On Waiving Rules and Ruling Waves

When the cosy physical and intellectual structures that we used to live in are reduced to matchwood debris strewn along the tideline, right about now might be a good time to give some thought to catastrophic wave dynamics. History proceeds in waves, as pointed out by futurologists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, and those powerful species-transforming movements usually arise from relatively sudden forward leaps in thinking: hunter-gathering endured until somebody had the bright idea of agriculture, which unleashed a flash-flood of new information and new ways of living, rolling out implacably across the globe for a few thousand years until today almost none of our various populations still maintain themselves by foraging.

Then, in the eighteenth century, our gradually accumulating scientific know-how launched another culture-changing tide, this time a sluicing surf of industry that radically transmuted the whole human landscape, altering the way we thought of time, environment, and even our identities. This second torrent of transformative new concepts, much more forceful and immediate than the first, took only a few hundred years to race across the planet leaving vanishingly few of our communities untouched. The Tofflers’ ‘Third Wave’, which we might suppose to be the one engulfing us at present, would appear to be occasioned by the dizzyingly rapid surge in information and communication systems, alongside the increases in cultural intricacy that will unavoidably accompany such advances.

It’s worth noting that these world-transfiguring events don’t have their origin in any single individual’s mind, neither in any pre-existing plan nor reasoned-through philosophy. Instead, they would simply appear to be what happens when our thinking and our consequent technology inevitably reach a threshold of complexity that proves to be a tipping-point. Most of the great upheavals of the past, while nominally based upon political or moral principles, are best considered as reactions or responses to the tidal shifts in our human condition that were happening anyway. The U.S. Civil War, although purportedly fought over attitudes to slavery, can be seen as a victory for the industrial North over the agricultural South. Likewise, the Russian Revolution can be easily interpreted as a predominantly rustic Czarist culture being superseded by the more industrially-minded Bolsheviks. The blind and massive forces of mathematics, history and causality do pretty much what they were always going to do and leave us to make our justifications well after the fact.

It also might reward us to consider that with waves, be they movements of water or of people, we should not confuse them with the medium they are travelling through. The shattering phenomenon that we call a tsunami is not actually the iron-green wall of water hurtling towards our beaches. Rather, it’s a pulse of devastating energy expressing itself through the medium of an ocean. Similarly, global social movements such as Occupy are possibly best understood as a socially-triggered wave or impulse that is moving inexorably through the more unpredictable and complicated medium of human beings. Individual protestors, regardless of how personally indefatigable, motivated or heroic they may be, are not themselves the seismic ripple which is shaking the foundations of our venerable institutions but are better pictured as the substance in which that dynamic motion is occurring.

Waves, whether we’re speaking of the tidal or the socio-political variety, result from massive subterranean bucklings and juddering collapses in the very bedrock, geological upon the one hand, economic on the other. Any major structure, when it finally subsides, releases its amassed kinetic force in one astounding burst that will then necessarily reverberate through the entire environment or system, sometimes catastrophically. As basic physics forcibly reminds us, all the energy which is inherent in an earthquake or an international financial cave-in has to have somewhere to go, and in this instance that turns out to be the purlieus of St. Paul’s, or Wall Street, or some several hundred other places. It’s probably better to be harnessing this energy as the protestors are attempting rather than to be an obstacle and bear the full brunt of its crashing, unobstructed flow.

Considered from the limited perspective of authority, our leaders might be well advised to bear in mind that when it comes to monumentally enormous waves, the best position to be in is to be either part of them or riding up atop them on some kind of customised and gaudily embellished board. The worst position to be in, conversely, is to be sat in your governmental beach hut dazedly observing the colossal wave’s approach. As pointed out above, this isn’t individual people half so much as it is the stupendous spectacle of history in its compelling motion. And in those exchanges which involve a tidal wave we should perhaps remember that it is the substance of the wave, the water, that is least harmed or affected by the damaging encounter, at least relative to those fixed edifices that were standing in the water’s way.

A wave, like a 300lb gorilla, goes exactly where it wants. If one is bearing down on you then hurriedly-concocted legislation ordering it to cease or orchestrated tabloid disapproval, realistically, aren’t really going to make a lot of difference to it. The same goes for pepper spray and water cannons. While these might be temporarily effective in dispelling some localised spillage of dissent or scattering some protestors it should be recalled that people aren’t the wave itself but are merely the medium that it moves through. Suppressing individuals does nothing to address the much more serious problem of the motivating seismic force behind them, which historically is irresistible and will not be denied. No tidal barrier or levee of outmoded ideology can ultimately stand against it, and whatever he might have intended by the gesture the example set by King Canute, sat on the beach in his jute Saxon deckchair and insisting that the breakers should return from whence they came appears to demonstrate the sheer timeless futility of this approach. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.

For anyone who’s out there under canvas, bivouacking on the front lines of this generation-wasting economic conflict, be assured that tide and history seem to be on your side, and be prepared to ride this deluge for as far as it may go, into whichever new world it sees fit to wash us up in.

With a rush and a push and unlimited love from your friend, Alan Moore, From The Northampton Austerity Crater.

By Alan Moore