of historiographical interpretation, or has some ontological relevance for Mayan civilization, is another question.

I mentioned in my previous post that most historians today don’t use the term “dark ages” and indeed sedulously avoid it, and that it has, after being abandoned by academics, become a term of “folk historiography.” Yet my previous couple of posts, along with this one, make me realize how useful the concept of dark ages can be. There is a lot of interest today in the topic of civilization collapse, partly made respectable by the study of global catastrophic risk and existential risk, which now has the Oxbridge stamp of approval and no longer need be consigned to Chicken Little Status.

A dark age is what happens after the collapse of a civilization, unless some preemption event occurs to change the course of history. In the event that a global catastrophic risk or an existential risk is realized -- whether in the past, now, or in the future -- the result would be either the extinction of civilization or a dark age for civilization. This is a difference that matters, and it would help if we could talk about dark ages without embarrassment in order to make this crucial distinction.  

A key tool that evolution gave human beings to survive is the ability to plan for the future. We are able to analyse the information available to us to simulate and predict the future. This allows us to make better choices as we can delay gratification, find optimal solutions and work towards a common goal with others.

However, our ability to predict the future is far from perfect. We are still slaves to our base desires and numerous cognitive biases. We are often either too cynical, thinking of every reason something may fail, or too optimistic, thinking of the best-case scenario. Sometimes our emotions cloud our judgement, while sometimes we rely too much on cold logic, ignoring what our hearts really want.

Another problem is that sometimes we overanalyse things. We may become insecure that a certain problem will cause more issues and heartbreak down the line. We let our fears and anxieties create a chain reaction leading to the worst possible scenario. Instead of trying to work through the problem, we decide to not even try.  We start to preempt the preemption.

But the thing about the future is that it is inherently unpredictable. There are too many variables and random probabilities involved that no matter how hard we try, we cannot perfectly predict what will happen. What is certain is that if you do not make an effort and pursue something, it will certainly not happen.

Consider the last time you made a major decision, such as deciding to change jobs, or to date someone, or to move to a different city. Did things work out exactly as you planned? Now think back to the times when you gave up on something before even starting because you didn't think it would work out. Do you think things might have gone differently had you not given up?

It is perfectly reasonable to make a conscious choice not to act or pursue something. But every now and then, even if you feel that things won't end perfectly, take the leap and make a daring choice. Whether the outcome is good or bad, you gave the future a chance to prove itself. 

Life is like a lottery, and you can't win anything without buying a ticket.