The Kubler-Ross model describes, in five discrete stages, the process by which people deal with grief and tragedy, especially when diagnosed with a terminal illness. The model was introduced by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. The stages have become well-known as the Five Stages of Grief:
- Denial: The initial stage: “It can’t be happening.”
- Anger: “Why me? It’s not fair.”
- Bargaining: “Just let me live to see my children graduate.”
- Depression: “I’m so sad, why bother with anything?”
- Acceptance: “It’s going to be OK.”
I got to thinking about this topic because I’ve just about finished another re-read of Charles Stross’s amazing novel Accelerando and TS1 and I just watched the underrated science fantasy movie The Last Mimzy (which is based on the classic CL Moore/Henry Kuttner short story Mimsy Were the Borogroves).
Accelerando is an important book (in the science fiction world, at least), not just a good one, as the first novel to deal with life during and just after the Vingean Singularity. One of the values of science fiction as a genre is as a tool to simulate and understand possible futures and one can hardly deny the possibility that the pace of technological change may reach an asymptotic curve–the near vertical climb of the so-called hockey stick curve–within the next 20-50 years.
Successful memes often (always?) generate criticism and the singularity has its share. The most significant one for me, which Stross doesn’t flinch from in his story, is that the idea of the singularity is nothing more than nerd nirvana or geek rapture, an idealized future philosophically equivalent to a religious believer’s Heaven and no more attainable or desirable than any other Utopia.
Emperor Palpatine is as likely as Luke Skywalker, the Borg as likely as the United Federation of Planets.
The Five Stages of Grief can also be considered a framework for cultural maturity, albeit with as many exceptions as any analysis of human behavior.
Denial corresponds to prehistory. Human thinking was closer to our tree-dwelling ancestors than our own, with little concern for realities other than hunger, danger and pleasure. Death was nothing more than a phase change, and no one went away.
Anger drove the earliest conscious polities, with the first organized thoughts about the nature of existence and our place in it. Why should life be so difficult and, importantly, why should another tribe have things we need? Hence, theft, murder and war.
Bargaining was the source of religious belief. We can be bargained with and since humans are the pinnacle of existence, whatever explanation there might be for existence must surely be similarly open to negotiation and requests. The major Judean belief systems, Islam, Christianity and Judaism, all say that humanity was created in the Maker’s image and what are prayer and faith if not attempts to bargain?
Depression seems to me to be the predominant emotion of our current Post-Modern Age. Waiting for Godot and Night of the Living are the same story at the core, dressed in different clothing to appeal to different audiences, and part of the process of dealing with our more-developed understanding of existence.
Some people refuse to accept our new knowledge, which Jim Fitzgerald and I wrote about in the days after 9/11, and others propose a middle path, a third way, a belief in a Judean Deity for ethical, behavioral guidance and acceptance of the scientific method as the explanation of the mechanics of the physical world.
Both groups refuse to accept the logical fallacies of their mental models and are the core cause of the conflicts at the root of most of our current conflicts. Which shows how amazing consciousness truly is, without regard to hypothetical explanations of origin, that so many people can hold mutually contradictory beliefs inside their skull.
I recognize my own easily disproved belief: that with the right logical arguments and context any (mentally healthy) individual can and will change their behaviors and beliefs.
This recognition, I think, proves my own mental health but also underlies my point about depression. Some critics say that modern America over-medicates as a crutch but they’re wrong, caught in the third stage and unwilling to accept the utility of technology.
Stross along with Last Mimzy scriptwriters Bruce Joel Rubin and Toby Emmerich, as well as most others writing fiction about the topic these days, differ from the earlier views best exemplified by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953(!) novel Childhood’s End in seeing science as the primary mechanism of transformation.
1953, after all, is only 10 years after Thomas Watson, then president of IBM, famously forecast that he could see only five computers fulfilling the entire worldwide demand. Clarke surely knew better while writing that novel, since there were already more than five computer companies, but he still resorted to an external agency as the means through which humanity ascended beyond physical shackles.
No, today’s futurists project from research on connecting our “meat sleeves” to external sensorium, processing and storage systems, unraveling DNA, RNA and proteins and glimpsing Planck scale phenomena. Stross sees less than a century from our present to near future developments like Manfred Macx’s theatre of mind, then his daughter Amber’s ambitious exploitation of the orbital energy of Jupiter’s moons and finally the conversion of our Solar System’s dumb matter to computronium arranged in successive shells around the Sun, each layer powered by the waste heat of it’s inner neighbor’s irreversible computations.
Which gets us, finally, to Kubler-Ross’s fifth stage, acceptance, the only way we’ll get to see those wonders come out of the lab and into our lives. The refuseniks’ violent response to the collapse of their simplistic world view, from Osama bin Laden to Timothy McVeigh, from Vladimir Putin to Dick Cheney, suggests the truth of my assertions as well as their fragility.
Frankly, every year science and the inexorable march of technology not only enrich our lives ; they also enable smaller and smaller groups of people to cause greater and greater damage. One obvious example from which we all suffer every day since September, 2001: Al Qaeda only needed 20 men and $500,000 to kill nearly 3,000 people, destroy billions in real estate and other property and draw us into six years of war that cost tens of thousands of lives and trillions more dollars.
Eric Drexler, in the prescient nanotech primer Engines of Creation, foresaw the need to develop a framework for controlling technology before it jumped out of theory, something Bill Joy brought to the mainstream in his 2000 essay Why the future doesn’t need us. Sadly, Drexler’s call went in general unheeded and Joy’s pessimistic screed provoked a defensive, can’t happen here backlash from techies concerned about losing their shiny toys.
So where do I see this going? To acceptance, of course, since despite all my fretting I am an optimist. My metaphor is a tree trunk across a high gorge which must be crossed and the trunk’s thickness varies with my optimism.
For many years the trunk got narrower as assorted negative and potentially negative events came to light, but in the last couple of years, despite the madness of King George and all his mistakes, it’s gotten steadily wider.
BillSaysThis 