The Long View

Institute for Impure Science
Emergency New Year Board Meeting

"We've been on some tall ones," said Gregory Smirnov, the large-hearted director of the Institute, "but we've never stood on the edge of a bigger one than this, nor viewed one with shakier expectations."*

"What you say is not true, Smirnov, it is contrary to fact," insisted Willy McGilly, a man of unusual and not always natural parts. "We have been in far worse situations than we face today. On some of those occasions, the time-space continuum collapsed; the continuum we are in now is more stable because of multiverse natural selection. On other occasions, the human race encountered a horror so dispiriting that we had to not just defeat it but erase it from our own memories and that of the world at large. Indeed, I sense that we have made several such erasures relatively recently."

Glasser the humorless but inerrant inventor intervened. "Director, McGilly's remarks are a distraction. We are confined to working with the history we know and within the parameters of the ordinary rules of causality. We know through our advices, conventional and contested, that 2012 will be a year of discontinuity unique in our lifetimes, and some of us here are pretty old. No one item of our information makes the case for this projection. Some of them, in fact, make demonstrably bad arguments. Through the use of Bayes' Rule, however, we see that the very accumulation of bad arguments points to a certainty. Ladies, gentlemen, and entities, we have to do something."

"I can at least assure the Board that the inference of doomsday from the Mayan Long Count alone is a crock," said Epiktistes the Ktistec machine in a soothing voice from every audio speaker in the conference room, not all of which had been turned on. Since wireless service became common, Epiktistes no longer felt it necessary to use a physical representation of himself to interface with easily confused humans. They had gotten the memo about AI by now. Besides, as the only piece of transcendental technology ever known to have been consulted by Steely Dan, he was becoming a little complacent about the certainty of his being recognized.

"The Maya astronomers were merely competent. The famous hyper-accuracy of their calendar resulted from their calculating with an arithmetic that used base 20 rather than base 10. In any case, the day when the Long Count of their calendar-cycle ends, December 21, 2012, was not an apocalyptic date for the Classic Maya, nor is it for their modern descendants. Had the Classic Maya flourished closer to the 21st century, maybe they would have made something of the 2012 date: Mayan history does seem to have been influenced by arithmetically interesting dates in their calendar, rather like Western history was influenced by the year 1000. But there is no evidence the Maya thought that the world would be destroyed this year. There is rather a lot of evidence that they didn't, since dates long after 2012 appear on the stelae in their cities."

"Could you tell us just why the Maya were incorporating far future dates into their inscriptions over 1200 years ago?" asked Charles Cogsworth, the worthy but often overlook husband of the incandescent scientist Valery Mok.

"Sorry Charlie," answered Epiktistes, "I am not at liberty to say. In any case, the 2012 date occurs just once for sure and twice for maybe in the archeological record. The inscriptions almost certainly have nothing to do with us."

"But the fact that we are talking about them has something to do with us," chimed in Valery Mok supportively. The fact that she had spoken would cause her husband's remarks to be inadvertently attributed to her in the official transcript of the meeting. Even the digital recording would mistakenly render them in her voice.

"Widespread apocalyptic dates are often Ouija messages from the Zeitgeist. When enough people in the right places are anxious enough to suspect that the age is about to come to an operatic end, that is usually a sign that those people are sensing something altogether real, even if it is not the something they think it is."

"No doubt, Ms. Mok, but it is not clear that enough people are projecting anything at all onto 2012 to prove that it means something," said the talented but deplorable Audifax O'Hanlon. The Minimal Decency Rule excluded him from membership in the Institute; normally, it forbade him from approaching the Institute's headquarters closer than 1000 yards. It was the measure of the crisis that he had been invited to attend.

"The people who are projecting are not Influentials in any case, but persons of dubious competence whose motives are open to question. Since my motives are invariably open to question, I know how far to trust these people. 2012 is a chronological hula hoop, not an integral part of the culture whose approach could be the shadow of impending events."

"Excuse me, but that analogy is inapposite," rejoined Willy McGilly. "Hula hoops now are an integral part of the culture. It has been a long time since they were a 1950s fad that almost everyone had forgotten about."

"Focus, focus, people!" said Aloysius Shiplap with some exasperation. The exasperation was not occasioned solely by the meandering course of the meeting. He was a seminal genius. Seminal geniuses are people whose brilliant ideas change the world every few years, but who are never quite the first person to put them into patentable form.

"Let us not forget that these are Bayesian deliberations. Bayesian analysis is the art of recalculating the odds in the light of later information. If you are a temporally unattached person who wakes up in a bed in a darkened room, the odds are very slight that you have woken up in a stateroom on the Titanic. If you hear a voice saying to proceed to the deck, then you are probably on some ship that is having a drill, but it is only a little more likely that you are on the Titanic. If water starts to accumulate on the floor, then it is still less than probable that you are on the Titanic; ships sink all the time. Only if you hear a string quartet playing 'Nearer My God to Thee' do the numbers finally creep past the 50% mark. Then you would be logically justified in preferring the Titanic hypothesis, though a reasonably intuitive man might have entertained misgivings before that point. In our case, the Mayan calendar has negligible probative value of an impending discontinuity when considered as an instance of ancient hoodoo wisdom, and only a point or two as an expression of the Collective Semi-Conscious. When considered in conjunction with all the mishaps likely and possible that have taken residence in the immediate future, the odds of Awfulness become very good."

"Has the Institute really come to this?" asked the well-dressed Diogenes Pontifex. Most Board members looked away when Diogenes Pontifex began to speak; Epiktistes blurred the focus on his camera. Like Audifax O'Hanlon, Pontifex was considered morally unsuited for membership with the Institute. Tax authorities refused to take his money for fear of being seen to benefit from his scandalously legal enterprises.

"All we are doing here is rehashing the Doom Soon Hypothesis. The Doom Soon Hypothesis is popular mathematics of the most pandering sort. Yes, it has some force: granted the mortality of the human race, it is easy to use probability analysis to demonstrate that what seem like minor problems are really extinction-level contingencies. The problem is that the argument never doesn't work. If the Romans had had Bayes' Theorem, the Hypothesis would have had some force in their time, too. If there are still people around in a thousand years, it will have some force then."

"It is important to recall that the perils we face are not absolutely cosmic perils," Gregory Smirnov said. "We are not talking about a globally sterilizing gamma-burst, or the sudden third recurrence of a Snowball Earth climate ('fourth,' mumbled Willy McGilly, but he was ignored) or anything larger than one or two quite minor nuclear wars. We are talking about something on the order of the fall of civilizations here, not the venerification of the biosphere. Indeed, we are probably talking about something less than the fall of civilizations; perhaps something as small as the end of the post-World War II world. The same kind of analysis that underlies cosmic Doom Soon applies here, too, but less speculatively. We don't know how long a sophont species like ourselves can be expected to exist. We do know how long a historical era lasts. We have a Problem that is due to hatch soon, and there is reason to suppose it will do so in 2012."

"These are the High Causes of our dilemma," said Aloysius Shiplap, "or, if you are that kind of person, the Deep Causes. They are second and third derivative stuff that is never visible while it happens. The history we will actually experience will not be so ethereal, but will be encountered as shallowly buried landmines that will explode at precisely observable points in time. May we review a list of these landmines, or would it be too tedious to enumerate them?"

"Yes, it would indeed be very tedious to enumerate them all," said Epiktistes the Ktistec machine through all the audio speakers in the room. "It would be even more tedious to listen to them. Cybernetic devices such as myself experience tedium as a sort of sugary soft-drink, however. Here is an executive summary of some of the principal contingencies":

Millenarian War: The friction between Iran and the United States has fundamentally eschatological causes. The driver and time-keeper is a variety of Shia eschatology. Some forms of Christian eschatology will be engaged if a shooting war involves an attack on Israel.

Burning capitals: This looks increasingly likely in post-American Baghdad and not impossible in Cairo and Damascus. For Afghanistan the interesting capital is not Kabul but Islamabad: the collapse of Pakistan, or even the establishment of a sufficiently hostile regime, would make the US presence in Afghanistan logistically untenable. That could mean a withdrawal under pressure, or an alliance with India, which would mean general regional war.

China: All economic statistics emanating from China should be assumed to be false. The economy is probably contracting. The two points to keep in mind are that authority is devolving to the localities, and that when popular uprisings occur in authoritarian societies, the security services provide the portable toilets for the final demonstrations.

Europe: The banking system at this point seems to be an accountant's fantasy, and there is no demand for European goods or services anywhere in the world that could put the situation right again. On the political level, the fantasy is not the European Union, but the assumption that it can be organized on a post-political level, like an NGO. People will consent to the state organizing major changes in their lives, but not to a confederation of utilities doing so.

United States (economic): The US economy is showing a great deal of technological resilience and even, surprisingly, an uptick in consumer demand. It is benefiting from import substitution as the world's major mercantilist exporters implode. One way to look at it is that the New Deal safety nets worked. This is not a formula for expansion, but for preservation, which is actually optimal in this context.

United States (political): Every piece of the political system is bleeding legitimacy. The major political parties are in an unpopularity contest. The Occupy counter-convention this summer could attract more attention than the presidential conventions of the major political parties, which have been deliberately drained of serious content. The United States (and each of them) works because the machinery of government and politics runs automatically. The political parties, however, are like monkeys in a factory, trying to see how much they can strain the system before it breaks. Legitimacy is most sorely missed when the machinery stops; legitimacy is what makes it possible to act when the law does not provide an answer.

"My colleagues will note," Epiktistes continued, "that the situation we are facing is not like other points of historical inflection, when some new idea was trying to manifest itself. Quite the opposite. This is not a case of Plan B clamoring to replace Plan A. It is purely the decomposition of Plan A. That does make it easier to choose sides this time around."

Diogenes Pontifex cleared his throat when the machine stopped. "This is certainly a very deplorable state of things," he said, "and there does seem to be an unusually large set of accidents waiting to happen this year, including those that not appear on our indefatigable Ktistec machine's list. However, I must ask what about this analysis suggests that the special resources of the Institute would be particularly useful. Do you plan on changing your name to the Institute of Impure Political Science? That name might seem to some people to include a redundancy."

"My thought," answered Gregory Smirnov, "was that we might employ our subtle technologies to modify the timeline and correct the point in the past where we went wrong."

Willy McGilly broke it to them gently. "People, we have done that many times before. That's why we are here."

The meeting groaned collectively. "Are we to chew on a whole box of old chestnuts this morning?" asked Glasser. "Are you about to tell us that ours is the Best of All Possible Worlds?"

"I was not about to tell you any such thing," McGilly replied, "because it is not true. We achieved the Best of All Possible Worlds some iterations ago and we arrogantly cast it aside. We are now in another island of stability: the Fallen World that Will Pass the Laugh Test. Our world is not ephemeral because it is not frivolous. The lack of zeppelins proves that."

"Are you sure of that?" Diogenes Pontifex asked. He was thinking of the fact that he was just then arranging a rickety tower of leverage to finance the construction of a vast fleet of freight and passenger zeppelins, while simultaneously shorting the operating companies in the certainty that they would fail.

At that point the often overlooked Charles Cogsworth put the Laugh Test in a whole new light. "May I point out," he said, "that 2012 is the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic?"

There was a pause.

"People," Willy McGilly said, "we have a problem."

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*This comment is a direct quote from an unimpeachable source. The rest of the transcript was reconstructed from sources that have been impeached but not convicted.