North Yorkshire Library Service Book Group discussion
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High-Rise
High Rise
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I do think humankind is capable of this and that our animalistic nature is not far beneath the surface. That is demonstrated by centuries of human atrocities. Not least, this week, the mentality of a person who can fly an aeroplane containing 150 other humans into a rock face at top speed, having lost, presumably, anything any of the rest of us would consider a sense of morality.
It is superficially tempting to ascribe my lack of hope for humanity, here, to atheism. I think we are animals; complex animals, true, but basically animals. We are very close to chimps and they display cruel and violent behaviour against each other and other animals. Luckily, we are also close to bonobos and hopefully their model of peaceful coexistence and - apparently - their natural ability to take happy and consensual physical and sexual comfort in each other is something we can at least aspire to partially, although the complexity of our social interactions precludes a carefree bonobo life as a realistic idyll.
However I don't want to even for a moment suggest that atheism denotes amorality, as it doesn't. The moral sense of atheists as far as I can wishy-washily summarise is based on the rationality that a) the happiness of other humans matters emotionally to us therefore we will generally wish to act to increase happiness and reduce suffering and b) a peaceful and cooperative society, the most rational way to exist, requires us to operate intellectual empathy with each other and treat each other as we would wish to be treated, and c) evolution has developed us into beings that wish to preserve our relationships with each other as well as to protect our children and even our community. There is a genuine bodily and visceral morality built in to our genetic makeup.
If you take it as a given as in the book that society is going to break down, then would selfishness kick in though? Refer to the Riots thread for this discussion.
We are at a point in our evolution where our intellectual ability to rationalise about our own consciousness seems to be at least partially at odds with our baser urges. Particularly in the West we agonise about things like the notion of marriage and the values of consumerism as we attempt to make them fit the chimp-brain. This isn't to say, however, that we would collectively abandon them given the chance, at least permanently. There is a certain thrill in disobedience.
How do we explain this though - it seems pathetically boring to attribute thrill seeking to biological hunter-gatherer urges in men (as this article does: http://freakonomics.com/2010/03/17/wh...) and indeed there's not uninteresting amounts of evidence that our tendency to view men as the prehistoric hunter-gatherers may simply be retrospective sexism.
It may certainly be that we have biological, animal needs that modern society is chronically failing to adequately meet, leading to a Freud-tastically creative range of sublimation activities that we invent for ourselves in the modern world. It's not a stretch to imagine that these might implode into animalistic excess given the right crucible, such as an enclosed self-sufficient society like the high-rise.
The more open society is, therefore, the more healthy outlets for our needs we are likely to be able to find and the less likely we are to have our innate morality impaired by a dysfunctional society. As mentioned in the other thread technology should surely only help that aim, virtually eliminating geographical isolation in the sense that humans can communicate instantly.
The key perhaps is to consider a healthy society as a given in our evolutionary makeup, and that society should be cared for and prioritised just as the body is cared for and prioritised, since the two form a system. Luckily, the system is pretty strongly hard wired in us and we have developed accordingly our notions of politics and the state. In this light the difference between local and national government is not just anecdotal. It could be that our mental health depends on getting the levels of societal functioning optimal for our biology.
I found I could go along with the premise in an artistic sense. I would say Ballard wasn’t going for realism but rather an exercise in nightmare, and very effective it was. Just as order and civility break down I had a sense that reality went with them. But then I would guess that there is an unreality to the actual experience of societal breakdown - as Ballard experienced in Shanghai, so he’d know better than me! What surprises me in my experience is that even a small group of people can create all sorts of ludicrous obstacles to achieving anything, yet I turn on the tap and there’s water, I flick the light switch there’s illumination – the complexity and co-operation required for this to happen is mind boggling. But it’s there. And that makes me believe that humanity can co-operate and progress, despite its propensity for slaughtering everything in sight from time to time. (Of course when I turn the tap and there’s nothing I’m immediately reaching for the broken chair leg and readying myself for the apocalypse.)
I do think we’re in a period where the old ideologies –religious, cultural, political - have rapidly fallen apart, at least in certain parts of the world, as their absurdities and contradictions are able to be discussed openly without sanction. The uncertainty around this can result in fear or aggression, but also in potential and possibility. Aren’t the worst and most extensive horrors driven by irrational and unquestioning adherence to ideology, religious or otherwise, resulting in “organised” atrocity? I initially thought that the violence of High Rise emerged from a kind of motiveless apathy, an innate desire for destruction or oblivion. But then its basis is in the segregated nature of the building, which could be viewed as another form of absurd ideology – the people on these floors are different to the people on those floors. The characters eagerly absorb the absurdity and violence spirals.
The equivalence of body to society is interesting. People do wilfully destroy their bodily health, almost as a subconscious statement or protest on their circumstances. The physical decay of the characters in High Rise mirroring the increasingly rubbish strewn building was a powerful image. The choice to care for or damage oneself seems to be mirrored in how individuals treat their society. Just as there are signs and symptoms of physical health there are signs of societal health. I view the ability to hold an atheistic outlook as a sign of societal health, alongside other markers - Worker’s rights, animal welfare legislation, the outlawing of racial and sexual discrimination, universal suffrage, the slow erosion of rigid class divisions and oppression. Even as consciousness twists and turns to deconstruct itself in a maze of ethical conundrums that these create. And just as physical health must be maintained if it is to continue, so must these signs of a healthy society.
And just to head off on another tangent I’m ploughing through David Graeber’s “Debt” and this struck me as (kinda…) relevant to the discussion:
“[Anthropologist Peter] Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly:
"Up in our country we are human!" said the hunter. "And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.
... The refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found throughout the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization.”
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Earlier than this though I felt desperate fear for the children, particularly Wilder's children who seem doomed from the moment you see that they are locked in with their mother and sleeping in the grey flat during the day. I find these sorts of things profoundly horrible just as I found profoundly horrible the fact that the drunk bloke in One Day was left to babysit the baby while drunk. I was terrified to the depths of my gut that he would hurt that baby. Hated One Day. Anyway.
You have to buy the poetic license of the tower block being able to exist in perfect isolation with the people within it becoming rapidly institutionalised to the extent that Wilder can leave and go to work and then return (at one stage) while chaos reigns in the building. If you can't buy that premise then the book is basically finished for you.