The Resistance/ Vector 302

As Heraclitus pointed out, you can’t step in the same river twice. The current is continually flowing, responding to the seasons and the weather, swirling into ever changing fractal patterns. While this is literally true, the power of the adage is metaphorical. We live with this constant change. Some people like it. Some people don’t like it. But it’s more complicated than that. For most of the history of the human race – up to the end of the Palaeolithic and into the Neolithic – people lived fluid, seasonally nomadic lives in tune and rhythm with natural change. Just to be clear, I’m not romanticising that lifestyle. To paraphrase George Orwell, I’m a selfish and lazy intellectual who expects their oat milk and New Statesman to be delivered to the doorstep. However, the larger point that I’m trying to make is that we can choose to live fluidly in relation to change or we can choose to live against change, by metaphorically damming the river. Most of recorded history is dominated by the latter approach, which broadly takes the form of imposing solid-state, hierarchical social structures in place of fluid cultures. 

Here, I’m defining culture not in the narrower sociological sense as being the way of life of a particular society, but in the broader anthropological sense of the holistic manner in which humans interact with each other and the wider natural world. When sociologists talk about social reality, they are talking about the norms and behaviours resulting from a particular social structure. In the world today, the dominant social structure is that of nation states, bound together through a system of global capital. The core organisational features of the nation state are rigid class hierarchy and a hard binary divide between two genders. These features are so central to the ‘social reality’ of a nation state like the UK that many confuse them with inescapable human nature and biology. However, if culture is seen as broader and independent of social structure, then it challenges the norms that constitute social reality. The clash between these two opposed value systems underpins the culture wars that have increasingly raged across the Anglosphere and beyond. 

While it is difficult to think outside the parameters of the social structures we inhabit, science fiction does offer imaginative possibilities for freeing ourselves from such constraints. For example, in devising ‘the Culture’, Iain M. Banks suggested that a future technologically advanced civilisation could choose to align itself with a fluid sense of life and change outside state structures rather than attempting to socially engineer a perfect society within those structures in the manner of Soviet Communism. In 2025, however, we are not choosing between solid-state socialism and some sort of futuristic anarcho-communism. Instead, the choice being offered – at least, as it’s often portrayed in the mainstream media – appears to be between, on the one hand, varying models of authoritarian ‘respect’ for traditional values and, on the other hand, ideas of autonomy and social justice, which are now often described by their political opponents as the ‘woke’ progressivism of a metropolitan liberal elite. Demoralised, as most of us are, by the seemingly endless ebb and flow of the struggle between these two apparently opposing worldviews, it’s difficult to imagine any meaningful future let alone the prospect of a utopian culture. It’s far easier to picture a not-too-distant future in which two women are huddling outdoors at night by a bonfire while wolves howl around them.