21 January 2022. Doomsday | Beatles

The Doomsday Clock is still hovering dangerously close to midnight. The Beatles and moments of cultural innovation.

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#1: The Doomsday Clock is still hovering right by midnight

I think that my first introduction to the idea of the Doomsday Clock was the 1980 Wah! Heat song ‘Seven Minutes to Midnight’ (FN Wah! Heat was an iconic Liverpool band in the early 1980s). The clock has been set annually since 1947 by the members of the Bulletin of Atomic Scienctists. Bigger numbers are better, since what we’re measuring here is the risk of nuclear catastrophe, and there was a brief moment in the 1990s when it went out to around a quarter of an hour. Last year it was at 100 seconds, and there was speculation that it might come even closer to midnight when they reset it this week.

(Image by Ryanicus Girraficus, via Wikipedia. Public domain)

So perhaps we should be relieved that it is still at 100 seconds for 2022. Cheerily, they headlined their edition of the newsletter explaining the setting with ‘At doom’s doorstep’. Because 100 seconds is still as low as the thing has ever been.

(The Doomsday Clock from 1947 to 2020. By Fastfission, via Wikipedia, Public domain.)

From a futures perspective, the assessment that goes into setting the clock represents a summary of current possible nuclear and other military risks out there—a kind of geopolitics watch, if you like.

US relations with Russia and China remain tense, with all three countries engaged in an array of nuclear modernization and expansion efforts—including China’s apparent large-scale program to increase its deployment of silo-based long-range nuclear missiles; the push by Russia, China, and the United States to develop hypersonic missiles; and the continued testing of anti-satellite weapons by many nations. If not restrained, these efforts could mark the start of a dangerous new nuclear arms race. Other nuclear concerns, including North Korea’s unconstrained nuclear and missile expansion and the (as yet) unsuccessful attempts to revive the Iran nuclear deal contribute to growing dangers. Ukraine remains a potential flashpoint, and Russian troop deployments to the Ukrainian border heighten day-to-day tensions.

The Bulletin’s scientists also consider other pressures towards instability, whether from climate change or the pandemic (and its vaccines) or biological weapons. They take a global view—the failure to distribute COVID19 vaccines to the Global South is noted, for example. And they remind us that it’s not a good thing that the clock hasn’t got closer to midnight; it was already as close as it had ever been:

This decision does not, by any means, suggest that the international security situation has stabilized. On the contrary, the Clock remains the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse because the world remains stuck in an extremely dangerous moment. In 2019 we called it the new abnormal, and it has unfortunately persisted.

There’s a long analysis of the state of play on nuclear weapons, most of which is not encouraging, and on climate change (slightly more so). Any positives from the more internationalist outlook of the Joe Biden presidency are offset by America’s political paralysis. This is, of course, familiar stuff. But they also feel that biological hazards are present, increasing, and are largely neglected:

The scope of potential biological threats is expansive. Preventing and mitigating future biological events will require a wider lens for viewing biological threats. For example, slow vaccination rates have allowed virus mutations, perpetuating the threat from COVID-19. Similarly, failing to address antibiotic resistance could trigger a worldwide pandemic involving antimicrobial-resistant organisms within a decade. Research into novel diseases has proliferated high-containment laboratories around the world. Some of those labs inadvertently release pathogens into the environment. Some regimes to monitor and regulate these laboratories are perceived by their researchers to be excessively burdensome and restrictive.

And there’s more here—for example on the US State Department’s view that both Russia and North Korea have active biological weapons programmes.

The world now lives in an age of biological innovation. Many countries and corporations are making enormous investments in biological science, biotechnology, and combinational science and technology (in which biology combines with other fields), recognizing that they have immense opportunities to establish and grow bio-economies. Innovative biological research and development efforts simultaneously increase and decrease biological risk. The field is moving quickly... The world is failing to recognize the multifaceted nature of the biological threat. Advances in biological science and technology can harm us as well as help us. Leaders must recognize that COVID-19 is not the last biological threat we will have to face in our lifetimes—or, perhaps, even this year.

And there’s more, again, on the state of digital technologies, space, and so on. As I said at the beginning, it’s a pretty comprehensive review.

There are some recommendations as well, which I’m not going to discuss in any detail. Quite a lot of them require our national political leaders to do a bit more leading when it comes to geopolitical flashpoints and types of weapon stocks. And quite a lot more are about the rich world using some of its wealth and resources to help reduce the impacts of both pandemic and climate change in countries across the global South. Because one of the lessons of the Doomsday Clock is that no-one’s safe until everyone’s safe.

#2: The Beatles is so yesterday

There was a piece in the Financial Times earlier this week complaining about our cultural obsession with the Beatles, a rock band that broke up more than 50 years ago. The writer, Janan Ganesh, observed that this obsession had been sharpened by Get Back, Peter Jackson’s lengthy edit of the ‘Let It Be’ video recordings:

It was unavoidable, in retrospect, that the Beatles bore and the television bore, two of society’s most grinding bores, would meld... It just needed a precipitating event. Peter Jackson obliged with Get Back.

I’m not going to get into much of his argument; it’s behind a paywall. I do some have some sympathy with it. The Jackson film has provoked outpourings from certain sorts of men of certain sorts of ages, and not generally in a good way. And surely his film would have been better as a shorter cinema release, as intended before Disney+ got involved and reshaped it to benefit their TV platform.

(Photo of the Beatles statue in Liverpool by Rudi Winter, CC BY-SA 2.0)

But I ended up in an interesting discussion with Ian Christie on the nature of cultural innovation, and some of that is worth summarising here.

There is one substantive point in Ganesh’s article—one of those ‘big picture’ moments you sometimes get when a columnist sets out from shore and then suddenly realises they need to quite a lot more swimming to get to the other side. That’s a contrast between 2022 and 1922.

2022: pretty much cultural stasis.

Hollywood’s addiction to franchise sequels and superhero tomfoolery is the best example of today’s cultural stasis. But we are spoilt for others. Structurally, an Adele or Ed Sheeran single is no different to the average no 1 in 1972. No one would accuse Sally Rooney or Jonathan Franzen of playing fast and loose with the basic form of the novel.

1922?

In 1922, Ulysses and The Waste Land took the written word in an elliptical, inward-looking direction. That taste for novelty also drove Wassily Kandinsky to join the Bauhaus and Louis Armstrong to bring a soloist’s flair to the team sport of jazz in Chicago. It is possible to be ambivalent or even scathing about “modernism”... and still delight that people were open and forward-looking.

Well, you can be sure that this isn’t the last time that someone’s going to mention that this year is the centenary of The Wasteland and Ulysses.

As to the wider point, there’s different ways into this. The first is through the late cultural critic Mark Fisher, who wrote about the contrast between the culture of the 20th century and 21st century in his book Ghosts of my Life, where he argued that culture had lost the ability “to grasp the present”. Two reasons, both connected with neoliberalism. The first is about conditions of consumption:

Why did the arrival of neoliberal, post-Fordist capitalism lead to a culture of retrospection and pastiche? … Could it be that neoliberal capitalism’s destruction of solidarity and security brought about a compensatory hungering for the well-established and the familiar? (p14).

He was writing almost a decade ago, but that hankering for the familiar is familiar to almost everyone who lived through lock-down.

The second is about conditions of production:

It’s no accident that the efflorescence of cultural invention in London and New York in the late 1970s and early 80s (in the punk and postpunk scenes) coincided with the availability of squatted and cheap property in those cities. Since then, the decline of social housing, the attacks on squatting, and the delirious rise in property prices have meant that the amount of time and energy available for cultural production has massively diminished. (p15).

Cultural innovation, on this reading, needs loose money, loose time, and loose space.

But there might be simpler arguments. Maybe it’s not about economics at all. It might just be about technology. As it’s become ever cheaper to produce stuff, there’s a lot more out there, and it’s harder to find.

The production of books and music has expanded enormously since the 1960s. As platforms proliferate, as I think Umberto Eco said, we no longer know the “genealogy of culture”, but instead get everything washed past us. Maybe it’s harder for distinctive voices to stand out, although I am not sure if Gen Zers would be as concerned about this as Umberto Eco was.

But there might also be cultural explanations. Ian pointed out to me George Steiner’s observation that periods of cultural innovation are always followed by periods of stasis. In Ian’s summary:

a period of spectacular cultural flourishing makes subsequent decades of effort look derivative, stale and uninspired by comparison: e.g. 1930s-50s after the firework display of high modernism between 1910-29; or English theatre for centuries after Shakespeare et al. The pop cultural outburst 1956-76 was a kind of Renaissance moment; so much was ‘used up’ then and everyone since has been in the shadow of the creators in that period.

There’s a bigger picture version of this as well. I can’t quite locate this idea, but it might be in James Shapiro’s book 1599, about Shakespeare. If I am remembering this rightly, he more or less argues that each new medium has one big rich outpouring, when it is only a few decades old, and everything is there to be invented (and typically the producers are also young). After that, it’s all footnotes.

So on this reading, Shakespeare and Marlowe are still relevant because they happened to hit that moment when theatre first became a popular form. Film had a similar moment in the 1930s and 1940s. Dickens and later George Eliot rode the wave of the mass market novel (or maybe story, since they were serialised) in the 19th century. And The Beatles were lucky enough to hit the same moment in popular music, 20-30 years after electric instruments joined the band. These moments often follow a point where technical or economic innovation have changed what’s possible creatively, and the way that creators and audiences interact.

Music isn’t going away. But on this reading, the generation that spans from Elvis through the Beatles to the Beach Boys and Bowie and Pink Floyd, now all dead or dying, just got lucky with an accident of birth.

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